by Nancy Gideon
Max took the small bundle of nylon, then grinned. “Yeah? Well, my girl wouldn’t have liked that. That’s an extra problem I don’t need. Thank you, Giles.”
“No problem, boss man.”
Max stood in the doorway, bemused. Boss man. Apparently they had an easier time accepting him in the role than he had in taking it. Step up, Savoie. Still perplexed, he pulled a white silk shirt from his closet and carefully opened the bathroom door. Steam billowed out, along with the scent of Charlotte Caissie.
What are you waiting for? My permission?
Yes, he was. Because no one else had.
He hung the two garments on the inside of the knob and backed away.
CEE CEE PAUSED under the spray. Had she heard the door open? Gathering the curtain in her hand, she peered out, ready to call his name in invitation.
The room was empty.
She awkwardly finished rinsing with one hand, trying to wash away the fear that she was losing Max. He’d treated her differently since she’d failed him that morning in her room. Ever since she’d been too afraid to say what really motivated her concern. She wanted to keep him safe not to testify, not to earn kudos on the job. But because she just plain wanted him.
But the moment to tell him was gone. Now he’d never believe her. She’d pushed him in the direction he was going, not Jimmy. And if anything happened to him, it was her fault.
After drying off, she put on the luscious silk shirt, growly ill temper stirring at the sight of the red scrap of nylon and lace hanging behind it. She put the panties on, then stalked into Max’s bedroom, as steamed as the bathroom mirror.
Max had changed into slouchy jeans, a plain white tee shirt, and his red shoes.
“Thanks for the change of clothes,” she snapped as she tugged up her skirt.
Understanding, he grinned at her. “They aren’t mine.”
“Obviously. Did your little playmate lose them in your game of chance?”
He blinked, not immediately catching the reference to his alibi from Gautreaux and Surette’s murders. Then he grinned wider. “I just made her up to make you jealous. Did it work?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Savoie.”
“Then why do I feel flattered?”
“Because you’re an arrogant beast, that’s why.”
“And you love that about me.”
She sighed. “Yes, I do.”
“And you love me.”
She started to reply but his fingertips pressed to her mouth, halting the words he feared were going to be no, and she feared would be yes.
“Let’s just leave it at that,” he suggested softly, then turned for his raincoat. He settled it on her shoulders, then shrugged into his leather jacket. “You drive. I don’t know how.”
In Jimmy’s big garage, Cee Cee ignored the Porsche, the BMW, and the Mercedes, rushing over to a bright green Nova with a black roof and white striping.
“Is this a ’69 Yenko? There were only forty of them made.”
“Thirty-seven,” the chauffeur corrected.
“She’s beautiful.” She looked to Max and explained that the hot muscle car was the brainchild of a Chevy dealer in Pennsylvania who’d gotten the factory cars through GM, then swapped out the Nova’s lightweight engine for an asphalt-ripping RPO L72 big block V-8, and tossed in a tachometer along with his “Yenko Super Cars” striping and badging, to create a mouth-watering classic. To Max it was just an ugly little car with all the sex appeal of a shoe box.
“Zero to sixty in under four seconds.” The husky sound of Cee Cee’s voice made him forget about the car as she nearly begged, “Can we take this?”
Max watched her hands caress the square hood and his throat tightened. “Give her the keys,” he told Pete.
She slid her long legs under the wheel. When the engine roared to life, Max buckled up apprehensively. She pumped the accelerator and the vehicle shuddered with power.
“Oh baby,” she purred, her hand stroking the gear shift in a way that made him go all hot and cold. “I like things that are fast, dangerous, and wickedly sexy,” she crooned, then grinned at Max. “That’s why I like you.”
She popped the clutch and sent them hurtling out of the garage.
AT A QUARTER to midnight, New Orleans was just waking up. Pedestrians crowded the narrow sidewalks, wandering in and out of the open doorways where blues and zydeco and laughter floated on the smoky air. Cee Cee parked on a side street, locked up the car, then started looking for the address Dolores had given her.
