The Reluctant Vampire - Lynsay Sands [88]
Leonora moved around the bed to Stephanie now and repeated the same question and actions; feeling her forehead he realized now, not just brushing hair back, and checking her eyes, perhaps to see if they were clear or how much silver there was in them. It could be a good gage of many things, including passion levels and blood levels.
Harper heard Stephanie murmur that she was fine. He didn’t believe her for a minute. He had no doubt the poor kid was traumatized. Hell, he was traumatized, and he wasn’t a teenager who until just recently had been mortal. Fire was one of the few things that could kill their kind. If they hadn’t gotten out of that room and found help to douse the flames, they could have died there.
The thought disturbed him and made him shift unhappily. “Where’s Drina?”
“Er . . . She was sprayed by a skunk,” Teddy said with a grimace.
“Yes, Stephanie said so, but where is she?” What he really wanted to know was why the hell she wasn’t there with him. He’d nearly died, dammit. He wanted her with him.
“Well, she’s down in the kitchen at the moment.”
“They won’t let her out of the kitchen because they don’t want her to smell up the house,” Stephanie told him, no doubt plucking the explanation from someone’s head. He didn’t care whose.
“She’s very worried about you, though,” Leonora reassured him. “She wanted to be here with you both. She’s probably fretting herself sick down there.”
The words soothed him somewhat but not completely, and Harper sat up and started to get out of bed, pausing when the blankets covering him fell away revealing a Port Henry Police T-shirt and black joggers.
“Your clothes were pretty much just charred bits melted into your skin. They fell away with the damaged skin as you healed. Teddy was kind enough to loan you those and help Alessandro dress you while Dawn and I dressed Stephanie,” Leonora explained quietly.
He glanced back to Stephanie to see that she wore a similar getup. Grunting, he stood, his gaze sliding over a garbage bin brimming with empty blood bags. They were really going through them. In fact, he wondered that they’d had enough to deal with the accident, Tiny’s turn, and now this.
“Leonora opened up the blood bank, and she and Edward brought back a bunch more blood,” Teddy announced, catching where his gaze had gone.
Harper nodded. Leonora had insisted on coming out of retirement after her turn and taken a position at the local blood bank, which had distressed Alessandro no end. Not that he really minded having a wife who worked. It was just distressing to him because they were still new turns, and Leonora’s position meant she had to leave their bed more frequently than he’d liked when she’d taken it on. Especially when he was wealthy enough that she needn’t work at all if she chose.
“Thank you,” he murmured to Leonora, heading for the door.
“Wait for me,” Stephanie said, throwing the covers aside to follow him.
Harper slowed as he headed out of the room, but not much. He wanted to see Drina. He wanted to take her in his arms and never let her go. A man got a lot of things straight when he was forced to face his own mortality, and Harper had realized some things. He loved the damned woman. He’d come to love her fire, her passion, her wit, and her strength. And he was glad as hell she hadn’t been in that room when the firebomb or whatever it was had come flying through the window.
“A Molotov cocktail,” Stephanie said behind him, as he started down the stairs. He only realized she was naming whatever it was that had exploded all over them, when she explained, “The memory of the fire chief saying that was one of Teddy’s surface memories . . . Thank you for dragging me out of the porch.”
Harper slowed at her quiet words and turned to slip his arm around her shoulders affectionately, muttering, “My pleasure.”
Stephanie slipped her own arm around his waist