Now it was, what? Six a.m.? Seven? He was no closer to finding Docia, though he felt he was just a hair behind her, close enough that he could feel the warmth in a chair she might have sat in or the faintest scent of the crisp, clean botanical shampoo she used. Or so he’d imagined, as her former host explained oh so calmly and oh so believably how a bunch of people completely out of her social sphere had come to have her at their home … only to have to hastily remove her from that home after a sketchily convenient gas explosion had taken out the fireplaces, the dining room, and the whole right side of the house.
Henry Kamin had had an answer for everything. The guardhouse vandalism had taken place the night before, supposedly, when the guards had gone to walk the perimeter of the house. They had not reported it, preferring to handle it privately unless it happened again. This Vincent Marzak had Docia but had not had time to grab a cellphone before leaving to bring her elsewhere, and Kamin assured him she would probably contact him as soon as she was able.
Apparently, Kamin was an upstanding citizen and a huge donor to the local PBA, so the Windham cops had swallowed every bit of his story readily.
Even Jackson’s fellow cops had decided there was nothing else to be done about it and had gone home for the night. But he didn’t bother. He’d only be coming back on shift in a few hours anyway. Unless, of course, he got sent home by the boss when Landon got wind of what a mess this was turning out to be. Those Windham cops were used to dealing with insanely rich and privileged people, who, it seemed, deserved a whole different level of consideration. If Henry Kamin said there was an explosion, there was an explosion. If Henry Kamin said Docia was being well cared for, well, that had to be true.
It was all a load of horseshit as far as Jackson was concerned. But now even the cops from his own department were looking at him cross-eyed when he insisted on pressing forward with finding Docia. Go home, they said. She’ll probably call in the morning, they said. Get some sleep, they said.
“Yeah, right,” he snorted into his coffee cup. Mr. Coffee understood. He was a longtime veteran of this station. He knew what drove a good cop. Well, besides caffeine-infused brew, that is.
Oh, crap. Now he was anthropomorphizing the frigging coffee machine. Was this what it had boiled down to? Was his only friend in the world a Mr. Coffee machine?
“Dude, this place smells funny. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Leo threw himself into Jackson’s desk chair, the impetus rolling him back a little. He kicked his legs up, crossing his feet on the corner of Jackson’s desk. His wet, muddied feet.
“Christ, Leo!” Jackson pulled out an abused file folder from under Leo’s boots and wiped it off against his jeans. “It smells like law in here. You know, that thing you so inherently like to work against?”
“Untrue. I am a very law-abiding citizen.” He grinned. “As long as the law makes sense. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of the greater good. And tell me something, Dudley Do-Right, just what kind of law are those guys practicing up there in Windham?”
Jackson hated to admit it, but he was right. Something wasn’t right up there. Besides the obvious explosion, there were things … things that didn’t make sense. And a whole hell of a lot of them.
“They aren’t me,” Jackson felt the need to point out.
“If you mean they aren’t running on caffeine fumes and zero downtime, then yeah, you got that right.”
“What the hell, Leo?” he burst out in a shout, somehow refraining from throwing his cup against the wall. “What do you want me to do? Go home, curl up, and sleep like a kitten, all content and worry-free? While she’s out God knows where with God knows who doing God knows what?”
Leo waited a long beat after Jackson’s explosion of temper, long enough to make Jacks feel a little awkward for letting loose in the first place. It was much better when Leo got just as mad as he did and they fed off each other. Then usually he would play the cooler head and all would be right with the world.
But the world was about to change.
“I’m not saying you forget. I’m not saying you go home. There’s bunks in the back room behind the break room and nothing you can do until the world starts to wake up, so why don’t you let Red here take you back and give it a try for two hours?”