She paused, frowning. “This can’t be right.” The building was shuttered tight and dark. It looked more like an abandoned warehouse than a nightclub.
Max walked around her and headed down an alleyway barely wide enough for his shoulders. In back, they could hear the faint pulse of music and conversation seeping through a heavily barred door.
Cee Cee tapped twice, paused, then tapped again, feeling vaguely foolish using the code Dolores gave her.
The door opened and Max took a quick step back, his posture tense, his senses quivering. “What is this place?”
“Let’s go see.”
They went down a long, narrow hall with warped floors and worn rugs. It was almost too dark to see anything; the promise of light ahead kept them moving forward.
“Good evening. Welcome to Cheveux du Chien.” Hair of the Dog. A stunning woman greeted Max with a smile, but her face stiffened when she observed Cee Cee. “I think you’re in the wrong place, honey.” It wasn’t a friendly suggestion.
Max put his arm about Cee Cee’s shoulders. “She’s with me.”
The woman pouted. “No accounting for taste. This way.”
Max gave Cee Cee a hard squeeze and a chiding, “Behave.”
The club beat like a wild heart with sound and light. Café tables circled a dance floor, with two tiers of seating rising behind them. Exposed pipes and conduit were painted flat black. Chains and pulleys hung from the high ceiling, stirring in the breeze of the fans. The tables were full, the bar crowded with customers drinking and shouting over the hard techno music.
Max pulled up to scent the air. His expression grew strange—sharp with tension, yet dreamy at the same time. Cee Cee put her palm on his chest. His pulse lunged beneath it.
“Max, what is it?
“I don’t know,” he whispered, advancing into the room with a stiff-legged gait. She could feel him shaking, and suddenly she feared she’d made a terrible mistake bringing him into this unknown.
As they followed the waitress between the tables, heads turned, eyes fixed and followed, and postures became guarded. In the dark, smeary light, she thought she saw eyes flashing gold and red.
“Stay close to me,” Max rumbled, so low it was nearly a growl. She didn’t need to be convinced to take his arm. Tense and agitated, he sank into a booth, pulling her into his side. His body vibrated with tension, and she rubbed his hand as it spasmed around hers.
Scanning the crowd, Max found all focus on him. In hoarse amazement, he told her, “Charlotte, they’re all like me. I’m not alone!”
Seventeen
CEE CEE’S HAND tightened on his. Feeling very much like Porky and Baco, she tried to adopt a toughly confident manner, but something about the patrons of Cheveux du Chien was so alien, her skin prickled. She could see in them that difference that set Max apart. The quickness, the power, the strange attentiveness, the sudden feral gleam in the eyes. Eyes that gauged Max as a threat and her as . . . dinner.
Two men approached. One was huge, with a bald head and massive hands, and the other was all sleek muscle topped with a mane of bright red hair. The big one leaned on their table, showing his teeth. It wasn’t a smile.
“This is a private club.”
Max met his glare levelly. “So invite me to stay.”
“You have a lot of guts coming here. Or very little brain. Which is it?”
“You decide.”
“Do you know who we are? What we are?”
“Not by name, but yes, I know you. From the docks. From Vantour. What you are is like me.”
“Jacques LaRoche. This is Philo Tibideaux. And your friend?”
“She’s mine and not a part of this.” His hand tightened to quell Cee Cee’s objection.
LaRoche took Cee Cee’s other hand and tugged firmly. “Philo will entertain your friend while we talk.” He waited for Max to slowly, reluctantly, let her go.
“Keep her where I can see her.”
The redhead grinned. “Just a dance. Right over there.” He took the hand LaRoche passed to him, bending over it, running the tip of his tongue across her knuckles.
“Be careful with her,” Max warned mildly. “Her bite is much worse than her bark.” His gaze locked on Cee Cee’s for a moment before turning to LaRoche, who’d assumed her seat.
