before. Ryan loved to hear stories of all the little girls who had been so excited to meet a ballerina who looked like them, instead of always seeing only white dancers.
“Misty Copeland is doing God’s work,” Annie liked to say. They’d made a deal to go see Misty dance in New York one day soon.
Ryan wondered what Annie would say if she found out about vampires.
Probably nothing good, and she sure as hell wouldn’t want Ryan to have anything to do with them. She might like Meara, though. Annie was joyfully bisexual and had a special thing for tall blonds of every gender and skin tone.
Ryan was discovering that she had a thing for tall blonds, too. Or at least one of them.
“What is that smile on your face? Oh my God, you got some. Finally! Praise the lord and pass the lubricant. Who is it?” Annie ran over and threw her arms around Ryan in a quick hug. “Tell me right now. Is it that new resident in the ER?”
“No! Doctor Douchehead? Euwww!” Ryan shuddered. “Why would you think I’d be attracted to an arrogant asshole like that? He mansplained a simple surgical procedure to me last week, and I finally had to tell him that after he’d finished his residency, we could talk. Jerk.”
Annie tapped her foot. “Then who? And don’t tell me nobody, because I recognize that glow, my friend.”
“I—it’s so new, I don’t want to talk about it yet, okay?” Ryan knew she sounded honest, because it was the truth, as far as it went. She certainly didn’t want to talk about Bane. She couldn’t share the truth, for one thing. For another, she found that she wanted to hold the secret of him to herself for a while longer.
“Well.” Annie grinned at her. “Fair enough. Gotta run, break over, those kids need their ballerina doctor. But my birthday is this weekend, remember? So when we go out for drinks, you have to spill all.”
“I will,” Ryan lied.
She would spill nothing.
Instead, she would, to quote Elizabeth, after Darcy proposed and she turned him down, have so much to conceal.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ryan popped into HR and told them she had to take emergency leave for a week, due to a family emergency—it was no problem, she was assured, since she had several weeks of leave built up. Old Reliable Ryan worked all the holidays, after all, so the doctors with families could be home. Then she made another, more surreptitious, stop to get a few of the supplies and some equipment that wouldn’t be missed here but would be very helpful at Bane’s place.
After that, she found herself rushing out to the parking garage, almost afraid that the car—and Meara and Mr. C, her links to Bane—would have disappeared into the dark abyss of her imagination, where she’d dreamed them up in the first place.
She ran up the three flights of stairs, raced across the aisles, and then stopped, a sound almost like a sob escaping her throat.
It’s still there. I didn’t dream him.
This is all real.
When she got closer, Mr. C popped out of the car and made as if to walk around and get the door for her, but she waved him off.
“I’m good. Sorry if I took too long.”
“No worries. Meara slept the entire time, and I’ve been caught up in a killer game of Scrabble.”
She gave him directions to her house, and they chatted a bit about her job at the hospital, Meara still asleep in the back. She told him she worked at the clinic two days a week, usually.
“I can’t believe I’ve worked there for more than a year and finally meet the woman who founded it…and she’s a vampire.”
“They’re good people,” he said, taking a turn quickly before a carload of drunk tourists from Michigan could sideswipe the limo.
Savannah was a hot tourist destination. Ryan usually avoided them, but it was always fun to catch a ghost tour once in a while or buy a round of drinks for a bachelorette party in town for a destination wedding.
“Have you known Bane and Meara for a long time?”
“Luke, too. We’ve been with them for more than sixty years, now, I guess. Well, I have. Mary Jo has been with them all her life. Her parents and grandparents ran the house before her. I married up, you might say.” He grinned at her, eyes twinkling.
“Married up?”
“I was fresh out of the Army and couldn’t find a job other than working at the