Delphi thought Arlee’s metaphors needed work, but she had to admit, when Jet looked at her, her temperature heated.
So him standing in front of her now, big and powerful, but not going to do anything about the attraction sizzling between them because she’d refused it, Delphi did the only thing she could do in the circumstances. She threw caution and everything else to the birds and kissed him.
And holy heck, that kiss was worth it.
Even wearing her high heels, she was shorter than him, so she pulled his head down and shwoosh!
His kiss was dynamite. Well, something detonated. He yanked her into his body. She lost a shoe, but that was okay. She traced her stockinged foot up his calf. He growled into her mouth and she licked the hum of that hungry sound from his lips.
Oh mercy. He wasn’t touching her anywhere inappropriate, but their kiss was getting out of hand, anyway. She wanted him in the worst way.
She panted as he tore his mouth from hers.
His chest heaved under her hands. “Woman, you’re killing me.”
“Am not.” Her protest was weak.
“I’m hard. In running shorts. In the middle of Central Park.”
She giggled.
“Witch.” He nuzzled her hair, nipped her ear, and found her mouth.
Oh yeah. The world went past. Delphi simply existed to kiss Jet. It was her whole purpose in life, and she gave herself to it, utterly.
Finally, slowly, he stopped his long, devastating kisses. “I’ll be here till nightfall doing a few thousand push-ups till I’m fit to be seen.” He stroked her hair, fingers lingering against her neck, as she leaned against him. He was all that kept her standing. “You don’t care, do you?”
“The kisses were worth it.” She could taste him on her kiss-swollen lips.
“Definitely.” He stole one more before putting her at a short distance.
She glanced down and realized that he did, indeed, have a big problem. She glanced up at him, laughing, and met the aroused hazel-gold blaze of his eyes.
He quirked an eyebrow. “Totally your fault.”
“I’ll walk you back to your office.”
Both his eyebrows flew up.
She swatted his chest. “Not for that reason!” Although, given their kiss, further love-making was a given. “You’re a were, so I can’t directly magic you, but I can place a look-away spell so that no one notices your bulge.”
“My…bulge?”
“It’s an impressive…bulge.” She exploded into giggles.
“All right, do your magic.”
She managed the complex spell despite her giggles. She felt giddy with happiness and kisses. “Done.”
But what she appreciated was when Jet didn’t question her magic or comment that he hadn’t felt it. He just took her word for it and started walking with an arm around her, demonstrating in the best, most natural way, that he could accept her magic.
She hugged his arm around her. He glanced down at her in silent question and she smiled brilliantly.
The gold in his hazel eyes glowed. “I like you smiling at me.”
“I like smiling at you.” Inane. Real. Their conversation was happening beyond words. Walking down the busy sidewalk with him, seen but unseen among the crowd, had its own tingle of excitement simply because she was with him.
“So why did you say no to a relationship with me, and now, this…?”
She double-checked that her look-away spell held as the conversation turned serious. “Being neighbors, with Tony and Grace involved and likely to form an emotional bond with me, and me being uncertain how you’d react to learning I had magic, it just seemed safer to not act on the attraction between us.”
“Tony and Grace.”
The concern in his deep voice reassured her that she’d made the right decision to kiss him and open the door to a relationship. “Whatever happens between you and me, I’ll be there for the kids if you’ll let me. Well, me and my family. Fair warning. Getting involved with me means you become part of the Cosmatos clan.”
“I worked that out.”
“You’re so smart,” she teased.
“Tony and Grace will be all right. I’ll make sure of it.” He pulled her tighter against him so that their hips bumped. “Emma, their mom, loved them, but from what they’ve said and how they behave, her addiction grew to rule her life. I want you in my life for me, but you’ll also be nothing but good for Tony and Grace. They need all the love and care they can get.”
“Where is your office?” she asked.
He paused a second, probably to adjust to her whiplash-fast change of subject. Then he pointed. “That building, three along.”
“Good because I want to kiss you and I’m not sure I can do that and remember to hold the look-away spell. You distract me.” And his care for his young cousins underlined what a good guy he was. She found that a turn on. For her, good guys finished first, not last.
He quickened the pace. Her heels struck the pavement sharply, then the tiled foyer of the modest building, and finally, echoed up the concrete stairs of the fire exit.
“The elevator takes too long,” he muttered.
Then they were inside his office, the door closed, and she was trapped against. She moaned at how good it felt to finally feel him pressed full body against her as he lured her into one of those stunningly hot kisses. She melted.
He put two hands at her waist and lifted her up. Her short skirt resisted, before hiking up, letting her wrap her legs around him. Their kiss went insanely desperate. He ground into her, his “bulge” hard and hot, through the thin barrier of his running clothes and her panties. Her hips started jerking to his thrusts.
She tore her mouth from his, needing to breathe. “We…you…I…oh Jet. Jet!”
He stood powerful and strong, holding her up as her climax swept through her.
When she could focus, she saw his eyes were a feral gold.
“You are so damn beautiful. I want you like this in my bed.”
“Out of control?” She didn’t normally orgasm so easily. Nor with a man she’d met relatively recently. But he didn’t feel like a stranger. He felt…he felt like he was hers.
