Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

out, so she left a message on her machine. When she talked to Sorcha, it seemed like old times. They chatted for forty-five minutes and by the time Fia got off the phone, it was already getting dark. She was just taking a low-cal frozen dinner out of the microwave when her doorbell rang.

Her doorbell never rang. Betty always called. Never came by.

Fia knew who it was before she looked through the peephole….

She glanced down at her ratty sweatpants and T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a stubby ponytail with pieces hanging down. No makeup. Not even lip gloss.

The doorbell rang again.

“Fee? It’s Glen.” He lifted up a brown paper bag. “I come bearing Chinese. Food, not men,” he clarified.

She smelled shrimp chow mein through the door and it had a far more appealing aroma than her low-cal dinner of Sonoma chicken.

She opened the door. “How’d you know where I lived?”

“Saw it in your personnel file.” Shy grin. Way too appealing.

“You’re not allowed to look at my personnel file.”

He pushed past her, through the doorway. “No, I’m not. Bet you’ll look at mine as soon as it’s transferred, though. Kitchen this way?”

She followed him through the living room. At least the place was picked up. No bras and panties drying on the kitchen-cabinet handles. Blood, bagged in the freezer, was concealed in an empty ice-cream container.

“Glen…” She hesitated. She didn’t want to be presumptuous, suggest something was going on that wasn’t, but wasn’t it obvious something was going on between them? “I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

“Dinner? Dinner’s always a good idea.”

“You know what I’m talking about. You being here.”

“It’s just dinner,” he protested.

Sam leaped from the countertop to the refrigerator to study the stranger, as unused to visitors as Fia was.

“I took a chance you’d be home. I’m staying with my great-aunt, my father’s mother’s sister, over in Chestnut Hill. Lights out is pretty early around there. She eats dinner at four-thirty.” He pulled white boxes from the brown paper bag.

“You came all the way here to get Chinese?” Chestnut Hill was on the northwest side of Philadelphia; whereas the trendy neighborhood where Fia lived in Olde Kensington was on the southeast side. “They don’t have Chinese in Chestnut Hill?”

“I came here to have Chinese with you. Plates?”

She opened a cupboard and pulled out two of the total of four white dinner plates she owned. “And what if I hadn’t been home?”

“Guess I would have eaten Chinese in my car. Spoon? Something to get this out with?” He turned to her, folding up the stained bag. “If you want to know the truth, I was going to call. Ask you if you wanted to go out, meet me or something. But I chickened out.”

She smiled, somehow flattered. “You chickened out?”

“Well, you can be pretty intimidating.” He took the soup spoon she’d retrieved from the drawer out of her hand. “It takes a man a little time to work his way up from blond dental hygienists with rich daddies to six-foot-tall redheads packing heat.”

She grabbed two forks out of the drawer. “You should have called. I’d have said yes. And then I could have taken a shower, gotten dressed, maybe.”

He handed her a plate, looking her up and down. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see you braless again.” He walked out of the kitchen carrying his plate. “You have anything to drink? I forgot to get something to drink,” he said from the living room. “I thought about wine, but I didn’t want you to accuse me of coming here with the intention of getting you liquored up and into bed.”

Chapter 18

Turned out he wasn’t being presumptuous and he didn’t need the wine. He probably could have had his way with her without the charm or the chow mein.

They had dinner in the living room and talked, although about what, she could scarcely recall. He cleaned up the dishes. She excused herself to the ladies room, ran a rake through her hair, brushed her teeth, and the next thing she knew they were making out on the couch. He was all over her and she was doing her best to reciprocate. Her mind was saying no, no, no, but her body, that was an entirely different story.

“Fee…this wasn’t…it wasn’t my intention when I stopped by.”

They were both coming up for air. Her mouth was bruised from his kisses, aching, tingling. Every nerve in her body had become hypersensitive. Her panties, super damp. She wanted Glen in a way that she hadn’t wanted a man in a very long time, human or vampire, and the thought of blood barely crossed her mind.

“Not your intention?” she panted, pushing hair away from her face so that she could look into his brown, speckled-with-gold, heavy-with-lust eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious.” He tightened his arm around her shoulder. “I came because I wanted to see you. Couldn’t wait until Monday to see you.”

Fia knew they were just words. She’d been betrayed by, lied to, cheated on by men often enough to know better than to believe any man’s words. But he just seemed so damned sincere. And sweet. And he was a law-enforcement officer. They couldn’t lie, could they?

“You don’t have to say these things.” She leaned toward him, offering her lips again.

“No, I do. I mean…I know I don’t but, Fia. I really…”

She was trying to listen to what he was saying, but he was doing this little stroking, massaging thing on her collar bone with his fingertips that was amazingly distracting.

“…Like you and…” He exhaled and started again. “I don’t want to screw it up. Not here. Not at work. I knew I was taking a chance, agreeing to the transfer.”

“From what I hear, you volunteered.”

She could have sworn he blushed.

“Okay, so you don’t want to screw things up.” She shrugged. “So far, everything here is good.” She leaned toward him.

He kissed her, but it was a quick peck