Eternal

by V. K. Forrest

  Something in Joseph’s tone made her turn to look at him. The hairs on the nape of her neck bristled and her couple hundred years of experience with bad guys set off the synapses in her brain.

  He was talking about the Casey Mulvine case. But how? Why? He couldn’t possibly know Fia had been at the crime scene. Her mind raced. She knew she hadn’t mentioned the case to him when she’d seen him at the bar or at the restaurant. She certainly hadn’t brought up the subject during their brief phone conversations. She hadn’t said anything to anyone about Casey Mulvine outside the office. Had she been thinking about Casey Mulvine one of the nights she had seen him? She was usually so careful around Joseph, always putting up a barrier to prevent him from reading her thoughts. Had she slipped up?

  “I was supposed to look at some office space in Lansdowne, too, but that makes you think twice doesn’t it?” he went on. “Crimes like that, you used to only hear about in big cities, but now”—he glanced up at the menu hanging on the wall behind the counter—“Any leads on that case?”

  “How would I know? FBI doesn’t generally cover homicides in alleyways behind bars.”

  “Ah-ha, so you do know what case I’m talking about.” He pointed at her.

  He was relaxed. Perfectly at ease. Nothing suspicious whatsoever about his behavior. He was just making conversation. So why was she suspicious of him?

  Because she knew Joseph. Because she knew what a mean, conniving bastard he could be.

  “What do you know about that case?” She took a step closer to him, lowering her voice. “How did you know a woman was killed and left in an alley in Lansdowne?”

  “Whoa. Easy there, Miss Special Agent for the FBI.” He put up both his hands as if surrendering to her.

  She looked around to be sure no one was watching them. There had to be other agents in the shop.

  “I told you,” Joseph explained. “I saw it in the paper. It caught my eye because I knew the street. It was one of our old haunts. Good memories, right?”

  “Ma’am? Ma’am, may I help you?”

  Fia whipped around to face the guy with the shaggy Beatles haircut in the Starbucks apron. She ordered Glen’s coffee, her chai tea, waited for them, then walked around the side to add sugar to her cup. Joseph followed a minute later with a tall something.

  She dropped the plastic stirrer on the counter as he pushed up beside her.

  “You sure are jumpy, Fee,” he said quietly.

  He was up to something. She just knew. Felt it. Tasted it.

  “Do I really make you so nervous?”

  “Joseph, I swear by all that’s holy,” she threatened under her breath. She’d had just about enough of his crap and she was beginning to think it was time to move past asking him nicely to get out of town.

  “Easy, girl—”

  “Don’t you easy me.”

  He took a plastic stirrer from a bin and slowly began to stir his coffee. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said. About possibly relocating somewhere other than Philadelphia.”

  This was so like him, to taunt her, to force her to draw back, then to offer a tempting morsel to reel her back in again. She waited.

  “And I’ve been thinking about what you said about seeing your shrink. It’s not a bad idea.”

  “You want to see her?”

  “Am I dying to see a freak shrink? No.” He licked the coffee stirrer. “Do I want to keep my problem from getting out of hand again? Yes.”

  She ignored the freak comment, not sure if it was aimed at Dr. Kettleman or her patients. “I’ll get you the number; make an appointment for you, if you want.” She hated to sound so overly eager, but she really wanted Joseph out of her life. Especially now when Glen seemed to be coming into it.

  “I definitely think I’d like to see her.” He tossed the stirrer into the trash receptacle in the hole in the counter. “But I’ll only go if you go. You know. Like couples counseling.” He smiled and sipped his four-dollar coffee.

  So there it was. Another one of Joseph’s traps. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on. You said you’d consider it when you brought it up. It was practically your idea.”

  “It wasn’t my idea.” She popped the lids onto the two cups and reached for a cardboard carrier.

  “But you said—”

  “I don’t care what I said.” She abruptly stepped toward him and he jerked back. “I’m not going for couples counseling with you, Joseph. Now if you’ll excuse me”—she stepped out of his “space”—“I have to get to work.”

