by Lyn Gala
“We already knew that one,” Brady pointed out.
“Jim says there are different kinds of vampires, and from the sounds of it, even he knows that he doesn’t know as much about his enemy as he should.”
Brady looked over at her. “Like what?”
Paige thought back on the conversation she’d had with Jim. “He doesn’t know if the demon can be driven out after it’s gotten in there. He doesn’t know if the soul can stay in there with the demon or if a demon can take over a person who hasn’t been weakened by a ceremony or an injury. He said some old hunters talk about demons jumping into people without the ceremony they put you through.”
Brady fell silent, his hand rubbing his chest where an ugly scar marred his chest. Paige waited. “So one might grab you?” Brady finally asked. The red in his eyes intensified again.
“I think one tried. But face it, I’m too damn mean to get pushed out of my own body.” Paige grinned at him. “Jim said that you can kill a vampire by destroying the brain or staking it. He suggested that you stay away from close combat and just blow the brains out, and when he did just that, I could feel something pulling at me.”
“Shit. You fought these guys. You fucking promised me that you would wait until I was there to back you up and you went in there anyway.” Brady reached out and grabbed her arm. His fingers pressed deep into her flesh and Paige felt a flash of fear, but then she’d just spent all that time convincing Brady he wasn’t a demon…or he wasn’t only a demon, anyway.
“That hurts,” she said calmly. Brady looked down to where he was holding her and immediately loosened his grip.
Pressing his lips together, Brady thunked his head back against the cinderblock and dug his fingers into his own knees. He was struggling for control and Paige rested her hand on his arm.
“You have control over yourself, Brady. And yes, you have a right to be angry, but just remember to keep control.”
“Right now I want to lose control,” he said tightly. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to handcuff me to some pipes so I can really lose control and call you all kinds of names for pulling that stunt?”
“Nope. You’d rip my pipes out of the wall. Sorry, you’re just going to have to control yourself. However, if it makes you feel any better, I never left the car until I saw the hunter going up to the house.”
“It doesn’t,” Brady said.
“Well then, try this. As the senior partner, it’s my call and you’ll just have to suck it up unless you want to go to the captain and complain.”
Brady opened his eyes and rotated his head so he could glare balefully at her. Paige patted his arm. “Trust me, you are not the first trainee to have those thoughts about me,” she assured him. “We have a few facts now, so maybe we can go on the Internet or dig up a few books that seem to match what we know.”
“I really hate that you’re being logical with all this,” Brady said.
“Yep,” she agreed. “But I have to live with being short and you’re going to have to live with being annoyed. You may also have to get used to wearing a sheet because those are your only clothes and you’ve made a mess out of them.” Paige used her hand on Brady’s knee to push herself up. “I’m going to go close all the blinds and make sure we have privacy before you come up for a shower.”
Paige headed for the stairs. They had a lead they could follow up. Police work often meant days of no leads or bad leads, so any day where they got a solid lead was a good day. Today just might turn out to be a good day. At the stairs, Paige turned and looked back at Brady as he sat crumpled on the floor. The joy drained from her. No matter how many leads they got, today was still the day some monsters had killed Brady. But she’d fix it. Somehow. She wasn’t going to let her partner down.
Chapter Eight
Brady came out of the shower followed by a cloud of steam. “Is there any hot water left for me?” Paige asked.
“Um…” Brady gave a comically exaggerated cringe. “If you wait a couple of hours, sure.” He pulled the sheet closer. The little roses were a cute touch. Very metrosexual. “Are my clothes done?”
“If you wait a couple of hours, sure,” Paige answered. “Look what I found.” She turned back to the computer and showed him the Wikipedia page.
“I hope you did better than I did. I totally struck out on researching the symbols. There’s just too much stupid shit on the net.” He leaned over her to read the page. “Strigoi?”
“They aren’t fond of light, but they don’t go up in flames, garlic does work against them and they have red eyes.”
