She shook her head, dumbstruck by both his words and his touch.
A shiver ran through her. She noticed every runnel of water across the muscle-hugging neoprene, felt the stir of his breath and the goose bumps rising on her skin.
“The agreement stands.” Slowly, as if she were an animal he was afraid might startle, he reached out and put his hands on her waist, his fingertips almost meeting in the small of her back. He pulled her to him.
Knee to the groin, she told herself, blood thumping hard through her arteries. Or a chin strike and a heel slide down the leg to crunch onto the foot. And yet…and yet she did nothing.
“One kiss,” he murmured. And, oh, those green eyes, lids halfway down. His lips covered hers, lake water mixing with the taste of his mouth. She swayed and closed her eyes. The brush and press of warm lips melted whatever resistance she might have summoned, and she felt warmth between her thighs. Beneath her hands was the moist slickness of his wetsuit, and beneath that the shift and glide of muscle. She clutched at him, lost, drowning in sensation.
Whatever time passed, she couldn’t say, as she answered his kiss with the instinctive movements of her body, pressing against him, groin to groin. She sighed as his mouth left hers to journey with a trail of kisses down to the hollow of her neck and farther, to where her breasts swelled above fabric. He glided his broad hand across the thin T-shirt, from her waist down her back, fingers curving into her bottom and drawing her closer. Then he stopped. She hung there in his arms, with her head back and lips parted, inviting more of his caresses. Through the languor, she was aware of his gaze, though her eyes remained closed.
He leaned in, warmth stirring the lock of hair at her ear as he murmured, “I see our agreement is to your liking. Later then, we will continue this.”
He released her, and she staggered a little, then recovered.
Every part of her ached with longing, her vulva wet, swollen, and so sensitive, the pressure of her jeans between her legs sent out a ripple of pleasure.
She should tell him no. She should. And she shivered and lifted her head only to find him gone. Water gurgled as it washed together where an arrow of disturbance mapped where he’d gone. Underwater, again. People walked past, silent, as if shocked at what they’d seen only moments before.
One of them, a young woman she called Bug Lady, waded past like a strange new species of flamingo, jeans tucked into galoshes, notebook in hand, her sleek black tresses caught neatly by a silver clip, her hands encased in a pair of black gloves. She was a university type who studied the wildlife. A pair of little yellow sunglasses were perched on her nose, and Danii could tell that behind them, Bug Lady’s eyes were examining her.
And Danii didn’t care at all, only wondering at what had come over her. She squeezed her hand over the dogs’ leads until it hurt, as if that would make everything normal again.
Did I imagine it? The grass at her feet was wet but held no footprints. No paw prints either. She tested her own bare feet, pressing down on the grass. The lush stiff blades sprang upright too quickly to leave a trace for long.
Near the lake’s edge, stirred-up mud swirled. Something had been there. There was always an explanation.
She squinted out across the water, daring him to appear, feeling…watched, by something out there. She sucked in her lower lip, let it slip across her teeth. This was ridiculous.
He never emerged, at least nowhere that she could see, and at last she gave up and turned aside to go back to her car. The dog leads were still trapped in her right hand—the woven cord having left imprints on her flesh. Killer and Jugsy, who’d been waiting patiently on the grass, climbed to their feet and followed her. She picked up the butterfly hat as she went past and let it swing idly from her hand.
“Did I imagine that?” she asked Killer, but he only laughed back at her in that laid-back cocker spaniel way, forehead wrinkling, eyes sad but completely clueless. “Jeez, why can’t dogs talk? It would sure help.”
What a morning. The urgency of the world swept back over her. She was going to be late for work if she didn’t step on it. The real world beckoned, not some strange man who disappeared underwater and who might never have been there at all. But memories simmered in her mind—the touch of his lips and tongue and hands on her mouth and skin, the ache in her swollen cleft. She couldn’t have imagined him, or that kiss. A sigh escaped her lips as she remembered. What a kiss.
