Dead Over Heels (2 page)

Siamese blue eyes narrowed at him. “I will, of course, do as my sire commands.”

But that was a lie. He wasn’t in charge here, and they both knew it.

“Then we stay,” he said, surrendering. And the thing he had made chortled and bounced and giggled, and he smiled at it, and hated it, but he loved it, too.

Because he had made it, all those years ago when there were more horses in Manhattan than automobiles.

I
was so excited to land at the airport in New York City (La Guardia or the other one . . . I wasn’t paying attention to the pilot’s intercom ramblings) that I didn’t even bother with the stairs leading from the private plane to the ground. I just jumped, putting one hand on the railing and vaulting over, my black Gucci pumps dangling from my first two fingers. Didn’t even feel the shock in my knees when I hit.

This was not a trick I could have pulled off while I was alive.

At the head of the stairs, my husband (husband! bridegroom! Yessssss!), Sinclair, king of the vampires, shook out the Wall Street Journal, folded it, and scowled down at me.

“How completely indiscreet, Elizabeth.”

“Aw, Cooper doesn’t care.”

“Didn’t see a thing, mum,” Cooper assured me in his adorable Irish accent. He wasn’t our pilot, and this wasn’t our plane. It was my best friend, Jessica’s. She’d lent it to us for our honeymoon, told us we could go wherever we wanted. Cooper had worked for Jessica for ten years and, as they say, knew where all the bodies were buried. “An’ by the way, glad to see you’re not dead. That was a nasty business a couple of springs back.”

“Horrible practical joke,” I said, referring to my firing, death, thirtieth birthday, and return from the grave as the long-foretold vampire queen. The people who
didn’t
know I was a vampire either never knew I’d been killed, or thought it was a nasty trick thought up by my (late) evil stepmother. My friends and I did absolutely nothing to disabuse them of their silly-ass notions. “Really really bad taste. But it all worked out in the end.”

“Yes indeed, mum,” Cooper said, his blue eyes twinkling. Before Sinclair, I’d been a real sucker for Black Irish . . . that thick dark hair . . . those big blue eyes . . . umm . . .

Meanwhile, Sinclair (who wasn’t Irish . . . in fact, I had no idea what he was) was gliding down the steps like a beauty queen (all he lacked was the tiara and bouquet of roses . . . and the tearful wave), when I knew perfectly well he could step off the IDS Tower and not even rumple his tie.

“Try to contain yourself,” he sighed, moving past me toward the waiting limo.

“But it’s New York City! And we’re married! And we’re in New York!” I, the country mouse, ran after him in my bare feet. I was wearing a sky blue shirt dress, no stockings. Oh, and my wedding ring! Not to mention my non-cursed engagement ring. But that was a whole other story. “Don’t you think it’s going to be a blast?”

He muttered something that I, even with my super vampire hearing, couldn’t catch. Probably just as well. Behind us, Cooper was calling, “See you in a week, mum! Sir!”

I flapped a wave over one shoulder and practically dived into the limo (fortunately, the door was being held open by the driver, a tall, lean, gorgeous black guy with cheekbones you could cut yourself on and the most amazing green eyes). Sinclair got in on the other side and shook out his paper once again.

“The Grange Hotel?” the driver asked.

“Yes,” Sinclair replied absently as his pants made the dreaded
chirrup
. He fished out his cell phone, flipped it open, and blinked at the screen.

I sank back against the luxurious leather seats, halfway to full pout. “Don’t even tell me. Tina called again.”

“No matter where I am in the world,” he reminded me mildly, “I still have business to attend to. And so do you.”

“Dude! It’s our honeymoon, all right? If that thing beeps in your pants one more time, I’m going to
eat
it, understand? Now shut the fucking phone, toss the fucking paper, and bask in our mutual love and joy, dammit!”

“I’m not sure
bask
is the verb I’d choose,” he replied, but at least he put the phone away.

“Nice of Jess to arrange a limo,” I commented, relieved to finally get a fraction of his attention. We’d been married for three whole days and I still couldn’t believe it had really happened. Of course, according to my bridegroom, we’d been married since the first time we’d had sex. Don’t even get me started. “It’s not like her to throw her money around. And the plane! You believe she let us have her plane?”

