Illicit

by Pryce, Madeline

  Black, hardened tar dripped down the tree trunk, the liquid no longer moving. Frozen blood. Something else adhered to the bark. Her stomach revolted. Remnants of Greg’s head. Hair, skull, and…brain.

  Peter growled, the resonance vibrating the air. Fists bunched and air streaming from his nose, he speared her with a red-hot glare. “I knew it.”

  “Whose smell are you picking up?” she asked, backing away from the rage dancing in his eyes.

  “Grady.”

  Vomit rushed up the back of her throat and she put a hand over her mouth to staunch it.

  Peter kept on talking. “His scent is all over this clearing. There is no reason for him to have been here. Greg never would have taken him here, unless you—”

  She shook her head before he could say it. “It’s been more than a year since Grady and I...and never here. Maybe Grady found out the same information we did and came to investigate—”

  He cut her off, stepped close enough for his skin to burn hers. “How dare you defend him? He killed Greg, the man you claimed to love.”

  “I’m not defending him,” she shouted back. Her vision blurred. Furiously, she wiped at the moisture wetting her cheeks. She couldn’t stand the thought of Grady, a man she’d once trusted, doing something so cruel. What hurt worse was the judgment in Peter’s eyes.

  He turned away to pace. Every so often he grumbled things like “I’ll rip out his heart,” and “He’s a dead man.” Back and forth, every pass increased his agitation. Claws shimmered in the darkness. Peter’s eyes changed, lengthening into feline slits.

  “If he murdered Greg I’ll help you kill him,” she said, her voice rising in strength. “That is, if he did it. We need proof, more than a scent.”

  He spun on her. “If?”

  “Put your anger to the side and think about it. What if he didn’t, Peter? An innocent man will die because we jumped to the wrong conclusion. Grady knows about this place; maybe he fishes here on his days off or, like I said, maybe he followed clues not in the folder that led him here.”

  Peter stepped forward, bridging the distance between them. He gripped her hair, pulled her head back and looked deep into her eyes.

  “You still love him, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You lie,” he growled, closed his teeth around the front of her throat.

  Her heart sped and she moved closer, thrust her head back in submission, the only thing she could think of to soothe him. “I swear to you Peter, I don’t love Grady, I never did. I care about him as a person, if he’s innocent. If he killed Greg, has threatened our Pard, then I promise you I’ll help you cut off his head.”

  The fist trapping her curls loosened. He pulled back, slowly took a step away from her. Incensed rage darkened his eyes, and she knew he wasn’t fully in control of the leopard. Both man and beast stared at her. “You’re mine, Eva. He won’t touch you again.”

  In this state of mind, she thought it best not to correct him.

  “Tonight,” he said, “we’ll break into the police station and go through Grady’s files. If he was here for a legitimate reason, he’ll have noted it. If not, then we hunt.”

  Midway through the return trip to the truck, her flashlight died, her lack of sight making the trip twice as long. The first thing she saw on approach was a blinking light coming from inside the cab. Apprehension pricked. Her cell phone. She’d left it inside the cab. The flashing stopped for a second, then resumed in a fast rhythm to signal an urgent message. Three messages, it turned out. As Peter retied his boots, she listened to her voicemail.

  “Eva…” There was a pause, but the one word was enough to tell her the caller. James. “God, Eva. I don’t know how to tell you this, but Becca...” A long, silent gap filled the airway, and she imaged her uncle running a hand through his beard, thought maybe she heard the rasp. Her heart hammered inside her chest. Already her brain spun, desperately finishing the sentence in a number of different ways, none of them good. Her palms grew moist with sweat. “She’s dead, Eva.” Her hammering heart stopped. “Murdered at the clinic. The cops are here. Grady needs you to come by the scene, wants you to bring Peter with you. Get here as soon as you can.”

  Dropping her phone, Eva pressed a hand to her stomach, a choked sob breaking free.

  “What is it?” Peter asked from the other side of the truck.

  She swallowed, the sting of hot tears against her cold cheeks the only sensation she felt. She looked up, met his gaze. “There’s been another murder.”

