Within minutes, he had gathered a bag of fancy pasta (bow-ties are always fancy, even when made of semolina and salt), a pile of brightly colored vegetables, some cream, butter, and various utensils.
“So, it’s not a problem?” he asked again, reminding me I had been staring instead of answering.
“No, why would it be? What lady doesn’t like to have an attractive man make her food? I mean forget the potential coupling part; everyone likes food.” I tried to ignore the fact that Mel was an attractive man who’d cooked for me just months earlier. I also tried to ignore the fact that apparently I put out some sort of signal to available males that screamed, “Cook for me and I’ll take my pants off.”
“I thought maybe you had some sort of dietary restrictions we’d forgotten to go over.”
“Oh no,” I said, watching his hands. “I have a feeling there will be very few restrictions where you’re involved.”
Owen smiled, glanced up to meet my eyes and then pulled a large glass cutting board from under the island. As he slid a very sharp knife out of a block of wood next to the stove, he said, “I like you, Gwen.”
“Drat,” I mumbled, snapping my fingers and leaning a hip against the counter. “There goes my plan of seducing the EMTs when you poison me.”
“Wait,” he said, going at the ingredients like the star of a Ginsu knife infomercial. “Who’s calling nine-one-one in this scenario? Am I poisoning you and then regretting it instantly and calling for help?”
“Maybe I overpower you and tie you up and call the paramedics myself. It’s very dramatic and heroic, part of what makes me irresistible.”
“You’ve really thought this through. It’s just too bad one of us has to get poisoned for there to be bondage.”
A giggle slipped through my lips as I reached for the mound of matchstick carrots. Unsure what to say, I snagged three and stuffed them into my mouth, crunching on them obnoxiously as I tried to remind myself that if I jumped him so early, all the food would go to waste. Change the subject, Gwen, I thought with all the conviction of an untrained puppy trying to talk itself out of chewing a shoe.
“You said you’re here for work, right? To,” I wiggled air quotes, “‘take care of something the police can’t’?”
“I am, indeed.”
“So, how’s that going?”
“A bit stalled. The task is proving harder to accomplish than I’d hoped,” he said, turning to grab the bag of pasta off the counter. The water was edging on a boil and he brought the pasta closer, sliced the top open and set it down.
I glanced around, looking for a chair. Spotting a stool at the far end of the island, I dragged it around so I could sit down and still watch him work.
“What sort of task is it?” I leaned forward, resting my chin in my hands. I caught his gaze as it hit my face and then slid to my cleavage, and felt another swell of arousal. For a moment, I couldn’t be sure if it was me feeling attractive or if my empathy was picking up him being attracted.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” he said, moving to prep the pain with oil. When he didn’t elaborate, I felt a bit of my natural stubbornness well up. I wasn’t really asking difficult questions, but he didn’t seem to want to answer them, and that made me want to make him. I ignored the urge and made a joke instead.
“You’re in town to challenge Timberlake to a dance-off, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “I just haven’t found the perfect sequined vest yet.”
Owen upended the full cutting board into the oiled pan, but kept a curl of bell pepper trapped by his thumb. When all the veggies were sizzling, he picked the pepper up and moved close to me, holding it out. I smiled, sat up straight and took it from him. Our eyes stayed locked as I popped it in my mouth and chewed.
“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.
“Welcome.”
He spent the next few minutes in silence, working at turning the food from raw veggies into what I hoped would be a sauce-covered masterpiece that my childish palate would tolerate.
“You want a tour?” he asked as he finished putting away the half-empty pasta box and spices.
“Sure,” I agreed, impressed as I always was that anyone trusted cooking food enough to leave it unattended. Any time I step away from the foods I stick in the microwave, they inevitably burn. One day I’ll teach myself to cook properly, but I’d so far not gathered the initiative to even open up any of the cookbooks my sister buys me every year. Besides, they all have vegetables on their covers; I suspect they’re meant to remain closed.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing toward me.
