Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  “You’d have to Mirandize me to find out.”

  “You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass,” he murmured, voice husky—but he did so between more deep, probing kisses. His thick thigh, between her legs, made a great focus for her writhing.

  Between the kisses, and his hands, and his hard, hot body, she suddenly felt happier than she could ever remember. Giddy, even. “Let’s hear it,” she teased. “‘You have the right to remain silent….’”

  “Yeah,” he warned, moving over her again. His eyes glittered at her with a potent mix of humor and desire. “Silent. You. Like that’s going to happen.”

  She didn’t make a bet on it. Good thing, too.

  As soon as he slid into her, slick and solid and absolutely necessary, she would definitely have lost.

  Chapter 13

  Roy slept afterward.

  Wow, did he sleep. He worked a night shift, so Faith supposed that midmorning for him was like 4:00 a.m. for her. Add to that the fact that he’d sure earned some rest with her, and that he hadn’t been sleeping well since Butch’s death….

  Well, it seemed important to let him sleep.

  Even if part of her wanted to wake him up and demand he have sex with her again. Another equally powerful part of her wanted to slip out the front door, find a pay phone, call a cab and run. Not just back to the apartment, either. Her mother had taught her well, without Faith even knowing it. She could move unexpectedly to another state with surprising ease.

  Then maybe Roy would never have to find out she was Cassandra. Or if he did, she’d be far, far away when it happened.

  She lay beside him for the first hour, while he slept. At first, she couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. She definitely wouldn’t have wanted to.

  Damn, but she loved sex! She felt lazy, and sticky, and kind of sore, and none of that mattered—at least, not in a bad way. For maybe the first time ever, she also felt like a real, physical human being. Corporeal. Touched. Fully, finally touched. And nothing that happened between them could ever take that away.

  She owed this man for that. Big-time.

  Eventually, her breathing and pulse finally eased to normal and she drifted back from her postcoital bliss. That’s when she found herself watching Roy sleep in the sunlight that filtered between his closed curtains. Watching him…and worrying.

  First and foremost, she didn’t want him to find out she was Madame Cassandra. Not ever. But as long as he didn’t know, then he was making love to someone who was just as much a fantasy creation as the fictional psychic. Either way you cut it, this wasn’t good.

  Also, who had killed Butch? Was Roy just being paranoid when he’d answered the door gun-in-hand? In one morning, he’d gone from being someone who intrigued her to someone she found almost indispensable. Oh, she wasn’t such a baby as to think she was in love with him. Not real love. Not yet. But she certainly understood, now, why so many people mistook sex for love. And Roy did have possibilities. If the man who’d killed Butch came after him, Roy and all his possibilities could be cut short, just as surely—

  Faith pressed a hand to her mouth at the memory of Butch dying, dying even as she tried to hold his blood in. The killer came for Cassandra, she reminded herself, and she tried desperately to believe it. He had to have come for Cassandra.

  It didn’t bring the comfort she’d hoped. Roy was a homicide detective, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a safety-first kind of job.

  She didn’t like the fear she felt at that. She guessed she’d have to get used to it, if she wanted more chances to watch him sleep. And she did want that. Selfishly. Needfully.

  The longer she lay awake, the more problems crowded through her mind. Who would the serial killer target next? What was her mother hiding? Why the hell was Faith such a freak?

  Though not, she thought as her gaze caressed the sleeping Roy, quite as big a freak as she’d feared.

  Roy turned to his side with a grunt and began to snore. She decided that was her cue to get up and to do something marginally more productive than worry.

  His hand latched around her ankle before she was fully off the bed. His tired eyes cracked almost imperceptibly.

  “Leaving…?” he slurred.

  “Should I?”

  “No.”

  “Then I won’t. I’ll just…clean up.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. His eyes closed, and within minutes the snoring resumed. Faith was able to slide off the bed, collect her clothes from there and the living room and find his bathroom.

