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His eyes started to smolder. “God, I love how you think.”
“Consider this, too—we won’t be on the same floor as your parents.”
“Hmmm, maybe Reynolds is my friend after all.”
Chuckie hung up the phone. “They couldn’t reach Catering. Someone’s supposed to call me back. Housekeeping is the standard staff. But, realistically, I don’t think it was them. The pineapple thing came with the food.”
“Works for me. Jeff, you going to call your dad? And, Paul, you need to call your mom, too.”
Gower nodded, pulled out his phone, and dialed. Martini grumbled. I decided to give him incentive and wandered over to Chuckie. “We need human as well as A-C guards on the Gowers and the Martinis. What do you suggest?” I heard more grumbling, but also heard Martini dial his phone. Good, he had picked up my a
Chuckie sighed. “I’ll have Agent Lewis handle it.”
“Where is Kevin, anyway?”
“Checking out some leads it makes more sense for a human Federal officer to check out.” Chuckie gri
“I’m sure I could if I worked at it.”
His grin got wider. “Not with Martini around.”
The room phone rang before I could come up with a suitable retort, and he went to answer it. I was relieved and wistful both, which probably wasn’t good.
It was shocking to me to realize I was finding it harder to be here with Chuckie than I’d expected. This part of the Mandalay Bay hadn’t existed when we’d been here, but we’d stayed in the complex. The part of me that was thrilled to be staying here for a week or so was doing its best to ignore the other part that felt it wasn’t a good idea to put myself into any kind of compromising position with a legitimate romantic option. Martini was too easily able to pick up when I was thinking things I shouldn’t be.
Gower and Martini hung up about the same time. “My parents are all set,” Gower said. “My mom’s looking forward to it, my dad, not so much.”
“Have Michael come out here to finish his vacation. We can use the help—we need to have help we know we can trust—and maybe your dad will have more fun if he’s here, too.”
Gower shrugged. “Good plan.” He opened his phone again.
“My parents are coming,” Martini said in a voice of doom. “My mother has a different impression of why we’re here, though.”
“Oh? What does she think we’re doing?”
“Girl-time bonding.” He looked as doom-filled as he sounded. “You might want to see if your parents can come out, too.”
“I’ll see if we have enough rooms.”
Chuckie hung up before I could get my phone out. “Caterer’s a jerk, but the food was catered from one of the restaurants in their version of a food court.”
“Which one?”
“L’Avventura.”
I shook my head. “There’s no restaurant named that here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m positive.” The week with Chuckie wasn’t the only time I’d spent in Vegas, and I lived to eat out at nice restaurants—at least, I had before I’d discovered sex with Martini. Fine dining had dropped a bit on my list since then. But not so much that I wasn’t fully aware of every restaurant here.
I walked over to the huge television that dominated one wall in what I supposed was the living room. The hotel amenities book was there. I flipped through it. “No L’Avventura.”
“Check the mall,” Reader said as he finished his call. “Could be there.”
I did. “No. Nothing like it.”
Martini and Christopher looked at each other. “Be right back,” Martini said. They both disappeared. I checked the double doors—they were unlocked.
“That has to be weird to live with,” Chuckie said casually.
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
I looked up at him. “Yeah. Thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For still being you.”
He gri
“I’m going to fail the tests.” I hadn’t meant to blurt that out.
Chuckie reached out and stroked my cheek. “He doesn’t care. It won’t matter to him. Martini’s not focused on regaining the throne—he’s focused on protecting you, the Pontifex, and the rest of his people. Not going off to a world he’s never seen to take care of it or solve its problems.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m positive. I wish I weren’t. I’d be happy if he disappeared and left you here. But he won’t, not willingly.”
“What if they force him to?”
Chuckie shrugged. “Then we’ll do what we Americans do best.”
“What’s that?”
He gri
CHAPTER 13
MARTINI AND CHRISTOPHER WERE BACK, both looking angry. “Get your buddies in here, fast, and get the phones fixed,” Martini said to Chuckie.
“Not that I mind, but why?”
“Catering never took an order from the front desk for anything to come up to this suite. Catering says their phones haven’t been working all day—they’ve had to send a ru
Chuckie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”
“Haven’t found a human yet who could lie to me,” Martini snapped. “Oh, and we tell the humans from the A-Cs by the heartbeats. And A-Cs can’t lie to me, either. So, yeah, humans down there, not A-Cs. Confused humans who haven’t spoken to you, ever. Who also, let me mention, didn’t send any food up to you.”
“Stop eating or drinking,” I barked. “Lorraine and Claudia, full medical scans on everybody, right now.”
Reader opened his phone and made another call while the girls leaped into action. They sca
He didn’t need to tell me. Martini’s empathic blocks and synapses burned out under too much stress and activity. Sleep was a regenerative, and so were some medical procedures, but he routinely reached a point where he had to go into an isolation chamber, and if he didn’t get into one, he had to have adrenaline or die. Point of fact, I had to slam a huge hypodermic that resembled a harpoon far more than a sewing needle into his hearts. It was horrible, but it was a better option than letting him die. We’d had plenty of enemies use his adrenaline dependency against him, particularly during Operation Drug Addict, so there was no reason to think this time would be any different.
The girls were done. “Nobody has anything wrong that we can tell,” Lorraine said with relief.
I looked at the table. “What, if anything, wasn’t eaten by someone on the team?”
We all examined the offerings. “That,” Chuckie pointed to a dish near the center. “I have no idea what it is, by the way, which is why I didn’t touch it. But it’s undisturbed from how it was when it arrived, so no one else had any either.”
Reader and I looked at it. “No clue.”
“Me either, girlfriend. Yo, Tim, flyboys, need you for a minute.” The rest of the humans came over. Reader pointed. “Don’t eat it or taste it, but do you have any idea of what it is?”
They all shook their heads. “Looks gross,” Jerry said.
“Sort of like boiled okra,” Joe offered.
“Only not like my mamma ever made,” Randy added.
All the A-Cs were staring at it. “Familiar?” I asked Martini.
“No. I’m with the others, that looks disgusting.”
I reached out and took the alien-detector out of Jerry’s hand and held it toward the icky foodstuff. It glowed red.