Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [905]
Well, this tired human—who would eventually pass on—needed some sleep in the worst possible way. If there was another hostile takeover tonight, it would have to proceed without me. I locked the doors all over again, called up the stairs to Amelia to tell her good night, and crawled back into my bed. I lay awake for at least thirty minutes, because my muscles twitched just when I was about to drift off. I would start up into full wakefulness, thinking someone was coming in the room to warn me about a great disaster.
But finally even the twitching couldn’t keep me awake any longer. I fell into a heavy sleep. When I woke, the sun was up and shining in the window, and Quinn was sitting in the chair in the corner where I’d slumped the night before while I was trying to deal with Eric.
This was an unpleasant trend. I didn’t want a lot of guys popping in and out of my bedroom. I wanted one who would stay.
“Who let you in?” I asked, propping myself up on one elbow. He looked good for someone who hadn’t gotten much sleep. He was a very large man with a very smooth head and huge purple eyes. I had always loved the way he looked.
“Amelia,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t have come in; I should have waited until you were up. You might not want me in the house.”
I went in the bathroom to give myself a minute, another ploy that was getting all too familiar. When I came out, a little neater and more awake than when I’d entered, Quinn had a mug of coffee for me. I took a sip and instantly felt better able to cope with whatever was coming. But not in my bedroom.
“Kitchen,” I said, and we went to the room that had always been the heart of the house. It had been dated when the fire had gotten it. Now I had a brand-new kitchen, but I still missed the old one. The table where my family had eaten for years had been replaced with a modern one, and the new chairs were lots more comfortable than the old ones, but regret still caught at me every now and then when I thought of what had been lost.
I had an ominous feeling that “regret” was going to be the theme of the day. During my troubled sleep, apparently I’d absorbed a dose of the practicality that had seemed so sad to me the night before. To stave off the conversation we were going to have to have, I stepped to the back door and looked to see that Amelia’s car was gone. At least we were alone.
I sat down opposite the man I’d hoped to love.
“Babe, you look like someone just told you I was dead,” Quinn said.
“Might as well have,” I said, because I had to plow into this and look to neither the right nor the left. He flinched.
“Sookie, what could I have done?” he asked. “What could I have done?” There was an edge of anger in his voice.
“What can I do?” I asked in return, because I had no answer for him.
“I sent Frannie! I tried to warn you!”
“Too little, too late,” I said. I second-guessed myself immediately: Was I being too hard, unfair, ungrateful? “If you’d called me weeks ago, even once, I might feel different. But I guess you were too busy trying to find your mother.”
“So you’re breaking up with me because of my mother,” he said. He sounded bitter and I didn’t blame him.
“Yes,” I said after a moment’s inner testing of my own resolve. “I think I am. It’s not your mom as much as her whole situation. Your mother will always have to come first as long as she’s alive, because she’s so damaged. I’ve got sympathy for that, believe me. And I’m sorry that you and Frannie have a hard row to hoe. I know all about hard rows.”
Quinn was looking down into his coffee mug, his face drawn with anger and weariness. This was probably the worst possible moment to be having this showdown, and yet it had to