"I guess I can handle some disgruntled exes. So will you go out with me?"
I looked at him for a second or two, scouring my mind for considerations. From his brain I was getting nothing but hopefulness: I saw no deceit or self-serving. When I examined the reservations I had, they dissolved into nothing.
"Yes," I said. "I will." His beautiful white smile sparked me to smile in return, and this time my smile was genuine.
"There," he said. "We've negotiated the pleasure part. Now for the business part, which is unrelated."
"Okay," I said, and put my smile away. I hoped I'd have occasion to haul it out later, but any business he would have with me would be supe-related, and therefore cause for anxiety.
"You've heard about the regional summit?"
The vampire summit: the kings and queens from a group of states would gather to confer about... vampire stuff. "Eric said something about it."
"Has he hired you to work there yet?"
"He mentioned he might need me."
"Because the Queen of Louisiana found out I was in the area, and she asked me to request your services. I think her bid would have to cancel out Eric's."
"You'd have to ask Eric about that."
"I think you would have to tell him. The queen's wishes are Eric's orders."
I could feel my face fall. I didn't want to tell Eric, the sheriff of Louisiana's Area Five, anything. Eric's feelings for me were confused. I can assure you, vamps don't like feeling confused. The sheriff had lost his memory of the short time he'd spent hiding in my house. That memory gap had driven Eric nuts; he liked being in control, and that meant being cognizant of his own actions every second of the night. So he'd waited until he could perform an action on my behalf, and as payment for that action he'd demanded my account of what had passed while he stayed with me.
Maybe I'd carried the frankness thing a little too far. Eric wasn't exactly surprised that we'd had sex; but he was stunned when I told him he'd offered to give up his hard-won position in the vampire hierarchy and to come live with me.
If you knew Eric, you'd know that was pretty much intolerable to him.
He didn't talk to me any more. He stared at me when we met, as if he were trying to resurrect his own memories of that time, to prove me wrong. It made me sad to see that the relationship we'd had - not the secret happiness of the few days he'd spent with me, but the entertaining relationship between a man and a woman who had little in common but a sense of humor - didn't seem to exist any more.
I knew it was up to me to tell him that his queen had superseded him, but I sure didn't want to.
"Smile's all gone," Quinn observed. He looked serious himself.
"Well, Eric is a..." I didn't know how to finish the sentence. "He's a complicated guy," I said lamely.
"What shall we do on our first date?" Quinn asked. So he was a good subject changer.
"We could go to the movies," I said, to start the ball rolling.
"We could. Afterward, we could have dinner in Shreveport. Maybe Ralph and Kacoo's," he suggested.
"I hear their crawfish etouffee is good," I said, keeping the conversational ball rolling.
"And who doesn't like crawfish etouffee? Or we could go bowling."
My great-uncle had been an avid bowler. I could see his feet, in their bowling shoes, right in front of me. I shuddered. "Don't know how."
"We could go to a hockey game."
"That might be fun."
"We could cook together in your kitchen, and then watch a movie on your DVD."
"Better put that one on a back burner." That sounded a little too personal for a first date, not that I've had that much experience with first dates. But I know that proximity to a bedroom is never a good idea unless you're sure you wouldn't mind if the flow of the evening took you in that direction.
"We could go see The Producers. That's coming to the Strand."
"Really?" Okay, I was excited now. Shreveport's restored Strand Theater hosted traveling stage productions ranging from plays to ballet. I'd never seen a real play before. Wouldn't that be awfully expensive? Surely he wouldn't have suggested it if he couldn't afford it. "Could we?"
He nodded, pleased at my reaction. "I can make the reservations for this weekend. What about your work schedule?"
"I'm off Friday night," I said happily. "And, um, I'll be glad to chip in for my ticket."
"I invited you. My treat," Quinn said firmly. I could read from his thoughts that he thought it was surprising that I had offered. And touching. Hmmm. I didn't like that. "Okay then. It's settled. When I get back to my laptop, I'll order the tickets online. I know there are some good ones left, because I was checking out our options before I drove over."
Naturally, I began to wonder about appropriate clothes. But I stowed that away for later. "Quinn, where do you actually live?"
"I have a house outside Memphis."
"Oh," I said, thinking that seemed a long way away for a dating relationship.
"I'm partner in a company called Special Events. We're a sort of secret offshoot of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events. You've seen the logo, I know. E(E)E?" He made the parentheses with his fingers. I nodded. E(E)E did a lot of very fancy event designing nationally. "There are four partners who work full-time for Special Events, and we each employ a few people full- or part-time. Since we travel a lot, we have places we use all over the country; some of them are just rooms in houses of friends or associates, and some of them are real apartments. The place I stay in this area is in Shreveport, a guesthouse in back of the mansion of a shifter."
I'd learned a lot about him in two minutes flat. "So you put on events in the supernatural world, like the contest for packmaster." That had been a dangerous job and one requiring a lot of specialized paraphernalia. "But what else is there to do? A packmaster's contest can only come up every so now and then. How much do you have to travel? What other special events can you stage?"
"I generally handle the Southeast, Georgia across to Texas." He sat forward in his chair, his big hands resting on his knees. "Tennessee south through Florida. In those states, if you want to stage a fight for packmaster, or a rite of ascension for a shaman or witch, or a vampire hierarchal wedding - and you want to do it right, with all the trimmings - you come to me."
I remembered the extraordinary pictures in Alfred Cumberland's photo gallery. "So there's enough of that to keep you busy?"