Nobody's Angel (The Earth Angels)

by Stacy Gail

  An appalled breath hissed out of Kendall, and she shifted furtively away from the intoxicating press of his body. Her motor sure was running hot lately, she chastised herself, shocked by her lusty thoughts. First Zeke got her all steamed up with his bedroom eyes and hands made for caressing a woman’s body, and now she was revved-up for the so-called Guardian Angel. Since when had she pulled on her any-man-will-do hot pants? It had to be the danger, she decided, trying to ignore the fever flushing her body. Danger was an aphrodisiac, but as of now, she was immune. The one thing she had to focus on was making sure she stayed out of the hands of the geist, and not pushing herself into the hands of a man who had a mask fetish.

  His grip on her tightened. “Stay still. As soon as they head back inside to report a moped trying to take a short cut through their trailer, I’ll walk you to your car and you can make your escape.”

  “I...I just didn’t want you to crush my Junior Mints.” Oh God, did I say that?

  His huff of laughter confirmed her wince-worthy stupidity. “We wouldn’t want that, now would we?” With the unerring dexterity of a pickpocket, he lifted the box of candy from her bag with a telltale rattle. “I think they’re okay. Mind if I check them out just to be sure?”

  “Um...”

  “Don’t be stingy. Didn’t your mother ever teach you to share?” There was another faint rattle. “Are you going to open it, or should I?”

  “Allow me.” Popping the lid, she shook one out into her palm and offered it. “Though I’m disappointed you don’t have some nifty gadget tucked away in a utility belt to do the job. You’re also missing a kick-ass cape in your ensemble, by the way.”

  “It would get in the way. And as the masked hero who keeps saving you, I’m surprised you think I’m worth only one measly piece of candy.”

  “Oh uh, I...” Her frazzled words faded into silence as he cupped his hand under hers and brought his mouth to her open palm. The precursory caress of his warm breath set her flesh ablaze scant moments before his lips slid, as light as a whisper, along the rim of her palm. Her lungs ceased to function, her breath catching in an audible hitch in her throat. Her skin flushed with a fever that seemed to hit everywhere at once, all because of an innocent brush of lips against her hand.

  Innocent? Yeah, right.

  His lips lingered with sensual deliberation, nuzzling her with an intensity so focused it was clearly a caress designed to seduce. Then he took the candy into his mouth, the moist rasp of his tongue licking the melted chocolate from the bowl of her palm, and everything that was feminine in her dissolved as easily as the candy. This was about as far from innocent as the sun was from the moon, and though she knew it was insane to let a strange man—strange on many, many levels—touch her with such open intimacy, she couldn’t find the strength to protest. Whether it was the shock of the night’s revelations or once again finding herself so close to death, she didn’t know. Nor did she care. What mattered was that she was alive, and there was nothing to stop her from enjoying that life to the fullest.

  “Please.” Her voice was the merest tremor. Her free hand rose to touch the hollowed concave of his cheek, the tips of her fingers just brushing the edge of his mask. “Tell me who you are.”

  He jerked away as if burned, and all at once the illusion shattered. She was alone in a dark alley with a man whose presence warped the ordinary world she knew. If she didn’t get back to rock-solid reality, it might be lost to her forever. But before she could make a move, he stepped away from her as if he feared she was a bomb with a faulty switch.

  “Forget about who I am. If you want to keep yourself alive and well for the next few days until I can cross this geist over, you just worry about yourself.” His hand lifted as if to caress her face, before he dropped it and turned resolutely away. “Let’s get you to your car.”

  Kendall was so baffled that her cheek tingled from a caress that didn’t happen, it took her a second to realize he’d led her right to where she’s parked. “How did you know this is my car?’

  She could have sworn he almost stumbled. “Lucky guess. Stay safe, Kendall.”

  As she looked up from the task of opening the car door, she discovered he’d vanished from sight. More rattled than she cared to admit, it wasn’t until she was revving the engine to life that another heart-stopping thought occurred to her.

