Sucker Bet (Vegas Vampires #4)(22)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Making a home of her own was yet again another thing she had never got around to. Or maybe she just hadn’t known how.

"Thanks." Nate sat down and gave a sigh, like his body and bones were weary.

He still hadn’t given a reason for his appearance, nor did he look like he was in a loving, touching, squeezing mood. Gwenna was absolutely unsure how to proceed. She had no previous one-night stand experience and hadn’t been given any illicit sex etiquette tips at the girls’ school she had attended in her youth.

Of course, here she was stupidly worried about how to handle a postorgasm encounter, and he had probably spent the day contacting family and the funeral home. She was an insensitive cad, thinking of sex when he was grieving.

"Are you doing okay? Did you have a chance to speak to your parents today?" she asked, taking the chair across from him. She wanted to touch him, to just reassure him, offer a bit of comfort, but he looked very hard, very closed off.

"Yes. They got stuck in L.A., but they should be here by morning." His fingers drummed across his knees, over and over, and he was sitting forward, stiff. "I wanted to let you know that the victim wasn’t your pal Slash."

Gwenna was surprised at how relieved she truly was. And yet how sorry that someone else’s life had ended in such a vulgar fashion. "Oh, good. Thanks for telling me. I thought it couldn’t be him, because I got an e-mail from him saying he had to miss our meeting because he was working late, but it’s good to hear it officially, because you know how e-mail can be… it’s totally unreliable in terms of time, etc."

Nate just shook his head. "It wasn’t him."

"I’m so sorry for whoever it was. Were you able to identify him?"

"Yes. His name is Andrew Fletcher. Twenty-one years old. Does that ring any bells for you?"

"No. Should it?" Why was Nate looking at her like that?

"Andrew Fletcher spent a lot of time online, including a vampire slayers’ loop that also has a member named Slash87. You can confirm this for us, but I’m going on the assumption this is the same loop you’re on and we’ve been discussing. Andrew’s online name was Buzzdrew."

"Bloody hell." Gwenna recognized the name immediately. Buzz was constantly posting to the loop. He had a sharp sense of humor and an impressive vocabulary. And he made her extremely happy by always using capitalization and punctuation. "You can’t be serious."

"Oh, I’m afraid I’m very serious. So how much of a coincidence do you think it is, Gwenna, that one loop member suggests you meet at the very location where another one has just been brutally murdered? Drained of all his blood, in fact. Like a vampire."

Gwenna had suspected that had been the case. She had seen the victim’s pallor, and normally she could smell blood, all the time. While she had heightened smell and could decipher shampoo, skin lotions, toothpaste, and various other scents on mortals, blood was always the easiest to pick out. It hovered around mortals, their blood scent like an aura. It had been absent in Andrew’s body. But she hadn’t really put it together, had been so shocked, and very aware of a strong fleshy odor. She’d just attributed the lack of blood scent to his death. Now she was appalled to realize that Nate was right. This couldn’t be a coincidence. It was too odd. Too planned. Yet it made no sense against the backdrop of knowledge she had—that the slayers were planning a large-scale attack on vampires in Vegas. So how would murdering one of their own fit into that?

"That’s awful. Absolutely horrible."

"Yes, it is. And there are over four hundred members on that slayers’ loop. We have to go through every single one, matching online name to real name, and we don’t have the staff or the computer expertise to do this kind of crap. But you can save us a few minutes by telling me which cutsie little fake name is yours."

It was a bit mortifying, but Gwenna cleared her throat and went out with it. "QueenieG." No more apologizing to men.

That actually brought the closest thing to a smile on Nate’s face since he’d walked in the door. "QueenieG? Okay, then, thanks."

Gwenna realized she could help him save a bundle of time and labor. "I know who about half the loop members are, and I can give that to you for the investigation. I’ve been playing around a little and seeing who is who. The ones who registered with real names are in a spreadsheet I created, and the ones who used fake names or registered anonymously are in a separate spreadsheet. In my spare time I’ve been picking through those, searching for their real identities. I’ve found about a fourth of those."

She was trying to be helpful, but he gave her an odd look. "Why were you collecting that kind of information?"

The truth was incomprehensible, so she just shrugged. "I was curious. I get bored easily and I like to do online searches. It’s like a puzzle to find someone’s real identity."

"But you don’t know Slash’s real name?"

"No, I haven’t found his yet." Much to her annoyance.

Nate just looked at her, clearly thinking. He had this way of staring right into her, immovable, just like he had in the elevator. Like he had during sex. He could simply look at her, and it was like he was seeing everything—the real her, the inner thoughts, the secrets, the true Gwenna no one else understood.

"What do you do for a living?"

She’d given a vague response the first time he’d asked her that and he hadn’t pursued it, which was amazing given how much they’d talked the night before. At least initially. Then they’d been too busy moaning to form words. But he was waiting for her answer now to his utterly loaded question, though Nate couldn’t know that.

"I don’t do anything."

"You don’t work?" Nate didn’t move or change postures, but she could sense his discontent with her answer. He had excellent control over his expressions, and he could sit as still as the dead, but she was starting to clue in to the way his thumb went up and down, up and down when he was studying her.

"No, I don’t work." That wasn’t a lie, though not the whole truth either. "I never did." She took a deep breath and forced the rest out. "And after my daughter died and my marriage ended, I had something of a breakdown. So I’ve just been sponging off my brother."

For the first time since he’d arrived, she saw a crack in his control. His fingers stopped moving, his eyes looked troubled. "Gwenna. I’m sure your brother doesn’t see it that way. I’m sure he wants to help you."

"He does." She couldn’t argue that Ethan had been good to her, despite his annoying tendencies, because he had. She had never lacked for money, housing, material luxuries. He gave her whatever she wanted and way more than she’d ever ask for. But lately it had begun to rub that Ethan controlled her finances. He was so generous—more than he should be really—but it meant that yet again Gwenna wasn’t independent. "But I keep thinking that I really need to learn how to take care of myself. One sort of needs a job skill to do that, though."