“So,” LaRoche began conversationally, “Legere passed his business to you. Amazing. Vantour wanted us at his back, but he would never allow us any power. He had no interest in our kind, only in what we could do for him. Legere was the same. What about you? What would you do for your kind, Savoie?”
“Tell me why I should care about people I don’t know, and who never reached out to me until I held something they wanted.”
“We were afraid of you. You walk on the outside of us. You stand in the shadows of those who would use us and hurt us. Why would we trust you?”
“Because I can protect you if you work with me.”
LaRoche’s eyes narrowed as he watched Savoie’s attention drift to the human woman he’d brought in with him. A weakness. “You don’t have that kind of power.”
“But I could, if I can control the docks. I didn’t kill Vantour.”
Huge shoulders shrugged. “We don’t care if you did or not. He enslaved us. We would follow someone who would set us free to walk as men do. Would that be you, Savoie? I’m not sure. You bring one of them in here with you, and ask for our trust. Leave her with us and you have it.”
Max’s stare fixed on his, chill and unblinking. “She brought me and she leaves with me. And if anyone gets in the way of that, I will crush you all and scatter your bones in the river.”
LaRoche chuckled. “You have a big reputation, Savoie, but we’ve never seen for ourselves the truth of what you can do. Take her if you can.” He sat back and waved a hand toward the dance floor.
Max slid out of the booth, the movement gradual and sleek. “We’ll talk again soon.”
“Perhaps we will.”
Max strode out onto the dance floor to pull Cee Cee out of Tibideaux’s loose embrace. “Time to go.”
Clued in by the quiet tension in his voice, Cee Cee was instantly alert to danger. And to the fact that they weren’t getting out of the club without a fight. There was subtle movement in the shadows all around them, figures circling, closing in until they stood in the center of the dance floor under the strobing lights. Like wolves surrounding sheep. And she thought suddenly of Benjamin Spratt.
Only, Max Savoie was no sheep, and she hadn’t been a little lamb for a long, long time.
Max said, “I’ll distract them. You get the hell out of here.”
Her gaze flashed up at him. “Run and leave you? I don’t think so. I’m not much for running.”
He cursed softly as he stripped off his jacket, tossing it away. He assumed a slightly crouched position, looking lethal as he said quietly, “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
“I was about to tell you the same thing.”
He caught her quick grin before Tibideaux grabbed her arm, too swiftly for her to react in her own defense. He flung her into the group of tables, where ranks quickly closed her off from Max. Sprawled on the floor, she heard a hair-raising sound ripple through the room, a rumble starting low and building in intensity into dangerous snarls. She stood to see Max smiling ferociously, his hands beckoning.
“Step up,” he called with mocking amusement. “Who wants to see what I can do?”
He made fists and when his hand opened again, each finger was tipped with a razorlike claw.
He didn’t wait for them to make a move. He grabbed the back of Tibideaux’s head and drove his face down into the floor, then threw him up into the second tier of tables. And then they were on him.
Cee Cee pushed her way through the fringe of onlookers. She’d been in her share of hand-to-hand situations, but she’d never heard sounds as horrible as these—the snarls, the yips, the roars, the groans, the awful thuds of body contact and rips through fabric and flesh.
Max became hidden by the tangle of combatants scrambling up and tumbling down, then he rolled free and up to his feet. He hadn’t changed form, though most of the others had become variations on the creature she’d seen in her bedroom—blazing eyes, perverted canine features, and deadly fangs and claws.
Max was breathing hard, streaked with blood: some of it his, most of it theirs. He dodged a paw aimed at his throat, nearly buckling as deep groves tore through his shoulder. He grabbed his attacker’s arm and pivoted, using his body to bowl over a half dozen assailants. Then, in a quick evasive move, he vaulted onto one of the pool tables.
“Max!”
He turned to catch the two pool cues she tossed up to him. Grabbing the handles of a couple of beer pitchers, she rolled up onto the table beside him, smashing the heavy glass on the side rails before standing with bristling shards rimming the knuckles of either hand. His gaze took her in from head to toe as she braced beside him for battle.
