Maybe the man had something to prove to her after all. Her poor, aching body clenched in protest.
“Uh, Luc,” she began, bracing her hands against his chest as if that feeble gesture could hold off a man of his size intent on conquest, “I’m not sure this is a good idea. Or even physically possible. I’m, um, a little sore at the moment.”
Luc grinned, white teeth flashing in the darkness. She saw his eyes glint with deviltry just before he positioned himself between her legs and hooked her knees over his shoulders. “No problem. I think I’ll just improvise.”
Corinne woke on her stomach to the feel of clever teeth nibbling at her spine and silky dark hair tickling her skin. She frowned. “That was a damned sneaky way to solicit an invitation to stay the night.”
Her voice sounded raspy with sleep, what little of it she’d gotten, and her muscles felt soft and pleasantly achy.
“Mm, maybe,” he said from somewhere around the bottoms of her shoulder blades, “but it was effective.”
She snorted. “Yeah, and you saved on your hotel bill.”
She could feel his mouth curve against her skin. “Last time I checked, Graham didn’t plan to charge me for the room. But you never know. He’s damned capitalistic for a werewolf.”
Surprise had her craning her head to look at him. “You’re staying at Vircolac?”
“Uh-huh.” His tongue traced a pattern between two vertebrae and his hands slid up and around to close over her breasts. “I usually do when I visit. It’s convenient. And the chef there is talented.”
She rolled her eyes and turned her head to stare across the room at the closet door. “I can’t believe Missy didn’t warn me about you,” she muttered.
“Graham’s mate? I haven’t met her yet.” He slid back up the bed and curved his body around hers, like spoons in a drawer. His hands squeezed her breasts affectionately, and his lips brushed lightly over the top of her head. “But I heard a lot about her. He’s smitten.”
“He’d better be, after everything she went through for him.” She flipped onto her back and leveled a meaningful glance at Luc. “Fair warning, the minute you tell me about some weird Fae sexual tradition involving being hunted down like a stray dog, or mating in front of a live studio audience or something, I’m outta here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So then I imagine you don’t want to hear about the four purified virgins, the consecrated gourds, and the chocolate pudding, huh?” She felt her eyes widen for a second before he gave up on the attempt and laughed. “Don’t worry. No mate hunts for the Fae. Although I do personally happen to have a fondness for chocolate pudding…”
She punched him. “And I have a fondness for sharp objects, so watch it, beagle.”
He grinned unrepentantly. “I couldn’t resist. You have some of the most ridiculous notions about the Fae. And you’re so cute to tease.”
“Remember how cute I am when I’m amputating body parts.” She mumbled the threat more out of a sense of obligation than any real intentions, and he must have understood, because he looked remarkably unafraid. She would have to work on her delivery.
A glance at the bedside clock told her she’d woken half an hour later than usual, which mattered not a lot. Technically, she had set this day aside for interviews, so she didn’t need to go to the office at all. That was a good thing, too, considering her newly acquired sidekick. With the witnesses, she could pass him off as a photographer or something, but if she tried that with anyone from her office, the jig would be up before she even got the words out.
Hiding an enormous yawn behind her hand, she pried Luc’s arm from around her waist and pushed herself out of the bed. She stood for a minute beside it, making sure everything worked—and feeling vaguely surprised that it did—before she headed toward the bathroom. “I’m going to go take a shower,” she called over her shoulder. “If you’re still here when I get out, I suggest you at least have breakfast ready. It’ll go easier on you that way.”
She heard him laughing through the closed bathroom door and contemplated opening it to tell him she hadn’t been joking. Oh, well. He’d figure it out.
A hot, hot shower managed to steam away most of her morning brain fog and a good bit of her soreness as well. Somehow with the water beating down over her head, relaxing her muscles and pinkening her skin, she found it a lot easier to outline the path forward and see the benefits of joining Luc in the hunt for this Seoc character. She also found it easier to acknowledge that after so many months of going on about her life as if she didn’t know that the things in the stories her grandmother used to read her before bed at night actually existed, she’d just now managed to get herself all tangled up with what amounted to a crisis for the Others. She might even just manage to acknowledge that she maybe cared about what happened to them.
