Bled Dry (Vegas Vampires #3)(36)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Her dental hygienist, Sandra, came into the room and made notations in Louise’s chart as she said, “Yeah, but now we don’t know what to give you, Dr. B. You don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, and you haven’t even registered at the Baby Superstore.”

“The baby isn’t due for four months. There’s plenty of time.” To drag Corbin to the store and subject him to a baby registry. Brittany threw away her gloves and washed her hands as she pondered Corbin’s reaction to a breast pump. Maybe she shouldn’t take him after all.

Louise stood up and pulled her purse off the hook. “Yeah, but you need to have the shower, see what you’ve gotten for gifts, then still have time to fill in the gaps yourself. And what if the baby comes early? You should be having the shower in your sixth month.”

“See?” Sandra looked up at her in triumph. “Told you. You need to go register.”

“I’m not even having a shower.” Her only family was Alexis and her mother’s sister, who contacted them only once in a blue moon. Her friends had scattered around the country, and her coworkers were wonderful, and she considered them friends, but she didn’t want to put anyone out. Brittany smoothed her shirt down over her stomach. If anything, she needed to get maternity clothes. The two outfits she’d grabbed a few weeks earlier were not going to cut it. And her regular pants were now out of the question.

Sandra recoiled in horror. “No shower? That’s… that’s like blasphemy! You have to have one. We’re having one. The office staff. So go register. Now.”

The hygienist quivered with indignation as she poked her finger toward Brittany.

Louise told her, “I think you’d better go register.”

Brittany laughed, touched by Sandra’s vehemence. “Okay, yeesh. That’s sweet of you all to do this for me.”

She walked Louise out and came back to get her purse. Sandra was cleaning the room as she said, “Get your calendar out so we can pick a day. Maybe we’ll go to Don Juan’s across the street to have it after work one day. They have good food and a party room. And you have to bring the baby’s father.”

Oh, Lord. “I don’t know… he’s French. He doesn’t always know what’s going on when a lot of people are talking at the same time.” Okay, that was a lie. But the visual of Corbin surrounded by females cooing over packs of pastel onesies was discomfiting. That might be blurring gender and class lines too much for her traditional vampire.

“What is there to know? You open gifts and pass them around. Hey, he got you pregnant. The least he can do is show up and haul everything out to the car.”

There was something to that. He had gotten her pregnant. He shouldn’t be exempt from all the details parenting involved. Like baby registries.

Corbin had left a message with Alexis the night before that he wanted to speak with her. Brittany had been planning to call him around nine o’clock or so, but she was starting to think she might just pop over to his place for an impromptu visit instead. She was curious to see where he lived. And some things might be better said in person.

Like a request that he appear at both her baby shower and her next doctor’s appointment. That could take some convincing, no matter how many hours he’d spent in Baby Boot Camp.

Corbin lived in an opium den.

That was Brittany’s astonished assessment when she walked into Corbin’s apartment. On the outside, it was nothing special, just a concrete building on the fringe of downtown, built in the seventies. But inside, it looked like an East Asia silk retailer had exploded gold and ivory fabric everywhere, with a dash of scarlet tossed in occasionally for good measure. The furniture was all carved wood, a thick solid walnut color, low slung, and filled with pillows. The art was French, gilded, portraits of somber-faced women and men, a dog thrown in here and there. Books were stacked everywhere, which admittedly didn’t match the opium den theory, but added to the jumbled eccentric feeling of the crowded room. Brittany could swear she smelled vanilla, as if Corbin had just baked a cake, but when she walked past his dining area, she saw six thick pillar candles burning in a multi-armed mosaic votive holder.

The man burned candles.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t this. Not this homey, overstuffed intensity. Minimalism would have matched her image of him, but now that she saw his apartment, she realized how right it was for him, and how much it pleased her. Her own place was an abundance of florals and kitsch.

“Sorry it is so dark in here. I don’t open the draperies during the day and at night I have excellent vision.” Corbin cleared his throat and gestured to the sofa. “Would you like to have a seat?”

He had reverted to formality. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to pop in unannounced.

“Sure.” She sank onto a satin sofa, nearly slipping right off it onto the floor. “Slippery little sucker.” She gripped the armrest and laughed. “I like your apartment.”

“Thank you. It is convenient to have my lab right here. I connected this apartment with the one next door.” He gestured to an open door at the far end of the living room.

Brittany couldn’t see inside it, but she was curious if it would look like a hospital lab, sterile and computerized, or if it had a Dr. Frankenstein quality to it. “That does sound convenient.”

They both went silent.

Damn it, why were they doing this again? They took two steps forward, then six back. They had had sex. Twice. With lots of moaning involved. They were having a child together. And yet they sounded like two strangers forced to sit next to each other at a wedding reception.

“Alexis said you stopped by last night,” she prompted.

“I wanted to make sure you were feeling all right.”

“Yeah. I was just tired, I think. And that class was too much after a long day at work.” She didn’t mention the needle.

“I’m sorry.”

This was painful. Brittany drummed her fingers on her knee. The night before, it had felt like they were close, like they had an understanding. Now? Nothing. He was blinking at her like an owl, his eyes darting to his lab several times. Clearly she had interrupted his work.

“Well, I’m on my way to go shopping. I need to get some maternity clothes for work and I just thought I’d stop by since you said you wanted to talk to me.” Hint, hint. God, she wanted him to say something meaningful. Something real. Something that wasn’t polite bullshit.