Bled Dry (Vegas Vampires #3)(29)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“I don’t care. I want to talk to her. Can Ethan contact her? Or would it make her more comfortable if I flew over there?”

“Good gravy, don’t do that. Just sit tight and I’ll have Ethan talk to her.” Alexis gave her a stern look. “Promise me you won’t go running off halfway around the world. I’m serious.”

Brittany tucked her hand under her thigh and crossed her fingers. She wasn’t making any promises she couldn’t keep. While she had no intention of jetting off to Europe at the moment, she wanted to leave her options open. Her answer was deliberately vague. “Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

Damn, Alexis knew her too well. “Okay, I won’t fly to England immediately. Or without consulting you first.”

Alexis sighed and popped the locks on the car so they could get out. “You are going to be the death of me.”

“You can’t die.” Brittany pointed out the obvious with a smirk.

“Brat.”

Brittany laughed. It was nice to know that some things would never change.

“Hey, you want to grab a beer or something?” Travis asked Corbin when they finally emerged from the classroom, overloaded with info and a new understanding of the words big responsibility .

Corbin had scrubbed his arm down in the men’s room and checked his shirt to see if there was a visible spot from Austin’s spit-up. It looked presentable, and he suspected only vampire nostrils could detect the sour scent. “Sure.”

“Dave, Jason, you in?” Travis asked the others.

“I’m in,” Jason said, running his hand through his short hair and rubbing his scalp. “I need a cold one after all of that. Jesus Christ. Parenting is like police work—rules, regulations, and paperwork.”

“I need to get home,” Dave said with a regretful shrug. “My wife hates being alone.”

As he waved and trotted down the hall, Travis shook his head. “That guy’s whipped.”

“Seriously,” Jason agreed. “And I figured hey, we might as well go out while we can, right? I mean, there won’t be any grabbing a beer once the baby gets here. At least not for a while.”

“You got it.” Travis hit Corbin in the chest with the back of his hand. “Alright, you guys call your old ladies, then I’ll call mine. Let them know what’s up.”

“Oh, I don’t need to call Brittany,” Corbin said, shaking his head at Travis’s offer of his cell phone. “But you two go right ahead.”

They both gaped at him. Travis looked horrified, Jason skeptical.

“Your funeral, man,” Jason said.

“She went to her sister’s,” Corbin hedged, a little embarrassed that he and Brittany were not married. “She wasn’t feeling well, so her sister picked her up.”

“Yeah, but she’s not going to sleep there, and she’ll be pissed if she gets home and you’re not there.”

Corbin made a noncommittal sound and said, “Go ahead and call your wife.”

Travis cocked an eyebrow. “Dude, did you two argue or something? If she’s trippin’, you need to deal with it. All those hormones and shit, you need to work it through, you know what I’m saying? My dad always said never go to bed wanting to kill the bitch, and that’s good advice.”

Corbin almost laughed. It reminded him of a conversation he had had with his own father regarding marriage. Better to despise each other and have exceptional sex, than to get along but be bored in bed. It hadn’t made sense to Corbin at the time, and he wasn’t sure it did two hundred years later, either. But apparently his father hadn’t been the only sire doling out questionable advice.

“We are not arguing. The truth is that we do not live together, so she is not expecting me this evening.”

“You don’t live together?” Travis said, his bellowing voice ringing in the empty hallway. “You’re married but you don’t live together? How the hell’d you manage that kind of arrangement?”

Corbin shifted and stuck his hand in his pocket. “We are not married. I never said we were married.”

“Oh. Shit. Okay. Sorry. Let’s go grab that beer.”

Apparently grabbing a beer in Vegas meant doing it in a dark bar with glossy seats and women dancing around poles on a pink-lit stage.

Corbin stared at the brunette critically. She looked bored, and harbored a certain sense of entitlement. For every little shake and slide, she seemed to expect money. There was no effort, no emotion. Corbin felt as bored as she did. There was nothing enticing or appealing about a woman just gyrating naked. Where was the aura of sensuality? Where was the buildup, the tease, the hint at a woman’s body, the titillation? This woman was naked, yes, but she was exuding as much sensuality as a stick.

Jason was staring hard at the blonde, who had br**sts that were too round to be natural. “My wife used to have a body like that. Before the pregnancy. Rock-solid thighs, flat stomach, tits high and perky.” He demonstrated by holding his hands up by his pectorals. “She wore a thong all the time. Now she wears granny underwear.”

“That’s rough,” Travis said. “But don’t worry, she’ll get the bod back.”

“We met at Hooters,” Jason said. “She was a waitress. I was a cook. She used to lean in to pick up those burger orders and smile at me. That’s all it took. I was gone. I really love her.”

“That’s beautiful, man,” Travis said.

Corbin took a small sip of his beer and frowned. He liked Brittany’s thongs. She was fond of bright colors, and he liked that little scrap of fabric on her fair skin. He would be sorry to see those disappear. “What is granny underwear?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Jason drained his beer bottle.

“They’re underwear that cover everything. You know, like from here to here,” Travis said, his arm moving from his thighs to his ribs. White, or maybe powder blue or pale pink, cotton, nasty stuff.”

Corbin made a face. “Well, I suppose it is more comfortable for the women.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Travis nudged him. “So how come you and the old lady ain’t living together? You break up or something?”

“We’ve never lived together. We’re sort of only partially together… it’s complicated.”

“You can tell us.”

They looked so sympathetic, that Corbin found himself divulging the situation. Leaving out the issue of his vampirism, of course. And a few other things. “We have only known each other a little over four months. We had met a few times, gone out.” They had met exactly three times, and had never gone out, unless you chose to count the night he had dragged her onto the roof of the casino. That had been outside, but not really out . All in all, they had spent approximately forty minutes total together prior to his impregnating her.