  The Guardian Angel knew her name.

  Chapter Five

  A dull ache pulsed behind Kendall’s eyes as she pushed out of her building’s front door. Sleep deprivation headaches were always oodles of fun, she thought with a grumpy sigh, digging for her keys. But sleep had been impossible after a grenade full of crazy exploded her world apart and opened her eyes to another reality lying just beneath the surface. A strange reality, where spirits were a natural occurrence and geists were more than things that went bump in the night.

  They were things that bumped people off.

  That they existed was something Kendall could no longer deny. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning she came to the conclusion that rejecting them just because the information had come from a man who enjoyed his leisure time playing Captain Mysterious would be a deadly mistake. Nothing else explained the sudden change in both Dave Beamer and her attacker at the hospital. Nothing else explained the smoky thing she saw zoom off into the night, the same thing The Guardian Angel had admitted he’d tried—and failed—to stop at Fisherman’s Wharf. And she sure as hell couldn’t pass off The Guardian Angel as some crackpot telling tall tales, when she’d seen his powers firsthand. Whether she agreed with his peculiar fashion sense or not, she believed he was the one who could defeat that murdering phantasm once and for all.

  Taking comfort in the knowledge The Guardian Angel had the powers to handle the geist, her terror-frozen brain at last thawed out enough to recognize that she didn’t have to wait like some distress-riddled damsel for answers to drop into her lap. There had to be a reason why this ghost-gone-bad had targeted first Dave, then her, and every investigative instinct she possessed told her that when in doubt, she had to begin at the beginning.

  That meant looking into the murder-suicides.

  With a jaw-popping yawn, Kendall froze in the process of aiming her key ring remote. Her breathing also halted along with all measurable brain activity, as Zeke Reece unfolded his frame from where he leaned against the trunk of her car. The way he stretched his back made her think he had been there a while. It also made her think jeans that tight on a man had to be illegal.

  “Oh.” She’d wiled away the sleepless hours thinking of things she’d wanted to say to Zeke, from blasting him for not believing her, to trying to seduce the truth out of him. Now, as he stood there with his dark hair mussed and begging for her hands to smooth it, and those soulful eyes latched onto her as if she were a piece of candy and he needed a sugar fix, her mind went new-glass blank. “Hi.”

  Wow. Way to knock his socks off, player.

  Those golden-brown eyes lightened. “Morning, Kendall. Have you had coffee yet?”

  “No, my coffee never tastes as good as coffee made by someone else, so I usually pick some up along the way.” His come-hither voice was enough to make her fingers curl on her car keys, and she had to consciously relax them before she accidentally hit the panic button. “What are you doing here? I somehow had the idea I’d never see you again after yesterday.”

  “Yesterday is what I’d like to talk to you about, actually.”

  She grimaced and pointed the remote at the car with a loud chirp. “I’d rather not. I’ve got to go, so—”

  “Kendall.” The sound of her name on his lips was enough to once again lock her in place. “Please.”

  Her mouth tightened against the internal melting at that one word. Honestly, she was such a pushover. “Look, we’re good, okay? I’m used to people not wanting to talk to me about things they’re not comfortable with. You’re like everyone else in that regard, so don’t worry about it.”

  “I don’t think I like
being lumped in with everyone else.”

  She had to bite her tongue to keep from assuring him that when it came to sheer masculine magnetism, he was in a class by himself. “My point is that your blowing me off is just part of being a journalist.”

  “Blowing you off, huh?” His slow smile was so full of sensual heat it made the morning sun seem chilly by comparison. “I think I would have remembered doing that to you.”

  Irritation warred with a flush rising up her neck. “What would you call it?”

  “Trying to take care of you.”

  Kendall blinked. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Even when you’re out of your depth?”

  “I’d like to think there is no such thing.”

  A low, attractive laugh escaped him. “Why don’t we talk about that over coffee?”

