Diana looked adorable in her t-shirt, cutoff shorts, and flip-flops. Her skin, still dewy from her shower, looked soft and appealing enough to touch. No makeup on her face, her curly hair pulled up into a puff of reddish corkscrews. Sweet and pretty and smelling of coconut. He felt the familiar surge of desire as his body reacted to Diana's proximity.
He arranged a neat pile of charcoal bricks in the bottom of the grill and doused them with lighter fluid. Diana seemed not to know what to do with herself as her sister stayed focused on her children, pointedly ignoring Bubba. Mac made a show of staying busy with the grill.
"Hope you don't mind me helping y'all out," he said.
"Not at all," she said. "I appreciate the help."
She seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but hesitated. He pinned her with a direct look, and said low enough for only the two of them to hear, "How do you feel? You holding up okay?"
She shrugged. "I guess so." She cast her eyes down. "I'm a little embarrassed at the way I acted this morning."
"Why? What should you have done differently?" He hated seeing her looking so unsure.
"I don't know. I probably should have told you the moment I knew something was wrong. It's just that I've never had any problems in all the years I've been doing this. I shouldn't have assumed this would be routine."
"This is why you take backup, Ms. Independent." She blushed at the endearment. In the bright early afternoon light, the tiny freckles on her nose stood out.
He returned his attention to the grill, striking a match and tossing it in. The flames flashed, and they both stepped back from the heat, grinning.
"Have you always played with fire like that?" she asked, her body language visibly relaxing.
"I might have played with fire as a boy," he acknowledged. He stood there watching the flames subside. He took the bottle of lighter fluid and squirted it at the flames, which promptly flared again. "Hard to believe, right?"
She shook her head and cocked an eyebrow, her eyes cutting to the fire. "No, actually not that hard to believe. You seem to enjoy setting fires..."
"Woman, I know all about fire safety," he said, adding. "I was a Boy Scout."
She looked at him, skeptical.
"I was an Eagle Scout."
Her head cocked back, and she looked up at him in disbelief, stifling a grin. "If you say so."
"What, you don't believe me?" When she smiled, she did it with her whole face, and he smiled back. Mac, broody and isolated for years now, couldn't believe how easy it was to smile at this woman. Maybe that was why his bull still wanted her.
"So... what do you know about this...thing we saw this morning? Did Bubba know anything about it?"
"What?"
"You two work together. I assumed you invited him over to talk business with him. I figured you probably asked him for help."
"I did not invite him," he grumbled. "I would never just invite him over to your place. He just knew where to find me."
"So... did he have anything important to add?"
He put the lid on the grill, nodded toward the back porch, and headed for the kitchen door. Diana eyed her sister and nieces. The girls were playing a game wherein one bit down on Bubba's pant leg, whereupon he made a show of tossing the pup across the yard. The girls gleefully charged Bubba, and he obliged by repeatedly tossed them off, but gently enough not to injure them. Mac had never seen Bubba playing with children, and he thought the wolf had a knack for it.
In the kitchen, Mac brought Diana up to speed.
"What makes Bubba so sure this was a changeling?" she asked.
Mac raised his eyebrows and ran a hand through his hair. "It's just a guess at this point, and everyone knows there are a lot of rumors surrounding... shifter origins."
Diana had not yet asked him whether the things they said about his kind were true. She was a woman who played by the rules, and the rules stated it was rude for full humans to grill people on their shifter heritage.
Diana was a solitary kind of person, slow to friendship, guarded, and careful about emotional intimacy. Their brief conversation over, she went about busying herself with the meal preparation, taking fresh vegetables out of the refrigerator and rinsing them in the sink.
"Do you need help?" he asked. She looked at him, surprised.
"No, no," she said, waving him off. "This will only take a few minutes."
Scowling, he edged around her to the sink to wash his hands. He took the vegetables from her and motioned to her to have a seat at the kitchen table, then set about chopping vegetables.