“They’re also witches that can turn into animals,” Brady said as he leaned over her. She swallowed and tried very hard to ignore the warm, well-muscled man leaning close to her. Her sheets weren’t very substantial and she could see a shadow of Brady’s thigh and the curve of his ass. She worked around handsome men all day and didn’t normally have a problem with that, but this was a handsome man who had just admitted having a crush on her. That was harder to ignore.
“Paige?” he asked, his voice confused.
She yanked herself away from an incipient fantasy. “Um… what?”
“You smell different.”
“If you feel like biting something, the chickens are outside. Try to avoid the small, fuzzy ones because the silkies are new. The big white one is a real bitch when you try to collect eggs—feel free to eat her.”
He sat on the edge of her bed and pulled at the sheet. “Not like that.”
“Oh.” Paige was almost sure she knew exactly what he was getting at, but she was going to ignore it and hope the smell went away. He was a partner, a victim, a trainee. The ethical reasons for staying away from him were pretty overwhelming. “About half the department called and left messages on my phone,” she offered after an uncomfortable moment. “They all miss you.”
“Huh.”
She turned and looked at him because his tone was just off. “What?”
He scratched and Paige tried hard to not notice where he was scratching. “Who called?”
“The guys from the shift—Rick, Veronica, Alex, John, Phil. Bryan from Records and Michael and Paul from Forensics called. I bet your parents are buried in sympathy right now.”
“My parents,” he echoed. With a vacant expression, he got up and turned toward the window, flinching as he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirrored closet door.
“Brady?” Paige called as he walked to the side of the window and lifted the curtain a fraction of an inch to look out into the dark backyard. “Someone’s going to see you, Brady.”
“No one’s out there.”
“You can’t know that.” Paige went over to pull him away from the window. The second she curled her hand around his arm, he swung around, snarling at her—literally snarling with his lip raised. Paige fell back, her heart pounding painfully fast, but Brady didn’t move. He just went back to looking out the window through his tiny crack between the wall and curtain.
“What the fuck?”
Brady shook his head. “My parents.”
“Yes, your parents.” Paige edged around the bed so she’d be closer to her bedside table. She hadn’t locked her gun safe and now she was grateful.
Brady slowly turned and looked at her. The red had faded from his skin, but his eyes were still grotesquely bloodshot. He looked like he had a raging case of pinkeye. “I should feel something.” He sounded confused, but Paige still kept her distance.
“You don’t have to feel anything in particular.”
“Shouldn’t I?” He tilted his head. “Shouldn’t I feel something about all these people who care about me? Shouldn’t I love my parents?”
“I know you—”
“I don’t,” he said, cutting her off.
“You don’t what? Brady, you aren’t making sense.”
“I don’t care about them. I don’t care that these people are missing me. I don’t care if people are sympathizing with my parents. I mean, I remember my parents, but
I don’t actually care about them.” Brady gave a casual shrug. “If I really were Brady, wouldn’t I care about them?”
“You are Brady.”
He shook his head without answering.
“You care about me. You stopped when I said you were hurting me. You got pissed because I got out of the car without you there to back me up.”
The red of his eyes intensified when she brought that up and Paige made a mental note to avoid the subject. However, he just said quietly, “You’re different.”
“Why?” Paige asked. “Brady, maybe you just can’t let yourself feel anything for other people right now. Have you considered that?”
“So you have a psychology degree now?” He moved to her chair and sat down, looking more weary than she’d ever seen him.
Paige moved forward a step, but she sat on the end of the bed rather than get too close. He was Brady, but people suffering grief and pain could sometimes strike out. Paige usually avoided the worst of that because she was short and a woman, but she’d had grieving fathers and husbands strike out at partners before. Grief didn’t take one predictable course. Every person dealt differently, and if Brady dealt by not feeling anything, that was valid too. She’d gone that way herself once.
“You know I lost my mom pretty young,” Paige offered softly.
