Stakes & Stilettos - Michelle Rowen [48]
Way fewer bloodthirsty vampires.
Waiting there for my bodyguard to show up, I realized that I hated feeling helpless like this. It was a feeling I’d perfected, but it didn’t mean I liked it. I wanted to be out helping Thierry instead of waiting here like a two-fanged sloth.
“The sun has officially set,” Amy announced.
This was very good news. I looked out the front window to the street and saw Butch nearing the house. I opened the door to let him in.
Butch weighed close to three hundred pounds. As with a linebacker for a football team, the extra bulk was for brute force rather than running long distances. His head was shaved bald and he had a pale brown goatee. Under his winter jacket, he always wore a black T-shirt with some arbitrary phrase printed on it. Today it read: “You use the Force. I’ll use my fists.” He came highly recommended as a vampire bodyguard.
Plus, he was a fan of reality TV. It all helped.
I had considered not leaving Amy’s house after what happened with Thierry, but it had been almost four hours without incident, the sun was down, and a quick check in my shard confirmed my eyes had returned to normal. Butch gave the thumbs-up for our field trip.
I waited to feel the fog come over me again, but there was nothing. My mind was clear.
“What are we going out for?” I asked.
“Lingerie,” she said. “It’s Barry’s birthday next week.”
“And he likes to wear lingerie? I had no idea. What’s his favorite color?”
“It’s not for him, silly. It’s for me.”
“Just make sure you don’t wear your ‘Thierry Is a Hot Tamale’ T-shirt. He might not understand that.”
She glanced at Butch and her cheeks reddened. “I thought we were going to drop that?”
“Oh, we are. It’s dropped.” Her crush on Thierry had quickly gone from annoying to amusing. The fact that she was completely embarrassed about the whole situation only made it funnier.
“You’re married, Amy,” Butch brilliantly observed. “You shouldn’t be looking at other men.”
“Thanks for your opinion,” Amy said dryly, pulling on her winter coat. “Not that I asked for it.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I think when you’re married you shouldn’t look at anyone else. It’s wrong.”
Amy eyed me. “Sarah’s dating a married man. What do you think about that?”
“That’s way different,” I said quickly. “Can we go now? Pretty please?”
The promise of an annulment was just that at the moment. A promise. I wasn’t going to share that news with anyone else until it actually was news. Then I would shout it from the rooftops.
But that was the future. I was currently dealing with the present.
The present that included shopping for my friend’s lingerie while my married boyfriend searched for the witch who’d put a nasty curse on my ass.
A romantic fairy tale if ever I’d heard one.
With every step I took through the Toronto Eaton Centre, my favorite shopping mall in the very heart of the downtown core, I asked myself:
Am I feeling okay?
Do I want to bite anyone?
The answers continued to be: Yes, I’m feeling okay; and no, I don’t want to bite anyone. I felt perfectly normal. It was obvious that this situation was a temporary one. I could deal with it short-term, no problem, especially with Thierry on the case of finding Stacy.
So I allowed myself to relax a bit. Just a bit.
I hadn’t been to the mall for a couple of weeks. Mostly due to my acute problem of being broke. What fun was window-shopping if there wasn’t the potential of buying something? And sure, I could probably go shopping every day if I wanted to take Thierry’s readily available money. Part of me did. Part of me wanted to completely replenish the wardrobe I’d lost when my apartment blew up. But the other part of me wanted to do the right thing and wait. Earn the money on my own—although I still wasn’t quite sure how I would do that—and buy myself everything I needed.
The harder road, sure, but it did give me a sense of pride.