by Nancy Gideon
As he readied to tear into the lesser form below him, while those around them shrank back in shock and dread, a hand took a tight, twisting grip in the ruff of long hair at his nape and propelled him, headfirst, into the oak bar.
Dazed but still wild with fury, Rollo rolled to his hands and knees. His assailant caught him by the lupine face, thumb hooking beneath his ravening jaw and fingers clamping hard about the jowls and pressing into his eye sockets. Unable to attack and mad with frustration and pain, Rollo heard a single word spoken low, pounding like blunt force trauma.
“Think.”
He blinked. Max stood over him, eyes hot as molten gold, but otherwise unchanged. His powerful grip didn’t ease until Rollo’s tense pose relaxed. Then he was released, and Max stepped back to offer a hand up to LaRoche.
Rollo gained his feet slowly, aware that the others kept their distance but that Max held without a flinch. He laughed, letting his features reform, ignoring LaRoche to focus upon his son. “Forgive me. I didn’t realize this group of runts was yours.”
“Now you know,” Max told him.
“You waste your time with them, boy. You are so far above them and their petty, groveling lives.”
“It’s where I belong.”
Another loud, mocking laugh. “You need to decide where you will stand, Max. Will it be with those Uprights who pretend to accept you? Or among your own kind, your peers, where you could be royalty? Think about that. We’ll talk again.”
No one moved to challenge him as Rollo strode out boldly through the crowd. They were seeing something new, something both terrifying and wonderful. Two purebloods in their midst with unimaginable power. The power to protect them . . . or destroy them.
“Who is that?” LaRoche growled, recovering from his defeat with a surly humor.
“No one you want to know,” Max said.
Someone I may have to kill.
MAX TRIED NOT to think about it as he stood in the shadows across the street from Charlotte’s apartment. The beers had him slightly off balance—his first experience with alcohol—but it was the scent of the woman asleep upstairs that had him reeling.
One ring, two, then her husky voice.
“Caissie.”
He closed his eyes. He was trembling.
The silence made her tone sharpen. “Who is this?”
“Heya.”
“Hey, yourself.” The tough edges melted into a soft murmur.
“Can I come up?”
A telling hesitation. “It’s three o’clock, Max. I have to be up in less than two hours, and the reporters just stopped rummaging through my trash like raccoons about an hour ago.”
“Is that a no?”
“I wish it didn’t have to be.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you?”
“Across the street.”
The curtains were pulled back from the window in her bedroom. Ordinary eyes would have seen just a silhouette, but Max could see the expectation brightening her features. His system clenched at the sight of her sleep-tousled hair and the rumpled shirt that looked so much better shaped to her curves than his hard lines. He could breathe in the heat of her from her sheets. Her head turned, tilting. He could almost taste her pursed lips.
“I don’t see you.”
He didn’t move into the light. “Oh, sha, but you look good to me. I couldn’t convince you to pull up that shirt, could I?”
She smiled against the cell phone. “For the edification of my neighbors? I don’t think so.”
“I’m so hungry for you, I could devour you in one bite.”
“Hmmm. More ideas gleaned from your behind-bars buddies?”
“I don’t need any help coming up with ideas where you’re concerned. My mouth is watering for the taste of you.”
“Yeah? What kind of ideas?”
“I want to pour syrup on you and have you for breakfast.”
A pause, then a low purr. “Think of the mess.”
“I’m thinking.” More softly, more seductively. “I’m thinking it would be worth it.”
“Ummm. What else are you thinking?”
“How it would pool all warm and thick on your skin. Sweet. Sticky sweet trickling down your belly. Me chasing those drips with my tongue.”
The sound of her breath growing light and fast made him hesitate, giving her a minute to let her imagination work before continuing. “I’d have you naked on the dining-room table. Ready for me. Hot and ready.”
“I’m burning up for you, baby. Don’t hurry. Make me wait.”