Brady laughed and pulled his sheet closer. “Who knew that all I had to do to get you to open up was to get killed?”
“I don’t let people in easy, I know that. But my therapist said it’s a defense mechanism.”
“You have a therapist?” Brady sounded like he didn’t believe her.
“Had, past tense. I like to think I’m normal enough that I don’t need one now…at least I thought that up until about four o’clock this morning. Anyway, my mother was killed and I shut down. I couldn’t feel anything because if I did I was going to feel everything. It took me a long time to get over that, and what you’ve gone through… You’ve suffered more than I ever did, Brady. If you have to shut down to deal with this, then that’s what you do. But don’t guilt trip yourself.”
Brady shook his head. “I just don’t feel for them.”
Paige moved slowly, watching Brady for any sign of the anger she’d seen in him before. Instead of getting angry, he watched her wearily. When she was in front of him, she crouched down and rested her hands on his knees.
“You can’t let yourself feel. That’s normal—maybe not normal for everyone, but for us, that’s normal. Hell, I’d be running in circles and screaming if I didn’t have this emotional shut-down thing going for me. The officer who trained me, he was ex-military. He always said that if I wasn’t too short and too female to meet the requirements that I would have made a good sniper. But Brady, the emotions come back eventually. Eventually you will feel them again. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Moving slowly, he let his fingers follow the line of her vein over the back of her hand and up to her arm. Paige waited. When it seemed like Brady was ready to sit there all night, she tried again. “You care about me, Brady. I can see that. You care about me.”
His fingers paused. “I do,” he confessed, but his voice sounded pained. He looked up at her and she could feel her own heart contract at the visible evidence of his agony. She knew what it felt like to lose your world. When her mother had been killed, she was everything to Paige, and losing her…seeing her die…it had ripped something out of Paige’s soul and she could see Brady struggling with the same pain.
“Oh Brady,” she said. Tears prickled at her eyes and he raised his hand to cup her cheek. His thumb brushed against the soft skin just under her eye and a tear slipped out. Paige reached up to brush it angrily out of the way. She didn’t cry.
“I had a crush on you from the first day I saw you. You were chewing out some cadet for making some stupid joke.”
Paige ducked her head. “It was a racist joke,” she pointed out. She’d come to the training station to meet her new partner and this asswipe of a kid was entertaining the troops with Mexican jokes. She thought she was going to wash her partner out the first day of training, which would have been a new record, but then it turned out Brady had the balls to turn his back on the asswipe and walk away.
At first she’d thought it was because he was Mexican. He had the dark look that people from Mexico sometimes had. But his mother was Italian and he’d walked away because he’d honestly been offended. “I knew you were a good man when you chose to walk away from that.”
“I’m not the same man now.”
“Yes, you are. You’re just hurting. If you want, I can give you the name of my therapist,” Paige suggested with a smile. Brady’s hand still cupped her cheek, and Paige could feel something uncomfortably close to lust start to gather in her stomach.
“You smell good again,” Brady said softly. His hand slid down until it rested against her neck. A little part of Paige screamed at her that she should be scared shitless, but Paige had years of experience when it came to ignoring that voice.
“Yeah, well I did say you were cute.” She cleared her throat. “However, we have some answers to find.” Standing up, she pretended to not feel the loss of contact as his hand fell away. When she turned to look at the computer, Brady got up and reached out so his hand rested against her hip.
“I’m cute, huh?” he asked. Paige reached down to push his hand away and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sheet slip to the ground.
She closed her eyes before her body could hijack her better sense. “Brady, this is a bad idea.”
“Because I’m a monster?” he asked calmly, as if it was a simple fact.
“No, because we have a case to work.”
“Whatever they did to me, they did it and it’s done. I’ve lost so much, Paige, but maybe I can still get one thing I want.” He brushed her ponytail to one side and kissed the back of her neck. A shiver went through her body and Paige could feel her pussy tighten at the promise in that small gesture.
