The Curse of Tenth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  He clamped onto me, rendering me completely immobile, and did the unexpected. He slowed time as he pulled out and plunged inside again. Short, quick bursts. Sharp jolts of arousal causing the sweetest ache deep in my belly. My climax rocketed closer, but he tightened his hold and whispered, “Don’t let it go.”

  His labored pants came in bursts as quick and short as his strokes, and I knew he was as close as I was.

  “Don’t let it go,” he whispered again, his voice hoarse, his hands shaking as he pumped even faster. But I couldn’t hold it.

  His breath fanned across my cheek and, without slowing his stride, he pressed his mouth to my ear. “Now.”

  Time crashed into us, heightening the pleasure that exploded inside me. Every muscle tensed as the raw energy of orgasm spiked and pulsed and shook the world around us. A low growl erupted from his throat, and he clutched the plastic beneath us as his own climax shuddered through him in great, powerful waves.

  He whispered a few choice expletives from between clenched teeth, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. By the time he collapsed on top of me, only the shimmering remnants of pleasure remained, like tattered pieces of a forgotten star.

  He slid his weight off me to lie by my side. His lashes resting on his cheeks. His mouth swollen and sensual.

  “So, was it good for you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I faked it.”

  “Really? So did I. I guess we’ll have to try again.”

  A slow grin spread across his face. “Okay, but the tarp has to go.”

  “Deal.”

  19

  I’m one step away from being rich.

  All I need now is money.

  —MEME

  We talked all night. And ate Reyes’s amazing bourbon chicken. And discussed … everything. He answered anything I asked, and though I had no idea why he was opening up now, I was never one to look a gift horse in the chops.

  We’d gone from the Twister mat to the sofa to the bathroom sink—long story—and finally ended up in bed. Bed was a massive four-poster of rustic gray woods and smooth, tasteful lines.

  He asked a lot of questions, too. I explained about Heather, the homeless girl who’d been cursed, I’d mentioned in my drunken stupor at Satellite. Told him where we were on that case. And then I told him about my actual case.

  Since he didn’t work for the police in any way, I told him who’d hired us, mostly because I wanted to explain the other remark I’d made while inebriated about how Nick Parker has a file on us and Beep. How he was currently using it to ensure my cooperation on his case, but that it wasn’t necessary, because Fiske truly was innocent of the charges against him.

  But Reyes’s interest snagged on the fact that Parker had a file on us. The apartment almost exploded around that time. I was forced to take Reyes’s mind off Parker by flashing him Danger and Will. Totally worked. My girls always came through in a pinch.

  But I knew Reyes well enough to know that he would not let that one drop. Not for a minute. And he could make things very sticky for us and our extremely delicate situation. The last thing we needed was a full-blown investigation into something that could get us both thrown in prison. I was pretty sure falsifying birth records and giving your child away was illegal.

  I tried to feel him out as delicately as possible about the whole god thing. It was one thing for me not to know I was a god, but for Reyes, who’d been Rey’aziel in hell and then Reyes here, who’d been alive in his current state of mind for centuries, to have no clue. He was either playing that one very close to the bulletproof vest, or he really and truly didn’t know.

  It was getting late, but sleep was the furthest thing from my racing mind. Apparently that was not the case for Mr. Sugar Buns. He lay back, closed his eyes, and threw an arm over his forehead, his favorite sleeping position.

  I could hardly have that. So, I crawled on top of him and started chest compressions. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  “What are you doing?” he asked without removing his arm.

  “Giving you CPR.” I pressed into his chest, trying not to lose count. Wearing a red-and-black football jersey and boxers that read, DRIVERS WANTED. SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS, I’d straddled him and now worked furiously to save his life, my focus like that of a seasoned trauma nurse. Or a seasoned pot roast. It was hard to say.

  “I’m not sure I’m in the market,” he said, his voice smooth and filled with a humor I found appalling. He clearly didn’t appreciate my dedication.

  “Damn it, man! I’m trying to save your life! Don’t interrupt.”

  A sensuous grin slid across his face. He tucked his arms behind his head while I worked. I finished my count, leaned down, put my lips on his, and blew. He laughed softly, the sound rumbling from his chest, deep and sexy, as he took my breath into his lungs. That part down, I went back to counting chest compressions.

  “Don’t you die on me!”

  And praying.

  After another round, he asked, “Am I going to make it?”

  “It’s touch-and-go. I’m going to have to bring out the defibrillator.”

  “We have a defibrillator?” he asked, quirking a brow, clearly impressed.

  I reached for my phone. “I have an app. Hold on.” As I punched buttons, I realized a major flaw in my plan. I needed a second phone. I could hardly shock him with only one paddle. I reached over and grabbed his phone as well. Started punching buttons. Rolled my eyes. “You don’t have the app,” I said from between clenched teeth.

  “I had no idea smartphones were so versatile.”

  “I’ll just have to download it. It’ll just take a sec.”

  “Do I have that long?”