If someone had asked her about it a year ago, or even a month ago, she would have replied without hesitation by saying that if vampires and werewolves existed, and if Faeriewas more than just a derogatory word for a homosexual male, she didn’t want to know about it. Life had been simpler back before she knew, simpler and a whole lot more appealing.
Working a handful of herbal shampoo into a lather, she contemplated what it would mean to the Others if she and Luc failed at their missions—if Luc didn’t find Seoc before the human public started asking the right questions about his identity, and if she didn’t manage to turn the story into more spoof than scoop to control the potential damage.
First off, the Others as a people could be in very real danger. She supposed there was a scenario where the human public greeted the revelation with awe and wonder and learned to embrace them as a valuable part of society at large, but she had a feeling that didn’t rank as the most likely scenario. Missy and Reggie had told her that a growing faction of the Others felt the time was coming when Unveiling themselves would be inevitable, and the Council—meaning Rafe—had quietly begun to take steps to prepare. In other words, he was setting up a PR engine that would spin the biggest news story in human history in the way that would generate the smallest chance of worldwide panic and outright war among the species. Which, Corinne thought, was likely a smart move. But the most likely outcome of this story breaking right now was mass hysteria, the kind that resulted in lynch mobs and vigilantism and her closest friends being at risk of serious injury or death. Frankly, Corinne was willing to do a lot more to keep Reggie and Missy and their families safe than file one bogus news story.
Second, from what Luc had told her, she figured that the separate existence of the people of Faerie would come to an abrupt and unwelcome end. He’d been right about that. If humanity in general suddenly discovered that an alternate reality existed where magic made the world go round and the natural resources remained pristine and unexploited, there would be a stampede for the border so fast, people would get trampled in the confusion. Then they’d go right ahead and trample over Faerie. Which could very well lead to a second front of warfare. Corinne couldn’t imagine that the Fae would give up sovereignty over their domain without a fight, and if Luc was any example of a soldier among their people, it would turn out to be an ugly and bloody struggle. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t do everything in her power to prevent that.
And finally, Corinne thought about the picture she’d formed of this Queen Mab from the little bits and pieces Luc had let slip yesterday. Scaryseemed like a good word to sum up her impression of the Fae monarch. If the Queen had sent Luc here to complete a task, and Luc failed…well, Corinne had no idea what Mab would do, but she felt pretty sure that it would put one hell of a damper on the budding relationship between Corinne and the captain of the Queen’s Guard.
Corinne squeezed the last of the rinse water out of her hair and reached up to turn off the shower. Somehow that last part scared her almost as much as the possibility of a global and an interdimensional war put together. Why in God’s name should it mean so much to her to hold on to a man she’d known less than one day? A man who
had so far offered her nothing but sex—truly, stunningly mind-blowing sex, but still—and who had said not one word about whether he planned to so much as leave a forwarding address with her when he finished his job and went on his merry way back to his own world? A man who wasn’t even of the same species!
Wrapping a towel around herself, she admitted that the species thing bothered her a lot less than she had anticipated. When Reggie and Missy had gotten involved with their respective husbands, Ava, Danice, and Corinne had privately sworn that none of them would ever hook up with a non-human man. But then Danice had met Mac Callahan and disappeared for a few days only to come back glowing with love. And aside from his pointy ears—and the glowing and the magic and the ability to make her lose her mind with sex—Luc seemed like a nice, normal guy. The sort of guy she had always hoped she’d meet one day. He was sane—or at least as sane as she was—employed, handsome, and sexy. If he could do something about the pointy ears and the glowing, she could picture him being the man she brought home to meet her family—
And, whoa, she was getting way ahead of herself here.