He didn’t take my hand, but as I passed by he put a palm to the small of my back, leading me into the living room and then off to the right. We moved through the house at a casual pace and I made interested noises here and there, most of them genuine. The place was nice, and he stayed close the whole time, taking every opportunity to lean close or steer me with a hand on my body. Upstairs, there were only two doors. The one on the left edge of the balcony was closed.
“That’s Elisha’s room,” he said, by way of explaining why we went immediately to the right and into the other room. “And this is her office.”
It looked similar to mine, but I was betting Ms. Owns-Her-Own-Business didn’t have crackers and cookies stuffed in the drawers of her desk.
“And is that it? I didn’t see a single suit of armor, and the tapestries all look pretty new.” I turned to face him and found the way he was looking at me matched the lust I could feel curling out of him to wrap like velvet around my limbs.
“No metal knights, no.” I watched his mouth as he spoke, realizing he didn’t have to pull me in for the kiss I could tell he was angling for. I was already closing in, overpowered by the way I felt just being this close to him. Sliding his hand behind me again, he offered me his mouth.
I slid my hands up under his shoulders, tucking my elbows around him to hold him against me. I felt one of his hands slide to my butt, while the other moved up into my short hair. Lightning shot through my limbs, that delightful, “Oh wow, a boy is touching me!” response that had been showing up since high school. I suddenly felt like my insides were fluttering and my legs were jelly.
On a small sound, Owen pulled back, moving both hands back to an appropriate spot along my spine. I licked my lips as we separated, and slid my gaze up to his. My heart had started pumping quicker and, as I took a deep breath, I did my best to separate my feelings from his.
To break the silence, he grinned down at me and murmured, “You taste like peppers.”
“Spicy, that’s me.”
He gave a polite laugh and stepped back, letting his hands linger as they slid along my sides. We watched each other for a few moments, and when he didn’t yank me against him again and go at the buttons of my jacket, I figured the sexy times had at least been postponed until later.
“Back to the food?” I asked. He nodded and backed out of the room. I moved past him to the stairs and took them slowly, glancing around the living room again. We parted at the bottom of the stairs as he went to check the food, and I veered off toward a sunroom he had neglected to show me as part of the tour.
“Oh wow,” I said, loud so he could hear me. “This sitting area is beautiful.”
“We can eat out there, if you’d like,” Owen responded. I stepped out to watch the rain splat against the ceiling for a minute, before turning back into the kitchen.
Owen was shaking the massive pan, moving veggies around as I walked back into the kitchen. While I’d been exploring, he’d added the cream and butter ingredients to the smaller pan, along with flecks of things I couldn’t identify. The kitchen smelled amazing.
It didn’t take long for him to finish cooking and ninja everything onto the plate in a colorful, beautiful pile of deliciousness. In an adorable attempt to make me feel I had helped, he handed me a hunk of basil and told me to pull off a few leaves. I tore two of them before I realized I had
to pull from the stems, not the leaves themselves. I tucked the torn ones under the crusty bread set off to the side on the counter and hoped he didn’t notice. When the food was ready to go, I offered to grab the wine off the rack.
He looked to it as it he hadn’t realized it existed and then nodded and took two wine glasses before leading the way to the sitting area.
The food was so good I had to remember to eat like a human female and not just cram the entire plate into my mouth, grunting and growling. Owen ate slowly, and we talked about travel. I hadn’t grown up excessively well-off, but I’d managed to travel to Europe once in my mid-teens with my maternal aunt. Owen had been all over, it seemed, but recently he’d spent a lot of time in the States.
I’d polished off my entire plate of food and a half a glass of wine when I started to feel groggy.
Chapter Nine
I woke up in a bathtub, one leg flopped over the side and missing a shoe. My neck was bent at a very uncomfortable angle, but at least—I squinted at my body in the dimness—yep, I was clothed.
