From The Nights Before Christmas © 2010 by Kerry Allen
Chapter Four
“You’re very quiet.”
Harvey wished the same could be said for Miss Winderowe. There was no reason for her to speak after telling him where to drive. Her low, intimate pitch warmed and softened the distinctive elven lilt that had always sounded to him like a poorly played fiddle, but if she had nothing more substantive to remark upon than his reluctance to converse, he’d as soon listen to the tires hissing over wet pavement.
He stopped the car at a red light, and even the tires took a break from their noise making. “I’m thinking.”
“I know what about.” She ran her index finger along the top of one stocking.
The movement drew his gaze to the smooth, taut skin of her exposed thigh. The heater had been turned to its maximum setting in deference to her scanty attire, and one of the vents blew directly into her lap, ruffling the fur trim on her skirt. He wondered what her leg felt like when not cold and limp as a sack of wet sand.
Purely as a point of academic comparison, of course.
His muscles jumped when she transferred her hand from her thigh to his, enumerating an array of physiologic fields warranting further study.
She leaned toward him, smoke-colored eyes half veiled by a dense fringe of lashes, and her voice dropped to a sultry murmur. “You can’t take your mind off that upside-down pen I left in your office.”
The horn of the car behind them blared. Harvey stomped on the gas pedal without looking to see if the light had changed or if six lanes of opposing traffic still disputed his right of way—the sort of reckless behavior he’d managed to avoid since the days when transportation relied upon horseflesh rather than steel and combustible fuel.
He had also managed to avoid disruptive forces such as Bowe Winderowe, a fact to which he would hereafter attribute his formerly sterling safety record. “Must you be so provocative?”
She settled back into the passenger seat with a sigh and took her hand with her. “Must you be so uptight?”
“You make me uncomfortable with your…” Lord, where to begin? Existence, accurate though it was, struck him as unnecessarily harsh.
“Colorful language? Forthrightness? Raw animal magnetism?” she suggested when he failed to complete the thought.
How foolish of him to be concerned with hurting her feelings with labels she no doubt considered compliments. “All of the above and then some.”
“It’s funny. Humans have always portrayed vampires as decadent, hedonistic creatures. Used to be, that made them bad-nasties. Now, they call it sex appeal. Aside from humanity’s fickle attitude toward pleasure, what’s funny is that every vampire I’ve met since humans started telling tales about them has been a straight-laced, law-abiding, model citizen, apart from the dietary restrictions and keeping odd hours.”
“Humans also portray elves as tree-hugging, bow-twanging Aryans.” He extended a hand and flicked the puffball dangling from the hat she’d tossed atop the dashboard. “If you’re lucky.”
She snatched it out of his reach. “Santa’s midget slaves and cookie-baking tree dwellers are nothing but vicious anti-elf propaganda spread by damn faeries to make us sound more asinine than those bug-winged, tooth-collecting weaklings!”
Frigid air poured into the car when she rolled down the window and hurled the hat into the night.
Harvey’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror, expecting flashing red lights and a ticket for littering—something else he’d avoided up until this point.
Bowe raked her fingers through her hair, making it stand out like ink-drenched spikes. Her hand trembled until she balled it into a fist on the seat beside her, forcing it to still. Her voice was not so easily steadied. “Did you have a point?”
She had to ask, when she had done nothing but sharpen it since her arrival? Elves were impetuous, violent, more likely to burn a forest to the ground to flush out an enemy than launch a conservation campaign. They weren’t known to be as garrulous as this one, preferring to let their weapons speak on their behalf, but if all unarmed elves became chatty, he would expect them to be equally foul-mouthed. “Only that storytellers habitually forsake truth to achieve an effect. If villagers sharing their blood with nocturnal neighbors is an undesirable habit, exploit their fears to convince them vampires are sinners who will consign them to eternity in Hell. If elves are too frightful and offensive to be mentioned in polite company—”
“Make clowns of them, stupidly forgetting elves aren’t good-humored, forgiving types.” She put her feet on the dashboard so that the air whooshing from the vent ruffled the fur barely covering her posterior. “We have volumes of stories that make humans sound like morons, too. We call them ‘nonfiction.’”
Historical reports never explained why elves hadn’t declared war and exterminated the humans for besmirching their… bad name. “You left the realm rather than slaughter them.”
“We tried wiping them out once, but they’re like cockroaches—for every one you kill, there’s a whole nest of them hidden somewhere. It would take centuries to be rid of them, and the real estate isn’t worth that kind of time investment. We’re happier in our own vermin-free zone.” She tapped out Frelvis-inspired holiday tune on the windshield with her toes, cheered by the talk of carnage. “Better to leave than stay and submit to their rule like you did. Vamps can argue that you can’t kill ‘em all and survive yourselves, but there’s a wide swath of options between total annihilation and total capitulation that you failed to explore, which is why you now have a bunch of listless, aimless, and just plain less vampires who are no more than caricatures of a once-great breed.”
She had no grasp of the advantages of living in harmony with humankind. Had humans not begun to congregate in large numbers, vampires would still be forced to wander from one far-flung village to another in search of an inconspicuous meal. Without human ingenuity, there would be no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no central heat and air—luxuries many vampires were old enough to remember living without and would not volunteer to be without again. Humans devised countless means of recreation, and—perhaps most importantly—kept their cities awake all night long so vampires could take advantage of their achievements. In exchange for sharing the conveniences of society, a small price had to be paid in the form of limitations designed to protect the more vulnerable species.
