Bittersweet Blood (The Order #1)

“I wanted to…” He trailed off. “I wanted to kill them all, but there were too many and in the end I ran away.”


Tara frowned. “Who did you want to kill?”

“Demons.”

“You know about demons?”

Jamie buried his head in her stomach, and she could feel him shaking. She ran her hands through his hair, trying to make sense of what he’d told her.

After a few minutes silence, he rolled his head around to face her. “I wanted to warn you, to tell you everything. I went back to your apartment, but I must have blacked out before I could phone.”

“We found you there, unconscious.”

“Why did they have to take Chloe? She was nothing to do with all this.”

“It was a mistake, a horrible mistake. It should have been me. It’s my fault, but Jamie, please don’t do anything stupid. I couldn’t bear it if I lost you as well.”

His eyes were haunted. “It’s not your fault, it’s mine. I should have done something sooner.”

“What could you have done?”

“It doesn’t matter now, she’s dead, and it’s too late to make any difference.”

He turned his face away, and Tara stared out of the window watching as the streets flashed by.

None of this made any sense. She’d met Jamie on her first day in London when she’d felt lost and alone. Homesick for Yorkshire—something totally unexpected. Jamie had bumped into her outside the apartment building. They’d started talking, and she’d felt an immediate connection. Had it been a set up? But why? Who was he?

The car stopped. They were back in the underground garage at CR International. Christian glanced at her through the mirror, and she tried a weak smile.

He climbed out and opened the back door.

“Jamie.” Tara touched him gently on the shoulder then looked up as Christian hovered in the doorway. “I think he’s unconscious again.”

Christian reached in and picked him up. Jamie groaned but settled back in the other man’s arms. His eyes remained closed all the way up to the thirteenth floor.

Christian carried him into the office and lowered him to the back leather sofa. Jamie was still very pale, his eyes closed, his damaged arm held tight against his side.

Tara sat beside him, took his uninjured hand in hers, and squeezed. Jamie opened his eyes; they were filled with pain.

“Can you do anything to help him?” she asked Christian. “Please, he’s lost so much blood.”

Christian studied the other man, a slight frown on his face. “Oh, I think you’ll find he’s quite capable of healing himself.”

“What do you mean?”

Jamie stared at Christian with something close to horror stamped on his features. “Are you going to tell her?”

“Don’t you think it’s about time?” Christian said.

Jamie struggled into a sitting position, wincing at the pain. “Look, I didn’t want to deceive her, but I didn’t have a choice at first. I promised Kathryn. Later, after Kathryn went, we moved here and—” He shrugged. “She wanted a normal life, and for a while I thought maybe it would be okay. How could I tell her and spoil everything?”

Tara heard the words but they didn’t make any sense.

“Everything started to go wrong—demons popping up all over the place, and her wanting to break all the rules. I knew I couldn’t cope on my own, and I couldn’t tell her the truth about what I really was.”

“So you sent her to me?”

Jamie nodded. “I recognized your name. I couldn’t believe it. Christian Roth, a private investigator, but you had a reputation for being fair, and she was going to need somebody on her side.”

“Okay,” Tara said. “Is one of you going to tell me what’s going on?”

She looked from one man to the other, and Jamie nodded. A moment later, he disappeared, and in his place sat a large gray cat.

Tara blinked. Christian raised an eyebrow but said nothing. She turned back to the cat. “Smokey?”

The cat strolled across the leather toward her. It rubbed its soft head against her hand. Tara reacted instinctively, as she had so many thousands of times before, and scratched behind his ears. He purred loudly then rolled onto his back, paws in the air. She rubbed his silky tummy, an activity that had so often given her comfort. She tried not to think, did her best to keep her mind blank until a slow, trickling growl sounded behind her.

She turned to see Christian standing over them. He was staring at the exact spot where her hand met the gray fur, and he didn’t look happy.

“That’s enough,” he snarled.

It took her a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking to her but to the cat. Smokey rolled onto his feet, blinked his yellow eyes, and sauntered to the far end of the sofa. A moment later, Jamie returned.

She stared at him, her eyes moving over his body. Reaching up, he unwrapped the towel from his shoulder. The wound was still visible, but the healing process had started and the bleeding stopped. His expression was apologetic, and he shrugged.

“You’re a cat?”

He nodded.

“My cat?”

“I would have told you.”

“When?”