Those last words repeated themselves in her thoughts: Later then, we will continue this. If he was real, and surely he must be, what in the world did he mean by that? She’d not given him her address. Thank God. What had she been thinking?
Not thinking, no brain cells being used there at all. Dying to get laid, pure and simple.
She reached her four-wheel drive and clicked the button to open it, then tossed the hat onto the passenger seat. Marie’s car was nowhere in sight, so she must have left already. Having towel-dried herself, then Jugsy, she let the dogs in and slumped back against the sun-warmed metal. A crazy mix of fear and longing made her shudder, and she put a hand to her forehead, splaying her fingers in her hair.
If he was real, what if he finds me?
* * *
Heketoro stood ankle-deep at the sandy edge of the island, remembering the way Danii’s gaze had swept across her surroundings, looking for him. The fae glamour had concealed him, and yet he’d found himself wishing he could have stepped out and shown himself for what he was. That would have been a mistake. He knew this from the past—the last woman, twenty years or more ago, had run wild-eyed and terrified from him.
But what a soft, sensual mouth and delicious body this one possessed. Something else too, that he couldn’t yet pin down or understand, had always drawn him to her—something beyond mere sexuality. For all the years he’d watched her, he still didn’t know. Every instinct, every thought, every fragment of his body told him she was the key to his escape from this world. Soon he would see if the darker ways of the fae repelled her, or awakened her.
A green tree frog hopped onto his boot and clung there, moist and goggle-eyed, looking up at him.
He’d taken the first step on the path to defeating the curse and gained her consent. So many years, he’d waited for the antiquated sexual rules of humans to change. He’d waited through times of corsets and tea gowns, through flappers and miniskirts and power shoulders. He could wait a little longer. No matter how much he wanted to kiss her into submission until she begged him to take her. That would happen soon enough—tonight, it would have to be. So little time was left.
A black eel swirled up from the water, mouth gaping to swallow the frog. He grinned, plucked the frog from his boot, and let it hop safely onto the dry land behind him. The eel disappeared back into the depths.
He watched it go, thinking wryly, one of these days his empathy for the little ones would be his undoing. Eels had to eat something too.
Chapter Two
All day Danii battled against an onslaught of visions of Heketoro at the most inconvenient moments. These didn’t seem merely memories, and some were harder to shake off than a burr. The first had happened as she’d gone to get a soft drink from the machine at the station. A nudge and a gruff, “Hey, you gonna stand there all day?” had jarred her back into awareness. Apparently she’d stood there for twenty or thirty seconds. Why this was happening, she had no idea. Maybe she was just going nuts?
She tucked the thought away, reserving it for later. Here and now, woman, here and now. Get a grip. Burglary suspect first, visions later.
With the patrol car parked behind her at the curb, she strolled past the letter box. Thirty-two. Yup. This was it. Red brick, single story, yard full of rusted machinery and junk, from fridges to car bodies to a mashed pile of uncollected sales catalogs. The only thing missing was a half-breed, underfed watchdog to chew her legs off.
She jogged up the three battered concrete steps that led to an equally battered timber door, knocked, and waited. Her partner, Rob, raised a h
and as he went down the side. He’d cover the back.
The door creaked open, shedding a few more flakes of pinkish gray paint in the process.
“Yeah?” Facing her was a hard-eyed woman the size of a hippo, shrouded in a thin floral muumuu, her feet in a pair of scummy green flip-flops.
“Mrs. Georgette Hankers?”
The lady—though applying “lady” to her was a stretch of vocabulary—kinked an eyebrow and took another draw on the cigarette butt dangling from her lips like a suicide jumper with second thoughts. “Yeah.”
“I have a warrant here for the arrest of one James Finn Hankers—your son. Would he be on the premises?”
The boy was suspected of a spate of burglaries that might have made Jesse James envious.
“Ain’t him!” The woman scowled with one chubby hand on the door handle and the other on her hip. “You got the wrong address and wrong boy!”
Lying. It was clear as a bell, to her anyway. If the boy wasn't here, that could make it hard though. She'd need to convince the sergeant to throw more resources into this.