When he said “Red,” he nodded his head to a point just beyond Jackson’s left shoulder, and he knew … he just knew … who was standing there. He turned to see Marissa Anderson frozen like a deer in a pair of headlights right behind him, apparently trying to sneak past him to get to Mr. Coffee herself. Now, he might have actually found it a bit touching that she, unlike all the rest, had actually stuck around to the wee hours … if she hadn’t looked so damn flawless in the process of doing it. Not a hair out of place, not so much as a wrinkle in her blouse. And for some reason that just irritated the piss out of him.
“I don’t need a goddamn babysitter,” he bit out, slamming down his cup before it really did go flying across the room. What the hell was wrong with him? One of the best things about his nature was that he was very slow to anger. It was a good thing in a cop overall, and probably one of the key reasons he’d never had a brutality complaint or anything like it in his jacket. But honestly, between Leo and Dr. Hotbody, someone somewhere was asking just a little too much from him. “Fine. Eight a.m. I’ll lay around like an idiot until then. But then the SPD, the WPD, and all the rest of you can go screw yourselves and all your rules and jurisdictions. I’m going after my sister.”
“Amen, brother! Now you’re singing my song! Whoo!” Leo whooped.
Jackson flipped him off and marched away from him. It didn’t take him long to realize there was the rapid clickety-click of a woman in heels hot on his tail. When he reached the break room, he turned on her sharply.
“I thought I made it clear I do not need a babysitter.”
“Clearly you need something,” she shot back at him. “No rules? Disregard for jurisdiction? You’re going to throw your whole career away over this, Jackson, if you aren’t careful. And having been witness, I’m going to have to—”
Jackson grabbed her by the lapel of her suit jacket, finished yanking her into the break room, and shut the door tight. The minute they were closed off, he stalked her, getting a certain satisfaction in watching her eyes widen in shock and in the way she rapidly backed away from him until she hit the lip of the sink centered in the countertop of the small kitchenette. He trapped her there, a hand on either side of her hips gripping tightly at that lip edge.
“Have to what?” he demanded darkly, slowly, his gaze boring into hers. “Be a rat? Isn’t that what you are? You think you’re announcing something new to me? You think this entire police force doesn’t know that you’re the equivalent of a tattletale, running to tell the grown-ups on us if we so much as blink wrong? Or, for that matter, you so much as think we’re blinking wrong? You think that scares me or something?”
“It’s not meant to scare you, it’s meant to make you think twice about your actions,” she bit back at him, another flare of the temper he hadn’t realized until today that she had. Strangely enough, he found it unbelievably hot. Incredibly sexy. Just like everything else about her, damn her beautiful eyes. “Jackson, you’re tired. Worn down. People make bad decisions under stress as it is, but add to it—”
“Shh!” he hushed her fiercely. “Unless the next words out of your mouth are an offer to relieve my tension with a spectacular blow job, I don’t want to hear it!”
She smirked at him. Actually smirked, the brazen little thing.
“Oh, nice. Typical male reaction. You can’t deal with a woman on an even keel, so you reduce her to some kind of sexual object in order to make her less threatening to your candy-assed fragile male ego. And here I thought you were different.”
“Well, you thought wrong. I …” Jackson hesitated, his tired eyes narrowing a minute as he tried to review and absorb the words flying between them instead of just reacting to them. “What do you mean,
you thought I was different?”
“Nothing,” she snapped. “Now back up and let me out of here before I report you for sexual harassment, Waverly.”
She sounded smart, confident, and brave. Christ, she was stunning.
Jackson realized he needed to get away from her before he did something stupid like try to kiss her. Then the thought of kissing her led to another thought. A very dirty thought.
He reached for her mouth, those perfectly plush pink lips of hers that had taunted him for thirteen weekly visits of pretending to get his head together, either smiling with that holier-than-thou kindness of hers or parting every so often as she licked them in one of her rare absent moments. He’d often wished she were the type to suck or nibble on her pen in thought. But, of course, she wasn’t. She was far too perfectly put together for that. It seemed she worked very hard at that overall appearance of perfection. Not even a single foible? No tapping of a foot. No clicking of her pen. Not a single fidget. She had an amazing amount of control over her every action.
