Time After Time (Cora's Bond) by V. M. Black Page B

who wore her riotous black curls in an elegant French braid that somehow managed to make her look queenly even in her silly shirt.
    “Do you know what Clarissa got us?” Lisette asked as we all crowded into the elevator.
    “Couldn’t guess,” I said honestly, not really quite daring to.
    Clarissa shot me a toothy smile over Lisette’s head. “A party bus.”
    “Oh, I wanted to tell her,” Lisette pouted.
    I didn’t groan aloud. I thought I should be rewarded for that. “With strippers?”
    But of course it was Clarissa. I shouldn’t have bothered to ask.
    “With special strippers,” she said, winking.
    I had no idea what she meant until we piled onto the bus and I realized I already knew a good half of the so-called strippers. Three of them were shifter guards from Dorian’s house, wearing little more than thongs, bowties, and their smiles.
    They fit their role admirably for having been dragooned into that post, and I could only assume that Clarissa had conducted tryouts for the roles first. If they were embarrassed, they gave no sign—which was more than I could say for myself.
    Another six men I could also identify as shifters, though I didn’t recognize them in particular—from other people’s entourages, I could only assume. And Raymond and Dalton were also there, presumably to protect Paquita and Marie. They looked like the worst strippers ever in their sport coats and casual slacks. But they were vampires, so of course no mere human would challenge the appropriateness of their attire for the role they were supposedly fulfilling. No one would even notice except in the unlikely event that the agnates wished them to.
    “All right, everybody!” Lisette called, clinging to one of the poles at the center of the bus as the colored lights swirled off the recessed disco balls. “Let’s sit down and get this party started!”
    I had to smother a giggle at that statement—so very like Lisette, to whom it wouldn’t occur that dancing around in a moving bus might be an option. But I was happy enough to forego any gyrations and hip-thrusts for the moment and take a seat while my maid of honor passed around champagne flutes and a magnum of Dom Pérignon.
    “Courtesy of our new friend Rebecca!” Lisette declared.
    The agnate was seated next to me at the end of the couch that stretched down one side of the bus, and as I filled up her flute, she smiled. “It was the least I could do. I detest bad wine.”
    Lisette turned the music up—not to the blasting level that I’d feared but to a loud-but-not-unpleasant volume that still allowed for normal conversation.
    To my surprise, I relaxed and began to enjoy myself. If Lisette was doing my bachelorette party wrong, I thought as the thong-clad men passed around trays of delicious hors d’oeuvres, I didn’t want to go to one that was done right.
    I joined in on the chatter when I felt like it—and when I didn’t, I let it flow over me. With Lisette and Sarah in the bus, there were two bubbly people to effectively take the spotlight off me any time I wished. That was something I hadn’t had much of a chance to enjoy in Dorian’s world, where I’d been the focus of far too much attention from the very beginning.
    Nothing of note had happened in the past week. Nothing at all. On Saturday, Dorian and I had attended the funeral mass followed by the burial of Jean and Hattie, and on Sunday, he’d gone alone to Dr. Sanderson’s funeral. And in the intervening hours, we’d spent a great deal of time affirming our own lives in a most direct way.
    During the course of the week, I’d frittered away countless hours with Jane Worth, dealing with the endless minutiae that had seemed determined to arise with the last-minute tweaks to the wedding plans, while Dorian continued to tackle the logistical problems that came from scaling the perfected test that his and Hattie’s research had found.
    There hadn’t been a peep from the Kyrioi, not even a trace of evidence