“Telepathy?” Maya asked.

“I think so.”

“Congratulations! That’ll make a lot of things easier for you. Every mother will envy you for understanding your child even when it can’t talk yet. I suppose she hasn’t yet told you when she’s ready, has she? I think you might deliver earlier than with a human pregnancy. All signs point to it.”

“Just as well,” Delilah answered.

“I know it’s hard on you.” Samson’s voice was comforting, and Zane shook his head. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around how all these badass vampires turned into pussies once they were bonded. What a crock! Sure wasn’t gonna happen to him.

“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. You barely feed from me lately.”

Delilah did have a point. Samson was looking a little worse for wear these days, and Zane had suspected that he’d lowered his intake of blood. As a vampire blood-bonded to a human, he could only drink from his mate, and it appeared that he wanted to be mindful of Delilah’s pregnancy. It was different for vampires blood-bonded to other vampires as was the case with Maya and Gabriel. While they could feed off each other, one partner had to keep feeding off human blood in order to maintain the strength for the pair.

“I’m fine, sweetness.”

Before he hurled over all that lovey-dovey swill, Zane knocked on the door and entered.

“Sorry to intrude.”

Samson instantly covered Delilah’s bare belly with a blanket and rose to block Zane’s view of his wife. “You’d better have a good reason for barging in here.”

Vampires and their possessiveness about their mates—God, how he hated that. “I do. Where’s Gabriel?”

“Meeting with the Mayor,” Maya responded as she switched off the ultrasound machine and tucked away her instruments.

“Call him. We have a situation.”

“What’s going on?” Samson was all business now, and despite his tired look, there was determination in his hazel eyes.

“Yvette didn’t call in.”

“Did you page her?”

“No answer.”

“Her cell?”

“Goes straight to voicemail.”

“Have Thomas see whether he can activate the GPS chip in her cell remotely.”

Zane wasn’t a novice; he’d already called Thomas on his way over. “He’s already working on it.”

“Good.”

“Her client didn’t show up at her hotel either.”

“At least that probably means they are still together.” Samson ran his hand through his thick dark hair. For a moment, Zane was distracted. He missed having hair and being able to ruffle it. When he was human, he’d been shorn bald for the experiments they’d conducted on him, and since his hair hadn’t yet grown back when he’d been turned into a vampire, he was stuck forever with a head like Yul Brunner. Yeah, life sucked that way.

“The limousine they were supposed to take after the party has disappeared too.”

“You think the driver could have abducted them?”

“I wouldn’t eliminate that possibility.”

“Let’s see whether we can get a location on the limo. Find out if it was equipped with Lo-Jack and we can track it that way. If not, have the boys comb the city for it,” Samson suggested. “I’ll talk to Gabriel and have him mount an all-out search. It’s not like Yvette not to respond. Something is fishy.”

“I agree.”

As much as Zane couldn’t stand the prickly bitch, Yvette was part of his family, the only family he had. And he’d move heaven and earth to keep his family together. He wasn’t going to lose this one too. He’d had to watch his first family perish under horrendous circumstances. It had cut too deep, the pain still fresh even after over sixty-five years. “I’ll check out her house in the meantime.”
Seven

The first thing Yvette felt when she woke was long hair caressing her neck and shoulders. It instantly told her that she’d been out for more than two hours, the minimum hours of restorative sleep needed to make her hair grow back. The second thing she noticed was the fact that her hand was clamped around somebody’s wrist.

Still slightly out of sorts and dizzy, Yvette forced her heavy eyelids open and shot up from her prone position, releasing Kimberly’s wrist with her next breath. Her sudden movement made her vision blur, and she took a second to steady herself. Blood thundered through her veins, the noise no less jarring than a passing freight train, swallowing any other sound in the room.