“Point.” Sinclair frowned. With his dark good looks, dark suit, broad shoulders, and strong jaw, he looked formidable anyway; when he wasn’t smiling it was almost frightening. “She’s the least pretentious billionaire I’ve ever known.”

“Well, it’s her dad’s money.”

He gave me a long look and I nearly drowned in those dark dark eyes. “Correction. He’s dead. It’s her money.”

“Hwhuh?”

“It’s. Her. Money,” he repeated, well used to me being a little slow to pick up on current events.

I licked my lips. Jessica’s dad was a touchy subject. Fucking incestuous greedy arrogant asshole; if he was alive, I’d kill him. Seriously. And I am not a girl who kills lightly, as anyone who knows me will totally understand.

“I mean, she doesn’t consider it hers. It’s not like she earned it. Hey, I’m not putting her down, but that’s the way it is: she didn’t earn any of it. That’s why she doesn’t throw it around, and that’s why she has a day job.”

Sinclair just looked at me. He knew me well enough to know when I wasn’t coughing up the whole story. But in this case, it was just a theory. And the theory was, because Jessica had so recently (like, last week) recovered from terminal cancer, she was giddily celebrating life. (In all modesty, I must say that I cured her cancer. Yep. It’s true. But that’s a whole other story. Yay, me!)

“Including throwing planes and limos our way,” I continued. “God knows what is going on in the mansion back home in St. Paul while we’re away.”

Never mind. I didn’t want to know. I’d landed Sinclair—officially landed him, with paperwork and everything—and that was that. It was all I’d ever wanted, once I got over hating him and decided he was the vampire for me.

Sinclair, bless his cold, dead heart, tossed the newspaper on the floor and moved over until he was sitting beside me. He gave me a long, sweet kiss and cuddled me into his side. “Now, Mrs. Sinclair—”

“I told you, I didn’t take your name!”

“—what would you like to do first?”

“I want to check into the hotel and have nasty kinky sex. Oh, and then go see a Broadway show.”

“Odd,” my husband commented. “I’ve never been alternately intrigued and terrified at the same time.”

“Shut up. There’s lots of good ones.”

We discussed the pros and cons of live theater all the way to the hotel. I’d only seen high school stuff, and the plays at Chanhassen. And although those were pretty good, ergo Broadway would kick ass.

Sinclair, who had seen theater all over the world, begged to differ. And he did. Repeatedly. We had plenty of time, too, because even though it was full dark, traffic was horrendous.

And the
noise
. It sounded just as busy at ten o’clock at night as it would have during rush hour. And everything was open! Restaurants, convenience stores, shoe stores. It was unbelievable. New York City: the perfect tourist trap for vampires.

The limo driver pulled us right up to the front of the hotel, a forbidding stone building that looked like a transplanted castle. Sinclair helped me out (not that I needed it) while the driver shoved our luggage onto three bellboys.

Hand in hand, we swept into the lobby, me trying not to stare like I had cow shit on my heels, Sinclair looking perfectly at ease. He even yawned and, as we’d snacked on each other during the flight, didn’t have to worry about showing fangs.

Finally
, I thought, tightening my grip on his hand, a squeeze that would have broken the metacarpals of most people,
I get him to myself, and the Big Apple belongs to us. Oh, thank you, thank you Jesus.

The month leading up to the wedding had been a frightening, lonely time for me and I was very glad to be reunited with my husband. Shit, I was glad he’d made the wedding at all. And now we were here, and I was going to make the most of it. Bet your ass.

Sinclair slammed to a stop so suddenly, and so gracelessly, that I plowed right into his back. “What’s wrong?” I said into the cloth of his suit.

He muttered something, and I peeked around him.

Lounging across from the registration desk, taking up a small table in the bar area, was my best friend Jessica, and her boyfriend, Minneapolis Detective Nick Berry. They were both grinning at us with great big toothy smiles, at least one of which was fake.

“’Bout
time
you got here,” Jessica said, and raised her Cosmo to me in a toast.

“Oh, fuck me,” I groaned, surprised—but not in a good way.

“I don’t see how we can fit that into the schedule now,” my husband replied, looking as distressed as I’ve ever seen him.

W
ow, great. This is great. Seriously. So great to see you. And what a great surprise ! Now get out. Seriously.”

“Awww, you know I’m your hero.”