“I don’t know if I can. I want to taste you. Can I taste you, Charlotte?”
“Not yet. Not yet. Touch me, Savoie. Tell me how you’d touch me.” Her head was thrown back, resting against the window sash, offering her arched neck, the thrust of her torso.
“Slowly. Like torture. Gliding over that thick, sweet syrup. Spreading it over your skin with my palms. Rubbing it over your breasts. Warmed by my hands. Can you feel it? Close your eyes, Charlotte. Can you feel me?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
“Your body burning. Wanting me. My mouth on you. My breath on your throat. Soft. Light.”
“Soft,” she sighed.
“On your lips. Open for me, Charlotte. How do I taste?”
“Sweet.” Her voice was a rough moan. “God, you’re sweet.”
“Can I come up?”
He heard her take a quick, gulping breath. “Geez, Savoie, I don’t think I need you to, now. Whew.” Her laugh was low and rich. “I’m out of syrup and now I’m a mess. Go home, Max.” Silence, then a tender confession. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Dream of me, Charlotte.”
She closed the phone, touched her fingertips to her mouth, then pressed them to the window screen.
Eight
FRANCIS, COME IN here a moment.”
Francis Petitjohn hesitated outside the open door, telling himself it wasn’t because he was afraid of Savoie. Wiping his palms on his pressed trousers, he stepped inside what used to be his office, smiling.
Savoie turned to him, that rich, glossy exterior hiding the monster within, the monster no longer under anyone’s control. In that confident stance, T-John saw no trace of the frightened, silent kid Jimmy had brought back from the swamps. The one he used to tease and belittle out of boredom and jealousy because he knew Max would never strike without Jimmy’s say-so. That reassurance was gone now, and he wondered how much resentment simmered behind the cool green stare. The fact that he’d tried to kill Max might also have something to do with his uneasiness.
“What can I do for you, Max?” The humble tone, like the smile, pained him, but he knew how to play the game. He knew how to be patient and wait for the right moment.
“Rollo. Tell me everything you know about him.”
T-John’s surprise was genuine. Rollo? What had brought him up? “He worked for Jimmy’s father, Etienne. Dangerous and unpredictable, he was. Never took to the leash, like you did.”
No reaction to the swift sharp barb. “Where did Etienne find him?”
“Doing illegal fighting down at the docks at night. He was the odds-on favorite when it came to ripping apart an opponent. They said he couldn’t be hurt. That no matter how much damage was inflicted on him, the next day, he’d be on the job without even a scratch. Something you’d know about. Even his own kind was afraid of him. Which is, of course, why Etienne went looking for him. He was a crude, brutal creature. What little power Etienne gave him was enough to send him out of control.”
“Tell me.”
“Oh, he was good at taking care of any problems Etienne gave him. Took care of them in an unmistakably messy way. He didn’t have your . . . discretion or delicacy. And he also lacked your dislike of notoriety. He loved the attention. Liked to boast and shock and swagger. He enjoyed all the vices Etienne’s money would provide, too much so.
“My father went to his brother, told him Rollo was bringing too much notice to t
heir business, with his sloppy habit of bragging about what he’d done at the bar with his booze and whores. He told Etienne to take care of it, to take care of him.
“But Etienne wouldn’t listen. I don’t know if it was because he hated to give up the power or if he was afraid of his own creation. Like father, like son, I guess. Kind of an ironic pattern, eh, Max? Kind of a ‘bit the hand that fed them.’”
The glitter in Savoie’s eyes told T-John he might have gone too far, so he quickly soothed over the insult.
“Rollo was a savage animal. He didn’t have the advantages you had. Jimmy gave you polish and self-restraint. And he made you smart enough to see consequences. To know how to weigh the value of those around you instead of slaughtering indiscriminately.”
“Which is probably why you’re still alive.”