Unsure where I was, how I had gotten there, or where my other shoe had gone off to, I let out a grumbling sigh. I wanted to yell out and demand to know what the hell had happened. Instead, I shifted to get my arms under me so that I could push myself up over the lip of the giant tub. I recognized the hallway through the door as Owen’s place, but it was too dark to tell exactly what was going on.
I did my best to ignore my sore neck, glancing around and then taking a deep breath to listen for any telling sounds. When I heard only the falling rain outside, I shifted back into the tub, pulling my leg in as well so it felt less exposed, and then opened my empathy outward. At first I felt nothing, but after maybe three seconds I realized could in fact feel a familiar presence.
Owen was feeling irritated and a little disappointed, but no more so than if he’d accidentally dropped a freshly baked bran muffin on the floor. I couldn’t figure out in the moment what the hell was going on, but something inside me was jibbering quietly, wondering why I’d passed out and woken up in a dark bathroom. I didn’t want to think Owen had anything to do with it, since he’d been nothing but decent so far, but I couldn’t fathom any other explanation.
“What the hell?” I mouthed, climbing out of the tub as gracefully as I could. I stumbled at the last moment, catching myself on the ground and tweaking my wrist as I did. Instead of risking walking upright, I crawled toward the door, popping up to lean in close to the mirror. There was just enough light from outside that I could see the sharp outline of my dark hair around my face. I couldn’t see if I’d been bruised, or if some enterprising frat boy had drawn genitalia along my forehead. Grunting out my annoyance, I dropped back down to the floor.
I found my shoe about halfway between the tub and the door, but I only grabbed it and put it in the corner, along with my other shoe. When I hit the doorway, I leaned out as little as I could, peering right—noticing the curtains had been drawn on the hall windows—and then left.
Owen’s face didn’t change when he caught sight of me, but I felt surprise splash out of him. Glowering, I let him know as I crawled closer that I wasn’t happy with how the night was going. I only realized, as I rose to my knees, about to demand an explanation, that he was holding a gun.
Eyes drawn to it, I felt my mouth open but no sound came out. His expression stayed dead-eyed, but he leaned up to put his lips near my ear.
“We’ve got company, and they’re not friendly.”
“What?” I did my best not to squeak but Owen moved a hand from his gun and pressed a finger to my lips.
“They cut the lights after you passed out. I put you in the tub hoping it would keep you from getting shot up.”
“I like the amount of holes I have, thank you very much,” I whispered. Traces of amusement puffed into me, but he didn’t laugh or smile.
“I need to find where they are and deal with them. Get back in the tub and keep your—“
“Where they are?” I asked. Owen pointed back toward the bathroom. Before he could reiterate his order, I realized what my lizard brain had been tuned into without telling me: I could feel other human emotions within my range. They were similar to his, so slight I hadn’t consciously realized I was feeling them until he’d mentioned they were there.
“I can help,” I whispered. He watched me blankly for a few moments before I realized I’d been waiting for him to ask how or be surprised at my offer. Unperturbed, he gave me another few seconds before impatience crinkled against my skin and he gestured for me to get on with it. “Oh, right.”
Extending my senses out as far as I could, the first thing I noticed was the spastic emotional din of a bird above us. Opposite that, in the office, was a person moving carefully closer to us—or, more likely, closer to the office door. As I followed his progress, I realized there was someone else, too.
The man to our left had almost no emotional signature. I could tell he was human, but he just didn’t have any feelings on the situation one way or another. Concentrating on him, I tried to get a picture in my head of where he was.
Turns out he was in the kitchen, just past the doorway that led to the hall, so close that he might’ve heard me breathing. Feeling a stab of panic, I opened my eyes and clapped a hand over my mouth to hold in any more squeaks. Owen only watched me, curious about my obvious panic but unfazed. Shoving my hand past his shoulder, I pointed at the door and then adjusted, pointing lower. The man was crouching.