"Go sit down, Ms. Independent." Her lips did a sideways twist of contemplation, but she complied.
"You said you knew I was a shifter when we met." He extracted a box of table salt from the cupboard and lifted a colander off a pegboard hook over the sink. He set the colander in the sink and the salt on the side of the sink. Then he turned around to look at her. He proceeded to slice an eggplant with the composite knife.
"Have you always been able to do that? Tell that someone is a shifter?"
She hesitated, looking at him intently. "Yes...as far as I can remember. I would always smell smoke or fire where there was no fire. Sometimes, it looked like some people's eyes were glowing."
"I didn't realize other people didn't see the same thing," she said. "My parents told me it was better not to mention it to other people...they might not react well."
She went on. "I've never scented anything like what I did this morning. It just smelled...wrong." Her mouth curled in disgust at the memory. "Like burning rotten garbage or burning old grease."
"Do you ever tell anyone outside of your family about your abilities?" He had sliced the eggplant and had arranged it in the colander. He salted both sides of the slices liberally and left it to leach out the bitterness.
She nodded quickly. "Yes."
"What happened?" He knew he was pushing, but it felt like the right thing to do.
"I had a friend at school who was 'passing.'"
"What happened?"
"I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a really big deal," she said. "We didn't live in a rich neighborhood, and we had shifter friends at school. It didn't end well, and my friend was teased and bullied. I knew then that not everyone wants their heritage to be known. Some people keep it secret."
"Or maybe they just keep it private," he suggested. He was slicing carrots and arranging them on a platter. "I'll take care of the vegetables, but you're going to have to do the hamburgers yourself."
She hopped up to retrieve the hamburgers from the refrigerator. The kitchen, cramped and tiny, didn't offer much room to maneuver. He felt the whisper of denim on denim as she brushed past him. His body responded instantly, and he felt himself follow her movements as if he were tethered to her with an invisible cord. He moved without thinking, blocking her progress to the cooler.
"I didn't know you were coming over," she said, looking sheepish. Her eyes were huge and wide as she looked at him. "I don't eat lots of meat anyway. And I wouldn't want to offend you." The last part came out with a choking sound. She cleared her throat. Her hand was on the cooler door.
"I know you saw me that night at Jacob's house." He was face to face with her, their bodies inches apart. "Your voice cracked when you saw me." He took a tiny step toward her, until they were almost touching. He slid one arm around her waist and felt her reaction as her chest heaved and she blinked in surprise.
He pulled her into him, pressing her curves into her his torso. Her body was almost softer than he could stand. "There's something between us. I felt it from the first time I met you."
He could feel her shaking her head against his chest.
"Mac, I-"
Mac could hold back no longer. His arms circled her waist, and he breathed her in. He couldn't stand it if she rejected him.
"This wasn't what you planned, was it?" He felt her body tense and realized he was right. She was proficient at her job, cared about her clients, and longed f
or advancement. He suspected she chose her work to feel close to her father. His mother had been an orphan, too, and sometimes it seemed as if she focused on work to the exclusion of everything else--as if she wanted to prove she was good enough.
Her hands came up to his chest. His heart squeezed painfully while he waited to see whether she would hold him closer--or push him away. His heart pounded hard enough to make him dizzy. When she didn't try to put distance between them, his arms went around her. More exciting than making love to her was the sensation of protecting her. She turned her face up to his, lips parted and eyes hooded.
"Mac--"
She said his name, and that broke him. His fingers splayed across her back and brought her body into a passionate embrace. Before he knew what he was doing, he rocked her off her feet with his superhuman strength and pinned her to the wall beside the kitchen sink. He smothered her surprised yelp with his mouth. She opened up to him, a helpless whimper escaping her throat. Her legs wrapped around his hips as he pinned her to the wall, ground his hips into the apex of her thighs and hummed into her mouth. She clawed at his shirt, tightened the grip of her thick thighs around him, and matched her lips to the grinding sensuality of his mouth. She threw her head back in abandon and offered her neck to be devoured by his mouth. She gasped and keened as he attacked her neck, kissing, licking as she trembled against him. His jeans grew tight over his groin, and he wedged himself between her legs.
