“Lane,” the old man said in a reluctant voice. “Fletcher Lane.”
He took Sebastian’s hand and shook it, even though I could tell that he didn’t want to. Despite his desire to learn more about Vaughn’s mystery file, Fletcher wasn’t all that happy about me going out with Sebastian. Then again, he rarely liked any of the guys that I brought around the restaurant, not even the ones that we had no reason to be wary of. Fletcher’s dislike of my dates was yet another way in which he was overprotective of me.
He stared at the younger man, his green eyes sharp and thoughtful. Sebastian smiled back at him, although his expression seemed a little uneasy around the edges. Then again, Fletcher’s hard, laserlike stare was enough to make anyone nervous, even me.
Fletcher turned to me and held out his hand. “Let me put those in some water for you, Gin. You don’t want to keep your young man waiting.”
“Thanks,” I said, handing the roses over to him. “Ouch!”
Fletcher took the flowers from me, and I pulled my hand back, wincing. I watched a bit of blood well up out of my right thumb, which I’d stabbed into one of the pale thorns.
Sebastian gave me a chagrined look. “Sorry. I should have warned you. They have bigger, sharper thorns than most roses. I think it has something to do with the color of the stems.”
“It’s okay,” I said, grabbing a paper towel and wiping the scarlet drop off my thumb. “It’s just a little blood. Nothing to worry about.”
“If I could kiss it and make it better, I would,” Sebastian said in a low voice that only I could hear.
His gaze locked onto my mouth, as if he was thinking about the soft kisses we’d shared the other night. I certainly was. Sebastian caught me staring at him. He grinned, then flashed me a quick, sly wink. I blushed and dropped my gaze from his.
While Fletcher grabbed an old jelly jar to use as a vase and filled it with water, I untied my work apron, pulled it over my head, and hung it on a hook on the back wall. Then I grabbed my purse, which contained two of my knives, from its slot under the cash register and stepped around the counter. Sebastian reached out and took my hand, careful of my injured thumb.
“So what are we doing tonight? Dinner and a movie?”
He shook his head. “Nothing so predictable as that. I thought you might like to see the greenhouse where your roses came from, along with the rest of my estate.”
I glanced at Fletcher, who gave me a tiny nod as he kept arranging the flowers in the jelly jar. Getting invited to the Vaughn estate was too good an opportunity to pass up. Maybe Sebastian would give me a full tour, including a peek at his father’s office. If I was extremely lucky, he might even leave me alone in there long enough for me to search for the mystery file.
But more than that, I wanted to see the estate for myself, inside and out. You could tell a lot about someone from his home and the furnishings, photos, and knickknacks that adorned it, and I wanted to learn more about Sebastian. I wanted to know everything about him.
I flashed him another smile. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Sebastian grinned and tugged me toward the door.
“Don’t be too late,” Fletcher called out.
I gave him a distracted wave of my hand, completely focused on following Sebastian out of the Pork Pit and into the hot summer night.
Sebastian had a sleek black town car waiting down the block.
“After you, madam,” he said, opening the back door and bowing, as though he were a chauffeur.
I giggled and slid into the car. Sebastian shut the door, then went around and got into the other side. He gestured to the giant sitting in the driver’s seat. The giant had forgone the usual black chauffeur’s uniform in favor of a powder-blue suit that brought out the red color of his hair. Freckles were splattered across his nose and cheeks like brown blood drops, while his eyes were as pale as his suit.
“This is Porter,” Sebastian said. “He’s been the head of my father’s security detail for years. He’s agreed to stay on and work for me.”
Oh, I knew all about Roy Porter, since Fletcher had included plenty of information about him in the initial file on Vaughn. Porter arranged the security at the estate, but more than that, he had acted as a sort of foreman for Vaughn, overseeing building-material deliveries, checking on crews, and generally making sure that everything ran smoothly at the job sites. He’d also been Vaughn’s middleman, the one who actually doled out all the bribes necessary to keep his boss’s construction projects chugging along.
From what Fletcher had been able to uncover, Porter went beyond dropping off bribes. Whenever there was a problem that Vaughn’s money hadn’t been able to fix, Porter had often taken care of it himself—with his fists. Like a couple of weeks before the terrace collapse, when Porter had found two Southtown punks spray-painting graffiti at one of the job sites and had beaten them both to death. A third guy who’d been waiting for his friends in the car had said that Porter had toyed with the punks, breaking their legs so they couldn’t run away, then their arms so they couldn’t fight back, before finally caving in their skulls with his fists.
Charges had been filed, but nothing ever came of them, because the last guy had been found dead a week later, beaten to death in an eerily similar manner. That time, Porter had been smart enough not to leave any witnesses behind.
I wondered if Sebastian knew what kind of vicious, violent, ruthless man Porter was. Probably not. He hadn’t seemed to know about his father either. But seeing Porter cooled some of my enthusiasm for my date with Sebastian and reminded me that I still had work to do tonight.
Porter gave me a polite nod in the mirror. “Ma’am.”
I nodded back at him. “Mr. Porter.”
“Take us back to the mansion, Porter,” Sebastian ordered.
Porter steered the car away from the curb. Sebastian kept up a steady stream of conversation all the way from the downtown loop up to Northtown, where his family’s estate was located among Ashland’s other mansions. In fact, the Vaughn estate was down the block from Mab Monroe’s place. Well, perhaps that was a bit of an understatement. Given Mab’s sprawling compound and the thick woods that surrounded it, Sebastian’s home was a good two miles away, but he seemed to be the Fire elemental’s closest neighbor.
Finally, after about thirty minutes of driving, Porter turned off the road. He reached down into the console between the front seats and picked up a small black clicker, which he used to open the gate that led into the estate. The giant steered the car through the opening and up a long driveway that curved to the top of a hill.