American Vampire. Jennifer Armintrout
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have gotten all turned around in Cleveland. I damn sure wouldn’t have stopped here.”
“Well, you’re not here forever. You’re just here until you die.” Derek cracked his knuckles, probably imitating some mobster he’d seen in a movie. “You get my draft?”
“It’s drift, you moron.” Graf lay back down on the cot. At sundown, if Corn-fed was still hanging around with his stupid tough-guy act, Graf was going to drain him dry. At the very least, he would be doing Jessa a favor. If this was the kind of guy she really went for, it would probably be doing her a favor to kill her, too.
“What did you just call me?” Derek demanded, his voice dripping with unspent testosterone.
Graf didn’t bother to open his eyes. “I’m too tired to repeat it. Come back later.”
From the sound of Jessa’s feet shuffling on the dirt floor and the rapid-fire, “No, no, no!” she uttered, Graf knew Derek had lunged for him, and that most likely Jessa had held him back. Though it took considerable effort not to sit up and rip out the guy’s windpipe right then and there, Graf restrained himself. It would be better if he waited, until the sun went down and he had a place to hide the bodies.
“That son of a bitch has a big problem on his hands now, a big problem.” Derek swore, his voice accompanied by the creaking of the stairs.
When the door slammed, Graf sat up and pulled on his jeans. He cocked his head to listen to the muffled conversation upstairs.
“You can’t just go around punching people!” Jessa had a different angry voice with Derek than she’d had with Graf the night before. There was more frustration invested in it. That was interesting.
“There’s something weird about that guy, and I don’t like it!”
“It doesn’t matter if you like it! It’s not like he can leave!” There was a strained silence, and Graf imagined the two humans staring at each other, daring each other to try for the last word.
“And … go,” Graf prompted quietly.
On the heels of his words, Jessa spoke. “Look, I’ll take him over to June’s Place tonight, see if I can’t get someone else to put him up.”
Derek huffed in reply. “Yeah, well, you better take him over to Tom Stoke’s place, too. He’s going to want to know what’s happening, and you don’t want to get Tom pissed off. I might go over there, too, and let him know I’m not real keen on the notion of some guy staying out here with you, alone.”
“Oh, yeah, and what’s Tom going to do? Make me wear a big, red letter A on my chest?” She lowered her voice. “Besides, this guy isn’t dangerous. He’s just a prick.”
Graf couldn’t help but smile at that. They were so trusting sometimes. His smile died when she followed up her statement with, “He seems kind of like the whiny type. Not real intimidating.”
“Don’t make me worry about you,” Derek warned, and the implication went beyond fearing for her safety. And … confirmation. Graf had figured there was something going on between the two of them. So, he was a jealous boyfriend? Where the hell had he been when his girl was running from—and being rescued by—monsters?
When Jessa spoke again, her tone was hard and cold. “You should be getting back on home to your wife, shouldn’t you?”
That was interesting. Very interesting. Better than the soap operas Sophia had forced him to watch with her.
Derek swore, and the floorboards overhead creaked as he stomped across them. The outside door slammed.
Graf expected to hear Jessa crying—the spurned lover, the other woman, reduced to tears by the man she couldn’t give up. Instead, all he heard was an exasperated sigh, then footsteps through the kitchen.
If it hadn’t been so damned sunny out, he would have gone upstairs and shown her exactly how non-intimidating he was. Knowing the way the place was decorated, there were probably yellowing lace curtains on the windows and he’d be incinerated instantly. And a sick part of him still wondered if he’d kill her or have sex with her. If she was getting it from that Derek guy, it probably wasn’t that good. He could do things to her that would make her forget she ever gave a shit about Country Boy.
Thoughts like that made his fangs ache, and other things, too. Hunger, even the sexual variety, was too exhausting to deal with at the moment, so he lay down and went back to sleep.
“Wake up. Allergic to the sun does not mean ‘lazy as hell.’ I saw those girls on 20/20.”
Graf peeled open one eye. Jessa stood over him, scowling. Be patient, he urged himself. You can’t eat her yet. You don’t know how to find anyone else to eat without her help.
The way he figured it, he could follow her to this Tom guy’s house, and then to June’s Place, whatever that was. He could get acquainted with the town tonight and then finish off Jessa and her backwoods Casanova before polishing off the rest of the hillbillies as necessary.
He stood up and reached for his shirt. When he pulled it on, she turned away quickly, a guilty expression on her face. She’d been sneaking a peek, and the hungry look in her eyes told him her opinion of what she’d seen. Very interesting, considering Everybody’s All-American hadn’t been all that bad-looking.
“So, what, do you spend, like, forty hours a week at the gym?” she snorted, starting for the stairs.
“No, I don’t work out all that much.” It was true. There was really no point in a vampire working out. For the most part, he looked exactly the same as he had the day he’d been turned. Sure, his muscles had become more toned from the boost in strength, and his wardrobe was a lot different, and he didn’t have a lame haircut anymore, but physically, not much could be changed about the way a vampire looked. A lesson Sophia had learned when she’d stupidly tried to get collagen injections in her lips. At least the plastic surgeon had been delicious.
Jessa made a noise that told him she didn’t believe him. “Meet me in the kitchen. We’ve got eggs and apples for dinner.”
“I’m not really all that hungry,” he called after her as she jogged up the stairs. He followed, his stomach jerking in response to the smell of the food. Another physical thing that couldn’t be changed. “Eggs and apples?”
“All I can afford.” She shrugged as she scraped scrambled eggs from a large, cast-iron skillet. “We have to make do with what we’ve got.”
He rolled his eyes. “I appreciate that fact. You can stop acting like a dust-bowl farmer.”
The skillet clattered to the stove top, and she braced her hands against the counter. “You have got some nerve, buddy.”
“I have some nerve? You get me trapped here, you let your boyfriend come down to beat my ass—”
“Derek is not my boyfriend!” she shouted as she whirled toward him, the spatula in her hand whipping flecks of egg through the air. Her shocked gaze followed their trajectory.
Graf ducked the flying food and gave a low whistle. “You don’t say?”
“I don’t even know why I’m explaining it to you. It’s none of your business.” She took a deep breath. “What were you doing at the service station? You shouldn’t have been able to stop there in the first place. But couldn’t you tell it wasn’t open, from the fact that it was all dark inside?”
Before he could stop himself, his gaze flicked guiltily to the countertop in front of him, and he knew he was caught. Usually, he could lie convincingly enough to fool a polygraph machine, but for some reason that skill had failed him now, and in front of a woman who was, he had to admit, a pretty smart cookie.
“Oh my God!” She put her hands on her hips. “You were going to rob it!”
“I was not!” The quick denial sealed his fate. He should have laughed it off, like