  She liked Roy’s old-fashioned, tiled bathroom—it smelled very much of him, of the unique mix of soap, antiperspirant, shaving cream, shampoo and hair gel that all went into his particular scent. It was fairly clean, although…

  Faith touched the handle of the toilet brush in its plastic tube in the corner, and tried to put a word to what she felt. Mom. Apparently his family lived close enough to regularly drop by.

  The one saving grace was that, as in the guest room, Mrs. Chopin seemed to clean up around here of her own accord, maybe even against Roy’s protests. But if they weren’t halfhearted protests, surely the woman would have stopped.

  Oh well. So he wasn’t perfect.

  Stepping into the warm spray of his shower, smelling Roy all around her and on her, remembering his touch, Faith guessed she could forgive the man a little domestic laziness. Especially since Evan did most of the cleaning in her apartment.

  Once out of the shower and dressed, her hair toweled dry, Faith took a closer look at Roy’s home. It used to be his grandmother’s, she decided—half this furniture had to have been inherited, and she fancied that the old house still hoarded memories of him and his brothers and sisters as children, of his dad as a child, maybe even of his grandparents moving in right after World War II.

  But she had to be imagining that part. She’d imagined having some kind of family history of her own so often, in childhood fantasies, it was easy.

  She loved all the pictures, countless mix-and-match collections of parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Police uniforms seemed to be a running theme. She wasn’t quite as thrilled by the photographs of Roy with obvious girlfriends, but she supposed it spoke well of him that he didn’t tear them in half once the relationship was over. And considering how young he was in some of the pictures, at least some of those relationships had to be over.

  The place was messy, but not dirty. Roy had magazines so old, some had headlines about Martha Stewart’s insider trading trial or Navy SEAL Thomas King’s rescue from Puerto Isla. Fighting back the weirdest urge to straighten up, Faith decided the clutter made the place…comfortable.

  As opposed to the gun on the coffee table.

  Moving on to the dining room, she found more recent mail and papers covering the Formica tabletop. Apparently, Roy brought his work home. There were official-looking reports with the crescent-star logo of the City of New Orleans on them; she put those aside as private, determined not to look at them…unless she had to. A stack of library books bore titles like Psychics Debunked, An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts and A Dictionary of Superstitions. Strips torn from a fast-food napkin marked several entries in that last book, so she took a peek. She found an entry about hair and one about running water—both of which corroborated what she’d already thought. But she hadn’t expected the third entry.

  Red Cord: Protection. Power. Often used to hang or tie talismans. In Feng Shui, brings good luck. In ceremonial magic, can be used in initiation or as a belt to indicate either first-degree or third-degree status, dependent upon the group’s tradition.

  This killer of theirs was certainly into protection, wasn’t he? Did that mean he was afraid? Was that something that could be used against him?

  She moved on, increasingly involved. Past the library books lay an open folder with what looked like programs…

  From local psychic fairs.

  Where he’d gotten them, Faith couldn’t imagine. She supposed the NOPD had thei
r ways. But Roy had a whole stack of programs from different fairs over the past six or seven years, most of them listing participating psychics, schedules of workshops, contributors, ads and more. He seemed to have already gone through them…and underlined the name Cassandra every time it showed up.

  A few years back, someone named Cassandra Armstrong had offered her services in spiritual healing.

  At a psychic fair across town, two years ago, someone named Cassandra McCoy was listed in the “special thanks” column.

  A year later, someone named “Cass Kent” had provided a demonstration in Kirlian photography. Roy had put a question mark by that name, then written in “Cassidy” and crossed it off his list.

  He’d even circled an ad for an occult shop which included the legend, “C. Bailey, Proprietor.” Beside that he’d scribbled, “Charles.”

  Faith suddenly felt sick. Or hunted. Or both. Maybe that was just what being hunted felt like.

