Hotbloods (Hotbloods #1)

Navan pulled his bag onto his lap, and rummaged around, before pulling out his comm device. “I should check in with Bashrik now. I’m sure his anxiety’s off the charts.”

I moved over to him as he pressed a button and held the device to his ear. The other end picked up after a few seconds, and I was close enough to hear that the voice coming from the receiver was not Bashrik but Angie. I leaned closer and heard her say, “Navan?!”

“Angie?” he asked, frowning. “How are you? How’s Bashrik and Ronad?”

“We’re all fine. Lauren and I are with them now. We managed to slip away from the Churnleys. But listen, I gotta speak to Riley. There’ve been some, uh, developments.”

I held my breath, instantly feeling tense. Navan handed the device to me and I pressed it to my ear. “Angie? What is it?”

“Riley!” She sounded relieved to hear my voice, as I was hers, after everything that happened since I last saw her. “How are you?”

“I’m, um, okay,” I replied, figuring that now was not the best time to tell her someone had tried to kill us, again—I’d rather leave that for Navan to tell Bashrik. “What’s up?”

“Well, we’ve kind of been having a problem with the Churnleys regarding your absence. We haven’t been able to think of a good excuse to explain it other than… basically you got the major hots for one of the lumberjacks, and went off with him to Austin to spend a few nights.”

My face burned. “Oh my God. You didn’t tell them that.”

“Look—what else were we supposed to tell them?” Angie said. “Honestly!”

I sighed. She was right. It was extremely hard to think of a remotely reasonable excuse for my sudden disappearance, and I probably wouldn’t have thought of a much better one, either. Still, it was embarrassing.

“The main problem is,” Angie continued, “they got in touch with Jean and Roger, and they’re kind of freaked out. Understandably, they’re worried about you gallivanting off with some guy you’ve only known for like, less than a day.”

I swore under my breath. Crap, crap, crap. “What did my parents say, exactly?” I asked, my chest suddenly feeling constricted.

“They want you to call them as soon as possible. They’re worried about you.”

“Right, call them.” I swallowed.

“And, uh, they want you to actually go home.”

Damn. It wasn’t like Jean and Roger to be controlling, or make demands like this, but they were obviously completely freaked out—they might even be thinking I had been kidnapped or trafficked.

“They want me to come home,” I repeated, biting my lower lip.

“Yeah. They’re really, really worried. I’m guessing they’re gonna call the police if they don’t hear from you soon.”

I exhaled loudly, staring at Navan. He was close enough to have heard every word, and he looked back at me steadily.

“Okay. Well, the good news is we’re in New York now, trying to figure out how to meet with the Fed,”—I took a guess that Bashrik had already filled her and Lauren in on what the Fed was, and the fact that she didn’t ask confirmed it—“I guess… I guess we could visit them tomorrow morning. We’ve got some time to kill anyway.”

“We? You mean, you’re gonna take Navan to see them?”

I knew how crazy that sounded, but I was going to need to buy myself at least a few days more, and I needed them to be onboard with my excuse. I had too many other things on my plate to be worrying about them calling the police. Lauren and Angie had already fed them the lie that I’d found a summer boyfriend so… it only made sense that they should meet him. I was also strangely confident that Navan could pull it off. I’d seen that he could be a gentleman, and I wasn’t too worried about him seeming out of place—he knew a lot about Earth’s customs. We would go to see them during the daytime, when his skin was normal. We would need to have a little chat about some things in advance, though, such as the whole… boyfriend and girlfriend thing.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Okay, well…” Angie sounded totally skeptical, and I couldn’t blame her. “Good luck with that.”

“Is Lauren there?”

“She’s with Bashrik. He’s lying down.”

“Okay, tell her I said hi. And you can tell the Churnleys to stop worrying—I’ll figure things out with my parents.”

“Okay,” Angie replied.

“Do you want to speak to your brother?” I asked Navan, away from the receiver.

To my surprise, he shook his head. “I’ll talk to him next time. Giving him one more thing to worry about isn’t going to help him recover any faster. Just ask Angie to tell them we’re okay and we’ll check in again once we have more developments.”

I nodded and conveyed his message, then handed the comm back to Navan, who switched it off. I drew in another deep breath and returned to the bed opposite him. We stared at each other for several long moments, until I finally broke the silence.

“So, uh, you up for meeting my parents?”





Chapter Seventeen





The fact that somebody seemed to be following us worried me in relation to our planned visit to Jean and Roger. The last thing I wanted to do was put them in danger. After Navan agreed to meet them, and I filled him in on some basic things about my parents (they wouldn’t expect him to know a whole lot anyway, given that we had only just met), we agreed that we would avoid flight and travel there by taxi—I hoped that would make things safer.

I then dialed my adoptive parents’ number and spoke to Jean, who sounded both tense and relieved to hear my voice. I told her that taking off with Navan wasn’t something I would normally do but, given that it was my last summer before college, I kind of got swept up in the spontaneity of it all. I winced internally even as I said the words, knowing that it really didn’t sound like me, but she seemed to buy it. Though, she still wanted me to come home so she could see me face to face, and was glad when I suggested bringing Navan along. We agreed to meet at noon the next day.

Navan and I retired to bed soon after the conversation, though I barely slept, tossing and turning, wondering what tomorrow would bring—the stunt we were planning to pull off far eclipsing any nerves I had about the meeting with my parents. It didn’t seem like Navan slept much either, judging by how much he tossed and turned on the other side of the room.

We left the hotel with plenty of time the next morning, and stopped by a store on our way to the subway to buy some more suitable clothes.

“What sort of outfit would your dream boyfriend wear?” Navan wondered as we walked through the racks of clothing. “This?” He stopped in front of a purple velour suit and ran his fingers down the sleeve. “Pair this bad boy with a lime green bow tie?”

I snorted. “Um, that is not what my dream boyfriend would wear.”

“Well, show me then.”