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“Okay, but let’s turn this around, just for the sake of argument. What if your fiancé and fiancée had been turned instead?” Matt always was good at looking at both sides of a situation. “What would you have done?”
“I would have been there to kill the vampire who turned my fiancée, for one,” Dane said with conviction. “Staying together? I don’t know. It depends on how it changed her view of things. And whether she had even wanted to stay together.”
Jacqueline said, “Okay, I have to be honest here. Like Dane, I would have done everything in my power to kill the vampire who had turned him. But staying with him? I’m sure he would have changed too much for me. I could just imagine him being aggravated, hot-tempered, ill-at-ease, and not the man I had planned to marry.”
“That was probably me last week,” Dane said.
Matt laughed. “Yeah, I have to agree you were all over the place after you were turned, but then you settled down, got back to the business of taking down rogues, and went to your first therapy session.”
“And met Jacqueline.”
“I wasn’t even giving you the time of day,” she said.
“I know. That’s what intrigued me so much,” Dane said.
She laughed. “It’s not that I was trying to play hard to get.”
“I know. You’ve been through a lot. We both have. But I still wanted to get to know you.”
“You’re not afraid of being on the rebound?” she asked.
“Not where you’re concerned.”
She smiled.
“Well, you can be a member of our family anytime,” Matt said to her.
Then they arrived at the restaurant where Matt and Dane’s twin brothers were waiting in the parking lot. Ryan said, “Trey and I were going to have a fast-food burger and now we’re going to be at a dress-up kind of place?”
“You deserve it after all we did at the vampire’s house,” she said.
“Yeah, I can always go for a steak instead,” Trey said. “The hamburgers can wait.”
“Lobster for me.” Jacqueline headed for the front door of the restaurant while Dane hurried to open it for her.
They all went inside, and the hostess set up a table for five. When she returned, she led them to the table, carrying their menus, then she offered them the menus and left so they could decide on want they wanted to order.
“So are they here where we can see them?” Dane asked, picking up his menu.
“Yes, way over there by the windows overlooking the lake,” Jacqueline said.
All the guys looked that way, giving the women a hard glower. Not that anyone noticed.
“If we stay long enough and they leave first, they’ll have to walk right by our table,” Jacqueline said. “You can save your disparaging looks for them then. For now, we’re here to celebrate our victory.”
The waitresses brought them glasses of water and then took their orders. “Be up with the rolls and salads soon.” Then she left.
Dane was watching Jacqueline’s mother’s table. Jacqueline reached over and squeezed his thigh. He smiled at her. “Just enjoy the comradery we have here,” she said. Though she was looking forward to giving her mother and her mother’s friends the evil eye when they walked by.
But then one of her mother’s friends left the table and headed to the restroom and saw Jacqueline. The woman missed a step, her face turning pale. Her gaze shifted to the hunters with her, and Matt said, “Hey, Mrs. Gifford. How are you doing?”
“Uh, uh, fine.” Then she hurried off to the restroom.
“Well, you rattled her,” Trey said.
“She deserved it. Any friend of Jacqueline’s mother’s is in complicity with her, as far as I’m concerned. They’re not backing Jacqueline. She didn’t say hello to Jacqueline or acknowledge her in any way. She didn’t tell her she was sorry for what she had been through,” Matt said.
They all watched the bathroom for when Mrs. Gifford left it and she glanced at their table, and they all put on their best glowers. Jacqueline wanted to laugh. She felt bad in a way because she had been friends with all her mother’s friends, but now they were treating her like she was bad news. As soon as Mrs. Gifford headed to her table, they observed her sitting down and speaking, then everyone at her table turned to look at them. They just stared at them, and the women quickly turned around to eat their meals.