  He didn’t follow her, but in her head he stayed with her the rest of the day.

  Saturday, Fia decided against going to the office as she usually did on weekends. She took Betty to the grocery store, ran all her errands in the neighborhood, cleaned her bathroom, cut her cat’s back claws and in a moment of utterly positive thinking, called Sorcha, Shannon, and Eva to say hi. Just to try to continue the reconnection she’d made with them the other night.

  Fia and Eva chatted for five minutes and although the conversation seemed to go well, Fia wound up having to reiterate that she wasn’t interested in dating Eva. Shannon was out, so she left a message on her machine. When she talked to Sorcha, it seemed like old times. They chatted for forty-five minutes and by the time Fia got off the phone, it was already getting dark. She was just taking a low-cal frozen dinner out of the microwave when her doorbell rang.

  Her doorbell never rang. Betty always called. Never came by.

  Fia knew who it was before she looked through the peephole….

  She glanced down at her ratty sweatpants and T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a stubby ponytail with pieces hanging down. No makeup. Not even lip gloss.

  The doorbell rang again.

  “Fee? It’s Glen.” He lifted up a brown paper bag. “I come bearing Chinese. Food, not men,” he clarified.

  She smelled shrimp chow mein through the door and it had a far more appealing aroma than her low-cal dinner of Sonoma chicken.

  She opened the door. “How’d you know where I lived?”

  “Saw it in your personnel file.” Shy grin. Way too appealing.

  “You’re not allowed to look at my personnel file.”

  He pushed past her, through the doorway. “No, I’m not. Bet you’ll look at mine as soon as it’s transferred, though. Kitchen this way?”

  She followed him through the living room. At least the place was picked up. No bras and panties drying on the kitchen-cabinet handles. Blood, bagged in the freezer, was concealed in an empty ice-cream container.

  “Glen…” She hesitated. She didn’t want to be presumptuous, suggest something was going on that wasn’t, but wasn’t it obvious something was going on between them? “I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

  “Dinner? Dinner’s always a good idea.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You being here.”

  “It’s just dinner,” he protested.

  Sam leaped from the countertop to the refrigerator to study the stranger, as unused to visitors as Fia was.

  “I took a chance you’d be home. I’m staying with my great-aunt, my father’s mother’s sister, over in Chestnut Hill. Lights out is pretty early around there. She eats dinner at four-thirty.” He pulled white boxes from the brown paper bag.

  “You came all the way here to get Chinese?” Chestnut Hill was on the northwest side of Philadelphia; whereas the trendy neighborhood where Fia lived in Olde Kensington was on the southeast side. “They don’t have Chinese in Chestnut Hill?”

  “I came here to have Chinese with you. Plates?”

  She opened a cupboard and pulled out two of the total of four white dinner plates she owned. “And what if I hadn’t been home?”

  “Guess I would have eaten Chinese in my car. Spoon? Something to get this out with?” He turned to her, folding up the stained bag. “If you want to know the truth, I was going to call. Ask you if you wanted to go out, meet me or something. But I chickened
out.”

  She smiled, somehow flattered. “You chickened out?”

  “Well, you can be pretty intimidating.” He took the soup spoon she’d retrieved from the drawer out of her hand. “It takes a man a little time to work his way up from blond dental hygienists with rich daddies to six-foot-tall redheads packing heat.”

  She grabbed two forks out of the drawer. “You should have called. I’d have said yes. And then I could have taken a shower, gotten dressed, maybe.”

  He handed her a plate, looking her up and down. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see you braless again.” He walked out of the kitchen carrying his plate. “You have anything to drink? I forgot to get something to drink,” he said from the living room. “I thought about wine, but I didn’t want you to accuse me of coming here with the intention of getting you liquored up and into bed.”

  Chapter 18

  Turned out he wasn’t being presumptuous and he didn’t need the wine. He probably could have had his way with her without the charm or the chow mein.