First things first. The priority was to help Luc find Seoc. After that, she could worry about either picking out the china, or hiring a hit man to off Luc and hide the body.
Pushing the worries aside for the moment, Corinne finished toweling herself dry, used a blow dryer to bring her hair from sodden to comfortably damp, and padded cautiously back into the bedroom to dress. Luc was nowhere to be seen, so either he’d gotten a hot lead on Seoc while Corinne was in the shower, or he was at least pretending to take care of breakfast. Somehow, she saw him as more the roast-a-hunk-of-flesh-over-an-open-fire type than the scrambled-eggs-and-fresh-squeezed-juice type, but since she couldn’t hear the fire alarm, she decided to go with cautious optimism.
Panties, bra, red tank top, and khaki cargo pants passed for her ensemble of the day, and she carried a pair of white tennis socks and white canvas sneakers with her into the kitchen. She braced herself for Luc’s potential absence, then had to brace herself again not to let him see how pleased she was to find him piling toast onto a plate and carrying it to her tiny kitchen table. He looked up at the sound of her footsteps.
“Honey?”
Corinne cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, snookums?”
He grinned. “I meant, do you have any honey?”
“I dunno. Check the cabinets.”
He started opening doors while she sat down at the table and pulled on her socks and shoes. By the time she finished tying the laces, he had the honey on the table along with jam, butter, and a plate of segmented apples, chunked bananas, and the neatly sliced corpse of the kiwi she’d bought on a whim and hadn’t figured out what to do with.
“Thanks.” She popped a piece of banana into her mouth, swallowing just as a thought occurred to her. “Um, are you a vegetarian?”
Luc looked up from spreading thick layers of butter and honey onto his toast. “No, why?”
She nodded at the meatless breakfast, and he smiled.
“No, I’m just a lousy cook. I never saw a stove until the first time I came to Ithir. We don’t have them in Faerie.”
Corinne swallowed a bit of toast. “How do you cook?”
“We don’t. We use magic.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s gotta be convenient.”
“Very.” Her kitchen was so compact that he didn’t even have to get up to fetch the thermal carafe from her counter. He just twisted around in his chair and snagged it before turning to offer it to her. “Want some?”
Her mouth was full of jammy toast, so she just nodded and held her mug out for him. He poured it full before topping off his own and filling his plate with more toast and fruit.
Because she was watching him, Corinne didn’t notice anything wrong with her coffee until she took a big sip. Then she sputtered. “What the hell…?”
Luc looked up. “What’s wrong? If you don’t like Earl Grey, why was there a boxful in your cabinet?”
She choked, reached reflexively for her coffee mug, and jerked back as if she’d been stung. “Tea?” she coughed. “You made me tea?”
“Is that wrong?”
“It is if you want to live to see tomorrow.” Holding her mug at arm’s length to be sure the foul, watery brew in it wouldn’t do her any further injury, she carried it to the sink and dumped it down the drain before pulling her Krups automatic drip to the front of the counter and putting on a pot of coffee. “How the hell am I supposed to get through the day with nothing but leafy water to fortify me?”
Luc sat back in his chair, cradling his cup and watching her with an expression of baffled amusement. “I didn’t realize you needed fortification.”
“I do if I’m going to spend my day interviewing people about the elf-who-got-away.”
“Fae.”
“Whatever.”
Before the coffee finished brewing, she pulled out the pot and poured herself a cup. She’d taken her first sip before she even sat back at the table.
“Did the info about the models change your game plan? Or do we still plan to hit the sex shop owner at ten today?”
Corinne popped a piece of kiwi, decided it was just fine plain now that he’d removed the fuzzy rind, and chewed thoughtfully. “Well, I think we should run down the list and compare thoughts, but my gut tells me that Walter Hibbish is our best bet.”
“The rabbi? So we are changing our plans.”
“No, Hibbish is the sex shop owner.”
“What’s the rabbi’s name? Paddy O’Brien?”
