A feeling of fullness settled inside her. For the first time in her life, feeding had made her feel satisfied without giving her a guilty conscience.
“Thank you.”
Quinn gave her a long look before nodding. “You’ve never seen bottled blood before.”
Not a question, simply a statement, yet she felt compelled to explain herself. “The various vampire clans I was with, they only fed from humans. Nobody ever mentioned this to me.”
“Clans? Plural?” Quinn asked, raising an eyebrow in inquiry.
She shrugged. “Yeah, why?”
“It’s unusual for a vampire to change clans. Once you’re with a group, you normally stick together. Like a family.”
She snorted. The groups of vampires she’d met weren’t exactly like loving families, more like a band of Mafioso with even less loyalty than said murderous organization. Backstabbing and infighting was a daily order, and the makeup of each group changed faster than the menu in a fancy restaurant.
“There’s no such thing with vampires. Everybody is out for themselves.”
Quinn ran his eyes over her, making her feel as if she were being inspected. “Nice crowd you hung around with. That explains certain things.”
“It explains nothing. I’m not like them. I refuse to be like them!” And had she known about bottled blood, it would have saved her from a lot of emotional pain.
“Maybe it’s time you met my family then.” He motioned toward Oliver. “We’re off to Scanguards. I want you to come with us. Time to start training.”
“But I’m already a trained bodyguard,” Oliver insisted.
“You were a trained human bodyguard. That’s totally different. Now we’ll kick things up a notch.”
Then Quinn looked back at her. “Time to bring our grandson in.”
And if his voice didn’t have a little softness to it when he said grandson. Rose stared at him. Maybe he would learn to care about Blake and keep him safe, even once he knew what she’d done. Time would tell.
13
As soon as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, Quinn kicked down the gas pedal of the Scanguards-owned SUV and shot out of the six-car-garage underneath the B&B.
On the way to the car, he’d filled Oliver in on their assignment and who their charge was. To say that Oliver was surprised would have been an understatement. But he didn’t ask any personal questions, and Quinn wasn’t in the mood to divulge any more information than he already had. Confessing that he was hurt by Rose’s rejection, had been a major slip, one he could only attribute to the sense of shame he felt about what had happened in her bedroom. Not the sex part, of course, but the words they had exchanged afterwards.
It didn’t matter now. What was done was done. And maybe it would give her something to chew on. Maybe even soften her so she would tell him what was really going on. Because he neither believed her claim that Keegan wanted to get back at her for leaving him, nor her even more ridiculous declaration that she hadn’t come to see him because she was protecting Charlotte from him. Bullshit, if anybody asked him.
Quinn gripped the steering wheel tighter and forced his thoughts to focus on business instead.
He’d already received a text from one of the human bodyguards he’d assigned to Blake. The boy was on his way to Scanguards’ brand-new training facility in an old warehouse in the Mission. It had been refurbished and made vampire proof and been equipped with various training rooms and classrooms where vampires as well as human bodyguards trained for their missions. Samson took training seriously, and it showed.
The place was state of the art, but Quinn barely took any notice of it as they arrived. He flashed his Scanguards ID at the security guard manning the entry. Oliver did likewise.
When the burly guard squared his stance in front of Rose, Quinn tapped the man on his arm. “She’s with me.”
“She’ll still have to go through the check,” he answered.
Quinn turned the backside of his ID for the guard to see. Section V, Class A it said. The man instantly took a step back.
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know. Go right in.”
Quinn nodded. The guard didn’t know him, since Quinn had only once before visited the brand new facility in San Francisco. Had he been back in New York, he wouldn’t even have had to show his ID. He noticed how Rose raised an eyebrow, then brushed past him into the building. Once they were inside, she pointed toward the pocket into which he’d shoved his ID.
“What’s it mean?”
“Section V stands for the obvious, not that this guard would know. He thinks it stands for VIP.” As it might well have. “Class A is the highest clearance at Scanguards. Anybody with a Section V Class A clearance has access to every area within Scanguards.”