and akin to a fire being lit in a cold, drafty room: A shocking, very pleasant change.
Isobel would approve of this, she thought abruptly. All of it.
Boone. The jazz music. The cozy pub-like atmosphere. Helania . . . taking a chance on someone.
And in this moment, it felt like the dice she was rolling were not so much on Boone, but . . . on herself.
“Yes,” she said with a slow smile. “I would like that.”
They got to their feet at the same time, and given that their table was right in front by the stage, it was just two steps over and she was up against his body.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, he was big. Her head only came up to his pecs and his arms seemed enormous as they wrapped around her. But he held her gently, letting her decide how close to get, and what do you know . . .
She wanted close.
It was a tough goal to accomplish, however. He had never taken his leather jacket off, and it wasn’t until she snuck a hand underneath it and ran into a holstered gun that she realized why.
“Sorry,” he said tightly.
“It’s okay.” She looked up into his eyes. “At least I know I’m safe.”
His face got deadly serious. “Always. I’m never going to let anything happen to you.”
As tears pricked the corners of her eyes, she laid her head on his leather-covered chest. She didn’t want to ruin the mood, but the truth was, that vow was hard to hear.
Too much like the past. Too much like Isobel.
Dragging herself back to the present, she concentrated on the way he moved, the subtle swaying of all that muscle, the promise of things left as yet unexplored.
Naked things. Pleasurable things.
God, he smelled good. Leather, a slight whiff of gunmetal . . . but mostly the clean male underneath.
Helania thought once again that she had no idea where this was going or what exactly was happening between them. But she wanted things to end up in a bed.
Soon—
One of Boone’s hands stroked over her shoulder and down her back, following the contours of her curves. The warmth, the subtle pressure of the caress, the span of his large palm and deft fingers . . . all of it reverberated throughout her whole body, making her feel like she was a tuning fork calibrated for him and him alone. Tilting her head, she looked up at him again.
His face was a stark mask of hunger and his eyes burned as he stared down at her.
Except she didn’t need to see his tight expression to know how badly he wanted her.
She could feel his arousal.
“No, I’m going to do it.”
The dead tone cut through the anxious talk in the clinic’s private meeting room, a bomb blowing a hole in the conversational landscape. In the silent aftermath, Butch focused on the female who had spoken up through the tense gathering. Sitting in a chair off to the side, she was well into middle age, which for a vampire didn’t mean much in terms of physical changes—as per the species’ typical lifespan, she still looked like the twenty-five-year-old she had been after she’d gone through her change three hundred or so years before.
But the centuries she had been through showed in those eyes of hers.
And that tone.
Clearly, she had seen many bad things over the course of her life. This, however . . . this coming to see if a dead body was that of her daughter was undoubtedly the very worst. And these males around her, the hellren, the son, the uncle and the grandfather? They all fell quiet and dropped their stares to the floor in deference to her.
No doubt part of it was because no one could argue her right, but more than that? Butch had the sense that nobody except her had the strength for the grim task.
And he was not surprised that the mahmen was the one who’d woman’d up. After however many years in homicide, he had learned about the differences between the sexes. Men were physically stronger, true. But the women? They were the warriors. As much as those males who had come with her would have run into a burning building to save her, not one of them was strong enough to take her place for this heartbreaking duty.
Because they couldn’t handle it.
“All right,” Butch said. “Let me know when you’re—”