“It’d be a bad idea,” she warned. His arm slipped around her waist, pulling her back into his strength.
“Please,” he whispered, his voice desperate as his hand slid down until his fingers pressed right into the soft spot where her pubic hair started. She could feel his body tremble with need and her own body was warming to the idea—literally. She felt feverish as she reached down and caught his hand. He didn’t protest when she gripped his wrist, but she didn’t do anything with it. It’d been so long since she’d felt hands on her.
“After we get the job done, we can talk about this, okay?” she said. Gently, she pulled his hand up so that it rested against her stomach.
“You want to read more about how I can turn into a cat? About how I turned into a vampire because I wasn’t married or because my mother didn’t eat salt when she was pregnant? I found all sorts of interesting things on the Internet when I researched today. Is that how we’re going to solve this case?”
Paige looked over her shoulder, aware of how tall Brady was, how handsome and just how well-built. It took effort, but she avoided looking south of his chest. There was only so much temptation a woman could take and she was pretty close to her limits. “Not everything is right.”
He gave her a slow smile. “No, it isn’t. We can’t solve this case looking at the Internet and I seem to be out of clothes, so we can’t go out. We aren’t letting the case slide, Paige.” He shifted and Paige’s eyes slipped down to his cock. He was hard. Painfully hard from the look of it. She swallowed and forced her gaze back to Brady’s face. “Please, Paige. I’ve wanted you for so long. Don’t say ‘no’. Please, don’t say ‘no’.”
He slipped his fingers between the buttons of her shirt and Paige sucked in a breath. He froze, watching her, but she couldn’t get her tongue to form any words. He moved to her side and he popped one of her shirt buttons while his other hand brushed across her ponytail. He leaned closer.
“Brady,” she said, tendrils of fear seeping into the growing lust.
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“Shhh. I just want to kiss. I promise, Paige. I promise,” he whispered and then his lips were against her neck, kissing a gentle trail down her neck to her shoulder. He sucked a little harder for a second and Paige reached out and grabbed his shoulder and arched her back. Her panties were definitely wet. And her heart was pounding and she was definitely too hot to be wearing this many clothes, and somewhere in the middle of all those thoughts was a distant awareness that this was a monumentally bad idea.
Brady pulled back, and Paige realized that he’d worked the buttons loose on her top. Throwing caution to the wind, Paige shrugged the shirt off and reached around to unhook her bra before tossing it too. “I’m going to feel so guilty in the morning,” she said, but then she reached up and caught his shoulder with one hand and the back of his neck with the other. She pulled him down toward her and he came, his mouth open.
Their tongues met and Brady pressed forward so that Paige was caught between his solid mass and the bed. He sucked at her lip and Paige gasped for air through her nose and pushed herself closer to him. When Paige finally pulled back, Brady was blinking owlishly, his mouth still slightly open. The tip of his tongue was visible as it came out just enough to touch his lower lip.
“Bed,” Paige said. Sitting on the end of her bed, she crab-walked back into the center and Brady gave her a wide smile that was all boyish joy.
“Yes ma’am,” he said as he followed her, his hard cock bouncing as he leaped toward the bed. Paige laughed and reached out to grab his shoulders when he got in range. Bracing most of his weight on his elbows, he leaned in and kissed her, hard. His touches were pure need and Paige’s body responded in kind.
Paige wrapped one hand around his neck and the other around his waist and pulled him closer. Normally Paige felt self-conscious kissing, but Brady’s kisses were hungry, desperate, and with every move and every touch of her tongue, he groaned with desire. Soon enough he was thrusting down into her, his hard cock pressing between her legs.
Paige was wet and she ached to feel his cock, but that meant getting her pants off. Arching her back and turning her head, she got some space between them. Brady was panting, his breath tickling her ear, but then Paige couldn’t exactly catch her breath, either. It didn’t help that Brady was damn solid.