Free Moon Child (Vampire for Hire #4) by J.R. Rain

suspicions.
    His jaw dropped. “You really did it?”
    I nodded again.
    “And how is he?”
    “He’s fine. He’s great, in fact.”
    Fang leaned on his elbows. The grisly teeth
around his neck—definitely not shark teeth—clacked together with
the sound of knuckles striking knuckles.
    “But you’re not fine,” he said.
    “My job’s not over.”
    He nodded. “The medallion.”
    I caught him up to date, noting the striking
difference between the way he handled the news and the way Kingsley
had. There was no judgment in Fang’s voice. There was only concern
for me and my son.
    He said, “And so the ending I felt was the
end of your relationship with Kingsley.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “No, you’re not. I’m sure you’re glad he’s
out of the picture.”
    Aaron Parker, aka Fang, shook his head. “I
would not be much of a friend if I wished for you to experience
pain on any level.”
    Now I was shaking my head. “Not as much pain
as you might think. Kingsley is an amazing man, as you well know,
and he was there for me when I needed him the most, but...it was
bad timing. I was just dealing with the end of my marriage. I
wasn’t ready to start a new relationship.”
    “And he wanted to start one?”
    “He wanted something, more than what I could
give him. But it’s not that.”
    “It’s ideological,” said Fang, picking up on
my thoughts. In fact, I could even feel him in my thoughts.
    “We’re just too different,” I said. “Apples
and oranges.”
    “Vampires and werewolves.”
    I smiled at that. Fang smiled, too, and I
sensed his strong need to reach out and touch me, but he held back.
One relationship had ended. Now was not the time to push for
another. Perhaps not for a long, long time.
    “It takes all my willpower, Sam,” he said,
tracing his finger along the scarred bar top in front of my hand,
“to not touch you.”
    “I just need a friend,” I said.
    “I know,” he said. “And you have one.
Always.”
     
     
     

Chapter Twenty-two
     
     
    I was on my second glass of wine, even if the
first one did little more than upset my stomach. I haven’t had a
good buzz in half a decade, and I suspected my days of being buzzed
were long gone.
    Being buzzed was overrated, I thought. Now,
flying high over Orange County was a different story.
    There are some benefits to being a creature
of the night.
    Fang and I got back to the subject of my son.
He said, “I’m still fairly involved in the vampire online
community. I’ll ask around about our friend Archibald Maximus.”
    “You’re still hanging out in chat rooms?”
    “Often.”
    “They seem so...five years ago.”
    “Don’t knock them, young lady. It’s where I
met you, after all.”
    Years ago, confused and lost, I had joined a
vampire IM chat group hoping to learn anything I could about the
undead. I hadn’t expected to learn much of anything, let alone
create such a deep and lasting friendship.
    I said, “Well, I don’t have a lot of
hope.”
    “We’ll see what turns up. Remember, you never
know who might be popping into some of those chat rooms.”
    “Like me,” I said.
    “Right, like you. Sometimes I come across the
real deal.”
    “How do you know they’re the real deal?” I
asked, suddenly feeling a pang of jealousy for reasons I couldn’t
quite understand but wasn’t in the mood to probe very deeply.
    “Oh, you know. I’ve made it my life’s
ambition to find vampires.”
    “And to be one.”
    Fang glanced at me sharply. Last week, the
handsome freak asked me to turn him into a vampire, so that we
could live together, or some cheesy crap like that. Not that I
didn’t believe him, but I was suspecting he would do
anything—anything—to be a vampire. Fang’s story was...interesting,
to say the least. Interesting and disturbing. Born with a rare
defect, his canine teeth had grown in exceptionally long, so long
that he had lived with the “vampire” stigma during his entire
adolescence