Taste Me

by Tamara Hogan

  Lukas paged down to the document’s Appendix to verify that Wyland’s legal brief vetting the unorthodox plan was attached and signed. His sister’s looping signature, scrawled at the bottom, indicated her agreement with the document’s contents. Rafe had signed off his approval of being removed from the direct line of succession with bold, slashing strokes.

  Lukas blinked when he saw the effective date. When he woke up tomorrow morning, he would no longer be the Acting Incubus Second.

  [LSebastiani:] You work fast.

  [ESebastiani:] No reason to wait. Is there?

  No reason except his sister was… so young. Did she know what she was getting into? Lukas’s eyes drifted over the other items in his confidential workspace. Sentencing decisions, budgets, paperwork, and endless political machinations.

  The learning curve was massive. Hell, he still learned new things from his father every week. He particularly admired his father’s conflict resolution style. While Lukas tended toward vocal brute force, Elliott cut through the Council’s choppy political waters like a good-natured shark, striking and moving on to the next subject before the person even knew his blood stained the water.

  His mouse hovered over the sig button. This was harder than he thought it would be.

  [ESebastiani:] Did you find a problem? Second thoughts?

  Second, third, and fourth. What the hell were they getting Antonia into? Lukas took a deep breath.

  [LSebastiani:] If you die on me, I’ll kill you myself.

  [ESebastiani:] Consider me warned.

  Imagining his father’s wry expression, Lukas clicked to apply his electronic signature with a quick stab of his forefinger. Several seconds passed.

  [ESebastiani:] Got it. How is Scarlett?

  Lukas leaned back in his desk chair, jamming his hands in his hair. How the hell was he supposed to be able to answer that question? He couldn’t answer it for himself. Despite their agreement to “use their words,” Scarlett wasn’t giving him much to work with other than the lyrics she sang—

  He sat up abruptly. When had Scarlett stopped singing? All he heard from the bathroom now were intimate swishes and rustles of fabric as she stroked the water off her long, slim body with one of the soft green towels Sasha had insisted he buy. His dick twitched at the thought.

  *ping*

  [ESebastiani:] I didn’t think I was asking such a difficult question.

  Lukas scowled as he considered how to respond to his father. How was Scarlett? She no longer leached grief and exhaustion 24/7, but what she emitted now was a vexing cocktail of anger, sadness, hurt, and… desire. She slept a lot, was eating well enough, sang too often, and if his evil sister had packed Scarlett any bras, he saw absolutely no evidence of it. The tension between them felt like an over-inflated balloon just before it popped. He tried to alleviate this by spending almost all his waking hours downstairs at the office, or in the basement gym. When he came upstairs, dead tired, Scarlett was usually in the bathtub, or in bed, where she tossed and turned, seemingly having as much trouble sleeping as he was.

  She was sleeping in his bed, right across the room—and nothing but his faltering willpower kept him from joining her.

  [LSebastiani:] She’s… hanging in. Her ear is healing, and the scratches are nearly gone.

  [ESebastiani:] I’ll tell Claudette. She’ll be relieved. Well, I’m for bed. Suggest you do the same. Give Scarlett our love.

  [LSebastiani:] Will do. Good night.

  Scarlett’s sudden sadness poked at him like an accusing finger.

  He half-got up out of the chair, then sat right back down. You’re three-fourths naked, sporting the mother of all hard-ons, and you don’t have a clue what would make her feel better.

  The bathroom door opened, and Scarlett flipped off the bathroom light—but not before Lukas caught a glimpse of her snug boy-cut panties, a strappy camisole T-shirt, and those ridiculous cat slippers on her narrow feet. As she walked to the bedroom, she wished him a soft “Good night,” and then disappeared behind the wall section. Before long, the sheets rustled as she settled in.

  He bit back a groan. The woman was trying to kill him. The sooner she went home, the better.

  “She’s homesick.” He remembered Tomas’s words the night of the show. His eyes narrowed as an idea occurred to him. I can’t let her go home, but… maybe I can bring a piece of home here. Not giving himself a chance to change his mind—he already knew he was going to regret this—Lukas quickly opened a new email, typed his request, and sent it to Sasha.

