by Jory Strong
“You,” she whispered, pushing back against him.
There was no way he could draw it out any longer, no way he could tease the two of them higher. With a groan, Trace plunged his cock into her tight little channel.
Christ, he was never going to get enough of her.
Being inside her was pure heaven and pure hell. His hips bucked, driving his cock deeper into the tight fist of her sheath. He wanted it to last forever. He wanted to come right now. The conflicting needs only intensified the sensations whipping through his body.
Underneath him, Aislinn shifted, opening herself so that he drove deeper into her body on the next stroke. Shards of white-hot demand raced down his spine and through his balls and cock.
It was more than he could stand.
He reached around and took Aislinn’s clit between his fingers, squeezing it in time to his strokes. “Come for me, baby,” Trace demanded as he pressed wet kisses against her neck. She cried out, fighting his demand until his fingers tightened on her sensitive nub and his teeth locked onto her shoulder.
Her tight walls clamped down on him as waves of heat washed over his cock. There was no way Trace could hold back any longer. He groaned, pumping his hips in a frantic fury as he came.
It had never been like this before, never. She made him want to dominate her, protect her, care for her.
Trace couldn’t bring himself to separate from her. He knew he had to get back to work, but he didn’t want to leave her body.
What was he going to do about this? About her?
He shifted so that they were on their sides, his cock still held in her tight depths. “How’d you get out of my house this morning?” he asked, not wanting to think about how it felt as though she belonged here, how every time he fucked her, his dick felt like it was home and didn’t need to go anywhere else, ever.
Aislinn tensed at his question and Trace closed his eyes as her snug walls clamped down on him, making him pump involuntarily into her. Every cell in his body had screamed in satisfaction when he’d come, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t ready to do it all over again.
She traced a finger down his arm, hesitating so long that he didn’t think she was going to answer. “Did Conner come by?” he prompted, still sure that his friend wouldn’t actually give out the code, but not entirely sure that he wouldn’t have freed Aislinn.
“No. I could tell which keys you touched. From there it was just trial and error.”
Trace rubbed his cheek against her silky hair. Damn, he was getting too comfortable if he hadn’t noticed his alarm keys getting worn. Yeah, it might take more math and more effort than your basic criminal was willing to put out, but noticing which keys were faded and then using multiple number combinations wasn’t exactly complicated. He’d have to get the alarm company out to replace the keys.
“Can I trust you to stay here when I go back to work?” he asked. When she didn’t immediately agree, Trace added, “I can’t concentrate on who killed your friend if I have to spend my time worrying that some reporter is going to get a hold of you and give the killer something to be afraid about.”
“For today, I’ll stay. I can’t promise past that.”
Trace stroked her breast, pinching and tugging first one nipple and then the other before sliding his hand over her soft stomach and cupping her mound. When Aislinn shuddered and pressed even more tightly against him, he smiled, confident that he could convince her to stay.
* * * * *
“How’d the press conference go?” Miguel asked Conner when he and Storm got back to the bullpen.
“Fucking nuts. It’s a free-for-all. Even the Captain almost lost his cool. Some nutso psychic named Madame Ava stood up and claimed she’d done a tarot card reading for Dean and warned him that she saw danger. Not only that, but she claims someone else is going to die. Jesus, where do these people come from? You think danger and death is hard to find? Just get in your car. Or go downtown after hours.”
Miguel snorted with laughter. Storm frowned but didn’t say anything.
“Dylan check in yet?” Miguel asked.
“Yeah. No luck with any of Dean’s neighbors. He’s on the way to the Morrison house right now. But my guess is they won’t give him jack shit. What about with you guys?”
Miguel looked to Storm and she was the one to fill Conner in on what they’d learned at Dean’s place. “Do you have access to Aislinn’s apartment?” Conner asked. “It’d help if we could get a picture of the crystal piece that she thinks is missing.”
Storm frowned at the way he’d phrased his wording, but didn’t call him on it. “Sure, I can get a key from Sophie. If she doesn’t know where Aislinn keeps her sketches, then I can call Trace’s place and ask her.” She looked down at the book that she’d removed from Dean’s house. “What about this, you want me to follow up, maybe see if Dean has been in contact with the author?”
Conner and Miguel exchanged a look. “Sure, go ahead,” Conner answered, glancing at the book and only barely able to suppress a smile as he noted the title again. Tales of a Psychic Investigator.
Storm gritted her teeth but managed to sound calm when she said, “I’ll head out then.”
As soon as she left the room, Conner laughed. “Shit. That was close. Another second and I probably would have managed to piss her off.” He shook his head. “You got a take on any of this?”
“Other than feeling like I stepped into an alternate reality and any minute now my head is going to start spinning around, shades of The Exorcist? No.”
* * * * *
“You have five seconds to move before I arrest you for trespassing, obstructing justice and interfering with the duties of an officer,” Storm said as she came to a halt near the back stairs leading to Aislinn’s apartment over Inner Magick.
The man sprawled out gracefully on the stairs grinned and slowly stood. “There’s no need to get nasty, Officer, though I can understand why the police department is a little touchy these days. Should I assume the rumors are correct and Aislinn Windbourne is involved in the Patrick Dean murder? Or is the police department looking for a psychic to help them solve the case?”
Between the macho homicide cops and this guy, it took a lot of effort for Storm to rein in her temper. Cocky men set her teeth on edge. “And you are?”
“David Colvin.”
“The Channel 6 reporter?”
“I see my fame precedes me. Good. It saves so much time. You can understand now why it wouldn’t be in the best interests of the police department to haul me off in handcuffs. Freedom of the press and so on.”