  The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, his only show of emotion. “Who?”

  Guilt consumed, made it hard to speak the leopard’s name aloud. “Becca, at the clinic, James needs us there. The cops want to ask us a few questions.”

  “I’ll kill Grady.” Peter ripped open the truck door and climbed inside. The trip into town, much like the ride to the cabin, was made in brooding silence.

  The scene they drove into was familiar, one she hadn’t been able to get out of her mind since finding Greg’s body. Policed milled around, the entire station in attendance. Blue and red lights spun, and she cast her gaze to the plain, unmarked corner’s van.

  Peter’s truck slid into the parking lot, jerked to a stop that threw her against her seatbelt. He was out of the truck before she could wrestle out of the safety restraint. Panic grew as she watched Peter through the windshield. Peter locked gazes with Grady. The detective hissed something under his breath and trudged across the parking lot toward Peter.

  She scrambled out of the truck and almost fell on her face in her haste. At a dead run, she sprinted to catch up with Peter’s long stride. He’d made it half way across the lot. Evidence or no, he was going to tear Grady’s throat out in front of the entire Bellows Falls Police Department.

  She threw herself in front of Peter, her chest colliding with his. He never took his gaze off Grady, never stopped moving forward. He pushed her along, her feet scrambling over the snow in an awkward, backward jog.

  “Peter, stop,” she whispered.

  He ignored her. Grabbing his face, she forced his gaze to hers. The corners of his eyes changed, enlarging and lengthening. Sharp canines pressed from his mouth.

  “Look at me,” she demanded, and almost fell when he came to an abrupt halt.

  He curled his lip, snarling, presumably at her order. Behind her, the approach of boots crunched through snow. Grady was still far enough away that she had time to get Peter to rein in his anger.

  “You have to get yourself under control. I know you want his blood, but now is not the place. They will shoot you the second you lay a hand on him. Do you want to expose the entire Pard? Because right now you're seconds from sprouting fur.”

  He took several deep breaths, his chest rising and falling against hers. His eyes slowly melted back to normal. Teeth receded. He gripped her hands where they cupped his cheeks and she thought he’d pull her grip off. Instead, he pressed into her, tightening her hold.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” he said quietly, and she knew how much the admission of weakness cost.

  She shook her head, looked deep into his eyes. “You will because you’re strong and smart and whether you admit it or not, you care about Greg, James, and the rest of the Pard. You will protect them above all else. You are Alpha. You told me it’s instinct to put them above yourself. You need to do that now, for the Pard, for me.”

  Snow began to fall, flakes swirling. They landed in his hair, on his shoulders. He looked like a fallen angel, his dark hair and eyes glittering with fury and indecision.

  “Is there a problem here?” Grady asked.

  Eva turned, but didn’t break physical contact with Peter. In front of her, Grady stood erect with a hand on the butt of his gun. A few of the milling officers noticed, including his father, the Chief, and made their way closer to the potential problem.

  She stepped backward into Peter, the heat of his chest lining her back. He curled a hand around her waist, dug his
fingers into her clothes.

  “No problem,” she answered quickly, had a hard time meeting Grady’s swollen face. She knew what Peter was capable of doing. “Peter is very close to the Graysons. He isn’t taking Becca’s death well.”

  Peter grunted something she didn’t understand.

  Grady looked them both over, assessed, and then withdrew a notebook from his back pocket. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted James deep in a conversation with the chief of police. Her uncle had stopped him from coming over. She also saw the clinic. Her breath caught and she took an automatic step toward the damaged single-story wood building.

  Greg’s dream, his sole focus for the last fifteen years, had been ravaged. Peter tightened his hold, kept her from running across the parking lot. Glass littered the ground in front of the empty holes where darkened windows once stood. Bright red paint marred the brown wood structure with words like “whore” and “mine.”

  Hadley Grimes, not dressed in his usual suit, now wore a dark jumpsuit. He exited through the front entrance of the clinic, pushing a sheet-covered gurney. Becca.