Sinclair was overseeing our luggage (as an alternative to strangling Jessica), Detective Nick was still in the lobby, and Jessica and I were arguing in the hallway outside our hotel room. It was a nice hallway . . . crimson carpet, gold wallpaper, gorgeous wall fixtures, dim lighting. Too bad I was so pissed it was totally wasted on me.

“You’re not a tiny bit glad to see me?” Jessica was continuing.

I snapped my attention away from the wall fixtures. “Irrelevant! Now will you get lost already?”

“Don’t you want to go shopping at Macy’s with me?” Jessica had the nerve to sound wounded.

“We have one in the Mall of America,” I said coldly. Also a Bloomingdale’s and an Orange Julius. “And we’ve been a thousand times.”

“Listen, Betsy . . .” Jessica was trying to look earnest, but as usual, her black hair was skinned back so tightly her eyebrows couldn’t move. She could barely blink. Even in the low hallway lighting, her ebony skin shone, but not in a run-for-the-blotting-papers way. She was, as usual, ridiculously beautiful, although still far too thin from the cancer. “I had to come.”

“You had to crash my honeymoon?”

“You make it sound so mean.”

I put my hands behind my back, because they wanted to fly up and fasten around my best friend’s throat. “It
is
mean, you nimrod! I finally haul Sinclair’s protesting ass to the altar—after rescuing him from certain death,
and
attending a double funeral,
and
taking on responsibility for BabyJon,
and
curing your cancer—and now here I am in New York City for the first time ever, ready to enjoy my honeymoon and you two idiots show up! No offense.”

“Listen . . .” Wary of superior vampire hearing, Jessica tugged me by the elbow about ten feet further down the hallway. I didn’t bother telling her Sinclair could still hear her from inside the room if he put his mind to it. Ears. Whatever. “I know it seems like a rotten trick—”

“‘Oh, sure, Betsy, you guys can borrow my plane, but not until tomorrow . . .’ Giving you plenty of time to beat us here.” Now my hands wanted to fly into my hair and yank, hard. “And dumbass that I am, I actually left our contact information with you.”

“Well, yes, but there was a method to my madness. You see, Nick hates you and Sinclair.”

I blinked. “Yeah. So?”

“So?” Jessica threw her bony arms up in the air. “So? So I finally find a guy who doesn’t give a shit that I gave away more money last year than the Target Corporation. So I finally find a guy who isn’t so busy crushing on my best friend he doesn’t even notice me. So I—”

“Hey, hey!”

“Oh, shut up, you know it’s true. I finally find a guy who likes me for
me
, and it turns out he hates my best friend and her husband. Not ‘God, they’re boring, I hate going over there’ hate, or ‘I hate how all she talks about is shoes’ hate.
Hate
hate. ‘I hate war’ hate. ‘I hate plague’ hate.”

I blew out a breath, which wasn’t necessary, but I’d only been dead a couple of years, and old habits died hard. Jessica wasn’t lying, or even exaggerating. Her boyfriend did hate me, and it was a problem.

See, when I was a newborn vampire, out of my mind with the thirst, I’d feasted on Nick. And it . . . sort of drove him crazy. Crying, slobbering crazy. Sinclair had to step in and fix it by erasing Nick’s memory of all events leading from my death.

We’d assumed it worked.

It hadn’t.

It had actually worn off several months ago but, like all cops, Nick could lie like a sociopath. Instead he’d waited and watched. When Jessica had gotten sick, he’d explained in terrifying detail all the things he and his Sig Sauer would do to me if I didn’t cure her. But I’d had plenty of other things on my mind at the time, and as upsetting as it was to find out how he really felt, there hadn’t been much I could do about it.

Frankly, what with one thing and another (the aforementioned rescue, the wedding, Jessica’s miracle cancer cure) I’d managed to put Nick’s simmering hatred out of my mind.

“I can’t have the man I love hating my best friend.”

“So you figure we’ll hang out on my honeymoon and get to be friends again?”

Jessica opened her mouth to reply, but our hotel door popped open and a bellboy (bellman, actually) trotted down the hallway toward us, dressed in the crimson uniform of the hotel staff. He was a wide-eyed redhead with a goatee. Goatees irritated me. Either shave it all off, or grow a proper, Grizzly Adams beard, that was my motto. “Mrs. Sinclair, did you want your shoes kept in the tissue paper, or—”