The slamming of the back door had Mac freezing in the act of nibbling Diana's earlobe.
"Uh...don't mind me. I'll keep my eyes averted, I promise."
Mac released Diana and set her down gently. Vanessa breezed through the kitchen with her children following her. "I'm just going to get the girls ready for lunch. You just carry on talking with your 'co-worker.' " Mac watched Vanessa make air quotes.
Diana called out, "Uh, okay..." Mac clenched and unclenched his fists and stepped carefully away from Diana. Her eyes were round and dark, glittering with desire, her mouth open and swollen from his kisses.
"Ah, I guess we should start getting things on the grill," Diana said, waving at the food set out on the kitchen counter.
He collected himself, willed his erection to go down, and went to find Bubba
Chapter 21
Julie's captor hadn't much appreciated her yelling at the top of her lungs and kicking at the walls of her cell. He had told her in his slithery voice to knock it off, berating her with escalating frustration through the tinny speakers that piped sound into the space. When she didn't stop, he turned off the lights. That was several days ago.
She suspected she was underground. Her voice didn't echo as she thought it should and striking the metal walls didn't produce the hollow sound she expected.
Do they even know I'm missing?
A better question was: did anyone care? The gods kept up with sex workers like her through the Family Bureau and the social workers like the brown-skinned redhead who had been visiting Woodland Creatures for as long as Julie had been there, almost eight months. She thought this could only be because appearing to care about their creations was good for Pantheon. Would the authorities actually do anything?
The only person in her life who would report her missing was Amanda. And would the police listen to a sixteen-year-old faun shifter, the daughter of a prostitute? Not fucking likely.
The lights came on, and Julie's eyes burned as they adjusted after so many days in the dark.
She had paced off the dimensions of her prison days before, the last time the lights were on. It was roughly ten feet by twenty feet, and the metal walls were held together without a single rivet, screw or nail. The concrete floor featured a metal hatch the creature used to bring her food. There were no windows. The mirror was made of unbreakable glass and fully embedded into the wall above the sink. The whole works was knobless and motion-activated. The toilet had an integrated seat, no flush mechanism that she could see, and no valve.
She'd found traces of the other women who must have been held there before she had been kidnapped. A broken-off fingernail, covered in chipped red lacquer, which she found under the rim of the toilet. A tiny piece of ripped fabric, a stretchy lame from what she could tell, that she found wedged behind the edge of the unbreakable mirror. A smear of blood underneath the cafe table bolted to the floor.
She could also detect the vague scents of the other women. Even though air was piped into the space, it wasn't the same as throwing open a window open to let in the fresh air. The space was too confined to truly be ventilated. As a result, the confined scents of other captives hovered around her. Most humans wouldn't notice, but the gods had engineered shifters to have better scent perception than the average human. Of all shifters, predators had the best sense of smell--ruminants like Julie, the weakest. But even ruminants were better full humans at scenting, which is how Julie knew other women had been held in the bunker. Many other women. She also knew that the others had all been human.
The other women appeared to be skin trade workers, like Julie. But they were all something Julie wasn't: human. Julie didn't fit the profile of the other captives. Whatever her captor had done or planned to do with the other women...it probably couldn't do it with her.
Did her captor know about her shifter heritage? What would it do when it found out she didn't fit the profile?
She still wore her costume from work, a stretchy gold fabric that covered her tiny breasts in a tube that wrapped around her back, and a matching skirt that ended around the middle of her thighs. Her trench coat was gone. The stupid shoes she'd been wearing were gone. Her earrings and her belly ring--gone. In short, she had nothing to use to escape, injure her captor, or kill herself.
