from start to finish and hadn’t been in the least grateful when I completed the job. He’d already paid, shortchanging me by a hundred and fifty bucks, the stingy bastard. I doubted I’d ever hear from him again. Who could it be?
Wait a minute. “Alex” calling me right around the same time as Jack the White Hat?
Oh, no. No, no, no. That could only mean one thing.
Stifling a shudder, I made sure to keep my expression calm and blank. I didn’t want to upset Jen. If she’d listened to the message more closely or caught me looking upset she’d realize who it was, too. Her wounded, disapproving looks were the last thing I wanted to deal with right now.
“Thanks, Jen. I’ll check it out.”
“No prob.”
I closed the door, moving back around my desk and moving the files aside so I could review the contract one more time. My concentration was shot; my good mood soured. A White Hat and Alec Royce had both tried to get in touch with me, and I had no idea why.
The clock on my computer read 3:15, which meant I still had a little over two hours before my boyfriend Chaz would pick me up for my first real vacation in months.
Being stuck recuperating in a hospital or taking time off from work to wait for the effects of a vampire’s blood bond to wear off does not count as a vacation, by the way.
Sara was supposed to keep an eye on my apartment and my messages while I was gone. It was only for a few days, but that was more (voluntary) time off than I’d taken in quite a while. Her boyfriend was letting me borrow one of his lap-tops so I could keep an eye on my e-mail and stay in touch. He’d threatened to sic his familiar, a tiny black mouse named Bob, on me every night for a week if anything happened to his coveted Fragware 5000. I’d sworn up and down I’d treat it like my own. Seriously, who wants a mouse crawling on them in their sleep? Ugh.
Anyway, things should’ve been winding down. My current clients had been given the message that I would be out, and Jen was supposed to refer everything to Sara until I got back. Jack and Royce’s surfacing again changed all of that.
I frowned down at the blinking message light on my phone, strongly considering waiting until I returned to town to listen to it. Alec Royce, like Jack the White Hat, was straight up bad news. He was wealthy, good-looking, and had made a couple of halfhearted attempts in the past to seduce me away from Chaz. We should’ve been able to go our separate ways since I’d saved his life and he’d returned the favor by saving mine.
However, the guy was a vampire, and I should’ve known better than to think that he’d forgotten about me over the last month. He’d used threats and coercion to get me to sign a contract that bound me to him by letter of the law, and then later he bound me to him in a much more tangible way—by blood—in order to save my life. While I was grateful for being saved, the method he used to get me out of the clutches of Max Carlyle still gave me nightmares. The remembered taste of his blood on my lips made me shiver, and not entirely in a bad way. Disgusted and horrified as I was, it had been an electrifying experience to feel so needed, so safe, so complete, while under his sway.
As you might imagine, I’d done everything possible to keep the hell away from him since then.
I thought when I changed my cell phone number that it might keep him and some of the other undesirable elements of my past from contacting me, but the number to my office was plastered all over the Yellow Pages and the Internet. I wasn’t thrilled to know he wanted to talk to me again, but having him call me was marginally better than having him show up here at my office or, worse yet, at my apartment.
Grumbling under my breath, I lifted the receiver and punched in the password to listen to the messages. There were a couple others I had to wade through before Royce’s smooth, cultured voice came on the line.
“This is Alec, and I’m leaving a message for Ms. Waynest. Shiarra, I just wanted to make sure you know that whatever happens