Danii raised her hand to emphasize a point and felt the jarring slide that signaled another vision. Images flooded through her, drowning out sound and sight and leaving her mute. When next she became aware, she found herself staring at an empty doorway with no knowledge of how long she’d been there. Explaining to Rob how she’d managed to lose a woman who’d be lucky to run fifty yards without a cardiac arrest would be difficult, to put it mildly.
An engine revved nearby. To the left, over the tall paling fence shielding the driveway from the house, the top of a white van slid past. A green flip-flop halfway down the steps and a still-burning cigarette stub on the grass showed which way the lady had gone. Straight past her nose.
Damn! How the—
“Shit!” No time for gates. She sprinted, flung herself at the fence, hit it with a thump, shaking it and going over the top with the ease of a hundred on-foot chases, to land on the other side next to the dented van door. She grabbed it, wrenched it open, put on her best snarl and yanked the keys from the ignition.
The young man inside flinched, staring at her slack-jawed, his only sound a half-strangled yelp.
From the crackle of snapped-off shrubbery and the crunch of footsteps, someone was running along the other side of the van. Rob, panting and red-faced, appeared in the window. He yanked open the opposite door, gun out and pointing upward.
“Stay put!” she yelled at the young man.
Rob gave her a thumbs-up.
On opening the back of the van, she discovered a treasure trove of stolen goods and one very irate and glowering mother.
She smiled back at the woman.
Definitely the maniac burglar. Make that burglars, if the mother had anything to do with it.
Done and dusted, thank heavens. If she’d messed up this arrest, she’d have stood a fair chance of being tagged for parking fine duty on Monday. Not that it would’ve surprised her—being a woman on the force had disadvantages, not least being that she was expected to be perfect. Though, if she was honest with herself, maybe her own reputation for being different didn't help either.
It was disturbing how close she’d come to disaster, especially for someone who prided herself on her professionalism. Having to guard against the possibility of something going wrong, of another vision affecting her, every second, every minute of the hour, for the rest of the day, wore her down bit by bit.
She seriously considered begging off and having a sick day, but how would she have described all this? A psychologist would rub his hands with glee at her symptoms. Still, one more bad one and she’d do it. She didn’t want someone getting hurt.
Luckily there were no more that day. The visions had vanished back to wherever they’d come from. She just needed a rest, that was all.
One morsel of brightness appeared when she pushed through the front doors of the station at the end of her shift. A slim figure detached himself from the brick wall of the shop across the street and sprinted across a gap in the traffic toward her. Nick Wilmer, teenage graffiti artist extraordinaire, who had more talent in his little finger than anyone deserved.
“Hi,” he said, thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets and a sly grin on his face.
“Hi, Nick.” She smiled, but couldn’t help surreptitiously dropping her gaze to examine his hands for signs of spray paint. He noticed.
“Hey! If I got paint on me, it’s in a good cause. I gotta job now. Working for a place on Trent Street that lets me do freestyle signs now and then.” He grinned and scrubbed his hand through his scruffy blond mat of hair. “Some of it’s boring shit, but I’m getting paid.”
“Yeah? What about that art competition?” There was no way she could see Nick being happy with just sign painting. “I thought you were going to try entering one or two?”
He cleared his throat and flashed an even wider grin. “That’s really what I wanted to tell you. I won the new talent section. A hundred bucks. I wanted to say thanks for telling me about it.”
She grinned back at him. “It’s your art that won it, Nick. Congratulations!”
“Yeah, thanks. Maybe I’ll enter that big one someday, hey? The Archibald Prize or something. Maybe I’ll paint you?”
That stunned her. “Uh, no. Thanks for the offer, Nick. I’d just probably melt your canvas.”
“Ahh, now you’re being modest. You wait.”
She blew a raspberry.
He stepped away and ran backward a few paces. “See ya! See ya on my canvas next year!”
“In your dreams, Nick!”
But he only chuckled evilly before sprinting off down the street.
