“You can seriously read my mind to the degree that you know what I like on my pizza?”
“Not quite but I do very good recon work….aka, your old roommate is on my speed dial. Although she doesn’t remember our conversations.”
“My old roommate?” Kyla was confused.
“Daisy?”
Oh. Past tense.
“I’m your roommate now,” he winked at her, making her blush.
“My vampire prince boyfriend is---awe-some!” she chanted and took a very big unladylike bite.
He gave her a big dimpled smile and flopped back on the bed, “Your vampire prince boyfriend?” he raised one eyebrow at her.
“Umm…” she blushed furiously. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. She was mortified and could never remember her brain to mouth filter malfunctioning like this before. It was typically very measured, unless she was angry. She totally had her guard down here.
He snuggled in and kissed her on the cheek, “I think that’s a fairly accurate description. And I’ll take being called awesome. We’ll eat and then grab a shower. I’ll scrub your back for you, you scrub mine?” He winked and swiped a piece of pizza and sauntered over to the window and looked down at the busy city while he ate it.
“Is that why you made me a real turkey sandwich that first afternoon? Because you found out it’s what I liked?”
He smiled back over his shoulder at her, “Creature comforts are helpful during captivity, yes?”
“Hmmm. I suppose,” she mumbled with mock disapproval, “What else did you find out about me?
He wiggled his eyebrows at her, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Uh, yeah. I would. You have a very unfair advantage. Several unfair advantages, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes, I do. I like having an advantage. You’ll have to get to know me the old-fashioned way, I guess. It’ll take some effort on your part.”
She smiled warmly, “I’ll take on that challenge.”
“Come here. You already have a pretty good idea of one or two things that I like,” he whispered huskily. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and wrapped her arms around his neck. She got on her tiptoes and nibbled on his earlobe. He let out a little moan and his hands trailed up under the back of the dress shirt and gripped her backside.
“I love seeing you like this,” he whispered into her ear, “I could feel that this was in you somewhere, deep down.”
“Way deep,” she mumbled, “It feels so good that it’s just us. It feels different,” Kyla told him, “I guess I’m enjoying it while it lasts. Hey, wait a second…the coffee --- was that another creature comfort?”
“Yeah, and I got you another can of it on my way here.”
“What’s your favourite food?” she asked.
“You first, steak, second. Rare steak. Very rare.”
“Favourite colour?”
“Green.” He smiled and his eyes sparkled. She blushed.
“Favourite movie, book?”
“Dracula and Dracula. Favourite cereal, Count Chocula, favourite animal, vampire bat, favourite Sesame Street character, Count Von Count. We don’t have a lot of time before the hair and make-up troupe get here. Come, let’s shower,” he murmured, stopping her from going to the darker recesses of her mind, the place where she was afraid of what was to come.
“We have like an hour and a half.”
“Not enough time for what I have planned for you,” he flirted.
“You mean, like, maybe an eco-tour and well-digging in Kenya?”
“Huh?”
“What you said to Daisy.”
“What?”
“I talked to her.”
“You did what?” he looked pissed.
“Relax. It was just a Facebook chat. I said almost nothing. But now I know why no one is looking for me. They think I’m doing an eco-tourism thing where there’s no internet, then digging wells in Kenya, then moving to Spain with you and ah… marrying you.”
Tristan folded his arms, “When was this?”
“Last night.”
“And you’re just telling me now?”
“Uh…”
“Let me see this Facebook chat.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Not true. I wouldn’t have left a computer if I didn’t trust you and I’d know if you were lying to me, but I need to check out this conversation. Now.”
She opened the laptop on the desk in the bedroom, logged into Facebook, and then backed up and sat on the bed, feeling slighted, feeling more than slighted.
Tristan scanned the conversation and then snapped the laptop computer shut. He spun around to look at her,
“Don’t even think about get pissy with me,” he pointed his index finger at her, “If anyone has hacked and is monitoring my computer usage and sees you having a conversation about me with someone, if someone is pretending to be someone you trust in order to gain information about me, if anything is happening that puts you or me in more jeopardy than we’re already in I need to know about it. Okay? You can’t just have a recordable conversation like that, Kyla. We need to work together to keep you safe. Okay? I’ll trust you to be alone, I’ll trust you to use a computer, but you have to trust me when I say that we are in danger and everything we do, every single fucking thing, has to be carefully calculated before we do it.”