“So tightly wound,” he said roughly when she dodged him, her hands suddenly gripping his shirtfront, perhaps to shove at him but not quite putting any heart into it.
But when he moved to take her mouth, she dodged him again, this time turning out of his arms and standing for a minute with her back to him. She took a breath and turned to face him, as composed as ever.
Except … there was an intriguing flush on her fair cheeks.
“Get some sleep, Jackson. You won’t find your sister this way. And you can kiss my help good-bye if you don’t.”
The funny thing was, he realized, her help was important enough to him— to a man seemingly abandoned by those who should be far more loyal to him because he had known them longer and better than he knew her— to keep him from pursuing her.
All he did was nod before moving to the back room and the bunks waiting there for him.
“No. Don’t stop. I’m not afraid,” she said breathlessly.
It was like an infinite release, like speaking something into being, when Docia said those words aloud to Vincent. For both of them, really. For her it was revitalizing, like bringing herself back to life for the first time since her accident. She’d been living on borrowed time, literally. She’d found a whole new meaning to the words. It had almost been as though it were no longer her life to live. And in a sense, that was very much true, but it wasn’t not her life to live, either. It was more than that. It was going to be more than that. More than her tiny little life could possibly have conceived of. That didn’t make her smaller-scaled life less worthy, that wasn’t what she thought at all. The world was made of lives in all shapes and sizes, of all sorts of dynamics, but her death and rebirth had proven more than anything that even the smallest life could have a tremendous impact on the world … if in only one other person’s perspective.
For Vincent, it was an equally dynamic understanding. He had been part of a pair, a marriage, to be blunt, for so long that he had nearly forgotten how to be an individual. And Ram had been so determined to see to the care and comfort of so many others that he’d been willing to sacrifice everything about himself to bring it to fruition. In a way, he had become far less of an individual than the man who had agreed to share his life with him. So Vincent might have been doing Ram the biggest favor of all time by ignoring all the rhetoric his symbiont had forced on him about queens and kings and great destinies and the fate and future of a people … and remembering that sometimes it was the fate and destiny of one individual that could change the world. Ram and Menes and all of them had tried it their way over and over again and it had never quite worked. Wasn’t that the definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?
So he was going to do something different and he was going to earn a different result, he thought with determination. He was going to pursue the way this simple, cute little lady made him feel, and he was going to see what came of it. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to stop. And he was not letting go of her until she asked him to.
Perhaps not even then.
It was strange, but he’d picked her apart and reconstructed her in so many ways these past few days. As Ramses, the great pharaoh who had become the loyal advisor to Menes, his second in command and second only to his queen in all things. As Vincent, the ex–navy SEAL-cum-Bodywalker who could digest any situation and break it down into what it was, what it needed to be, and what he wanted it to be. And as Ram/Vincent, the Bodywalker blend of two powerful male beings that so purely complemented each other and had found such a rhythmic way of moving through life together. Yet none of that came to matter in the least. It all boiled down to the two simplest essences. A male. A female. Both so complementary to each other that the world was lit on fire by it.
And if not the world, most certainly their bodies. Their minds. Their souls. Whether it was two souls or four, twin minds or quadruple … in the long run … it was plain in the fierce heat of their kisses that it went far beyond just the physical and deep into the metaphysical. Vincent was kissing her so hard and so wildly that he didn’t take time to breathe. Not consciously, anyway. He didn’t have time to waste being present in his own mind. He was too busy delving into the moment, delving into her mouth, his tongue tangling with hers until the taste of her was scorched on his memory for all time.
Docia was clinging to him with gripping hands and fingertips, trying for all she was worth to remain on her feet when all she wanted to do was swoon deep into the world of sensation and ferocity he was covering her with. If not for the hand at her waist … infinitely, frustratingly, at her waist … she was certain she would have melted to the floor in the gooiest, bubbliest little puddle. It was hardly surprising she should feel that way when she felt so very wet, from her mouth to her damp skin to her sex, all so slick and hot and craving.
