hit a sore spot, she told him. “I have to be trained on a 3-D printer too. Have you ever worked with one? Oh, that’s perfect right there.” He told her that he had, but he’d not been all that successful at it. “I wonder what will happen if I can’t make it work either.”
“I don’t see you having issues with it. You can draw better than me, and that is where I messed up. Did you know you’re bruised right here? It must have been recent, or you would have healed by now.” Beckett loved how they could keep up conversations with each other and have other things to say as well. “It’s fading, so it’s nothing to worry about now.”
She leaned back on his chest when he’d finished helping her out with her neck. It sounded like she’d had a good day. So when he was asked about his day, he almost didn’t tell her.
“It started out well enough. I was supposed to look over some of the books for a company that makes salad dressings—all sorts. Before I even went to the place, I bought a few of their brand and decided I didn’t care for it. Mom said she’d not cared for it either when she saw them in the fridge.” When he told her the brand, she said that she hadn’t cared for them either. “So I try and go in with an open mind. Once I was there, I saw a lot of health code violations right off the bat.”
“Is that something you do as well? See if they’re going to pass inspections?” Beckett told her not usually. “I would think that would be something someone would need to deal with right away. Yuck. Don’t tell me what they were. I don’t want to know.”
“I wish I hadn’t either. Anyway, I reached out to Thatcher and my dad—they used to have something to do with that sort of thing. I let them know what I was looking at and where I was. Both of them showed up on the pretense of having lunch with me. But as soon as they were in the door, the entire scam fell apart.” He laughed a little. “Dad was appalled by what he’d seen. Thatcher gagged like fifty times when he saw it.”
“Don’t. Just move on to the part where the health department closed them down.” He laughed all the harder. “They did, right? I’d hate to have to start a protest of the place. I will, too, if they make one more bottle of that nasty shit.”
“Not only did they shut them down, but—” He was laughing too hard to catch his breath now. “Thatcher got sick, right there on the floor, while the inspector was pulling things away from the wall. Christ. Dad, he was patting my brother on the back, gagging too. It was, now that I’m not there, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Employees were trying to clean up the puke, slipping and sliding all over the place. The inspector was ill too and had run to the bathroom three times before the police showed up. Oh, Allie, you’ve turned my shitty day into something I can laugh at now. Thank you, love.”
“You’re very welcome.” She laughed with him when he described how green Thatcher had gotten. He told her how he’d had to go and shift to get the scent out of his nose. “I can almost see him doing that too. He’s so stodgy. I’d not equate him with someone that would get sick when there is puking going on.”
“He’s always been like that. If one of us was sick, we’d never call on him. He would be joining us. Mom can just hear it, and it has her sick too.” He pulled her over and sat her on his lap. He’d been thinking about her all day. “I wanted to tell you something. It’s really important. But it’s also something that was done behind your back. I didn’t, but Rogen and the others did. They know who the vampire was that kidnapped you and hurt you. He’s dead, as you well know.”
“They felt I needed to know, right?” Beckett told her it was important that she knew, in the event, one of their children was a vampire. “I didn’t think that would even be possible. Not with me being changed into a tiger.”
“I don’t know a great deal about it either, but I did get to talk to