“I don’t know.” Dawn didn’t want to get all mushy, but…“You looked a little sad in there. More than usual.”
A pause languished between them. Breisi shrugged. “Some nights it’s worse than others. Sometimes I can feel Frank walking next to me, not in a preternatural way, but because…” Her voice got tight. “Because I want to feel him there.”
Dawn didn’t know what to say. She’d never loved a man like that. Sure, she’d slept with more than a few, but she wasn’t stupid enough to confuse sex with something more.
She stole a peek at Breisi, just to see if she’d maybe started crying, hoping she hadn’t.
But her coworker’s jaw was tensed, like she was warding off the vulnerability. Dawn could relate to that, too.
The wind tossed Breisi’s hair again and, absently, Dawn thought about how different this woman was from Frank’s first love, Eva. Where Breisi was petite and dark, Eva had been elegant and light. Where Breisi was feminine yet tough, Eva seemed absolutely unguarded.
As Dawn kept staring, Jacqueline Ashley, Eva’s starlet look-alike, superimposed herself over Breisi. Dawn’s chest sucked into itself in utter fear and darkness.
Jac’s resemblance brought all Dawn’s competitive neuroses, her inferiority complexes, to the surface. Growing up, she’d done her best to avoid comparisons with Eva, rebelling against being her daughter in any way possible, even becoming a rough stuntwoman as a big “screw you” to the Claremont glamour. Now, with Jac, Dawn didn’t know how to feel, how to react to a woman who seemed to have Eva’s magnetism within her.
A woman who might not be human at all….
Stop it, Dawn chided herself. Jac wasn’t a vamp. The Voice would’ve said something if it was even a possibility.
Wouldn’t he?
The night had gone quiet as they approached the curb-parked SUV. As another car passed on the street, its moaning roar lingered, mingling with the wail of a soft wind.
The skin on the back of Dawn’s neck tingled.
But when she saw someone step away from the front of the vehicle, where he’d clearly been waiting, she knew her heightened senses had nothing to do with the atmosphere.
Her blood pistoned through her veins. “Matt?”
Breisi positioned herself in front of Dawn, stiffening.
“Whoa, whoa.” Matt Lonigan held up his hands and took a couple of steps to the side, into a pool of light from a streetlamp. He was holding something—flowers? “I know you don’t believe it yet, but I’m one of the good guys.”
His low voice abraded Dawn, and she enjoyed the gentle torture, the memory of how good his mouth felt against hers.
Hands still raised, he waited for Breisi to relax, his pale blue eyes running over Dawn with the usual hunger. He had short brown hair and a face of bruised beauty that intrigued her as much as it disturbed her.
Once again, Dawn couldn’t help thinking that if life were a movie, he’d be cast as a street thug who carried a baseball bat and wore his shirts rolled over his forearms. But Matt being Matt, he wore no such thing. He liked his just-about-new jeans, boots, leisure shirts over a T, and in spite of the weather, the oversized coat he wore now—a coat that hid what Dawn suspected to be a machete in a back holster.
A PI or fellow vamp hunter? Dawn had no idea, but whatever his job, he was real good at planting doubts about The Voice in her head.
Demand answers, he’d said, encouraging her to investigate The Voice and his motives. And she’d tried during this past month. Yet she’d also researched Matt Lonigan at the same time. He’d changed his name after his parents’ murders, from Destry to Lonigan, and she’d used that information to discover that he really hadn’t been lying when he’d told her about his parents. She’d accused him of using the Batman mythos to concoct a fake history and, now, seeing him face-to-face after finding evidence to the contrary, she felt like an idiot who’d jumped to conclusions—something she was trying to avoid with Jac, too.
After all, the man was holding flowers instead of a gun.
Daisies. The kind of petals Eva Claremont had worn in her hair during the most famous film scene of her career. One day at lunch, Matt’s eyes had gone woozy when she’d mentioned Eva’s name. On the surface, they’d been talking about Frank, since Matt had been hired to find him. By who? Dawn still didn’t know since client privilege barred him from revealing that information. But, truthfully, she and the team had been testing him to see if Matt was the enemy or a friend.
After his reaction to Eva’s name, she’d gotten jealous, as she always did when men responded to the suggestion of her stunning mother. Sometimes Dawn even wondered if that was one reason she was attracted to this shy guy who wasn’t her normal type. To win him over fully from Eva.
She nodded to the flowers, finally catching her breath, her balance. “Those for your sweet old grandma or what?”
He grinned, held them out to her, and took a step forward. Breisi stiffened even more.