She shook her head at his nonsense but couldn’t help a tired grin spreading across her own face. It was nice to see the boy getting somewhere after a spate of minor juvenile offences, mostly due to his graffiti tagging. Though a month ago she’d caught him hanging out with a gang known for glue sniffing as well as shoplifting and minor assaults to finance their nastier habits. But sometimes things came together the right way. This was why, some days, she wouldn’t swap being a cop for anything else.
* * *
The work day over, she pulled into the garage next to her little white weatherboard house and sat in the car for ten minutes with her head back, feeling the tension ebb and fatigue take its place.
“The weekend,” Danii muttered. Two days to get over feeling like a piece of flattened litter in the middle of the highway. By Monday, she’d have forgotten the man at the lake.
It was times like these she most missed her brother. He’d always been there for her to talk to, a shoulder to lean on, or at least someone she could send e-mails to—once he’d gone to Afghanistan with the SAS, that had been their only contact. Until four months ago, when he went missing on some mission chasing the Taliban in the mountains. Four months… She wasn’t stupid; he wasn’t ever coming back.
She huffed, screwed up her face. Fact was, Jacob had never been one for dwelling on the past, or for that matter on doing anything other than enjoying life. She should get on with it, with living. Maybe she should go see a shrink, like her friends suggested. ’Cause having the world regularly go morbid shades of gray and feeling like her limbs and head were stuffed full of cold dough sucked big-time.
“Rest and alcoholic intoxication. That’s what I need.” By then Killer was whining at the car door for her to come out.
She called off going to a movie with Jacqui and Sarah and fed Killer some steak she hadn’t the energy to turn into anything worth eating. She peeled off her uniform, tossed it into a pile of dirty clothes next to the washing machine, then padded barefoot to her bedroom to slip on the little white dress she’d bought at the flea market. The cotton slid light as a caress down her skin. In the mirror, her wavy auburn hair lay in loose curls across the white shoulder straps.
She grinned. For once she looked like a woman and not an underpaid, stressed-out cop.
Having nuked the remain
s of some chow mein, she toted a large scotch and ice out to the back porch and flicked on the light. At one end of the cane rocker lounge, two fat, oversize cushions beckoned her. Paradise. She sat and shifted the cushions into the right spot. After a big gulp of scotch that sank the level by an inch, she placed the glass on the floor and leaned back to soak up the nighttime show.
Beautiful.
She’d lived elsewhere in Australia—had even gone down to Sydney and tried out city living for a year—but this place drew her back. Like most towns on the East coast of Queensland, Coomooma Sands had beaches to die for, and for her, the small-town atmosphere was an added bonus.
The ice cubes clicked and danced. Frogs and crickets burr-upped and creaked under the hedges of mock orange and jasmine, stars speckled the sky like diamante, and a cool breeze wafted across the back fence. Only fifty yards farther back, the mangroves started, and past them lurked the river where the odd croc sometimes made a slothful appearance, or so the tabloids liked their readers to believe.
Danii took another cool swallow from the glass, snuggling farther into the plump cushions as the scotch worked its sultry, sweet magic on her. Midsummer, the mosquitoes would turn the air out here into a battleground for blood, but right now she reckoned it was close to heaven, and she wouldn’t have traded it for a penthouse apartment. Who needed psychologists when you had scotch and this? At her feet, Killer rested his nose on his paws and snored his way into doggie dreamland.
All in all, she guessed the day hadn’t gone so badly. Jugsy was back next door with his owners, safe and sound. She’d nailed the burglar and his crazy mamma, and well…she squeezed her thighs together, grinning…she’d had the steamiest kiss ever, from a sizzling hot man.
* * *
Heketoro waded out of the creek until he was only ankle-deep. Water dripped from his body and landed in little plinks as he stood quietly, letting the fae glamour flow over his naked body and clothe him in his usual black. The last of the fishes that were following zipped away into the deeper waters. After a hundred years, the lake and every creature in it responded to him in one way or another. He’d mastered them just as he felt sure he’d soon master this woman.
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