TALL DARK AND HUNGRY Page 0,24
He wanted to keep Terri away from Vincent be¬cause the very idea of his cousin wooing her under his nose made him sick, because... he was interested in her himself.
A banging on the window drew his distracted gaze. A driver had gotten out of his vehicle and was now yelling and pounding on Bastien's door. He couldn't hear what the man was shouting--the honking from behind was too loud--but Bastien gathered the fellow wasn't happy with the holdup. He watched the man's mouth move for several min¬utes, then put the suggestion in his head to shut up and get back into his car. The moment the fellow did, Bastien eased his foot down on the gas pedal and set his Mercedes moving again.
The incident set his mind going in another direc¬tion. He had put the suggestion in the angry driver's mind without any effort. Could he control and read Terri's mind? If he could, she wasn't for him. It he couldn't... He'd have to wait till he got back to the penthouse to see.
Eager to get home, Bastien put on some speed, cursing the fact that Chris Keyes lived in Morning-side Heights in the Upper West Side, far from his own expensive area of town.
When he got there, Bastien found he didn't need the keys C.K. had given him. The door to the apart¬ment was wide open. An old lady stood inside, hands on hips as she nattered at a pair of workers carting out chunks of plaster and wood--clearing away the rub¬ble from the fallen ceiling, was Bastien's guess. He entered and approached the woman, presuming she was the landlady. Wasting a good deal of time, he tried to explain to her that he was there on Chris's behalf; then he got tired of reassuring her and slipped into her mind to suggest she not notice his presence at all. Bastien then had to do so with the two workmen as well before being free to move into the bedroom.
He should have done so in the first place, Bastien thought with irritation as he slipped out of the apart¬ment several minutes later. He had a haphazard col-lection of clothes stuffed into a gym bag he'd found on the bedroom floor. Tossing the bag on the passen¬ger seat of his car, he started the engine, then paused. The next stop on his list was to collect subs, but he had no idea where those would be sold. Bastien al¬most got out of the car to ask the nearest passerby where he could find a shop that sold subs, then changed his mind. He'd wait till he was closer to home to ask directions. If the subs were usually heated, which he suspected a meatball sub would be--and for all he knew Terri's assorted sub might be too--he didn't want them to be cold by the time he returned. They sounded disgusting enough without being presented cold.
Unfortunately, it appeared that sub shops were scarce in the elite section of the city that housed Ar-geneau Enterprises; and the directions Bastien even¬tually got made him backtrack quite a fair distance to find what he was looking for. It also appeared that such shops were quite popular, because the line inside was atrocious. Bastien was tempted to leap into peo¬ple's minds to cut to the front of the line, but forced himself to be patient and wait like everyone else. This wasn't an emergency. He had no excuse for such manipulation.
Half an hour later, and well over two hours after he had set out, Bastien rode up the elevator to the pent¬house suite, carrying the gym bag with the editor's clothes, and a paper bag holding three subs, plain chips, two bags of barbecue chips, two Dr Peppers, and a Canada Dry ginger ale. He'd double ordered Terri's selections, to give himself something to pick at so she wouldn't wonder why he wasn't eating.
"The conquering hero returns," Vincent said as Bastien strode into the living room.
Bastien ignored him and focused his attention on his two charges instead, then gaped. "They're asleep!"
"Well, what did you expect?" his cousin asked in amusement. "You took forever. I've been back for an hour--and I was on foot and actually had to hunt down my meal, not pick it up from the corner sub shop."
Bastien turned a suspicious glance his way. "You did feed outside? You didn't--?"
"No, I didn't bite your houseguests," Vincent assured him, then gestured to the editor who was sound asleep in a sitting position, his