“That was totally hot,” she said, moving closer. “By the way, do you want to see my new cross?”
She dangled the cross between us, and I surged forward to give her a quick kiss. At least that was my intention. But Marilee grabbed my shirt in her fist, holding me in place, and prolonged it just a little bit longer.
“Excuse me!” My mother’s voice clearly indicated that she was not amused by our antics – or the fact that we were both ignoring them. “What are we going to do about the Murphys?”
I looked at Marilee. “We need a plan. Not just for Donny Murphy, but also to get the Rossis off my back.”
“Yeah, I’m tired of people coming for you. It’s putting a serious cramp in my efforts to woo you.”
I cocked my head. “You’re trying to woo me?”
She winced. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m not doing a very good job of it.”
“You don’t need to woo anyone, vampire. Moira is going to marry her fiancé, the way she promised.”
“I never promised,” I shot back. “You told me it was going to happen. I told you I didn’t like him, I told you that I was attracted to women, I even told you that word on the street was he liked to hit his women, and still you insisted that I marry him.”
“Your parents are dicks,” Marilee said, repeating her words from the other day as if they weren’t standing right there.
“Believe me, I know.”
My mother hissed in outrage while my father went back to mumbling curses under his breath.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Let’s go to Sapphic Security,” Marilee suggested. “We’ll pull the team together and come up with a plan to flush Murphy out and deal with the Italians too.”
“Sounds good. But what about them?” I asked, inclining my head in the direction of my parents.
“We’re going to need to bring them with us to the office.”
“What?” I squeaked.
“What?” my mother spoke just a half beat behind me.
“We ain’t going nowhere,”Dagrumbled.
“You guys got us into this mess and you’re going to help us get out of it,” Marilee told him.
She and my father just glared at each other for several seconds, but I had a better idea. Taking a few steps back, I pounded on the wall and called, “Boris! Are you still there? We need some muscle.”
The words had scarcely left my mouth when Boris came crashing through the door to the adjoining room like the Kool Aid Man in those old commercials. He zeroed in on my parents, stalking towards them. I’d never in my life seen my father intimidated by anyone or anything, but when the hulking bear shifter moved towards him he flinched and took a step back before he could stop himself.
“You will come with me,” Boris intoned, his voice firm but soft. “We must go see boss wolf now.”
I guess he’d been listening on the other side of the wall.
He gripped each of my parents by the neck and marched them into the adjoining room. A few seconds later Allie stuck her head through the door.
“Sounds like you guys have been having fun in here, but Lois is going to shit a brick if we don’t get to the office.”
“Right behind you,” Marilee said.
We all ended up in the same elevator, Martha and Allie near the doors, me and Marilee in one corner, and Boris and my parents in the other. No one said a word as we made our way down to the garage, me and Marilee getting into one SUV, the rest of them taking the other.
The vehicles split up as soon as we exited the garage, each of us going in different directions in case we were being followed. Once Marilee was satisfied that we didn’t have a tail, she relaxed into her normal alert state instead of her hyper alert state.
“We haven’t talked about last night,” I ventured, immediately hating myself for it.