  Humor sparkled in his eyes as he waited for me to find the app. I’d forgotten the name of it, so I had to go back to my phone, then back to his, then do a search, then download, then install it, all while my patient lay dying. Did no one understand that seconds counted?

  “Got it!” I said at last. I pressed one phone to his chest and one to the side of his rib cage like they did in the movies, and yelled, “Clear!”

  Granted, I didn’t get off him or anything as the electrical charge riddled his body, slammed his heart into action, and probably scorched his skin. Or that was my hope, anyway.

  He handled it well. One corner of his mouth twitched, but that was about it. He was such a trouper.

  After two more jolts of electricity—it had to be done—I leaned forward and pressed my fingertips to his throat.

  “Well?” he asked after a tense moment.

  I released a ragged sigh of relief, and my shoulders fell forward in exhaustion. “You’re going to be okay, Mr. Farrow.”

  Without warning, my patient pulled me into his arms and rolled me over, pinning me to the bed with his considerable weight and burying his face in my hair.

  It was a miracle!

  “But are you?” he asked, the question part promise and part threat.

  I giggled as a strong hand slid into my boxers. “No,” I said breathlessly. “Never.”

  And as he slid inside me again, my body clenching around him in reflex, I believed it. I would never be all right again. And somehow I was good with that.

  * * *

  “You know,” he said at around three in the morning, “there is one secret we’ve never talked about.”

  I tried not to get too excited, but … “Is this one of your two?”

  “No,” he said, then he laughed when I pursed my mouth in disappointment.

  “So there’s another one?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You had three?”

  “It’s not really a secret. You’ve just never asked.”

  Intrigued, I scooted closer. “Well, then clearly I should have.”

  “You’ve never asked about the money.”

  “The money. Your money?”

  “No, the government’s,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Are we going to talk about the
national budget? Because I am so there.”

  His gaze dropped to my mouth, his long lashes standing at half-mast over his dark, shimmering eyes. “You’ve never asked how much we have.”

  “We?”

  “We,” he said sternly.

  “I’ve never asked because I’ve never needed to. I already know.”

  One shapely brow inched up. “Do you?”

  “Yep. Kim told me. I know exactly how much you have.”

  “We.”

  “Or had. That was almost a year ago, and we both know you’ve been burning through the stuff like crude oil.”

  Kim was Reyes’s nonbiological sister. They grew up together, fighting side by side just to survive the horrors of the man who raised them, Earl Walker. He would do anything for her, and she for him. She proved it when she’d started burning buildings down about a year ago, all to hide evidence of what Earl did to Reyes. It was the sweetest misguided act of love I’d ever known, but she was on the verge of being a wanted woman, so Reyes set her up somewhere remote. I hadn’t seen her since.

  “So, what did she tell you?”

  “Fifty big ones. Which was kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, fifty million? Who the hell has fifty million dollars?”

  “Kim was talking about her money. Not ours.”

  “Yeah, she said that. But she doesn’t touch it. You know that, right? She only takes a little of the interest to live off of. She told me she would never touch your money.”

  “I know.” The muscles in his jaw jumped as he bit down in frustration. “She can be hardheaded that way. Like someone else I know.”

  “I wish I could get to know her better. I wish we could hang and share stories about you and talk behind your back like real sisters-in-law.”

  “Oddly enough, I wish that, too. I hope you still can someday.”

  I felt a current pass through him. A disturbance, though I couldn’t identify it.

  “Is something wrong? She’s okay, right?”

  He rolled onto his back and threw an arm over his forehead. “I’m not sure.”

  I rose onto an elbow beside him. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t find her.”

  Alarm rushed over my skin. “She’s missing? I don’t understand. When was the last time you spoke to her?”

  “Couple of days ago. She was setting up safe houses for the Loehrs. Scouting locations. Making the buys.”

  “Safe houses?” I asked, surprised. “How many safe houses are we talking?”

  “At the moment, ten. She was working on number eleven.”

  “Ten?” I tried to stop my jaw from dropping. I failed. “We have ten safe houses?” Before I could stop them, tears amassed. “You bought ten houses? For, I don’t know, just in case?”

  “Of course.” He said it like I’d grown another head.

  “Reyes—”

  “I told you. I’m doing everything I can to keep our daughter safe.”

  I blinked and turned away. The depths of this man’s convictions astounded me. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked. Kim?”

  “Yes. She was looking at a house on an island south of Mexico. She was supposed to fly out today and get back with me, but she never texted me to let me know she’d made it.”

  My shoulders stiffened. Kim and Reyes were close. If anything were to happen to her, I didn’t know how he would take it.

  “I’m sure it’s okay,” he said, lying through his teeth. But I got the feeling he wasn’t lying to me so much as to himself. “She probably lost her charger. She does that.”

  “Have you, you know, searched?” Meaning, had he searched for her incorporeally.

  “Not yet.”

  “We could send Angel.”

  “We could, but I have him on another assignment.”

  “An assignment? Like what kind of assignment?”

  He draped an arm over me. “It pertains to one of those secrets I told you about.” He waited a moment and then said, “Go ahead. You know you want to.”