“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he vowed, tone rough with passion. “I want to take you down and have you right here.”
“Pick a better time and place, Savoie, and I’m all yours.” A quick slash from her left hand sent one of the mutated creatures falling back with a howl. The others became more wary.
Max swung the pool cues in a dangerous arc to keep those on the other side of the table at bay. “Then let’s make short work of them so we can get on to better things.”
“Max?”
“Charlotte?”
“I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you.”
He inhaled sharply, but didn’t dare look at her. He struck out with swift, stunning blows to knock several aggressors to the floor. “You pick now to tell me? When I can’t do anything about it?” His voice was gruff with emotion.
“Get us out of here alive, Savoie, and you can do anything you like.”
“Consider me very highly motivated.”
And he jumped right into the thick of them with a roaring cry.
What they had on him in numbers was overcome by the constant shifts of his physical form. They simply couldn’t get a grip on him before he’d alter in size, in shape, from man to towering monster to sleek wolfish creature, each transition smooth and seamless to the confining limits of his clothing. They were nowhere near his match with their bulky, furred bodies and brutish power. And while he was careful not to kill, he was fierce beyond comprehension, shattering bones, tearing with fangs and claws through an increasingly smaller force as the injured crawled away to lick their wounds. Hardly unscathed but completely unstoppable, he whirled fearlessly to take on whomever was next.
Watching him, a huge swell of emotion overtook Charlotte. For a moment there was nothing but him, glistening with sweat and blood, savage, wild, yet tightly controlled. My God, he was magnificent! And he was hers. Nothing in the known universe could be as stunningly amazing, as humbling, as searingly hot, as knowing he was fighting for her. He was also doing it to impress the hell out of his kind with his wicked display of alpha dog superiority, but that was exciting, too. A hard fist of lust and longing and pride made her go hot and cold and shivery. When they left this place, he was going to take her the way he had on the side of the road, with hard, claiming purpose, and she was going to do everything she could think of to encourage him.
Then a larage hand clamped about her neck from behind and Tibideaux shouted, “Back down, Savoie, or I’ll tear out her pretty
throat.”
Tibideaux dragged Cee Cee from the pool table, his thumbnail poised to rip through her jugular.
Max paused for a terrified heartbeat before saying firmly, “Take him, Charlotte.” He was moving even before she drove back with her head and bit down on the sensitive membrane between Tibideaux’s thumb and forefinger, making him howl.
LaRoche looked shocked as Max lunged through his minions to take him to the floor. The fallen man’s windpipe clamped by his hand, Max leaned in until he was inches from LaRoche’s face, letting his own shift into its vicious alter ego.
“Enough of the foreplay. Do we stop this, or do you die?”
LaRoche put out his hands, fingers spread wide, and stared up at Max in amazement. “You’re everything they said you were. I’ve never seen a pureblood before.”
“Do you yield, or do I have to pee on you to mark my territory?”
LaRoche laughed at his audacity. “Let’s talk, Savoie.”
Max pulled him to his feet. Shifting into his human form in a shredded tee shirt, licking the blood from around his mouth, he then turned to seek out Charlotte. Tibideaux still held her by the back of her shirt. A seismic rumble came from Max’s throat. “Let her go before I eat your face.”
Tibideaux let go.
She didn’t run to him, or cast herself into his arms. She approached him with a long, steady stride, caught either side of his jaw between her hands, and kissed him hard and deep. When she pulled back, his eyes were molten.
“Wait for me at the house, Charlotte. I need to do some business here.”
“Play nice, baby.” She took his lips again, softly this time, then picked her way over the fallen without looking down.
“Quite a woman,” LaRoche allowed.
“And this was just our second date.”
HIS ROOM WAS dark when he stepped inside. When he saw the empty bed and the evidence that she hadn’t returned to it, his heart plummeted.
“Max?”
She stepped in from the balcony, where she’d been watching for him. She was wearing just his shirt. This time she ran, hurtling into his arms, clinging as tightly about him as shrink-wrap.