Without hesitating, Owen turned his back on me and duck-walked toward the door. Shifting his grip on the gun, he slipped the door open and leaned in briefly to grab a quick glance toward where I’d pointed. Sure he wouldn’t be seen, he moved into the kitchen and out of my sight. I didn’t hear anything, but suddenly I felt an explosion of shock from the other man. In the silence, pain and anger bled out and then I felt nothing.
Pain is a tricky emotion, one I can feel from some, though not all. People react differently to being hurt, but I’d come to recognize the distinct feeling of injury from another. I would never be able to identify exactly what accompanies the jagged, sharp emotion that I know to be pain, but regardless of if someone stubs their toe or slices open their finger, I know when some people hurt.
Panic had flooded my brain in response to that feeling. Adrenaline was dulling my senses and making my limbs feel light. Was he dead? Had Owen just killed a man? Had I come here tonight intending on making whoopee with a man who had just killed someone?
When Owen duck-walked back through the door closest to me, his face was blank, untouched by the gravity of the situation. It took my empathy a few false starts before I realized that my fear was making me stupid. No one was dead; I was getting to be old hat at running up against corpses and the man lying where Owen had hand-fed me vegetables wasn’t one. He was out cold, though, and Owen looked no worse for wear.
“Where else?” he asked against my ear.
“Um,” I mouthed, keeping silent. I took a shaky breath and opened up my senses again. My brain was fuzzy with adrenaline, but I had to at least control myself long enough to make sure I got out of this alive. I stretched my empathy as far as I could, this time avoiding concentrating on every available small animal psyche and just looking for human emotions.
I found two more people, both of whom felt no worse about the situation that Owen. I was the only one in the house freaking out about the situation. Even the bird on the roof was only mildly uncomfortable, and I was betting that had nothing to do with us being in danger.
One was the man from the office, who’d since made it to the top of the stairs, and the other was outside, at the far end of the house. Swallowing, I shifted to sit back on my heels. Owen followed me, keeping his ear close to my mouth and his body folded over mine in an odd parody of intimacy. I thought back to his comment about me not getting shot full of holes, and I forced the sound I made into helpful words instead of letting it turn into a wail of fear.
“One moving down th
e stairs, one at the far end of the house. Um, out to the left of the sun room.”
Owen didn’t say anything else; he pushed to his feet, gestured for me to stay low, and then moved toward the kitchen doorway again. Though I couldn’t see a body, I watched Owen take a wide step before he disappeared, as if he was stepping over the unconscious man rather than going around. I kept a bead on him through my empathy, tracking his movement.
I was staring at the carpet, but seeing a fuzzy vision of the two other people in the house instead. Owen was just inside the kitchen, presumably hiding around the corner. The other man—it might have been sexist to assume it was a man, but I wasn’t worried about political correctness in that moment—had reached the bottom of the stairs. Both were still for a few seconds before I felt the stranger jolt with surprise, heard him grunt, and then felt his emotions drop away like a bowling ball off a cliff. No pain this time, which could have meant any number of things.
I let out a breath that might have become a nervous laugh if I hadn’t clapped my hands over my mouth.
Owen moved back through the kitchen toward me, and when he appeared again he kept his gun up as if making it clear he wasn’t aiming at me. I found myself staring up at him, grasping at his emotions somewhat desperately. I sensed Owen’s confusion and then his sympathy, faint but there. He realized I wasn’t taking this as easily as he was, but he wasn’t about to gather me in his arms and try to soothe away my fear. Crouching down, he leaned in and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Go into the guest room, stay low, and I’ll come get you when it’s safe.” He moved to touch my cheek. “I promise, you’ll be fine.”
I gave a small nod and crawled into the room; my skirt rode up enough to leave my knees to scrape over the rug, but it wasn’t so bad. Owen’s landlord had immaculately soft carpets.
Business With Pleasure (Empathy in the Preternatural PNW Book 2) Page 8