  She wanted to, so much so it couldn’t possibly be good for her. “Like I said, I’m busy.”

  “Now who’s doing the blowing?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You just couldn’t resist, could you?”

  “Not really. Come on,” he cajoled, nodding at the diner across the street that kept her in lattes and French fries. “Just think about some good, strong coffee to start your day off right. I’ll buy you as much as you can stand.”

  She should say no. She should turn down this gorgeous man who looked at her so intensely she could almost believe she was the center of the universe. She wasn’t that desperate.

  “Okay.”

  Or, maybe she was.

  * * *

  “I really don’t have time for this.”

  Kendall seemed to speak more to herself than him as they settled in a booth at the back of the diner. The scents of fried bacon and strong coffee permeated the air, and the duct-taped splits in the vinyl benches crackled under their weight. It was a comfortable, welcoming setting, but there was no way Zeke could relax. The source of his agitation sat across the table trying not to look at him, but time and again Kendall’s gaze slid back as if he were the only thing she wanted to see.

  “You’re that busy, huh?” Leaning back against the padded seat that felt too small for him, Zeke tried to appear like those shy glances weren’t unraveling him inch by agonizing inch. “I thought you said you had the week off.”

  “I do. Officially.”

  “But you’re still working?”

  “Of course.”

  “On what?”

  She shot him a mistrustful look. “That’s private.”

  “It’s about the white-veiled eyes, isn’t it?” he asked, cutting right to the point. “You’re trying to track down the reason for it.”

  The arrival of their waitress forestalled her answer, which he suspected was just as well. If there was ever a woman who looked like she was ready to haul off and kick a man, Kendall Glynn was it. When they were alone once more, she graced him with a glare so cold he decided he was lucky he didn’t get frostbite.

  “I’m not going to talk to you about this, Mr. Reece—”

  “You’re cute when you’re trying to keep me at a distance. You know my name is Zeke.”

  She made a face at him, and looked cuter still. “All right, Zeke. You know something bizarre happened that night at KPOW, something beyond Dave going crazy. You specifically brought up the two colors that, when manifested in the eyes, signify human possession. Do you deny it?”

  He went to war with every instinct he had to protect soul-deep secrets. In the end, he wasn’t sure if he won or lost when he trusted her with a meager truth. “No.”

  “Yet when I tried to question you about it, you made me out to be some kind of nut bar.”

  “You caught me off guard, and I fumbled the ball. The fact is I’ve seen things in my life that I don’t care to discuss. Ever.”

  “So, since discussing it was off the table, you decided to try and make me feel like a lunatic? How does that make sense?”

  Zeke grimaced. If that was how she took it, no wonder she thought he was a jerk. “In my own ham-handed way, I was trying to discourage you from looking any deeper into this. There are things in this world no human should tamper with if they want to stay healthy. Hell has a way of breaking loose if you poke at things you don’t understand.”

  “We met because hell broke loose without any poking at all. I didn’t start this insanity, but I’ll be damned if I’ll just sit around waiting to be a victim of it. I’m going to get to the bottom of whatever this is, Zeke. That’s the only option I have left.”

  Did she have any idea how brave she sounded? Or how scared? “Okay. Where are you going to start?”

  “There were three murder-suicide attempts within a twenty-four-hour period, two of which were successful. The odds of that happening are sky-high in any city, but what makes those odds astronomical is the way they were done. One second everything’s fine, and the next—whammo. The male flips out and chokes the female, then does himself in with a close-at-hand instrument to the neck.”

  “Wait. There were two identical murder-suicides the day of the KPOW event?” Zeke’s hand tightened on his coffee spoon until the bending metal forced him to set it aside. How had he not known that little detail? “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “One at Bayside Community College, involving an art professor and a student about nine in the morning, then another at Fisherman’s Wharf twelve hours later. Then Dave Beamer flipped out an hour after that for all of San Francisco to see. The only difference in the attack at KPOW was that Dave didn’t kill his co-anchor.”

