“Sounds like a sensible woman.”

“She is. And a good one. So I’m riding the stick—working the bar—when Jeremy comes in with a couple of friends. He’s just copped this big account, and they’re going to hoist a few. He’s a stockbroker.” She waved that away. “Hard to explain. Anyway, he’s good looking. Great looking, actually. So, he hits on me—”

“He struck you?”

“No, no.” Finding that wonderfully funny, she snorted out a laugh. “It’s parlance, slang. He flirted with me. I flirted back because he gave me the buzz. You know what I mean? That little zzzz you get inside?”

“I do.” Larkin brushed a hand over hers. “I know that buzz.”

“He hung around till closing, and I ended up giving him my number. Well, we don’t need every detail. We started seeing each other—going out together. He was fun, sweet. Normal. The kind of guy who sends you flowers the day after your first date.”

Her eyes misted over, but she shook her head, downed more whiskey. “I wanted normal. I wanted a chance at it. When things got serious between us, I thought yeah, yeah, this is the way it’s supposed to be. The job doesn’t mean I can’t have somebody, be part of somebody. But I didn’t tell him what I did on those nights we weren’t together, or what I did some nights after he was asleep. I didn’t tell him.”

“Did you love him?”

“I did. And I told him that. I told him I loved him, but I didn’t tell him what I was.” She drew a deep breath. “Honestly? I don’t know if that was sheer cowardice or ingrained training, but I didn’t tell him. We were together eight months, and he never knew. There had to be signs, there had to be clues. Hey, Jeremy, don’t you wonder how I got these bruises? Why my clothes are trashed? Where the hell this blood came from? But he never asked, and I never let myself wonder why.”

“People, you said, have blinders. Love, I think, can thicken them.”

“Bet your ass. He asked me to marry him. Oh God, he pulled out all the stops. The wine, the candles, the music, all the right words. I just rode on it, the big, shiny fantasy of it. Still, I didn’t say anything, not for days. Until my aunt sat me down.”

She pressed the thumb and finger of one hand to her eyes. “You have to tell him, she said to me. You have to make him believe it. You can’t have a life, can never build one with him, not with lies or half-truths or without trust. Dragged my feet another couple of weeks, but it ate at me. I knew she was right. But he loved me, so it would be all right. It would all work out fine. Because he loved me, and he’d see I was doing not just what I had to do, but what was right.”

Holding her glass in both hands, she closed her eyes. “I explained it to him as carefully as I knew how, taking him through the family history. He thought I was joking.” She opened her eyes now, met Larkin’s. “When he realized I wasn’t, he got hostile. Figured it was my sick way of breaking the engagement. We went round and round about it. I badgered him into going to the cemetery with me. I knew one was supposed to rise that night, and hey, a picture’s worth a thousand. So I showed him what they were, what I was.”

She drank again, one long sip. “He couldn’t wait to get away from me. Couldn’t wait to pack his things and get away. To walk out on me. I was a freak, and he never wanted to see me again.”

“He was weak.”

“He was just a guy. Now he’s a dead guy.”

“So it’s your fault, is it? Your fault that you cared enough to share what you are with him. To show him not only that there are monsters in the world, but that you’re strong enough, courageous enough to fight them? Your fault that he wasn’t man enough to see the wonder of you?”

“What wonder? I do what I’m trained to do, follow the family business.”

“That’s bollocks, and worse, it’s self-pity.”

“I didn’t kill him—you were right about that. But he’s dead because of me.”

“He’s dead because a vicious, soulless demon killed him. He’d dead because he didn’t believe in what was in front of his eyes, and didn’t hold on to you. And none of that is your doing.”

“He left me, like my father left me. I thought that was the worst. But this…I don’t know what to do with the pain.”

He took her glass, set it aside. Reaching out he pulled her into his arms, pressed her head onto his shoulder. “Put a bit of it here for now. Shed your tears, a stór. You’ll feel better having given them to him.”

He held her, stroking her hair and soothing, while she wept for another man.

S he woke tucked into his bed, still dressed, and grateful she was alone. The hangover wasn’t the clanging bell of a night of foolish indulgence, but the dull gong that came from using whiskey as a cushion.

He’d drawn the drapes so the sun wouldn’t wake her, she noted, and checked her watch for the time. The fact that it was already noon made her groan as she threw back the covers to sit on the side of the bed.

Too much to do, she told herself, to coddle a half-assed hangover and a raging case of sorrow. Before she could gather the fortitude to stand, Larkin walked in. He carried a glass that held something murky and brown.

“I’d say good morning, but it likely doesn’t feel as such to you.”

“It’s not too bad,” she told him. “I’ve had worse.”

“Regardless, it isn’t the day for having a head. Glenna says this will help it.”

She looked dubiously at the glass. “Because drinking it will make me throw up everything in my system?”

“She didn’t say. But you’ll be a brave girl now and take your medicine.”

“I guess.” She took the glass, sniffed at the contents. “Doesn’t smell as bad as it looks.” She took a deep breath, downed all of it. Then shuddered right down to her toes. “Tastes a lot worse. Not just eye of newt, but the whole damn newt.”

“Give it a minute or two to settle.”

She nodded, then stared down at her hands. “I wasn’t at my best last night, to put it extremely mildly.”

“No one expects you should be at your best at all times. Certainly not me.”

“I want to thank you for the ear, and the shoulder.”