  They had dinner in the living room and talked, although about what, she could scarcely recall. He cleaned up the dishes. She excused herself to the ladies room, ran a rake through her hair, brushed her teeth, and the next thing she knew they were making out on the couch. He was all over her and she was doing her best to reciprocate. Her mind was saying no, no, no, but her body, that was an entirely different story.

  “Fee…this wasn’t…it wasn’t my intention when I stopped by.”

  They were both coming up for air. Her mouth was bruised from his kisses, aching, tingling. Every nerve in her body had become hypersensitive. Her panties, super damp. She wanted Glen in a way that she hadn’t wanted a man in a very long time, human or vampire, and the thought of blood barely crossed her mind.

  “Not your intention?” she panted, pushing hair away from her face so that she could look into his brown, speckled-with-gold, heavy-with-lust eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, I’m serious.” He tightened his arm around her shoulder. “I came because I wanted to see you. Couldn’t wait until Monday to see you.”

  Fia knew they were just words. She’d been betrayed by, lied to, cheated on by men often enough to know better than to believe any man’s words. But he just seemed so damned sincere. And sweet. And he was a law-enforcement officer. They couldn’t lie, could they?

  “You don’t have to say these things.” She leaned toward him, offering her lips again.

  “No, I do. I mean…I know I don’t but, Fia. I really…”

  She was trying to listen to what he was saying, but he was doing this little stroking, massaging thing on her collar bone with his fingertips that was amazingly distracting.

  “…Like you and…” He exhaled and started again. “I don’t want to screw it up. Not here. Not at work. I knew I was taking a chance, agreeing to the transfer.”

  “From what I hear, you volunteered.”

  She could have sworn he blushed.

  “Okay, so you don’t want to screw things up.” She shrugged. “So far, everything here is good.” She leaned toward him.

  He kissed her, but it was a quick peck and then he pulled back again. “I’m serious, Fia.”

  Since when did a man want to talk instead of have sex?

  “And I want you to be, too,” he went on. “At least just for a minute.”

  She stroked his cheek, drawing her finger along his jawline. He had a very nice jawline, sharp, but not too sharp, and taut skin that was just slightly rough with the day’s beard growth. “I know you’re serious. And so am I. Why do you think I’m cracking jokes? It scares the hell out of me, that’s why.”

  “What does?”

  She looked down, then forced herself to look up again. She’d faced some of the world’s most terrifying killers, alone, in the dark, and she honestly thought this was harder. More terrifying. “It scares me to think that you and I…that I…”

  “That you have a thing for me?” His voice was deep, sexy. Just a hint of tease to it. He was trying to make it easier for her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because?”

  He was doing it again. That stroking thing. Fia could feel what little fight she had left in her melting away. Whatever idea she’d had of stopping short of actually doing the dirty deed was nonexistent, though it hadn’t started out that way. The first time he’d kissed her, she’d told herself she’d just kissed him back out of curiosity. Same for the second kiss. The third. The breast caress. But now she was hot and bothered all over, her panties were damp, and she knew very well they were headed for the bedroom. The living-room floor if they didn’t get moving soon.

  She knew she shouldn’t have sex with Glen and knew all the reasons why, the fact that he was a human and a colleague only two of the top ten. But she also knew that she was going to have sex with him. And she could accept that. She could accept that she would have to feel properly regretful later. She’d been Catholic for four hundred years; she was good with guilt. But what she was having a hard time accepting was the tumble of feelings that seemed to be attached to this tumble. Fia wasn’t just sexually attracted to Glen. She…liked him.

  “Tell me why this scares you,” Glen said softly.

  He was still doing that thing with his thumb, only he had slid his hand over her shoulder so that his fingertips were resting lightly on her breast. Sending shockwaves through her that hardened her nipples and made her so uncomfortable below the belt that she wanted to squirm.

  She was having a difficult time concentrating on the question.