“Cute. It’s Levi Aaronson.” She gulped down another mouthful of coffee, then went to the living room to retrieve her notebook from her backpack. The sight of their clothes scattered across the floor gave her a warm, rosy feeling that had nothing to do with embarrassment. Why be embarrassed about such a delightful evening? She did frown, though, as she sat back down at the table and examined his fully clothed form. Clothes different from the ones he’d been wearing yesterday. “Do you always carry spare jeans around in your pocket?”
He grinned. “You mean the clothes? I conjured new ones. I like a fresh T-shirt in the morning.”
“Conjured? You mean they’re magic?” She reached across the table and fingered the heather-gray cotton. “Are they like the emperor’s new clothes? You’re really naked, and only you and I are the ones who know?”
“Sweetheart, we’re all naked underneath.”
She laughed and drew back. “That must be a pretty handy skill.”
“It saves time.”
“Right.” She flipped open her notebook and sipped her coffee. “Okay, so altogether we have six names. The models Ava gave to us are Leena Thomas, Marlie Hasek, and April Brodeur. Plus Hibbish, Aaronson, and the bartender, Mark Ingram. I called and asked Hibbish if I could stop by this morning at ten, so it makes sense to keep that appointment, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to give a call to the others on the list to see if we can set anything else up. I’m assuming that the sooner we talk to all of them, the better. Right?”
“Absolutely. Do you want to make the calls, or should I?” He glanced at the digital clock on her microwave and waggled his eyebrows at her. “We have an hour and a half until we have to be at the sex shop.”
“Stop trying to make it sound dirty. We’re going strictly on business.”
“I said nothing different.”
She handed him her cell phone and pulled the kitchen landline onto the table beside her. “We’ll split them up. It’ll take us half an hour or so to get to the shop. This way’s faster.”
“Someday I’ll have to teach you that fast is overrated.” Another waggle.
She rolled her eyes. “And you really think we’re going to get anything done if you spend all day thinking up sexual innuendos?”
He shrugged. “Think of it as our own personal version of good cop, bad cop.”
Corinne sighed into her coffee to hide the fact that bantering with him had quickly bec
ome one of her favorite pastimes. “Yeah, if we can’t win them over with charm, we’ll baffle them with non sequiturs.”
EIGHT
The blazing pink neon should have been their first clue. Of badness.
Walter Hibbish’s sex shop, The Pink Pillow, turned out to be one of those places people gave directions to using the phrase, You can’t miss it.And Corinne couldn’t. No matter how much she would have liked the opportunity to protect her poor, unsuspecting retinas. She spotted the storefront from a block and a half away.
She strolled through the East Village beside Luc, stubbornly taking her time, both because they had the time to kill—having left early, as she’d been trained to do by her obsessively punctual mother—and because a part of her just wanted to savor the feeling of walking beside a man who actually inspired fantasies about having him as a permanent part of her life.
The thought first ambushed her in the lobby of her apartment. She’d stopped at her mailbox on their way out, and the jerk in 507, who had the box next to her, had elbowed her trying to wrestle a padded envelope out of his box and hadn’t even apologized. Luc had tapped him on the shoulder, informed him of the oversight, and waited until 507 got a good look at him, went pale, and hastily apologized. That’s when Corinne caught herself thinking that she’d forgotten how nice it was to have someone around who cared enough to defend her from the small realities of everyday life.
When she’d realized what she was thinking, she’d gone a little pale herself, being a largely independent sort, though she’d shaken it off as an aberration and moved on. But then when they were walking down the street—with Luc deliberately positioning himself beside the street, to keep her away from the curb—she had read through her mail, and he had asked her what about the junk mail that had filled her box was making her laugh. Corinne had found herself reading parts of a particularly ridiculous flyer to him out loud. They had laughed together, and she’d thought how much she enjoyed talking to someone who seemed to understand her slightly warped sense of humor.
Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale Page 10