  “Because you tackled him.”

  “There was interference at the Fisherman’s Wharf attack, but that didn’t stop it.”

  He had to bite his tongue to stop from offering anything about the Fisherman’s Wharf attack. “What do you hope to find?”

  “I want to understand why things happened the way they did. I know Dave wanted to be stopped, because he was screaming for someone to stop him. That didn’t happen at Fisherman’s Wharf. When I meet with the dean of the community college later today, I’m hopefully going to find out if it happened at the first murder-suicide.”

  “What do you think that’ll prove?”

  “I don’t know. Something,” she added with a lift of her shoulder, a graceful motion that had his gaze drifting to the delicate hollow of her collarbone peeking out from beneath the bronze-colored blouse she wore. He licked his lips, yearning to know how she tasted there. “I’m just trying to gather pieces of the puzzle. Another piece is that Dave was reading my lead story about these two murder-suicides when he suddenly tried to make it three, in the exact same manner that the first two occurred.”

  “Huh.” She had magnificent skin. Flawless, like cream and silk all rolled into one. A man could become addicted to such alluring femininity. “That’s a huge coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences, huge or otherwise.”

  “You don’t seem to be too big on taking advice, either.” Their coffee came, and as she reached for the sugar Zeke caught her fingers in his. For a heartbeat of time he stared at his hand that had moved on its own volition to hold something he shouldn’t want so damn much. But once he’d broken the mental barrier he’d tried to put between them, all he could think about now was how he could break it down even more. “Whatever’s happening, people are dying from it, Kendall.”

  She was statue-still, her attention locked on their hands as well. “I’ve noticed.”

  “If you keep digging, odds are you’ll end up that way too.”

  “I’m in danger, whether I look into this or not.” After a long moment she removed her hand from his by pulling the sugar dispenser over. “At this point, the only thing I know how to do is look for answers. The danger of doing so is irrelevant.”

  “How altruistic of you.”

  “Realistic, smart-ass, not altruistic.” She slanted him a glance as she doctored her coffee. “The bottom line is that there’s something deadly out there, and it’s decided I’m next on its hit list. Don’t
ask me what,” she added, putting up a hand as if she wanted to ward off an avalanche of questions. “All I know is that I don’t have the tools to fight what it is. The only thing I can do is try to arm myself with knowledge. That probably won’t make any difference in the end, but if I just sit on my thumbs and let my fear consume me, I feel like I’ll never be able to get over that. In my job—no. In my life, I can’t allow myself to be that helpless or weak.”

  “Weak? Kendall.” Admiration bloomed in his chest so fiercely he worried he was somehow glowing with it. “Lady, you need a dictionary. That’s the last word I would use to describe you. Now, stubborn—that’s a good word for you.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Impulsive. Inquisitive. Nosy. Pushy. I could go on.”

  “By all means, you’re on such a roll.”

  “Intelligent. Courageous. Undaunted. Beautiful.” Again his hand came to capture hers, and this time, by God, he meant to do it. Just as he meant to lure her gaze back to his, so he could enjoy its delicate weight clinging to him. “Distracting. Unforgettable. So sexy I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking of you.”

  He heard her breath hitch to a halt. Amazing, how he had managed to live twenty-nine years without knowing how sexy that sound could be.

  “I...”

  Zeke brought her hand to his lips, at last surrendering to the need to taste her. His senses swam with her scent of lilies, until all he wanted to do was drown in it. “Yes?”

  “You’re hitting on me.” The words seemed to tumble out on their own. “You’re seriously hitting on me.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I just didn’t see it coming.”

  He smiled. “Excellent. Stealth-hitting always gets the best results.”

  “But...” She shook her head, clearly not as dazzled as he’d hoped. “You’re the most bewildering man, Zeke. After you left yesterday, I had the impression you didn’t even like me. Or at the very least, you thought I was unbalanced.”