Not for the first time, she wondered about the creature. It had to be a changeling, a special type of shifter that lived underground and kidnapped little disobedient girls. At least, that's what the nuns at the reservation used to tell the orphans in their charge, even as they chastised them for believing in the old myths.
I found evidence of changelings. Maybe there's a reward?
She let out a hollow snort of laughter. Like she would live long enough to get out of here. According to the nuns, changelings boiled disobedient little girls in huge pots of water, then ate them all the way to the marrow of their bones. Then they ate their bones.
Julie jumped at the sound of the air exchanger starting up. Tiny holes drilled into the walls of her cell piped in fresh air, and she was grateful.
Has homecoming happened yet? Did Amanda go?
She tried to imagine her ex, Amanda's father, helping their daughter to create an elaborate mum to wear to homecoming. Taking her dress in for alterations. Hiring a car for the evening for Amanda and her friends. Lining the girls up and taking photos with his Omni.
Going to Amanda's high school graduation. Sending her off to college. Walking her down the aisle...
All without Julie in attendance. Everyone would tell Amanda that her mother had abandoned her, just as Julie had been abandoned so many years ago, because that is what any prostitute would do. At least Amanda had her father...
She knew then she was on the verge of tears. It was so fucking unfair. She was just trying to make a living. She hadn't done anything to deserve this. Her bottom lip trembled, and her eyes prickled with unshed tears.
So fucking unfair.
The air exchanger abruptly cut off, then started up again, only it wasn't clean air being piped into the space. It was something that smelled vaguely sweet and bitter. The evil creature was pumping a sedative into her cell. It would enter her cell as she slept, and tidy things up. Which was a weird little habit, when you considered that it was a maniacal creature and all.
Well, shit.
She was going under again. She would black out and then escape her current predicament through her dreams. She fought it, knowing it was useless, but knowing she had to try anyway. Amanda was going to go on without her, never knowing what had happened to her mother, not knowing w
hether she had abandoned her daughter, or was strangled in a ditch somewhere. Or in a giant cook pot, the meal of a creature that wasn't supposed to exist.
As she lay paralyzed, the changeling entered her cell, on light, slithery feet that creeped Julie the fuck out every time she heard it.
"Julie Wheeler," it hissed. Julie was too paralyzed to move or react in any way, but panicked thoughts ran through her brain. It had used her real name, rather than the name of the co-worker it thought it had taken.
The changeling knew who she was.
The changeling knew she didn't fit the profile.
Panic drove her desire to move, to defend herself, but paralysis meant she produced nothing more than a small twitch in one finger. That, and a trickle of tears that rolled down her temple and into her ear.
Blackness began to overtake her, and as she slipped into unconsciousness, she realized that she would soon know what happened to little girls who didn't fit the profile.
Chapter 22
Diana applied a steamer to the wallpaper of her guest bath. The wallpaper told a story in toile, tiny little cowpoke girls and boys riding ponies, lassoing sawhorses, and grinning apple-cheeked grins. Adorable, but old, worn and yellowed. Steam billowed, and the edges of the wallpaper lifted.
Diana attacked the soggy wallpaper ruthlessly with her scraper. Mindless, but necessary work. She was still wound up after the encounter with the changeling--and with Mac. She was running on almost no sleep, but also too tired to sleep. So, she did what she always did when she felt like this: busywork.
The barbecue had ended on a high note, with the kind of breezy camaraderie one doesn't expect from a room of virtual strangers. Watching her sister deflect Bubba's attempts to get to know Vanessa had been amusing. She had been a little disappointed when Mac left with everyone else, but she figured he needed to meet with Bubba about Julie. Sex workers only rarely truly went missing, and when they did, it was the responsibility of agencies like Mac's to locate them. Julie was tiny and delicate, with pale skin, platinum hair and luminous brown eyes. Diana shuddered to think of what she might be going through.
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