  “You are so fucking whipped,” he muttered to himself.

  Ashes wisped across his taste buds again. Lukas glared at the Hot Sheet, still indicating Code Green. “Bullshit.”

  But all he could do was wait.

  Chapter 17

  “Garrett, what do you expect me to do about it?” Scarlett paced and tried to placate her manager, who’d spent the last five minutes complaining about how the band’s message board was exploding with rumors about her whereabouts, each one more outrageous than the last.

  “I just cleared it with Lukas,” Garrett said. “Having you post a short message thanking your fans won’t be a huge security risk.”

  Bailey Brown was under Lukas’s desk not three feet away, puttering with the computer network. She bit her lip. Maybe Bailey could hack her password. Scarlett couldn’t post a personal message without it, and right now she couldn’t remember what it was to save her life.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she told Garrett. She could call Sasha and have her read the password off the sticky note she stupidly kept taped to the underside of her laptop. Bailey would no doubt be horrified.

  “Today,” he responded.

  Damn it. “Okay.”

  After paraphrasing the high points of what he thought Scarlett’s message should say, Garrett shifted into ruthless prioritization mode. “I talked with Tia Quinn’s editor yesterday. The interview’s postponed indefinitely.”

  Scarlett murmured her thanks. She just wasn’t ready to speak to the press yet, even if that member of the press was a friend. A blog posting, yes—but an interview would be more than she could handle right now.

  When would media coverage die down? She glanced at Lukas’s monitor, and just as quickly glanced away again. Regardless of which website she hit, every story seemed to use that intrusive picture taken of her and Lukas as they stood on the cliffs at Annika’s funeral. The wind whipped the hem of Lukas’s dark coat behind him like a superhero’s cape. His face seemed frozen tight, but the photographer had captured something blazing in his eyes that drew her attention time and time again.

  A shuffling noise caught her attention as Bailey backed out of the knee well of Lukas’s desk. “I have to go now,” Scarlett told Garrett. “Yes. Yes. Yes, I’ll post a message today.” She finally hung up, snatching her hand back from the phone. “Geez.” Scarlett collapsed into Lukas’s oversized chair and stared at the ceiling. “What is it about men?”

  “That’s a rhetorical question, right?” Bailey asked around the screwdriver she held between her lips. She grabbed some green cabling before diving back under the desk.

  Yawning hugely, Scarlett scooted the chair further away from the desk to give Bailey more room in the knee well. She was exhausted, yet oddly exhilarated at the same time—because for the first time in a long time, her insomnia hadn’t been caused by burnout or nightmares.

  It was him. She felt… ready to explode.

  When she’d finished her bath last night, and had seen Lukas sitting, barely clothed, at his desk, it had been all she could do to keep walking to the bedroom. The desk light had cast such fascinating shadows and hollows. He was bigger now than he was when they’d slept together so many years ago, but rather than looking tight and muscle-bound, he looked sleek, ready to rocket out of the chair.

  And all he’d been wearing was a pair of thin cotton gym shorts that had done nothing to hide his reaction to her.

  She hadn’t slept at all, and it
was entirely his fault.

  A knock on the door startled Scarlett. “Expecting anyone?” she asked Bailey.

  “Nope. Remember to—”

  “—look at the monitor first,” Scarlett finished with a roll of her eyes. “We’re inside one of the most secure buildings in the Twin Cities metro. It’s either Lukas or Jack.”

  “Probably,” Bailey agreed, “but the first thing either of them will do is verify that you checked to see who was at the door before you opened it.”

  Another knock rattled the door, followed by a feline howl. “Scarlett, hurry up,” Sasha called.

  “Sasha?” Scarlett hopped out of the chair, sending it skidding. Taking an admittedly cursory look at the monitor, she saw Sasha and Antonia’s dark, familiar heads—and Sasha losing her wrestling match with a huge cat carrier.

  Scarlett tore open the door. “Calamity!”

  Sasha stepped in, gently setting the heavy cat carrier on the floor. Calamity promptly banged his body into the side wall of the carrier, tipping it on its side.