  “I don’t want you to be scared, Fee.”

  “Of this?” She made a weak attempt at a chuckle. “Please, Glen, don’t tell me you think I’m a virgin.”

  He didn’t grin back. “I’m serious about being serious. This, between me and you, doesn’t have anything to do with breaking my engagement. It has everything to do with you. I think I fell for you that day in the post office with your uncle standing beside me and the stink of Bobby McCathal’s burnt flesh in my nose.”

  She could feel herself crumbling inside. To most women, what he’d said wouldn’t have sounded very romantic. But for a woman who had had her share of romance with no substance behind it, his words were sweet nothings to her ear.

  “And I think,” he went on, “that you knew there was something there, too.”

  “Okay, so you got that off your chest. Will you kiss me again now?”

  He brushed the tip of her nose with his and she tried to reach his mouth, but he moved away from her.

  “You have to say it,” he whispered.

  “Say what? That I thought you were hot?”

  “Of course you thought I was hot.” He drew his lips along her cheekbone. “But I want you to say that you liked me from day one,” he whispered in her ear. “I want you to say you wanted to get me into the sack the first time those blue eyes of yours saw me.”

  She giggled. He was making her hotter by the second. “What, are we in the third grade?”

  “No, but close. FBI.”

  She giggled again. Felt stupid. And yet so good deep down inside. Inside where she was dancing. Singing. He likes me! He likes me!

  He brought his hand up under her breast and squeezed gently.

  She was unable to stifle a moan.

  “Say it.”

  His mouth, magical, magnetic, pulled at hers. She slid her hand over his waist, over his abs that were still minus a love handle, over his hip, to the rise in his chinos.

  “Say it.” It was almost guttural this time.

  “I like you,” she whispered.

  “Say it again,” he taunted as he pushed her back on the couch, crawling over her, hovering, his mouth only centimeters from hers.

  She looked up into his eyes and shared one of those moments she knew, only too sadly, rarely took place in a man’s or a woman’s lifetime. For a moment, for the briefest moment, both of them lowered their guards. In his eyes, she saw the pain of his breakup wit
h Stacy, his fear of letting Fia see who he truly was.

  “I like you,” she whispered.

  He rewarded her with a kiss that took her breath from deep in her chest and left her panting, aching, a thin sheen of perspiration on her forehead.

  Fia allowed Glen to remove her T-shirt and toss it on the living-room floor. Next came her sweatpants. She started to wiggle out of her pale blue thong panties, but he rested his hand on the feminine mound between her thighs.

  “Not yet,” he breathed in her ear, sliding his finger into the crease of the sleek silk.

  She moaned and brushed her lips across his neck. Nibbled, but did not bite. She could feel the blood pumping through the thick carotid artery; hot, sweet, pungent blood. But she did not bite…would not.

  Fia lifted her hips against his hand and wrapped both arms around his neck, opening her mouth to his. He thrust his tongue and finger at the same time. She moaned.

  “Bedroom?” he whispered in her ear.

  “I don’t need a bed, Romeo.” She tugged at the buckle of his belt.

  “Sure you do.” He rose off the couch, taking her hand in his. “You going to show me which way or did you want me to carry you?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He leaned over the couch, arms open as if he was going to lift her and she jumped up off the couch and led him down the dark hall, wearing nothing but her panties. A soft glow of light came from the bathroom, but her bedroom was dark. At the bed, he kissed her, long and hard, the way she liked to be kissed, and then they fell onto the bed.

  She found herself laughing, although why, she didn’t know. She didn’t remember sex ever being this much fun.

  Again, her hand found his belt buckle and this time he let her have her way with him. Pants, shirt, socks off. Nothing left but the boxer briefs that were straining under the pressure of his erection.

  Fia rolled on top of him, rotating her hips, pleasuring herself and him at the same time. They kissed again and then he rolled her over so that he was on top. Somehow, in the process, he lost the briefs.