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Nick didn’t look down. His mouth hardened a touch.

“Am not,” he grunted.

“Are too.”

“Nope.”

“Yes. You are. I can tell.”

“So what?” He gave her a bare glance, his eyebrow quirked. “Isn’t that what you wanted? One big happy fucking family with your ex-husband, me, and the rest of the brood?”

She laughed.

It was a real laugh, and he relaxed slightly when he heard it.

He could feel her again, which definitely helped.

He’d fed on her before they came upstairs, mostly so they could hear one another, and so they’d be more tightly connected once they were no longer inside the sub. Unfortunately, they’d gotten almost no alone-time at all, not even for the feeding himself, so he was feeling distinctly uncomfortable in other ways.

He tried not to think about it.

If he let himself obsess onthat,it would only get worse.

Forrest walked back to them then, and jerked his chin.

“Okay, I think we’re all set,” he said. “They’re waiting for us at the science outpost. They’ve got a few of the shielded transports, so we’ll take a train to the edge of this dome, a bit further north, and then their back-up transport down to the science dome itself.”

Nick felt a whisper of nerves down his back, but couldn’t really pinpoint from what.

For the same reason, he only nodded to the other man’s words.

“Lead the way,” he said, making a slightly over-the-top flourish with his hand.

If Forrest Walker noticed, he didn’t comment.

* * *

The train ride was quick,only about twenty minutes, since they were only traveling through two stations. They got off inside another part of the same dome, then were driven to the dome doors, where they parted ways with the black-clad Mi6 agents, who pulled Forrest aside for only a few minutes to confer with him about whatever it was Mi6 agents conferred about.

Then the agents left, and Nick exhaled a short sigh of relief, in spite of himself.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them… exactly… but anyone human and official made him nervous as fuck right then.

Some part of him kept waiting for a legion of black-clad agents to emerge out of the shadows and shackle them. He’d half-expected it disembarking from the sub, then again when they got off the train, and now while they changed hands between Mi6 and the science team.

Jordan was still a little bit of a complication.

The Mi6 agents actually offered to take Jordan off their hands when they realized he was a recent newborn, to house him somewhere in Antibes while the rest of them went out to survey the “science bubble,” as they called it.

Nick wasn’t sure what Forrest told them about what they were doing in this part of France, but he felt certain he hadn’t told them the truth, or not all of the truth, at least. When they made the offer to “hold onto” Jordan, Nick guessed they meant the offer sincerely. He let Walker handle the explanations to his colleagues about why they couldn’t do that, and whatever he’d said, it must have been convincing, because they didn’t mention it again.

Now the members of the science team driving the armored vehicle were surveying the handcuffed and half-drugged Jordan with more than a little skepticism, too.

“He’s fine with other vampires,” Forrest assured them. “We’ll need him out there, for the archeological spot we’re going to check out. He and our Galileo here…”

Forrest waved at Nick, the only other vampire in the group, who was apparently now a vampire research scientist, or Galileo, and no longer a vampire cop, or Midnight.

“…will be stuck doing all the truly dangerous and difficult scouting. We weren’t crazy about bringing a newborn, but he’s the only one they had on offer for such difficult work at the Kellerman Labs.”