“Yes,” Jet growled.
And that made her tremble. “It’s you,” she told him. “You drive me wild.”
“It’s mutual.” He lowered her to the floor.
Her shoes had come off and she stood so much shorter than him in her stockinged feet. Tall as she was, he was massive. That worked for her, and it seemed to work for him.
He knelt, collected her shoes, and fitted them on her feet.
She collapsed back against the door as his hands travelled up her calves, up her thighs. He tugged down her skirt, but before she could be disappointed, he rested his face there and he inhaled.
“I could get drunk on the scent of your arousal.” His voice rasped.
She tangled her fingers in his hair and tipped back his head.
His face was a fierce mask of male desire. He surged up, claiming her mouth, and plunging his tongue in.
She wobbled in her high heels.
Finally, he leaned against the door, caging her there, his forehead against hers. “I’ll see you, tonight. I still have to go out.” Hunting his cousin’s killer. “But when I get in…?”
He was asking if he was welcome in her bed.
They’d known each other such a short time.
She thought of trying to sleep, knowing he was in her house but not in her bed. “You’ll have to be in your room before Tony and Grace wake.”
His smile was brief, relieved, and lost in his devouring kiss. “I’ll try not to be too late.”
After midnight.
Jet shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and walked faster. The street was nearly empty. Behind him, three people lingered in the park: the low-life dealer and the two addicts who’d just scored. They’d shoot up together. He’d insisted they answer his questions first. He’d been tracking the de
aler intermittently for the last week and had finally located him.
It shouldn’t have taken that long, but six weeks had passed since his cousin’s death. Six weeks filled with negotiating the child welfare system to rescue Tony and Grace, changing his job, buying a house, moving as fast as he could, and all the time aware that the trail of Emma’s life and death was going cold.
The British police had liaised with those in New York, but Emma’s death hadn’t been important to either force. It had been gruesome, but the argument went that who knew how crazy druggies were? Not crazy enough to flay one another, Jet thought grimly.
He had a location, now. A bar Emma had taken to hanging out at.
“You go there, people employ you.” The low life dealer had avoided Jet’s gaze. His accent was educated, the young man’s body emaciated. Drug-pushing wouldn’t support his habit or life much longer, not unless someone intervened.
As no one had for Emma.
Jet swore, spinning on his heel. But when he returned to the park, the dealer and his fellow victims were gone. What could I have done, anyway?
And back at home, Delphi waited for him. Healthy, sane, sexy.
He took his hands out of his pockets and jogged toward the bar. As a marshal for the weres' Suzerain, he was accustomed to working alone, but if the commander of the Collegium guardians discovered that one of her people hadn’t accompanied him on this investigation, she’d be angry. It was her fault, though. She’d assigned two guardians to Emma’s case, but they were people with other priorities and commitments.
Martin was half-way out the door, preparing for his retirement and a move to Florida. He’d claimed a prior commitment and ducked out of tonight’s investigation. His partner, Seleste, had stepped up, until a phone call. Since she was juggling responsibility for three teenagers and her elderly mom, who’d just fractured her left hip, it wasn’t reasonable to drag her out on the case at night.
Which left Jet to impose on Delphi to babysit Tony and Grace, and to sleep alone when he finally got home.
“Damn.”
He slowed as the bar came into view with a dimly lit, narrow front window. When you needed to hire someone for something illegal but not requiring skill, you found your victims in places like these. Places where the desperate crawled through another night.
Jet entered and let the door slam behind him. Given his size, he’d be noticed no matter what he did.
The barman glanced his way, not much interested. So did a couple of emaciated nervous types. One slid off a barstool and headed out the back.
“I’m looking for my cousin or for news of her,” Jet said. “Emma Dillon. Tall, skinny woman, brown hair and eyes.”
No one was much interested, but no one gave him a smart answer either. There were benefits to being big and tough.
“I’ll pay for information.” He pulled out his wallet, selected a hundred dollar bill, and replaced the wallet in his inner jacket pocket.
A couple of people watched his actions, gazes lingering on where he’d stowed the wallet, then their gazes rose and met his eyes. They turned back to their drinks.
“Emma’s kids need to know where their mom is.” One thing he could say for the New York police’s lack of action, news of Emma’s death hadn’t gotten out.
“Tony and Grace?” A short woman with pink hair, the black roots showing, tottered forward on high heels.
Jet’s breathing evened out with the alertness of a predator finally catching a viable scent trail. “Let me buy you a drink.”
“Nah, handsome.” She stared at the hundred in his hand.
Jet glanced at the barman. “You serve food?”
A jerk of the head indicated an abbreviated menu.
Jet ordered fries and gestured the woman to a table. He didn’t offer his name and the woman didn’t give hers. But he liked that her first question, even with the hundred on the table, was for the kids.
“Tony and Grace, they in care?”
“They’re with me.”
Her eyes, rimmed with black eyeliner, widened. “Not in the system?”
“No.”
She leaned back in her chair, assessing him with the shrewdness of a survivor. “You gonna keep them?”
“Yes. When did you last see Emma?”
