Claude turned to me. “Is it okay to leave you? I can stay if you need my company.”
“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t like to read romance novels.”
His eyes skated over to the diary on the bedside table. “Did you discover anything?”
“Just the tragic ending of Penny Burns. She mentioned meeting up with someone named Willard, but my guess is he gave her a fake name. Wyatt’s lead is better than what’s in that book. All that’s in there is heartbreak and death.”
He lowered his head. “We all have tragic endings, Raven. No one gets out of life unscathed.”
“How did you end up in a place like Keystone?” I asked, curious. Claude didn’t seem like a hardcore killer. Maybe Viktor just needed a tracker and the pay was good.
Claude patted my leg and stood up, towering over my low bed. “Have a good time on your date. And be safe. Never let a male disrespect you.”
And with that, the enigmatic Claude Valentine left the room.
Chapter 21
Glass turnedup the heater in his black Mercedes. “Are you still cold?”
I returned my hands to my lap. “Not really,” I lied.
Glass looked different tonight, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was a twinkle in his eye, and beneath his coat wasn’t a suit and tie but jeans and a cotton shirt.
“I hope we’re not going anywhere fancy,” I said, gazing down at my jeans and off-the-shoulder black sweater. No bra, because I thought that made my casual look a little sexier. I’d borrowed Gem’s hair dryer and annoyed Wyatt while running it in his game room so I could control my frizz. With a round brush, I made big sexy curls—one lock swooping over my right eye. Claude suggested I skip perfumes and lotions since artificial smells usually repelled Chitahs, who preferred the natural scent of a woman.
It didn’t get more natural than this.
“I thought you might enjoy something a little more intimate,” he said. An orange streetlight splashed across the windshield and then faded away. “How does a private dinner at my family home sound?”
I blinked. “I thought you didn’t have family?”
“They’ve passed. Since I was an only child, they left me the property. It’s not a large home; only six bedrooms.”
Only,I mused, thinking about the one-bedroom trailer where I grew up. My father slept on a pullout sofa.
“Do you cook?” I asked.
He slid me a sideways glance. “I’m a Chitah. Of course I cook.”
That seemed promising. Dating a man who could cook was the next best thing to dating a prince.
“I hope you don’t mind the short notice,” he said, pulling into a driveway. “I’m going to be working a lot of overtime this week, so I wanted to move up our second date.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t interested.”
I could live with that. Now I wouldn’t have to worry about him asking me out on the night of the masquerade ball. I really didn’t want to start off our relationship with lies.
Was this a relationship?
Glass didn’t give me butterflies, but maybe those feelings came later. Was love different from sexual chemistry? I’d felt that before, but not in a long time, and none of those relationships had worked out anyhow.
I discreetly looked at Glass. The roots of his hair in the back were darker than the front. He had such an interesting, square-shaped face with a straight nose that stopped at his brow instead of following the slope of his forehead. I counted four small moles on his neck, and no scars. His weathered appearance made him look like a cop, and I wondered if some people were just born to be lawmen.
He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing. Just looking.”