  She turned in to Peter, remorse coalescing. He cupped the back of her head, made a soothing noise against her ear and held her closer. She broke apart in his arms, no longer caring about anything except how many lives she’d ruined. Becca had been so young, so beautiful, and now she was dead because of Eva. The guilt was unbearable.

  “Peter,” Grady voice penetrated. “I need to ask you a few questions. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Now?” he growled, the rumble shaking her.

  “Or at the station. It’s your choice.”

  “Grady,” James interrupted, joining the group. “Can’t you see how upset Eva is? Don’t make it any worse.”

  “Make it worse?” Grady hissed, voice rising. “I’ve got two dead bodies, both at Eva’s clinic. She’s got a new boyfriend who happens to show up right when the murders started. I don’t believe in coincidences. I know he’s violent, I saw the marks on Eva the night after they were together. He broke my fucking nose.”

  “Watch your language,” James demanded, stepped closer to her.

  Peter let out a low hiss of warning, a sound she hoped Grady didn’t hear.

  “Oh come off it,” Grady said, totally unmindful to the power struggle mounting around him. “She isn’t a little girl. This entire situation pisses me off, and Eva is right smack in the middle of it! I don’t want the next dead body I find to be hers.”

  James turned to her, avoided Peter’s gaze. “Eva, why don’t you come with me? I’ll drive you home so Peter can talk to Grady. You don’t need to be here, to see any of this.”

  “The fuck you will,” Peter said. “Last night I stayed at Eva’s. I left about midnight to get a change of clothes from the cabin I rented. I lost my key, had to go to the office, Gloria can confirm that. I was out of there by one, returned the key and checked out. By one-thirty, I was back at Eva’s. I woke her up and we took a road trip in the middle of the night, decided to go to the hunting cabin. I got gas on our way out, you can check with Larry at the station. We came back as soon as James called.”

  Grady sneered, scribbled in his pad hard enough to impress the text into a few layers of paper. “You better believe I’ll be checking that out. Eva, you agree with everything he just said?”

  She nodded, looked into his smoky eyes, tried to picture him shooting Greg, killing innocent little Becca.

  Apparently as satisfied as he was going to get, Grady closed his notebook. “Don’t leave town,” and he walked away.

  “He’s a dead man,” Peter growled.

  “What’s the real reason you went to the cabin in the middle of the night?” James asked, coming in close so they weren’t overheard.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Peter said, walking away from James and pulling Eva with him toward the truck.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’m Alpha, it’s my responsibility to talk to the Graysons. I won’t let Becca’s murder go unpunished. I will prove Grady killed her, and when I do, I’ll let the Graysons have a piece of him. That’s Pard law.”

  “Then I’m going with you. I can help them, heal a little of their pain. It’s the least I can do.”

  He stopped walking. With narrowed eyes, he searched her gaze. “Heal them. You mean that literally, don’t you.”

  She drew in a deep breath. Things she’d imagined herself telling him over the last few days, but never dreamed of actually doing, spilled out. “I don’t remember the year I came to Greg, but he told me the story. He’d walked into a bear trap, the clamp shattering his ankle. I stumbled upon him, ‘a battered angel from heaven,’ he said. I put my hand on his wound and healed it.” She paused, cupped Peter’s cheek. “I didn’t just fix his ankle, I healed his broken heart. He told me I gave him the ability to love again. The last couple of days I’ve been going through his stuff. I found pictures of your mom, of you growing up. There were letters, Peter, dozens of them addressed to you in Montana. I don’t know what happened between you—”

  “Stop,” Peter said, pressing a finger against her lips.

  “The Greg I knew was an unloving asshole who drowned his sorrow with liquor and wallowed in guilt. Maybe you did heal him, Eva, and maybe,” he glanced at the clinic, a place where Greg had devoted his life to helping others, “maybe, he became a changed man from the selfish drunk I knew. But the dad I remember and the father you knew aren’t the same person. He loved my mom and when she died he stopped loving me. End of story.”

  His pain ran deep, was a wound she felt in the pit of her gut. His hurt called out to her on a visceral level, begging her to take it away. She didn’t know if Peter would let her. Taking a chance, she lifted on her toes and pressed a soft, tender kiss against his mouth.