Vampires weren’t the only race who considered the deal better than fair.
He turned into a parking lot, and a leaden weight compressed his chest in response to the solid expanse of cars that met his gaze. Two nights before Christmas, this was lunacy. “So your plan is to transform me into a fearsome monster, thereby instilling in me the Christmas spirit.”
Her toes ceased tapping. “Do you even know what that means, Harvey? I don’t. I do know why I would be given such a fuzzy objective, however—so no matter what I do, the Council can say, ‘Nope, not what we meant. Off with your head!’”
He stopped at the end of row of cars. Even the most remote corners of the lot were occupied. She was unlikely to accept that excuse for abandoning her mission, particularly in light of the consequences of failure. “You think they mean to execute you no matter what you do.”
“I know it.” She swiped a finger down his cheek, stuck it in her mouth, and pulled it free with a wet pop of suction. “Mm. I can taste the in that case, please leave me alone oozing from your pores, but I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Her touch lingered on his skin. He expected it would for a while, since he could still feel her handprint branded on his thigh. Her liberties with physical contact could be added to the list of things that caused him discomfort. “Why not?”
“Someone’s pulling out down there.”
He drove past the end of the row indicated. “Someone else is already waiting.”
“That someone else is waiting behind the guy pulling out. By the time they do the don’t-back-into-me dance and get any forward momentum going, you could be in that spot.” She twisted around in her seat and made a feral sound deep in her throat. “Too late. Now your manhood is in question as much as your vamphood, and that’s why I can’t leave you alone. You are a walking cry for help. Or rather, a driving-precisely-the-posted-speed-limit cry for help.”
He didn’t share her belief that obeying the law was a symptom in need of treatment. “I’m disinclined to entertain lifestyle advice from you, Miss Winderowe, when yours has resulted in you being sentenced to a horrific death reserved for those who far exceed previous records set for criminality.”
“It’s true I’ve been exceptionally naughty this year, but I’ll die with no regrets for the things I’ve done. Good thing, considering I’ll be reliving death every couple of minutes for eternity. The only thing I’ll regret not doing is teaching you to have fun.” She rested her chin on his shoulder and injected a hint of pleading in her voice. “It’s less than a day, Harvey. Can’t you pretend to cooperate, for that little amount of time, in the name of easing a dying woman’s mind? Isn’t that your job, to solve problems?”
Due to the distractions of her breath tickling his neck, her breasts pressed against his arm, and her invasiveness in general, he drove past the vacant parking space concealed between two SUVs before its availability registered in his mind.
An oncoming car sped down the aisle to pounce upon his oversight.
Harvey yanked the gearshift into reverse and backed into the slot with a squeal of tires.
The jerky maneuver deposited Bowe back in the passenger seat with a muffled oof.
The other driver gave him the finger in passing.
Harvey raised his hand above the steering wheel but stopped before extending the corresponding digit in reply. He had no desire to become a statistic on tonight’s eleven o’clock news, another victim pumped full of bullets over a something as trivial as a parking space.
Why single him out as the antithesis of Christmas cheer when mothers were knifing each other over children’s toys?
They’d chosen the right man if they intended her to fail, that much was clear. After little more than an hour in her company, the veneer of civilization had been breached. There was no telling what sort of savagery he’d be reduced to after twenty-four hours. This could not end well, for anyone.
Venturing to the building would be pointless, as would freezing while they debated the issue, so he left the engine running. “You said yourself nothing can be done to solve your problem. It is not my job to waste time and resources on lost causes.”
She steepled her fingers beneath her chin and adopted a solemn, contemplative expression. “I sense your turmoil. I’m not a damsel in distress, inspiring you to acts of heroism out of the goodness of your heart, nor does my predicament fall within your professional jurisdiction. Why, then, you’re asking yourself, are you here with me?”
The way her forearms squeezed together to accentuate her cleavage had nothing to do with it. He had never been manipulated by such cheap antics and barely glanced in that vicinity before focusing on her face. “Because you threatened my staff with legal repercussions and fostering delinquency if you didn’t get your way.”
“Exactly.”
She straddled him in one fluid move, knees tight against his hips, backside—toasted by the heater—searing through his trousers. Her weight shifted, and he reached to steady her before she fell against the horn and attracted attention. People would think they were… well… in a parking lot.
His hands landed on her naked thighs. He expected her skin to feel coarse as bark to match her personality. His fingers clenched at the shock of being proven wrong, relaxing just as quickly and moving on to verify the phenomenon wasn’t localized to those two small areas. It wasn’t. When did an elf on death row find the time to indulge in waxing and exfoliating and whatever other spa treatments were involved in making skin smooth as glass?
He stared at the breasts inches from his face and tried to imagine how the skin displayed by the costume’s immodest neckline would feel against his lips.
His gaze drifted up to the slender column of her throat. And against his teeth.
Bowe’s husky laugh warmed his cheek as she reached behind her back and took the keys from the ignition. “You see, I’m the problem, Harvey, and I’m all yours.”
.
From The Nights Before Christmas © 2010 by Kerry Allen
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