Blood Candy Read Online Free

was
positively ravenous. Bitter coffee washed it all down, a taste she
had never really became accustomed to but needed now.
    Tinch attributed her appetite to the blood she
had lost. She was still silently berating herself for what she had
done at the bar. Every time she thought about it she remembered the
bite more than anything else, and that damned bite felt good.
Thinking about it made her uncomfortable, considering her current
company.
    “So, are you two like a father-son vampire
hunting team or something?” she said.
    Tinch pulled his dark eyes away from his plate
to look up at her. “No, on both counts.”
    Candy glanced at each of them. She still
wasn’t sure she believed this nonsense about Rupert being a
vampire, but it didn’t add up any other way. It didn’t make sense
that she left the bar with such a loser.
    “So what’s your deal?” Candy said when neither
of them offered up any information. “What are you if not vampire
hunters?”
    “Never mind that,” Tinch said. “I happened to
be in the right place at the right time. Consider yourself
extremely lucky.”
    Jimmy had been quiet for the most part since
Candy returned from the bathroom. It was obvious she turned him on;
the signs were everywhere, most noticeably the fidgeting he did to
get a better position to look at her. Too bad he was so shy; he was
cute in a skinny, boy-becoming-man kind of way. She figured with
some time and hard work she could take the shy boy out of him and
turn him into something a woman might want, but those kinds of
projects were a waste of time and only ever worked in
movies.
    Tinch picked up the tab, throwing a twenty
onto the table and a five for the tip. He eyed Candy for a moment
and then he gave Jimmy a worried glance.
    “It’s nearly five in the morning,” he said,
looking like he was running on coffee fumes. “We need to get home,
Jimmy.”
    Candy didn’t know what to say. She felt out of
place, unwanted by at least one of them, but the last thing she
wanted was to go home. Jimmy gave her a comforting
smile.
    “Where do you live?” he asked her. At Tinch’s
clear look of displeasure, he sighed and went on, “What do you
expect her to do, Tinch? She needs to get home.”
    “I don’t know,” Tinch said with a touch of
both regret and sympathy. “I’ve never had to do this
before.”
    “You actually have. Just never with . . .”
Jimmy cleared his throat as if he was saying something he
shouldn’t. “You may as well get used to it with the way vampires
are running around our territory.” He turned his brown eyes to
Candy. “Sorry. We should have probably just taken you to a police
station or something.”
    Tinch shook his head and grumbled at the
younger man’s lack of wisdom. “That’s the last thing we want to do.
Exposure to people in any way brings nothing but trouble. Let’s
just get her home.”
    Candy fidgeted with her thumbs. Home was the
last place she wanted to be and not only because she was scared out
of her mind thinking vampires were real, but because she didn’t
want to return to her mundane life in small-town
nowhere.
    “I don’t think I should go home,” she said.
“Not after what I’ve seen—”
    Tinch shook his head again. “You need to be
with your family. You need to go back to your life and forget about
everything that happened.”
    “That’s not fair! You can’t tell me vampires
are real and then send me on my way. ‘Oh, vampires are real, by the
way. They snatch people up against their will.’ How’s that going to
help me?”
    She noticed the waitress staring at them from
behind the counter. The bell above the diner door jingled. She
heard the waitress say, “Hello there, handsome.”
    “What do you think is going to happen?” Tinch
said. “You can’t come with us, little lady. I’m not a babysitter.
You need to go home.”
    Behind Candy near the counter, someone spoke
in a British accent that made the hair on the back of her neck
stand on end. She