Night Shift (Grizzly Cove Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

and heading straight out into the hallway, past a frowning Brody. She didn’t look, but she kind of thought the men growled at each other for a moment before following her out of the apartment.
    Tina didn’t have another chance to be alone with Zak. Brody hustled her out of the bakery and into Tom’s truck while he all but ordered Zak to go to the sheriff’s office and get the paperwork started. But she saw the way Zak’s gaze followed her, just as she kept looking at him until Tom rounded the bend in the road and Zak was lost to view.
    She turned around in her seat and regarded Tom as he drove steadily toward Brody and Nell’s home in the woods. Tom seemed tense, although it would take someone who knew him as well as she did to realize it. Tina had a talent for noticing things about other people. It was like a sixth sense. She could tell by the set of someone’s jaw or the way they held their shoulders what their mood was.
    “So this vampire guy showing up…” she said, placing her opening bid for conversation in the quiet of the pickup truck’s cab. “It’s a really bad thing, right?”
    Tom threw her a glance and seemed to relax a fraction. “Not necessarily. We knew he’d probably come check us out sooner or later. John was aware of his yacht out there at the mouth of the cove for the past couple of days. He figured the master would come visit. We just didn’t expect him to show up quite the way he did.”
    “What happened to him? Did he say anything else about it?”
    She should probably have asked the question long before now, but Zak had distracted her. Oh, boy, had he distracted her. And she desperately wanted to be distracted by him again. Real soon.
    “Something in the water attacked his boat. Killed the crew. Smashed the yacht. He just barely escaped.” Tom sighed, and his shoulders tensed again, ever so slightly. “Whatever’s out there, it’s not good.”
    They didn’t talk much after that, each lost in their own thoughts. They picked up Nell, and then, Tom drove them all back to his place, where Ashley waited. The sisters reunited with hugs all around while the two older girls made a fuss over Tina, asking for a detailed play-by-play of what had gone down in the bakery that night.
    Tom prowled around the house, leaving them alone for a bit, which Tina thought was both considerate, and a little scary. It was pretty clear Tom was keyed up, checking all the windows and doors. He even seemed to be checking the wiring of the elaborate alarm system he’d installed in the house when Ash had moved in with him.
    Tina tried not to notice his stealthy movements, but his quiet vigilance was starting to creep her out. She literally jumped when his phone rang, and was glad when he went into his home office to answer questions and rustle papers. No doubt his legal expertise would be needed in dealing with the mess that had been made of the vampire’s yacht.
    “I can’t believe an actual vampire walked right in to our bakery,” Ashley said, leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping the coffee she’d made for all three of them. “Was he sexy?”
    “Ash, the guy was so beat up, I couldn’t really tell at first. He was scary when he arrived. His eyes were glowing. And red. Blood red.” Tina shivered, cupping the hot mug filled with coffee in both hands. “When I came back down later, he was a lot better. And he’d taken off his shirt. He wasn’t pasty white, like you see in the movies. He wasn’t tan either, mind you, but he was definitely hunky under the healing skin. Muscular. Polite. Handsome. But the freaky part was the way he healed. His torso had these parallel rows of what had to be teeth marks. They were angry and red when I first saw them, then he put a wine-soaked towel over them, drank a few bottles, and when he removed the towel, the marks were gone. Like completely gone. As if they’d never been there.”
    “Brody heals fast,” Nell put in from the other side of the kitchen