Steal the Day (Thieves #2)(41)

I zipped him up the rest of the way and prepared for bed. I climbed in next to my husband. I laid my head against the cold bag and let my arms wrap around him. It was the longest time before I managed to sleep.





Chapter Eleven





“OMG,” Neil said from the back of the van. “Then we decided to go to the lake, and you won’t believe what we did there.”

I would. I could take a big old guess. It involved various sexual practices that Neil was going to go into way too much detail about. Apparently in the last week, Neil and Chad had decided to reenact the entire Kama Sutra, gay supernatural edition, in various semi-public places. And Neil liked to chat. He’d been chatting for the last five hundred miles.

“Should I tell your gay husband a few tales, sweetheart?” Dev asked from the passenger seat. He didn’t actually look at me. He was laid out as languidly as he could stretch his long, lean body in the confinement of the van. He wore jeans in deference to our cover story, his glorious eyes covered by a pair of aviators, and his lips curled into a wry smile.

Since that night when he’d driven his demons out, I saw him differently and it hurt. Loving Dev made him even more beautiful. Maybe I could have handled it if loving him had cut one centimeter of Daniel from my heart, but it hadn’t. My heart had an enormous capacity for disaster.

“You should keep your mouth shut around my gay husband if you ever want to do any of those things again.” Our little road trip was turning into a game. Who could make the human blush the fastest? So far Neil was leading by a mile, but only because Dev had kept his mouth shut to this point.

Dev turned to me and gave me a look that made more than my heart race. “I haven’t had sex in this state. I really want to be able to check that off so I’ll hold my tongue, unless you’d like to hold it for me.”

“I totally am!” Neil exclaimed. “I’m your gay husband. Does that mean we’re involved in a four-way? Or would it be five if we count Chad?”

“We are involved in a no-way.” The last thing I needed was more men in my love life.

We’d been on the road since the ungodly hour of seven a.m. Sure, that’s when most of the world is heading off to work, but I was nocturnal. My husband was a vampire so no daytime there, and my lover owned a nightclub. Dev wasn’t a morning person either. I slanted a curious look at my boyfriend. “Just how many states have you had sex in?”

He thought for a moment, tallying some ungodly number in his head. “Forty-two. But I’ve done it on all the Hawaiian Islands, and that should count for something.”

“Did you and your girlfriend take a tour or something?” It was the first time he’d mentioned any other woman. As the current girlfriend, I was naturally curious about the women who came before me.

Neil erupted in fits of hysterical laughter. I turned briefly to watch him lean back against his dead boyfriend’s body bag. We’d bought the van with cash thanks to our lovely two million, which I absolutely rolled around in before putting it in my safe. It was already a good buy. It was perfect for lugging around vampires in body bags. Unfortunately we’d had to take out all the rear seats because we were also carrying our equipment, which included computers, night vision goggles, some really cool motion detectors and, of course, a complete traveling arsenal. I drove five miles below the damn speed limit the entire way because I didn’t think highway patrol would appreciate any excuse I came up with for the guns and dead bodies.

Neil continued his laughter, but Dev merely smiled knowingly.

“What?” I was not in on the joke.

“It’s the thought of Dev having a girlfriend,” Neil said, finally calming down. “You have no idea what his reputation is.”

“Was,” Dev corrected quickly. “What my reputation was.”

“He was a total manwhore.” Neil settled against the sleeping body again. Chad was smaller than Daniel, so we managed to spread him out a little. Daniel, we’d had to kind of cram in, and then we needed some place to put the luggage.

“Manwhore?” I kept my eyes on the road. I wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it didn’t sound like a good way to refer to one’s boyfriend.

Dev sighed. “Yeah, I guess that would work. Forty-two states, forty-two different women, and like I said, six in Hawaii alone. I don’t apologize for my past, sweetheart. I’m part fertility god. It goes with the territory.”

“Wow.” I couldn’t compete with his breadth of experience, and he knew it. Dev and I had gone over my sexual history, which before him had included only one other man, and he was currently zipped into his daytime coffin.

“Sorry, Zoey.” Dev took off the sunglasses, his emerald eyes fixed on me. “I thought you knew. I wasn’t real big into exclusivity. When I left the sithein, I enjoyed the human world for a while. I also enjoyed several werewolves, a couple of shifters, and some of the more exotic creatures on this plane. I was just having fun.”

“Finding monogamy difficult?” I was more than a little intimidated at that recitation. I knew Dev’s little black book was probably bigger than mine, I just hadn’t realized it resembled a phone book. The culture he grew up in was different, but maybe I should have put a little more thought into it before I’d jumped into bed. Faeries are very sexual creatures and Dev more so than most given his unique ancestry. It might have been na?ve on my part to think one woman, and an inexperienced one at that, could keep him satisfied.