  As she’d done with his leopard, she pressed her forehead to his. “You are wrong, Peter. It’s not the end.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The insistent pounding of a soon-to-be migraine sent starbursts of pain through Peter’s skull. His vision blurred. He forced himself forward, told himself he’d come inside Eva’s house only to make sure she was safe. A chivalrous lie. Hours with Becca’s mourning family left him raw and pissed off about it. An Alpha had no business feeling, period.

  He made it as far as his father’s study before the past and present collided. Suppressed memories from his mother’s death, his father’s subsequent isolation, unfurled. Things he hadn’t thought about in years ripped through him. The fights. The blood. The isolation of living without his Pard. Pain slipped past his self-control, and like a tidal wave, the current gathered momentum.

  The front door closed, a soft sound that had him turning toward it. Eva pressed back against the wall, as if no longer able to stand unsupported. Her gaze rose from the shiny wood floor, met his penetrating one. The weariness in her eyes tightened the invisible hand closing around his throat. He hated her discomfort. Hated the scent of her tears tracking down her pale, smooth cheeks. He hated the vulnerability shining her eyes.

  He clenched his fists, fought to stay where he was, several feet away from her. Her heart, innocent and fragile, was his for the taking. For the first time in his life, the temptation to take what didn’t belong to him reigned.

  “That was awful,” Eva said, her voice cracking, her body trembling.

  She undid him. “Come ‘ere,” he rasped, knowing his mistake and making it anyway.

  Tears streamed down her face. She crossed the distance between them, slow at first, then sped to a run. He stepped forward, catching her when she threw herself against him. As if he would never let her go, he buried his nose against her neck and clutched her tight. It was a lie he’d let her believe, one he’d let himself fall for as well. The sobs she’d held back for the Graysons’ benefit released with the force of a hurricane.

  In both hands, he cupped her cheeks, tilted her head up. Thumbing away the streaming moisture, he searched her eyes. Grief. Love. A knife across
his Achilles tendon wouldn’t have been more paralyzing.

  Fucking hell. She’d fallen in love with him.

  The look in her gaze sucked him in, had him lowering his mouth to hers. One kiss and then he was leaving. One taste of heaven was all he would allow himself. He wouldn’t break her heart, not more than he was already going to.

  At the first touch of her hot, silky tongue, all thoughts of nobility vanished. In the same instant Eva licked into his mouth, she scratched her nails up the indent of his spine, then along the nape of his neck. A shiver tightened his skin, had him groaning into their kiss. He fisted the back of her shirt, fought to hold himself in check. Desire pulsed and blood rushed to his rock-hard cock.

  Her scent, the one he’d been trying so hard to ignore, invaded. She clutched him closer, as if she could burrow inside him. Stupidly, he let her in all the way. Eva’s tongue caressed his, wet, slow, and delicious. Her soft body pressed into his hard one. Passion built, the kiss changing when she pulled back to nip at his lower lip. He chased her mouth, reciprocating her bite and soothing the sting with his tongue. Her soft, mewling moan broke his restraint.

  He growled from the place deep inside him, the place where his predator lived, and took control. Without breaking their kiss, he lifted Eva, wrapping her legs around his waist.

  Inside her bedroom, he set her down only long enough to unlace and tug off their boots. He found her kiss-swollen lips again, an addiction he’d need professional help to get over.

  Together, laid out in the middle of the decadent bed, he settled into the vee of her legs and rose above her. Beneath him she was tiny and delicate. His. He stared into her chocolate eyes. He moved the hair from her face, swiped the rest of her tears away. The tip of her nose was red, her forehead blotchy and her eyes bloodshot. Still, she was stunning.

  Eva looked up at him. Silently she gasped to recover the breath he’d stolen from her lungs. Mouth to mouth, he would give her all the oxygen she needed. His tongue swept inside, teased and caressed. She pushed at his long-sleeved shirt, got it half way up his back before he lifted enough to pull the material over his head. In between drugging kisses, he took his time removing her sweater, exposing the soft swell of her stomach. Beneath black lace, her breasts strained.