Page 9 of The Vampire's Guide to Wooing a Curator
She synced her breathing with the thump of her heart. Her fingers were light but firm on the thin, metal grip.
She whipped her arm behind her head and forward in a smooth motion, sending the dagger flying with a soft whistle.
It plunged into the target, two rings away from the center.
She frowned, picked up another dagger, and threw again.
As she practiced, her mind drifted to the thief who had invaded the museum.
His cocky smile. His confident swagger. The way he’d smelled of earth and decay, like fallen leaves left to rot.
She would have to instruct the guards to expel him if he returned. Perhaps she’d make sketches of his face and distribute them to the staff. The next time he tried to skulk about, he’d be spotted and thrown out. She could almost see the shocked look on his face and hear him sputtering in protest as two burly guards tossed him onto the grass. That would teach him to barge into her space.
A dagger plunged into the target just outside the center ring.
She was getting sloppy.
She strode down the range, grasped the dagger’s hilt, and tugged. The cork was tougher than wood. Every mark outside the target was a visible record of failure.
She tucked the dagger back into her belt and returned to the throwing line.
Great-Uncle Ezra wouldn’t let her join the patrols, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t defend herself. If another vampire breached the museum walls or dared to make themselves known to her, she would handle it the way she wished she’d acted the night of her parents’ murder.
Chapter Four
“You’re certain thehunter didn’t recognize you?” Jonathan’s brother Cordon asked. He scowled as he paced Jonathan’s drawing room, looking every bit the lord he was in a navy suit and trousers and a scarlet shirt. “You shouldn’t have made contact. If she told her family, you could be in grave danger.”
Jonathan leaned back in his chair and stared at the wood-paneled ceiling. “This is not the first time I’ve obscured a human’s memory, Cordon. In any case, I do not believe she is close to her family.”
He doubted they would have allowed her to move so many vampiric artifacts from their fortress of a base to a cramped room in a tiny museum. She’d likely smuggled them out.
“Why now?” Cordon asked, for the third time that evening. “You’ve been watching her for months.”
Jonathan groaned. His brother could not seem to get over that point. The mission was Jonathan’s, but as usual, Cordon criticized every decision. “I already told you, she was behaving suspiciously, spending so much time in that closet.” It was a weak excuse, but he was not about to tell Cordon the truth, that his desire to possess Felicity had become too strong to resist. “Now that I’ve planted the idea of an intrusion, she’ll fixate on it. In a few days, she’ll be begging to hire me, and I’ll be able to watch her much more closely.”
Hunters were pathetically easy to manipulate. They were so single-minded that they struggled to adapt to changing conditions, and they rarely possessed any creativity. When Felicity eventually broke, he’d be there to offer his help.
The other person in the room, their sister Helena, who had remained silent for the past several minutes, uncrossed her trouser-clad legs and put her elbows on her knees.
If Cordon was the worrier of the nest, then Helena was the nurturer. Were she human, she would have been at home in a kitchen with a dozen children begging for her attention.
“Are you concerned, sister?” Cordon asked.
She was quiet for several minutes. Jonathan was used to this. Unlike his youngest sister, Lucina, Helena did not chatter. Every word she spoke served a purpose. Sometimes that meant waiting for her to process her thoughts.
At last, Helena pinned Jonathan with an intense, blue-eyed stare. “Have you experienced symptoms of mate atrophy?”
“No,” he said quickly. Unfortunately, his body chose to betray him at that moment, and the rattling in his chest resumed. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and coughed several times. When he pulled it away from his face, it was splattered with blood. He crumpled it into a ball and lifted his arm to toss it into the fire, but Helena was too fast. She snatched the bit of cloth, unfolded it in her palm, then grimaced.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’ve had this cough for years.”
Cordon rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger. “Have you not learned from Marcus’s example? You cannot ignore this.”
Jonathan slashed a hand through the air. “Don’t, please. I would rather not fight.”
After watching both his brothers sicken before they’d formed the telepathic mating bond with their wives, Jonathan was extremely aware of the agonizing pain he’d suffer if he didn’tfollow their lead and find his mate. But death didn’t scare him nearly as much as how Cordon and Marcus had changed after they’d mated. Cordon had once been a committed hedonist, spurning anything that did not bring him immediate pleasure, and Marcus had been equally devoted to science. Now all they seemed to do was dote on their wives and badger their siblings to search for their mates.
Meanwhile, Jonathan still woke every evening feeling like there was a Marguerite-sized hole in his heart. If he had to choose between a slow death from mate atrophy or allowing someone else to fill the chasm his maker had left, then he preferred death.