  Antonia put down the empty litter box that was being used to carry a bag of litter, a small pair of speakers, a snarl of other wires and peripherals Scarlett hoped included her iPod dock, and her battered laptop. “How—why—oh, I don’t care.” She hugged Sasha, then Antonia. “I’m so glad to see you!”

  “What did I tell you, Toni? I knew she’d be bouncing off the walls with no one other than Lukas for company.”

  “Hi there.” Bailey’s greeting was muffled from her location under Lukas’s desk. She backed out of the knee well again, jean-clad butt first. “Is Jack downstairs?”

  “Yeah,” Sasha said.

  “Why don’t you like Jack?” Antonia asked. “You two fight all the time, but the car smelled like—”

  Sasha quickly clapped her hand over Antonia’s mouth. “Jack drove us over. Rather than escort us upstairs, I told him to just leave us alone for awhile.”

  Tugging her sister’s hand from her mouth, Antonia added, “He said he’d bring up the rest of Scarlett’s stuff from the car.”

  “He has some use as a pack animal,” Sasha admitted.

  “The rest of my stuff?” Scarlett asked. “There’s more?”

  Sasha nodded. “Lukas emailed me last night, asking if I could think of anything you might need or want, and to bring it over today. We have some clothes and stuff in the car. We also brought your four-track.”

  Yes. With her laptop and simple mixing board, she was all set. “Bless you. I need something to do here, because I’m going nuts. Might as well channel all this angst into some songs.”

  Calamity growled. The box jostled and skittered across the floor several inches.

  Antonia indicated the litter box. “Where should we set him up?”

  “He hates riding in the car.” Scarlett kneeled down and peered into the carrier. Seeing her, Calamity let loose a pathetic meow. “I know, sweetie,” she murmured. “Can you shut the front door?” she asked Antonia. “The last thing we need is for him to make a break for it. God knows what kind of havoc he’d wreak if he got downstairs.”

  Bailey spoke up from the desk, indicating the wiring she’d just finished working on. “How does he do with wires and cables?”

  “I’m more concerned about the leather couch.”

  After getting the litter box set up near the pantry, Scarlett brewed a fresh pot of coffee for the women sitting at Lukas’s big kitchen table, and settled in to catch up.

  “I hate to admit it, but you’ve gained a few pounds, and your energy seems better,” Sasha said.

  “I’ve been nothing but pissed off since I arrived.” Okay, that wasn’t quite true. She’d been horny as hell, too.

  “But you actually have some energy now,” Sasha said, nostrils twitching. “You were so wiped out when you came home from tour, you were practically sleepwalking. Then, before you had a chance to recover your stamina, Annika died, and then you were shot…” She reached for Scarlett’s hand with one of hers, and traced the healing scab on the tip of her ear with the index finger of the other. “You just… disappeared somewhere, and now you’re back. Crabby, but back. Being here with Lukas seems to agree with you in some perverse way.”

  Scarlett’s mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for water.

  “Now we don’t have to lie to Claudette,” Antonia chimed in as she peered into the pantry, extracting a box of individually wrapped Little Debbie snack cakes Scarlett hadn’t known were there.

  “Why would you lie to my mother?”

  Bailey joined them in the kitchen, gesturing to the box Antonia held. “Bring those over here, kid, and no one gets hurt.”

  Antonia complied. Cellophane crackled as they each opened a cake. “She’s worried about you,” Antonia said, her mouth full.

  Ah, damn. She hadn’t talked to her mother since Lukas had kidnapped her nearly a week ago. Her mother hadn’t called her, either. In fact, her phone hadn’t rung for—

  She sat up straight in her chair. She hadn’t received a single phone call the entire time she’d been here? As if. “That son of a bitch.”

  Sasha and Antonia exchanged a guilty glance with Bailey.

  “Damn it.” Her anger went into the red zone. She looked at Bailey accusingly. “You helped him?”

  “Didn’t have to. He did it all by himself. It’s pretty easy, actually, you just have to—”

  “You all knew?”

  Sasha sighed. “Lukas insisted that you needed some time.”

  Damn it. It was just like Lukas to be an uptight control freak and considerate at the same time. “I need to pick up my messages, damn it.”