  She shouldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t she come here thinking she might confess to being Cassandra? Because of her, Roy was wasting time on a false lead while Butch’s real killer was still out there. He was harassing other poor Cassandras, and a Cassidy and a Charles, in his search. She could save a lot of people a lot of trouble—but at the cost of what kind of trouble to herself?

  She wished she were noble enough to do the right thing. She really did. But just now, after what had happened between her and Roy, she was too selfish and too cowardly to confess. Not yet. Not without…without thinking it through.

  Her cowardice made her feel sick, too.

  She heard movement from the bedroom, then Roy’s footsteps in the hall, and she pushed away the folder of psychic fair programs. She met him in the hallway instead, away from all the evidence of investigation.

  His investigation into her.

  He’d pulled on a pair of boxers, she guessed for her benefit. Suddenly, more than anything, she wanted to be touched again. She wanted to be sure he was still safe to touch, that she hadn’t dreamed how unfreakish she’d felt with him.

  “Watch the morning breath—” he warned as she surged into his arms. Skin against skin. Full body contact. And she felt—

  Instead of the usual shock, she felt a blissful completion. It hadn’t been a one-shot deal. She hadn’t dreamed it.

  She didn’t give a damn about morning breath. She strained upward, demanding his lips, which he gave with enthusiasm. By the time they abandoned the kissing for air, Roy didn’t seem worried about morning breath either.

  He looked vaguely dazed—but not unhappy about that. “So I’m thinking, you want to grab a quick breakfast before I report to work? For you that would be lunch.”

  “Okay,” she said, clinging to him.

  “Okay?” he challenged. “That’s it?”

  She nodded. She supposed she should let go of him now, but she wanted to hoard this feeling. If he kept looking for Cassandra, she might not have many more chances…not that she deserved them.

  “How old are you?” he asked, wary now.

  “Twenty-two.”

  With a moan, he lowered his head onto hers, as if he didn’t like her answer. “Christ, I could almost’ve babysat for you.”

  That was intriguing enough to drag her out of her own fears, at least for a moment. If she was hoarding feelings, they might as well be good ones. “So…how old are you? Are you a pervert, or just a lucky son of a bitch?”

  “I just turned thirty-one, which I think puts me in the gray area. That’s actually considered young to make detective, you know. Now suddenly I’m old.”

  “You may have a few more good years left in you.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He kissed her again, quick and decisive, before going to shower. The casualness with which he did it—just kissed her, like any normal lover, just another way to say “Wait here” or “I’m coming back”—felt new and wonderful. And way too tenuous for her liking.

  But that part was her fault.

  “I brought work home,” he called back over his shoulder, vanishing into the bathroom. “Don’t mess with anything.”

  “Not even your gun?” she teased.

  He leaned back out the bathroom door. “No. And get used to calling that my weapon. My gun, you got pretty familiar with.”

  Then, with a wicked grin, he vanished again.

  She stood in the hallway for several minutes, listening to the water turn on, before she thought to go back into the kitchen.

  Her life had just gotten really, really complicated, hadn’t it?

  They didn’t make their breakfast-lunch; they’d gotten so busy kissing, Roy had to just drop Faith off with apologies before speeding away to work. But she saw him briefly the next day, at Butch’s funeral.

  He was one of the pallbearers, in full dress uniform. Watching him move grimly through the solemn ceremony, Faith could barely breathe. The misery of the funeral, the stone faces with which the officers hid their lingering outrage, felt like standing in the middle of radioactive fallout. Butch’s death wasn’t just a tragedy—and even before she saw the grief in his children and grandchildren, Faith had known it was undeniably that. It was becoming something more, too. Something even darker. Something she knew she couldn’t stop even if she did confess to being Cassandra.

  It was becoming a vendetta.

  “I swear to God I’m not ignoring you on purpose,” Roy said, finding her after the ceremony. He looked very official in uniform. Martial, even. He would terrify her mother, looking like this, but not Faith. She guessed she wasn’t the first woman to find a uniform sexy.

