The waitress frowned but ultimately did as I said without complaint.
Which was her only saving grace.
Render, please make sure the waitress that’s on her way to you is fired for doing something disgusting with a customer’s drink. Make sure she gets scrubbed, too.
Render’s ‘yes, sir,’ floated through the air to me, and I nodded once before returning to the conversation that was happening around me.
“What was wrong with it?” Acadia asked softly. “She spit in it, didn’t she?”
Worse… though I wouldn’t be telling her that.
“The glass was dirty,” I murmured.
It wasn’t a complete lie.
The glass had been dirty.
However, the vamp behind the bar had had a hand in the dirty glass, too.
Which was why the second the vamp, a young one named Luther, came close enough to the table, I grabbed him by the throat, pulled him down to me in a move so fast it would’ve been a blur to the human eyes around me, and hissed at the stupid man.
“That was your last and final straw,” I growled. “You will leave my bar. Then get in your stupid little car and leave my goddamn city. You will never return, because if you do, I’ll make sure you never see the night again. Do. You. Understand?”
Luther nodded, and I could smell his fear.
“Good.” I thrust him backward, which pushed him into the tables about twenty feet away.
“Render.”
I looked to the man weaving his way through the tables, anger still pounding in my veins.
“Yes, sir.”
Render picked up Luther by the shirt collar and started to drag him outside, all the while things went on as normal around me.
The club was used to my temper.
The woman at my side, however, was not.
She was scared.
I could tell that the minute I’d done it.
However, it wouldn’t do to have a vampire under me to disrespect me so publicly. I had to let any of the people paying attention know that I wasn’t a pushover.
Damn far from it.
“I think it’s time to go,” Keisha stood, swallowing her drink in three swallows. “I have to be at work early tomorrow, and so do you.”
I reluctantly slid out of my booth, knowing that Keisha had picked up on her friend’s trepidation, too.
Lucky for me, she stumbled and I had to catch her, otherwise she would’ve walked off without another word.
The second my fingers touched her skin, though, my mouth watered.
She smelled like the ocean. All sun and sand. Things that I could experience, but hadn’t indulged in a beach in well over a thousand years.
I’d been a twenty-four-year-old man, well on his way to having a family, when I was struck upon by thieves in the night. Thieves that’d been my own flesh and blood. Men that I hadn’t been wary of and should have been.
They’d stolen my horse and left me for dead… and that’s how I was found by Carrion. My maker.
He transformed me. He also said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done as an undead man, and I’d been so far gone that he thought I might not make it.
But I’d proven him wrong.
And I’d continued to do that up until this very day.
I would also continue to pursue this woman with her brown eyes and black hair. The succulent lips that were made for kissing and fucking.
“Have a nice night,” I told the woman in my arms before I released her.
She blinked, leaned forward slightly, and then pushed away so abruptly that I had to work to contain my laugh.
Yes, this would be fun.
As she walked away, I watched her, loving the chase already.
“Don’t,” Abraham grumbled.
I turned, a smile breaking out over my face, and scoffed.
“Watch me.”
CHAPTER 3
Is ‘fuck you’ something you’re allowed to say to your boss? Because I might chance it later.
-Acadia’s secret thoughts
ACADIA
My heart was still pounding two days later as I made my way down the steps of my apartment complex.
Keisha, who wasn’t attending the ceremony for the ribbon cutting with me, walked at my side, her cell phone in her hand.
“You know he’s going to be there, right?” Keisha asked as she looked at me sideways.
“Who?” I feigned ignorance, my thoughts automatically going to the one ‘him’ that had been on my mind for days.
“Buford.”
I snorted. “Bradford.” I laughed. “And he’s always there. He’s a freakin’ lawyer, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, I can tell you now that you and him in the same room isn’t a good idea,” she murmured, most likely more to herself than to me.
See, Bradford and I had history.
The type of history where we would break up, get back together, break up, and get back together.
This time, however, I was determined to stay ‘broken up.’
He, on the other hand, thought we would continue on the same as we always did.
Little did he know, however, that my mind wasn’t even on him anymore. It was on a sexy vampire that had haunted my dreams for the past two nights.
“Well, I can tell you now that I haven’t thought about him since two nights ago,” I informed her haughtily. “In fact, I would say that this is the best night’s sleep I’ve had in well over a year.”
“Because you can’t stop thinking of tall, dark, and dead?”
I slapped her arm.
“I don’t think they’re considered ‘dead’ really,” I murmured.
She tossed me a ‘you’re nuts’ look and stopped once she reached the door that would lead outside.
“You need anything else before I go?”
I pursed my lips.
“That stun gun you keep in your car wouldn’t be a bad thing…”
She slapped me on my arm this time.
“I lost the charger for it. I need a new one,” she said by way of denial. “Unless you have some magic charger on your person somewhere.”
I pushed the bar on the door and walked through it, not bothering to hold it for my laughing-at-her-own-stupid-joke best friend.
With one final finger wave, I got into my car and started her up.
I drove a 1967 Pontiac GTO, and it was definitely in need of some tender love and care.
However, I didn’t have the time, nor the desire, to fix the bad boy up.
So I drove it with rusted-out floorboards, springs showing in the seats, and a door that barely closed all the way.
The motor, on the other hand, ran perfectly.
Why? Because I had a damn good mechanic—one that’d been with me since that terrible day that I nearly died. The mechanic that had saved my life, and to this day I’d still never met in person.
Seemed he was a night owl, and I never was able to come to his place of business when he was actually in the shop.
I didn’t care, though.
The man fixed my car and made it purr, and I’d never go to another soul purely for that reason.
I was, however, rethinking my choice to drive my car and not take Keisha up on her offer to take me twenty minutes later when I arrived at the large sprawling mansion where the benefit dinner was being held and saw all the other cars.