Page 22 of Just the Pool Boy at Vampire Mansion

“That’s why you’re here, right?” Theo asked, walking the length of the pool to the pool house. The lights blazed inside. The pool house was what it sounded like—a three-room, one-floor building with a glass wall along the pool side. Inside, it looked like a five-star hotel room with all the luxury fixtures and fittings that were so expensive nobody knew what they cost. Most days when I’d arrived for work, the blinds were down, but tonight they’d been opened right up.

Music played inside. Just background noise. Nothing too loud or shouty.

“I come out here most nights,” he said, sitting on the couch. “The house gets too much. Sit, Owen. Relax. Let’s talk.”

Relax alone with the billionaire vampire in his mansion. Right. And how was I supposed to do that, exactly?

I sat on the second couch, the low coffee table between us, where Theo put his beer now. Relax. Okay. I could do that. I sat on the edge of the cushions, beer on my knee, and willed my shoulders to come down and my heart to slow.

“It wasn’t what you think,” Theo said, leaning back again.

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” I told him.

“I have a good idea. Let me take a wild stab in the dark. You think Jay and I were a thing, right?”

“No, actually. I mean, I think you liked him. Maybe liked him a lot.”

Theo waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t, he smiled softly. “You notice things, Owen. You’ve got an eye for detail. It’s why you’re good at your job. You’re methodical. I bet it drives your friends crazy, huh?”

It used to. When I’d had friends. They’d been the kind of friends who’d loved my methodical mind so much they’d used it for their own gain, and then they’d used me.

“We’re not so different,” Theo added.

“Right.” I laughed. “We have so much in common. I forgot to mention my second house in Connecticut and the German sports car I don’t own.”

“No.” His smile slipped down. “I meant we’re lacking in friends, right? You . . . because you’re you. And I don’t have friends, because⁠—”

“You’re an asshole?”

He laughed, bright and loud. “Wow. There it is! The brutal honesty. You just say it as it is, huh?”

“I try not to bullshit people. I had enough of that . . . before . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to tell him too much about before. Was that why he’d asked me over? So he could learn about my past?

“Jay was a friend,” he said, sobering. He dropped his sparkling gaze to the beer on the table, then sat forward again, scooped up the beer, and took a drink. After he’d lowered it, his fingers tapped on the glass. “Maybe my only real one. You think people wanna know who I am? They don’t give a shit about me. They want the house, the money, influence, the story, or they just wanna fuck a vampire because every TV show and movie ever has told ’em it’d be wild.”

“Is it?” Holy sheet, that one had escaped my brain-to-mouth filter. “I mean—I didn’t mean—that’s not what I meant.” That had been exactly what I’d meant.

His eyebrows shot up, then he laughed, a real, honest laugh. “If you’re like this after one beer, I can’t wait to see you after six.”

That wasn’t happening. “One is enough. I’m driving.”

“You can crash here.” He gestured at the pool house around us. “Nobody will bother you. No one comes out here.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

Theo’s gaze settled on me again, while he turned over something in his mind. How much to tell me, maybe. “Jay was a good guy, like you. Boring too, also like you. You’d have gotten along.”

I huffed at that. If only Theo knew the person I’d been. I dropped my smile before he could read too much into it.

“Could have talked about pools all day,” he added.

“Pools are actually very interesting,” I said, because apparently the brain-to-mouth filter was offline again. “People think it’s just water in a hole, but it’s not. It’s a closed system. Everything affects everything else. Sunlight burns off chlorine, rain messes with the alkalinity, leaves add phosphates, bodies change the chemistry. Uhm, human bodies, I mean. Living ones. Mostly. And if the pH drifts too high, the chlorine’s basically useless, but if it drops too low, the water starts eating metal, grout, skin . . .” I glanced at Theo’s blank face and realized he absolutely had not asked for a science lesson. “So. Yeah. Pools. Wet and blue. That’s the main thing.”

He does not care about pools, dumbass.

His grin grew. “That’s what I mean. Most people would treat it like some side gig, but for you, pools are serious. You’re serious.”

He said it like it was a good thing, and I didn’t know what to do with that. Another smile, another drink. I was going to need another beer soon, if I didn’t slow down.