Alisa
“I’m not sure even the baddest vamp would steal a girl away from right under her grandma’s nose,” Carter said, right before he raised his beer to his lips. The muted light in the bar did nothing to hide how handsome his chiseled features were.
Elly harrumphed at that. “I’m old enough to be her mother, not her grandmother, you ass.”
Carter leaned back, yawning and stretching before slinging his arm across my seatback. Julian watched us as he always did with an amused smile across his face.
I turned to regard Carter skeptically. That move would have worked on the girls by the bar who kept eyeing the two sexy Hunters, but I wasn’t interested. “If those fingers touch skin, I’ll castrate you, you know.”
He grinned at me. He had a nice grin that crinkled the corners of his deep brown eyes. “I love it when you’re scary.”
I rolled my eyes. “Buy me another drink. Get a girl properly drunk, would you?”
That was the plan for the night, after all.
He clapped me on the shoulder—his scarred hand finding just the cloth of my tank, none of his warmth touching my bare skin—and headed for the bar.
“I’ll be back too,” Julian said, and I groaned and threw a crumpled-up napkin at him as he stood. “Traitor.”
He knew Elly would want to talk to me about the messy Hunt that morning. None of us were supposed to work without backup.
Instead, she shook her head in amusement at us. Her hair was freshly permed and dyed into a deep shade of purple-ish red that I was pretty sure didn’t occur in nature. It looked good though with her tanned, wrinkled skin and her bright hazel eyes. I’d like to age as gracefully as Elly.
“I wish you two would stop flirting and bow to the inevitable,” Elly said.
I smiled non-committedly and swirled my half-drunk beer in the bottle. I knew that Carter and Julian were good-looking, with their handsome faces and their muscular bodies; I admired their competence as Hunters, and I loved the easy friendship between the three of us.
Elly had asked me once why I didn’t just try to like them the way they liked me, when they were such good guys.
“Or you three,” she added. “I wouldn’t judge. You go for what you want, Alisa.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said automatically, then added, “I love them too much as friends to risk ruining it all.”
But the truth was, I couldn’t see them as anything but friends. Carter was over at the bar now, and a slender redhead had sidled over next to him. He braced one big forearm on the bartop, keeping a respectful distance from her, but she kept pressing closer with a thirsty smile on her face.
I laughed and shook my head as I turned back. “They’re like my brothers. There’s nothing else there—but brothers is a lot, you know.”
She pursed her lips. “Are you going to feel okay when they move on?”
“Yes,” I promised.
“If you’re sure,” she said, raising her beer for the two of us to toast. I clinked the top of my bottle with hers.
“I’d tell Carter to move on tonight if I could,” I said. “Yet again.”
But I couldn’t because we had a mission. It was probably confusing for him because Carter and I flirted like it was our jobs. We had a little road show; he poured ‘liquor’ down my throat like a sketchball, I flirted with him, showing off a little leg and a lot of neck, I looked drunk, then I ended up lost and alone and inviting… to a vamp.
From the way that redhead was trying to defy physics and press herself against him until their bodies occupied the same space, Carter definitely had the option to move on tonight if he chose.
“I’m not going to change my mind, Elly. You can stop worrying I’ll have regrets.”
For some reason, I thought about Duncan. The memory of that jawline, the fierceness in those icy blue eyes, all made me feel a strange restless tension. When I thought about him, I wondered about the tattoos I’d glimpsed and what the rest of them looked like. There was something about him that felt… magnetic.
I’d been right to send him away. There was something strange about him, and I knew I should tell Elly about it, but I didn’t want to.
Because it would be hard to explain what felt so strange about him.
In five years, I’d learned how to fake normal.
But I hadn’t learned how to fall in love.
The way Duncan kept coming back to my mind felt…peculiar.
“What’s on your mind?” Elly asked.
I raked my fingers through my hair, pushing it back absently. I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about it.
Julian joined Carter at the bar, helped him carry over a round of beers and shots.
As they walked toward us, Julian passed his hand subtly over the drinks, taking away the alcoholic buzz.
Then Carter set the shot glass in front of me with a self-satisfied thump.
“Drink up,” he said, “I’ll just keep on getting cuter.”
“I don’t think you could get any cuter,” I half-slurred playfully, leaning forward to slide my hand up the hard muscle of his bicep. A strained look crossed his face, as if my touch really affected him, before he grinned.
“You are definitely drunk,” Julian said loudly, before taking a sip. More softly, he added, “We’ve got company.”
“Then I guess Alisa can tell me what’s on her mind later,” Elly said pointedly. “I know there’s something.”
“There’s always something going on in this wild brain.” Carter palmed my head with his big hand, before wobbling my head back and forth. He was lucky I had to pretend to be drunk and infatuated, because I was definitely going to make him pay for that later.
“Let’s go play some pool,” I said.
We toasted quickly, clinking our shot glasses together. “Swords,” Julian murmured for us all, and I knew he had an eye on our vamps to make sure they didn’t hear us.
To our swords. Never drawn without cause, never sheathed without honor was the rest of the refrain. But we all had to be genuinely drunk before we started to wax on.
Elly had been lying that day when she said they always preferred guns over swords. Swords were quieter and plenty of monsters were almost bullet-proof.
But rule one of Hunting is that everything dies when you lop off its head.
The harsh whiskey burned down my throat, and I choked. “Lord, Carter, you could spring for the good stuff every now and then.” I picked up my beer to wash the taste away.
“That is the good stuff,” Carter managed to look hurt. He slung his arm over my shoulders as the two of us swaggered toward the pool tables in the back. The two pool tables were on a raised dais, separated from the rest of the bar by a decorative rail. It was the perfect vantage point to keep an eye on my new friends.
He turned me toward him, his hands on my hips, our bodies intimately close. “Do you need me to distract Elly?” he asked. “Is she nagging you again?”
“Always,” I said. He was looking at me with those warm, open eyes—he was my best friend—and I added, “I met someone today who said he knows me. Knew me.”
Carter’s eyes widened. He knew how hard I’d tried to track down my past, and he knew when I’d given up.