  “Okay, seriously, can’t you just tell me one? It’ll be like opening one present on Christmas Eve. Then I’ll be satisfied and can sleep at night knowing that your secret isn’t that you’re really into women’s underwear or that you like Howard Stern or that you watched a snuff film once. If I just had those three things out of the way…”

  “Fine.” He shifted to face me again. “You tell me one, and I’ll tell you one.”

  I growled and buried my face in a pillow. “I can’t. Not yet. But soon.”

  “Same here.” When I started to protest—an act I had zero right to do—he raised an index finger in warning.

  I leaned forward. Wrapped my mouth around it. Sucked softly before sliding off it.

  Reyes’s gaze didn’t waver. He watched with great interest, and I felt his pulse accelerate.

  “Oh, wait,” I said, “what were you saying about money?”

  It took him a moment to recover.

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m out. I’ve gone through all of it redoing the building and buying the safe houses.”

  “Oh, Reyes,” I said, now worried for him. “It’s okay. We have the restaurant and my business. We’ve never actually been in the black for longer than five minutes, but I can turn that around.” I thought about it and cringed. “Or, you know, I can try. I’m always getting lawyers who want to hire me. But they usually want me to get their scumbag clients off the very legit charge of drug trafficking or spousal abuse or cannibalism, but that was only once.” I looked at him, positive we’d be okay. “We can do this. I may have to sell out and get some creep off a couple of human trafficking charges, but we can do this.”

  “You would never sell out. And I was fucking with you. I need you to know where everything is should anything happen to me.”

  “What?” I scrambled up and sat cross-legged on the bed, the sheet covering my vitals since I’d recently lost my jersey and boxers. “What do you mean? Is something going to happen?” I gasped. “Is that one of your secrets?”

  “No. This is just a precaution. We don’t live the safest lives. In general.”

  “Oh. Okay, well, what do you mean where everything is?”

  “Our money. Our lawyers. Our accountants.”

  “You have more than one accountant?”

  “We have more than one accountant. Seven, in fact. And one general manager. Basically you need to know how to get to any and all our resources. You have full access to everything, of course, so you can get anything you need anytime.”

  “You have seven accountants?”

  “We. And do you have any clue how much money we have?”

  “Yes. I told you.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not mine.”

  “Right, so you have more?”

  He held up a thumb and index finger, indicating a tiny amount.

  “Oh, wow.” I lay back down again. “A little over fifty million.” I let that sink in. Or tried to. It wouldn’t. It was so very far beyond my comprehension. “So, if you stacked all your money in a pile, how big would the pile be? I need a visual. Like, could it fill a Dumpster?”

  “Depends on the bills, but we don’t have a little over fifty million.”

  “You just held up your fingers.”

  “I know, and I also know you don’t care, but you need to.”

  “This sounds ominous.” I slid a thumbnail between my fingers.

  “Okay, just so you know, we have a little over thirty billion dollars.”

  I tilted my head. Blinked. Frowned. Looked up. Mumbled something incoherent. Bit my bottom lip. “So, two Dumpsters?”

  “Everything you need, if anything happens to me, is in the filing cabinets in our closet.”

  “Oh, you mean that room the size of my old apartment? That closet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gotcha.” I nodded and tried to absorb what he’d just said. “Just so I have this straight, you have over thirty billion dollars?”
r />   “We have over thirty billion dollars.”

  He gave me a moment. It didn’t help. Mostly because numbers were not my forte. I didn’t math. Mathing was never on my list of favorite things to do, but it did make a strong showing on my list of things I’d do only if the other option was having my toenails removed by a man from El Salvador named Toro the Magnificent.

  Yeah, no. My brain shut down after around three million. Couldn’t think any higher.

  “So, are you the richest man in the world?” I asked in awe.

  “Not hardly. Not by a long shot.”

  “Bummer.” I let all the possibilities rush through my mind like a movie on fast-forward. “I’m married to a billionaire like in all those books I read where the superrich guy falls in love with the poor chick who may not have much in the way of money but is wealthy in vivacity and sprightliness and is really into bondage?”

  “Why not.”

  “And she may or may not need a heart transplant.”

  “Story of my life.”

  “Dude, I am so getting a Vespa. And a signed first edition of Pride and Prejudice. And a pair of Rocketbuster boots.” I looked around our exquisitely decorated apartment. “And, yep, an elephant.”

  “Okay, but you’re cleaning up after it.”

  I scoffed. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I’m married to a billionaire. I can hire a pooper-scooper. Wait.” I tilted my head again as another thought hit me. “Isn’t there like a club you have to belong to if you have that much money? Shouldn’t you have, like, paparazzi and reporters following you around? And Forbes calling wanting interviews? And rock stars on speed dial? It’s impossible to have that much money without being hounded by the masses.”

  “Not necessarily. You just have to be smart about it.”

  And he had smarts down to a science.

  “And Forbes wouldn’t call me, anyway.”

  “Why? Offshore accounts or underground bunker?”

  “Something like that. Let’s just say I am very good friends with our banker in Switzerland.”