T-John’s smile thinned. “Exactly.” He moved restlessly to one of the walls, studying the odd collection of masks Max had displayed. Not the elaborately decorated and elegantly detailed porcelain Mardi Gras masks sold for a small fortune in the Quarter to grace a stylish parlor, but crude, feral depictions roughly carved into animalistic demons with jeweled eyes and wicked fangs. Reminding him of the reality that lay behind the mask of humanity Max wore all too easily these days. Frowning slightly, he turned his back on them.
“Was my mother one of his . . . women?”
“I don’t know, Max. I didn’t know your mother. Jimmy, like his daddy, kept those details to himself.”
He couldn’t tell if he was believed or not.
“You said there was a falling-out between your father and Jimmy’s and that Charlotte’s father was involved. What was that about?”
“Caissie set up some sort of sting operation using a project of Cummings’s to draw Etienne in. When the trap slammed on him, Etienne blamed my father for the betrayal and killed him. Another irony. That death was the reason he went to prison.”
“And who do you blame for your father’s death?” Max asked softly. “Jimmy, because of his father’s greed? Charlotte, because of her father’s ambition? Cummings, because he was in the middle? Or me, because of what I am?”
A trick question.
“I blame my father for being a mean, selfish bastard in a long line of mean, selfish bastards. Why all the interest in Rollo?”
“Just trying to fit some things together.”
“What things, Max?”
“Nothing important.” Max withdrew into his own thoughts, his expression unreachable.
“What is important to you, Max? I’m wondering if it’s Jimmy’s business or yours with those creatures from the docks.”
“You mean, my people.”
T-John ignored Max’s smooth comment, refusing to be drawn into that dicey area. “You spend more time cultivating their favor than those who control them.”
“They control themselves now, Francis. And they look to me. Jimmy never understood the strength that powers a leader. It’s loyalty in numbers. He took that for granted.”
“Like he took you for granted.”
Max had no reply to that. It was still a fairly raw subject, one he’d yet to address in relationship to his own guilt and regret. “Jimmy taught me to make the most of what was at hand, to seize an advantage even from an unlikely source. The way he did with me. The way I will with them.”
“The way you’re losing thousands upon thousands by turning away from the way my family’s done business for generations?”
“Illegally, you mean? Times change, T-John. A fella doesn’t have to be dishonest to make a dollar. He just has to be smart. I have my reasons.”
“A long-legged, hard-nosed reason by the name of Caissie?”
But Max had already dismissed Petitjohn from his mind.
Caissie, Cummings, and Rollo. He now had a link, a place to start, with Petitjohn tossed in on the periphery. What he needed was motive. And proof would be nice. Something he could present to Charlotte to earn his way back into her arms, and her trust.
Rollo was the key, and getting close to him was the only way to find out the truth. The truth of what happened to Sandra Cummings and Vivian Goodman. The truth of why his mother ran away with him.
The secrets of what it meant to be pure of blood.
CUMMINGS WAS THE key. Cee Cee dug through the public records, sitting at her computer screen hours after Babineau had gone home to his wife. Until she broke this case, she had nothing to go home to.
The floor was quiet. Apparently everyone else had lives to go home to, too. The night shift was out on some drug-related shooting where the Quarter spilled over into Faubourg Marigny. She leaned back in her chair, trying to rub the grit of fatigue from her eyes and find some still-functioning brain cells to continue her search.
There had to be something she was missing. Some connection she wasn’t making. With her eyes closed, with the silence surrounding her, she could see Sandra Cummings’s lifeless stare pleading for justice for a life not yet lived. Could see the dull despair in the eyes of Vivian Goodman’s husband as he gathered his children to him, seeking to protect them from a loss of love that tore through his soul.
These people needed someone to care about their pain, their loss. Someone who would understand their fear and be strong enough to strike back, hard. Without the mercy that they never received. Knowing she was letting them down with every day she delayed brought a fist of frustration to clench her heart. An ache that just kept getting bigger until it was difficult to work around it.