Yet all it was was kisses. Unending, fierce, and slowly frustrating kisses. Mind-blowing kisses. Breathtaking kisses. Until her lips were bruised and her face on fire from the shadow of whiskers he scored against her sensitive skin. It nearly drove her out of her mind until she wanted to scream at him to just do something! Do anything!
And that was when she realized this had been her problem for so long. She had constantly let life happen to her. Let it make the first move. Waited for it to take the next step. And because of that … she had waited too long. Had just about missed it all. Missed everything. And why? Because she was afraid someone might say no? She might be rejected? She might fail in some way? And because she had feared the failing, she had become utterly stagnant and had ended up failing gloriously just the same.
She pulled away, gasping for breath, panting hard as she looked up into his glittering gold eyes. She narrowed her gaze on him in suspicion because she knew he was not the type to sit back and let things just happen to him. She knew he was a taker. A mover and a shaker. A freaking heartbreaker. Because he wasn’t afraid of anything. So why? Why was he standing still? Doing nothing? Waiting?
“Screw you,” she gasped, shoving at him with all she had until he deigned to take a step back. Then she launched herself at him, leaping off the floor, ringing her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. He staggered back a second before grabbing her under her ass and hauling her in tight to his body, her dress ripping under both their efforts. He grinned as she slammed her lips over his and kissed him as hard and mean as she could. Then she broke off and glared at him. “You think I don’t have it in me? You think I’m not tough enough for this? Not hot enough? Not gutsy enough?”
“Did I say that?” he asked, every word a tease, every move of his mouth on hers a taunt.
“I’m sick of it,” she ground out. “I’m sick of life or death just happening to me!” She sat back in his hands and tangled with the top of her dress for a moment, pulling it back and down until her breasts were just about to spill out of it.
“Good!” he said, his gold eyes devouring her every movement. The
re was no condescension there, just raging agreement. Fierce need for it to be true.
“And this bitch inside me won’t dictate life to me, either. You won’t and she won’t and some decrepit pharaoh who isn’t even here won’t! You got that?”
“Understood,” he said with a growl of appreciation. “And Ram can go fuck himself!”
“Ram would much rather fuck you,” Vincent confessed to her. “He’s thought of little else, no matter what he’d like to pretend otherwise. Not since the moment he first touched you. Since we first touched you. Screw it. Like you said. I want you. I’m having you. And as long as you agree, nothing else matters. Nothing else will make the difference, and nothing is going to stop me.”
He threw her to the floor, slamming her back onto the mattress so hard that all four corners poofed out tightly, full of air, then hissed slowly in release as he rose on his knees, a hand bracing at her shoulders so his whole body shadowed over her.
“Wrong,” she said breathlessly, her hands reaching below his waist, one gripping at his belt, the other stroking boldly along the length of his zipper. “I’m having you. We’re having you. It’s going to be a freaking ménage á everybody.”
And then she took a hard breath in, held it, and let the surprising feel of him radiate into her fingers and palm, the message ticking up like a lightning telegraph into her brain.
“Jesus, you have no idea how good that really feels,” he ejected on a hot gust of breath, his hips moving into her touch. “Everything about you, even the simplest things … like that ridiculously adorable mole. On your foot. I’m going to lick and fondle that thing at some point because it turns me on … just like everything else about you. And I wish I could explain how painful this is.…”
He put his hand over hers so she wouldn’t pull away from him.
“In a good way,” he breathed against her ear in assurance. “Painful in a good way. Both physically and mentally, because even the lightest touches of Ram being present makes him fight what he feels is a disloyal act, and it translates inside of me in the most unbelievable haze of pain and passion, need and dread. But in no way does the lying bastard want to leave you. No more than I do.”
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