“Couple of months ago.” She looked sad, almost sorry for him. The fries arrived and she shook salt on them and ate a couple. “Emma was talking crazy about the things she was going to see. The Tower of London, them funny guards in furry black hats. She said she had her ticket to see the world. I thought she was high. Just talking. I never thought she’d leave her kids. She loves Tony and Grace—and how’d she get a ticket to England?”
“From someone here?” Jet suggested.
It won him another shrewd look. The woman ate a couple more fries, thinking.
He pushed the hundred dollar bill to her. “It’s yours.”
She shoved the money into her bra. “No one would pick Emma to carry drugs. She looks like what she is.” Brutal, but true. “But why else would someone send her to England? She was obviously going to be searched.”
Which was why what she carried had been tattooed onto her skin.
The woman met Jet’s gaze. “I don’t think Emma’s in England. I think she’s skipped. England was the story she told herself to excuse leaving Tony and Grace. A fairytale and one day, in the fairytale, she’ll return. She won’t. You look after her kids.”
“Anything you can tell me about anyone interested in Emma before she skipped?”
The fries were gone. The woman sucked salt off her finger. “You don’t think she’s skipped. You’re too intense about this.”
Jet decided she deserved the truth. Time to let it spread, along with the news that someone as big and scary as him was taking an interest. Emma’s killer would find him a harder target than a drug addict if he tried to stop the investigation. “Emma’s dead. She did reach England, and then, someone killed her.”
The woman blinked and looked down at the table. “Damn. A little bit of me believed her story of England. I thought, I want me some of that. The man she’d been talking to, Ian Lewis, I haven’t seen him around since. I wouldn’t have thought he—”
“Can you describe him?”
She inhaled shakily. “I could use that drink.”
He got two bourbons from the bar, hoping she wouldn’t rethink and decide on silence while he was gone.
She drank off her bourbon in one shot, glanced at him, and at his nod, finished his. Then she stood. “I’ll grab my coat.” She walked out with him as if he was a customer.
Given his questions on entering the bar, no one was going to believe that. “Have you got somewhere to go? Somewhere you can spend a couple of weeks?”
“That dangerous?” Her laugh was bitter and brief. “Never you mind about me. I don’t see Ian Lewis having the balls to kill a woman.”
“Mightn’t have been him in London. Might be he knows who to hire.” Jet took five hundred dollars from his wallet. It was renovation money, but for this unknown woman, it might save her life. “Hide a couple of weeks.”
She took the money. “Lewis is average height, average everything. Blonde hair, balding. Early forties or a worried kinda late thirties. Blue eyes that stare and stare. I remember before he spoke with Emma, before her stories, the first time I saw him, he walked out of the bar to a white van. He got into the passenger’s seat.”
Ian Lewis wasn’t working alone.
“Thank you,” Jet said.
“You look after Tony and Grace.” She started walking away, her footsteps hurried but definite, and flung her last comment over her shoulder. “Ain’t no one who looked out for Emma.” And with that parting shot, she left him with answers and renewed guilt.
He moved into the shadows as her footsteps faded. Senses alert, he waited to discover if anyone watched him or tried to follow the woman.
Nothing.
He had a long walk home. The night’s chase had led hi
m further and further, making him rethink his original decision to go on foot. But Emma hadn’t owned a car, so he’d calculated she’d have operated within a small radius, and she had, but at an increasing distance from where he, Tony and Grace, now lived.
No point expecting a cab in this neighborhood, but a bus approached. There was something lonely about a bus at night, something ghostly and insubstantial. He hailed it, running the short distance to the stop and climbing aboard. Two men with the empty gazes of people ending a work-shift stared at him, and away. The other seven passengers were intent on their phones. He dropped into an empty seat as the bus jolted off.
He had a name and the possibility that Emma’s killer didn’t operate alone. In one way, that was good. One man could slip away easier than two or a network. The more people involved, the more chance of an error and capture.
Tomorrow, he’d have Perez run Ian Lewis’s name through the system.
The streets slipped by, the bus stopping and starting as people got on and off. A group of four teenagers, two couples, got on, talking loudly, still moving to the music of wherever they’d been. So damn young. Ten years from now, he wouldn’t let Grace and Tony out at this time of night. He’d seen too many things.
Ain’t no one who looked out for Emma. The condemnation of Emma’s friend ate at him like acid. He got off the bus, striding up his street. Most houses were dark. A cat yowled. Grace wanted a cat, always drawing her dream of “Mousey”. He couldn’t handle house-training a kitten, but maybe a grown cat?
He shouldn’t make any decisions out of guilt.
There was a light on in Delphi’s living room. It shone faintly through the closed blinds. She’d left a light on for him.
Wanting twisted with guilt and sadness for the lost lives he’d encountered this night. He wanted Delphi, but he wanted his first time with her to be a good memory; not one of him waking her after arriving late and bringing to their loving all this emotional turmoil. He didn’t know what to do.
He opened the front door and walked into the living room to switch off the light.
Delphi blinked at him from the sofa. She struggled up, cocooned in a blanket. “You’re home.”
Alchemy Shift Page 6