Concerned by how still she was, Justin squatted and turned her over. He spotted the bloody gash on her forehead first. She’d obviously hit her head on the sidewalk as she fell. It was a good bump, but not that bad, he noted with a relief that turned to horror as he then spotted the scissors protruding from her chest in the small space where the loosely done up coat didn’t meet. Even as Bricker saw that, her eyes opened and then widened with pain and fear of a different kind now. She no longer feared him, at least not as much as she feared for her life. The hell of it was, he was afraid for her life too. It looked bad.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to run with scissors?” he said shortly, ripping her coat open to reveal a pink pajama top with white bunnies. The sight startled him enough that he paused briefly, until he noted that those bunnies around the scissors were quickly growing red with the blood bubbling up from her wound. He was sure the presence of the shears in her body was the only thing keeping that blood from spraying out in a fountain. It looked like a mortal wound to him. He was going to lose his life mate before even learning her name.
“Screw that,” Bricker muttered, and jerked his sleeve up to tear into his wrist with the fangs that slid forward in his mouth. He wasn’t losing her.
Two
Holly smacked her lips together and ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. She then grimaced at the serious case of morning breath she had. A truly serious case, she thought with disgust, and opened her eyes, expecting to see the canopy of her bed. Instead, she found herself staring at a somewhat clean white ceiling in a beige room. Her bedroom wasn’t beige.
Pushing herself up on her elbows, Holly glanced around with confusion. There was a desk and chair, a wardrobe with a television in the upper inset, black-out curtains, two chairs set on either side of a small coffee table to the left of the bed she lay in, and a perfectly dreadful print on the wall. It all spoke of one thing . . .
“A hotel?” Holly breathed with surprise. “What the devil am I doing in a hotel?”
Sitting up, she started to swing her feet out of bed, but then froze and snatched up the sheet and blanket as they fell away to reveal that she was naked. Holly never slept naked. She held the bedclothes briefly to her chest, her gaze shifting around the room in search of her clothes, but didn’t see them. That was distressing. Even more distressing though was the fact that she had no recollection of how she’d come to be in this state.
Her gaze slid to the clock on the bedside table, and Holly sucked in a startled gasp of dismay. Seven o’clock. Dear God, she’d been out all night. James would get home soon and wonder where the hell she was. He’d worry and want to know what had happened. Only she didn’t have a clue what to tell him, because she didn’t know herself.
Getting home before him seemed like a good idea, but getting dressed and getting out of this bed was an even better one, she decided, and got up, dragging the sheet with her. The blanket tried to come too, but eventually gave up the game and slid free to lie in a heap on the floor. Leaving it there, Holly moved to the closet and opened it to peer inside. Black filled the small space; black jeans, black leather pants, a black leather jacket and even black T-shirts hung neatly in the closet.
Someone was definitely fashion challenged, one part of her mind thought. The other part, however, was having a bit of a panic attack. These were not her clothes. They weren’t even women’s clothes. They were a man’s clothes, and not a man she knew. Holly couldn’t think of a single person she was acquainted with who would wear these items . . . and whose bed she should be naked in. At least, not that she could recall . . . although, for some reason, the sight of the clothes raised fear in her.
Suddenly desperate to get out of there, Holly quickly turned to tug open the drawers in the dresser along the wall, hoping for other clothing options, but there was nothing but a bit of dust. Not even boxers or briefs. Apparently the mysterious man who liked black also liked to go commando. She tried not to think about that as she moved back to the closet and pulled out a pair of black jeans and a matching T-shirt.
The pants were big on her, but she fixed that by rolling up the bottoms and making use of a belt she found on another hanger. The T-shirt was large as well, blousing out over the puckered waistband and hanging down almost to her knees. Holly caught the hem and tied a knot in it at her side to make it more of a shirt and less a dress. She then pulled on the leather jacket to hide the mess she was wearing.
Holly headed for the door, only to pause when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she passed the open bathroom door along the way. Dear God, Holly thought with disgust, if she were to wring the grease out of her hair there would be enough to fry something. On top of that, it was a horrible mess, sticking out in the back in a forest of knots. It was the hair of a woman who had been thrashing her head around during crazy, hot, monkey sex.
Not that she’d ever experienced crazy, hot monkey sex . . . that she recalled, Holly tacked on grimly as she glanced toward the bed. But her roommate at college had always looked like this in the mornings after her boyfriend visited. She claimed it could be blamed on her boyfriend for being so good at “doing the nasty.”
Holly tried to tame her usually sleek black mane with her fingers. When that didn’t work, she quickly searched the bathroom for a brush. There wasn’t one, of course. Why would anyone have a hairbrush when she needed it? Rolling her eyes, she gave up on that and instead began to search for something to wrap around her head to at least hide her bad hair. Holly was afraid if she went anywhere like this, she’d be locked up as a madwoman. Certainly, she’d draw attention to herself, and at that moment, she was thinking the less attention the better until she knew exactly what had happened and how she’d got here.
A hat or bandana would have done the trick, but apparently the mysterious man in black didn’t have either of those. Blowing her breath out on a sigh, Holly shifted briefly from foot to foot, and then snatched another T-shirt off its hanger and began tearing at it until she had a nice, sleeveless square. After quickly wrapping that around her head and tying it, Holly once again headed for the door.
She needed to figure out where she was, how to get home from here, and then . . . well, once she was safely home she could sort out what had happened and what, if anything, she should do about it.
“Her name is Holly Bosley,” Lucian announced.
“Yeah. Anders told me that the first night, when he got back with her purse,” Justin said impatiently. He was only in Lucian’s room because the man had insisted he had to speak to him. Lucian wasn’t someone you refused. But Justin didn’t want to be here; he wanted to be back in his own room across the hall with the woman presently in his bed. She’d been sleeping restlessly for two days and nights, something that had worried him. Every other turn he’d witnessed had gone more quickly, with the turnee thrashing and screaming their way through.
Justin had been very concerned at first by how silent and still Holly was . . . until Lucian had told him that Stephano Notte’s turn had gone just as quietly and had taken several days. Oddly enough, Stephano’s turn had been preceded by his being stabbed in the chest too. Lucian had speculated that it was possible the wound decided the tempo of the turn.
Justin didn’t care. All he cared about was Holly surviving and waking up. He had no idea when that might happen, but he wanted to be there when it did.
Hoping to speed this conversation along, Justin now added, “There was a car in the cemetery parking lot with a purse in it. Anders broke the car window to get to her purse, searched it and found her driver’s license. Holly Lynne Bosley. There were no car keys though, and she didn’t have any keys on her, so Anders had to hotwire the car to get it back here to the hotel.”