  “Take it up with Lukas,” Sasha recommended, glancing at her oversized watch. “He and Jack should be up with the rest of your stuff soon.” A mischievous look crossed her face.

  Uh oh.

  “I really need to get back downstairs.” Bailey stood. “Let’s get that laptop plugged in.”

  “I’m officially pissed at you about my phone, but thanks for helping with this,” Scarlett said as she joined her. “I know you have other work you should be doing.”

  Bailey waved off her thanks. “It’s a nice change of pace. God knows the other work will be there when I get back.”

  In short order the laptop was plugged in and working. Scarlett watched over Bailey’s shoulder as the other woman sat at Lukas’s desk, her fingers flying over the keyboard, testing this and that.

  “Want to hand me those speakers?” Bailey asked without turning around.

  Scarlett passed them over. Bailey connected them, found Scarlett’s music library, and randomly clicked. Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” pulsed into the room. Before long, all four women were bopping along with the infectious beat. Bailey opened a dialog box Scarlett hadn’t known existed, and with a couple of clicks, sharpened the sound.

  “Wow,” Scarlett said, narrowing her eyes. “How did you do that?”

  “Skillz,” Bailey said with faux humility. “I haz them.”

  Antonia swayed her hips. “Justin Timberlake is so hot.”

  “As hot as Stephen?” Scarlett teased.

  Antonia’s upper lip curled. “As if.”

  “Over your crush already?” Sasha asked, her own body moving in time to the music.

  “What crush?”

  The sisters grasped each other’s hands and started dancing.

  Bailey bobbed her head to the beat. “Your OS is two service packs back, and your security updates are from the Mesozoic Age,” she said to Scarlett. “Want me to update them as long as I’m here?”

  “If you have time. Thanks. My password is—”

  “Don’t insult me.” Bailey waved her hand. “Go dance, have fun. I’ll be a few minutes here.”

  She joined Sasha and Antonia, who giggled madly as they tried to samba to the thumping beat. They segued through to the tango, the foxtrot, and the cha-cha.

  “Minuet!” Sasha called in challenge.

  Antonia crossed her fi
ngers in a warding motion. “Nope. That’s just… wrong.” Jamming by herself, she wandered off to snoop through Lukas’s stuff.

  Sasha bowed deeply over her extended leg, and then held her hand out to Scarlett with a flourish. “Shall we?”

  When was the last time she’d simply danced without thousands of people watching? Sasha’s excitement was infectious. “Yes. We shall,” Scarlett responded, joining her hands with Sasha’s, assuming the opening position of the centuries-old dance, letting her voice soar.

  ***

  Lukas felt music throbbing through the floor from two floors above as he and Jack climbed the stairs to the loft carrying the rest of Scarlett’s belongings. A squeal of feminine laughter echoed in the stairwell. “It feels like we’re at the club. What the hell are they doing up there?”

  “Relaxing?” Jack suggested with a shrug.

  Lukas scowled. Sasha and Antonia had been upstairs for well over an hour, and whatever was going on, at least the music they were listening to wasn’t drenched with grief. He’d been right to allow Scarlett to have some visitors. Though he was certain he’d regret the cat, her happiness sparkled into him like fairy dust.

  Gritty rock and roll pounded from the loft. A gravelly male voice slurred about a hottie with a million-dollar body.

  “Nickelback,” Jack murmured as they reached Lukas’s door. “Hey, I don’t live in a cave like some people I know.”

  Lukas juggled two duffle bags and a portable soundboard, trying to free a hand to ring his own doorbell. Jack’s arms were empty. “Make yourself useful and hit that, will you?”

  Jack pressed the knob. “You’re the one who grabbed it all.” They waited for a good half-minute, yet no one came to the door. “Music’s too loud.”

  “Open it.”

  Jack did as he asked, entering the apartment first. Not watching where he was going, Lukas bumped right into him, because Jack had stopped dead not three feet from the door. “What the…”

  Lukas had grown up watching Sasha dance, up to and including an unfortunate vogueing phase, but Sasha’s current hyperextended side-straddled leg position was better suited to the strip club across the street than a dance floor.