One Lucky Vampire(55)
“Yeah,” Jake muttered, relaxing. After dinner was soon enough to talk to Nicole, mostly because he very much feared Nina had it right and this conversation was going to bring Nicole’s world down around her ears. She was so resistant to acknowledging that her ex-husband might wish her actual physical harm . . . She wasn’t going to take this well.
“Just a heads-up,” Nina said, closing the cover of her iPad and picking it up to walk toward him. “You have more than the hot tub poisoning to deal with here. You tried to bite her and flashed your fangs while you were out of your head,” she announced as she slid past him to exit the room. “Marguerite fiddled with her memory to keep her from freaking about it, and Dante and Tomasso have been reinforcing it while you were asleep. But it won’t last long once she’s in your presence again. You’re going to have to tell her everything.”
“What?” Jake asked weakly, turning to stare after the woman.
“You can handle it,” Nina said quietly, pausing to retrieve a brown leather jacket that had lain on the end of the couch. She tugged it on, shifting her iPad from hand to hand to do it, and then pulled her hair out of the neckline and moved toward the stairs with a solemn, “Good luck.”
Jake stared after Nina, wanting to call her back. He wanted to ask her to do the talking for him. Or to tell him what to say. This was not a conversation he was ready for. He’d only just learned Nicole was his life mate, and he hadn’t yet accepted and handled that; how could he expect her to accept not only that she might be a perfect mate for him, but also that there were such things as vampires and he was one?
Yeah, this was definitely a conversation that could wait until after supper. It would give him some time to figure out what the hell he was going to say.
“That’s good. It looks just like Christian and Caro. It looks live, like they could walk right off the canvas and into the room.”
Nicole smiled at that compliment from Tomasso as she shifted away from the portrait of Marguerite’s son and soon to be daughter-in-law to the next painting and began to work on it. It was the perfect compliment and exactly what she was trying to achieve. She loved it when work went well, and it was definitely going well. She was on a roll. The last two days since Jake had got sick she’d been on fire and had got more done than she normally did in a week. It was a real high for her, better than drugs. She was jazzed.
“Yeah,” Dante agreed. “But why do you work on more than one painting at a time?”
“It keeps it interesting,” Nicole said with a shrug as she played with the skin color on the portrait of the local politician. She was trying to get just the right shade to emulate the rough, somewhat florid color of the man’s face in life.
“Hmmm,” Dante muttered.
Nicole smiled faintly, and shook her head. “You guys must be bored to tears. I don’t know why you aren’t off doing something more interesting than watching me paint.” Frowning now, she added, “What are you doing here anyway?”
“We’re Jake’s cousins. We’re visiting,” Dante said.
“Jake said he ran away from his family,” Nicole told them.
“Yeah,” Tomasso said. “Some people don’t handle things so well, and some people need time to handle things. Stephano needed time.”
“Stephano,” she murmured and shook her head as she shifted to the next painting. “I know that’s his first name, but it’s still weird to hear him called that. I know him as Jake.”
“Jake’s a good name,” Dante commented.
“Yeah.” Nicole smiled. She liked the name. She guessed she liked Jake too. He seemed like a nice guy. He was certainly easy on the eyes. Not that she was looking at him a lot or anything, but he was handsome . . . and a good cook, and thoughtful. Like that cheese-and-fruit tray. That had been a nice surprise and she didn’t think it was really part of the job of a cook to supply snacks. Or was it? She had no idea. She’d never had one before, and he didn’t exactly fit what she would have imagined a cook/housekeeper to look like. The only housekeeper she knew was her Aunt Maria, a sweet, grandmotherly type woman who bustled around in black dresses and orthopedic shoes.
Jake was nothing like her aunt, Nicole thought, recalling him sitting on the edge of the hot tub, buck naked. With a flat stomach, and muscular arms and legs, the man was built. He could be a Chippendale, or a male model.
Nicole frowned as she recalled the blood staining his face and chest. The man had been vomiting blood. That had scared the hell out of her. He was better now, though, some part of her mind reminded her. He was apparently sleeping well and recovering. Everything would be fine.