  “I know,” she assured him.

  “Everyone’s working overtime,” he said. “We want to work the overtime.”

  “I know. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You know, Butch wanted me to take you out.”

  She’d guessed that. He hadn’t exactly been subtle. “Did you want you to take me out?”

  A smile played at his mouth for a minute, fleeting because of where they were, and why. But momentarily, wonderfully there. “Yeah. Still do. We’ll have to try it sometime, huh?”

  They hadn’t dated yet, had they? Instead, they’d just…

  Faith felt her body temperature rising at the same time she felt his, but this time they both looked away.

  “Will you be okay getting home?” he asked. “We’re talking business….”

  “I got here just fine. I can get home just fine.”

  So with a last, awkward nod, Roy rejoined the other men in blue, all smiles gone. She tried not to liken the energy coming from them to a lynch mob. There was a cop-killer loose out there. And when someone killed a cop, nobody rested until there was an arrest.

  Whether it was the right arrest or not.

  Heading home from the funeral, Faith had the strangest feeling she was being followed. She paused several times, examining all the different passersby and tourists on the sunny street around her. But no matter how hard she listened, she couldn’t settle on any one sound or scent to support her unusual intuition.

  She must be getting paranoid, she decided. Lynch-mob mentalities could do that to a person.

  The next afternoon, at work, Roy came by to talk to Greg about the shell casings found at the cemetery. He nodded at Faith as he strode past her toward Greg’s office—that was all, just nodded. He looked tall and tired and determined, and she felt short of breath just watching him move. Once he was in Greg’s office, she had a hard time concentrating on her work.

  She tried desperately not to listen in on their conversation about Butch. A normal woman wouldn’t be able to hear them behind closed doors. Then again, if she were normal, she wouldn’t be in this bind.

  On the way back out, though, Roy crooked a finger at her as he passed. Still not looking at her.

  Intrigued, she got up and headed out the direction he’d gone. He was waiting by the bank of elevators. He raised his eyebrows at her, feigned casual, and stepped with exaggerated nonchalance throu
gh the door into the emergency stairwell.

  Pulse picking up, Faith went after him—through the heavy door and right into his arms. Sensory information washed over her, as usual. He’d had a po’-boy for breakfast. He was overdoing the coffee again. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. But the images washed gently. His embrace felt like homecoming.

  “So are we co-workers or not?” he demanded, neatly turning her between him and the concrete wall, his gray gaze dancing across her lips as if maybe he wanted to kiss her as much as she wanted to kiss him. “’Cause if we are, and you’ve got some kind of rule against it, this could be trouble. One of these days, I really do intend to take you out on a real date.”

  “My rule isn’t that strict,” she reassured him, and was rewarded by his mocking grin—for just a moment, before his kiss blinded her to everything else. She stretched her arms up over his shoulders, hanging on for dear life, tasting him, breathing him.

  “Good,” Roy panted, after a few minutes of that. “That’s real good.”

  “So about this alleged date,” she started. She saw his wince and felt him tense up, so she smoothly added, “I’m guessing until you get Butch’s killer, you won’t have a lot of free time, huh?”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not much. I’m sorry, Corbett….”

  But even as he apologized, she could tell he was anxious to be gone—if maybe after a few more kisses. Work to do. Vengeance to wreak. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be with her. It was that his need to be elsewhere won out.

  “Well, until then, feel free to come by the apartment after shift some night,” she offered. Evan occasionally brought lovers home. So did Absinthe. Absinthe would hang a stolen Do Not Disturb sign on her doorknob when necessary, at which point Krystal—or now, Moonsong—knew to bunk on the sofa, or in Faith or Evan’s room. As Krystal had explained when Faith first moved in, it seemed safer than them going into unknown territory alone. At least at the apartment, the roommates outnumbered the visitors. “I have my own room now. The others won’t mind.”