Because behind the expectant, needy stares of the Cummings and Goodman families were the desperate, trusting blue eyes of Mary Kate Malone begging for rescue.
“Make them stop. Lottie, make them stop.”
“I can’t, Mary Kate. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now.”
Her cell rang. She snapped it open, snarling, “Caissie.”
A pause, then a deep, caressing voice.
“What are you wearing?”
All the tension ebbed from her on a shakily grateful expulsion of breath. Desire and longing flushed heat to all the cold niches of her spirit. She leaned back in her chair, smiling.
“I’m dressed to meet my lover. How do you think?”
“Tell me.”
“Where shall I start?”
“With your feet.”
She looked at the stubby toes of her Doc Martens as she lifted them to the corner of her desk. She’d gone for comfort today—boots, jeans. And one of Max’s silky shirts rolled up to the elbows.
“I’ve got on heels. Three-inch, with open toes. Black. My nails are hot pink.”
“Hot. I’m taking them off you. I’m rubbing your feet. Your sexy feet.”
“Ummmm. Nice.”
“Are you wearing stockings or are your legs bare?”
“Stockings. The kind that only go up to midthigh. Black and sheer.”
“Ooo. Put your hands on them. Tell me how they feel.”
“Smooth and silky.”
“And your legs?”
“Hard. I’ve been working out.”
“Hard. Yes. I’m ready to give you a workout.” His tone roughened. “Higher.”
“I’m wearing a skirt. Short, leather. The one you like.”
“And under it?” His breathing quickened.
“Just the bare necessities. Silky and black.”
“And damp?”
“For you. I want you, Savoie.”
“Where are you?” A husky growl.
“At work.”
A shocked pause. “Dressed like that?”
She grinned, imagining his expression. “I’m on loan to the hooker detail.”
“Yeah?” Hopefully. “I have money.”
“Yeah? I like ’em rich. Maybe we can work something out that’s mutually beneficial.”
“I don’t suppose you take American Express. I’m trying to build up some bonus points.”
“Strictly cash, and get carried away. Unless you want to just go at it with this luscious lonely lady over
the phone. Then you can just whip it out and start reading me the numbers and expiration date.”
“Sounds delightful, but I’m in the mood for hands-on. How much should I bring?”
“Depends on what you want me to do for you, and for how long. You might want to consider asking for some of that disgusting stuff. High-ticket items, but I’m so worth it.”
“Yes, you are. I want it all. Everything. All night.”
“Could you be more specific there, sexy guy?”
“Whoa, detective. Moonlighting?”
At Babineau’s amused tone, Cee Cee’s eyes popped open and her feet dropped off her desk. “Gotta go,” she whispered into the phone.
“I miss you, Charlotte.”
“Same here.” She snapped the cell shut and glared at her partner, her face flaming. “You could have knocked.”
He spread his hands wide, gesturing to the big open squad room. “I thought I was being discreet in announcing myself before you started running a per-item cost analysis on your desk calculator. Then I would have had to run out and find a quarter movie in a beater booth somewhere.”
“Ha, ha, ha.”
“Ha, ha, hot. Shame on you for misusing office communications. Maybe you should call it a night. Savoie is probably already camped on your doorstep, counting out twenties.”
Cee Cee turned back to her computer. Her tone was flat. “We’re not seeing each other.”
He perched on the corner of her desk, his pose casual, his attitude that of a confidant. “That’s news. Since when?”
“Since Atcliff told me to cut him loose or take myself off the case.” She started entering in data to look busy.
“And Savoie’s okay with that?”
“Why wouldn’t he be? He knows how important my job is. After all, it’s his bacon I’m trying to keep out of the frying pan.”
“Then he’s a better man than I would be,” Babineau muttered under his breath.
She wheeled her chair back to glare at him. She didn’t want to hear his lecture on Max, nor did she want to bare her broken heart by discussing him. “What are you doing here? I thought you clocked out for some domestic bliss?”