Storm frowned at his arrogant grin, at the way his eyes danced. He was enjoying this and she’d love to end his little party. But not without the Captain’s say-so. Shit, why did all the nice-looking guys have to be macho assholes or slippery scum, like David Colvin? Yeah, she knew who he was. She’d made a point of reading all the newspapers and watching as many of the news reports as possible before she’d made her pitch to the Captain and gotten the temporary transfer to work on the Dean case.
David Colvin might work for a respectable news organization, but he had the soul of a tabloid exploiter. His lead-ins had been the most inflammatory so far and he’d been the one to scoop Patrick Dean’s connection to the Morrison kidnapping case.
“Freedom of the press doesn’t mean freedom to trespass or interfere with a police investigation,” Storm said, stepping forward and hoping that he wasn’t going to push the issue.
Colvin waved a hand in the space between the building and his body. “By all means, please proceed.” Storm gritted her teeth and climbed the stairs, grateful that she could squeeze past him without touching him.
Once inside Aislinn’s apartment she paused in order to look around. She’d never been upstairs before. Storm gave a self-conscious laugh. In some ways she was as bad as the homicide cops. She’d expected to find a fortune-teller’s den complete with beads hanging from the doorways and occult symbols on the walls. Instead she fou
The cop in her couldn’t keep from looking around and trying to get a better sense of who Aislinn was. It was a risk defending Aislinn and taking what she’d said at the murder scene as absolute truth, but it wasn’t a huge risk, especially for a cop who wasn’t aiming for a detective’s shield.
Storm was a beat cop and probably would be for the rest of her career. It suited her. So if word got around that she hung out with and believed in psychics, it probably wouldn’t impact her work with the department—at least not too much. But it was still better to be safe than sorry.
Most of what she knew about Aislinn, she knew because of Sophie. Yeah, Sophie could sometimes go over the deep end and totally immerse herself when she got interested in a subject—like this thing with crystals—but Sophie was intelligent and analytical, so she wasn’t an easy mark for a con artist.
Storm had to smile and admit that Aislinn would probably have made a good con artist. Damn if she hadn’t done something to Trace! That alone was worth putting up with the egos in homicide. No way would she have ever guessed that Trace would fall and fall hard for someone who was so delicate and sensitive that she reminded Storm of an elf or a fairy.
Shaking off her amusement, Storm wandered through the apartment, just getting a feel for the place. She grimaced, aware that she was in fact trying to “open herself” to the vibes. Then she had to grin. Maybe she’d been hanging around with Sophie too much lately. Maybe this New Age stuff was starting to sink in a little too deeply.
But then again, all the best cops had something besides years of experience. They had instincts, gut feels, which Storm theorized was part survival instinct and part something else, something extrasensory.
There were only three rooms in the apartment, four if you counted the tiny closet of a bathroom. The kitchen was clean and clear of clutter, the sink empty of dishes. Aislinn had plants lined up along the windowsill underneath a small crystal arrangement.
Crystals sparkled in the muted light, holding Storm’s attention momentarily and filling her with sense of being safe, protected. And yet there was a haunting loneliness underneath. For a split second a flute’s melody whispered across her consciousness in a distant, sad song, but disappeared when she blinked and looked away from the crystals.
“I am really losing it now,” Storm said, hoping that the sound of her own voice would dispel the otherworld eeriness that still hovered around her.
She moved to Aislinn’s bedroom. A similar crystal arrangement hung from the window above the bed, but Storm was careful not to look at it. “Chicken,” she muttered, moving to the worktable where Sophie said that Aislinn kept her designs.
Out of curiosity Storm flipped though the papers on the table. The crystal arrangements were in varying degrees of completion. Some appeared simple, others more complex. But what caught Storm’s attention were the notations scribbled in various places on each design. The script was like nothing she’d ever seen, and yet it was clearly a written language and not a collection of symbols.
She bent and opened the filing cabinet next to the workbench. The design that Aislinn had done for Patrick Dean was where it was supposed to be. There were no notations on it other than Dean’s name, the date it was delivered and the source of the crystals that had gone into its making.
Storm flipped through the rest of the files in the drawer. None of the finished designs had the strange script on them.
It was a mystery that had Storm’s attention. Her own “extra senses” hummed every time she looked at the script.
She knew that she didn’t really have any business investigating further, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking around the office for a copy machine so that she could take a sample of the script with her.
Not finding a copier, she took her cop’s notebook out, but gave up in less than a minute. The script was too intricate for her to duplicate.
“Damn.” She put the notebook back in her pocket and made a quick pass through the desk. No tracing paper either. “Guess I’ll have to find the answer the old-fashioned way, by asking,” Storm muttered as she put the Dean folder under her arm and checked to make sure that there was nothing showing that could feed the media frenzy.
She took one more look around the bedroom, this time forgetting to avoid the crystal hanging in front of the window. Once again it caught her attention, trapping her.
Though the arrangement looked the same as the one in the kitchen, the feelings were stronger in the bedroom. Storm forced herself to focus more intently on the crystal, to “hear it resonate” as Sophie liked to say.
Safety. That’s what Storm got when she didn’t fight the skepticism and denial. The crystal arrangement was there to ward against danger. But it seemed to amplify the other, too, the sense of loneliness and isolation.
Despite her open mind, Storm’s heart beat a little faster as the melancholy, distant song of a flute whispered through her consciousness. Okay, this is getting a little creepy.
She couldn’t stop the shiver that washed over her. Aislinn’s father was a famous musician. A flute player.
Remembering the conversation that Conner and Aislinn had at the bar about her father’s music, Storm wondered if maybe a CD was playing somewhere in the apartment. But as soon as she tried to pinpoint where the music was coming from, it was gone, along with the other sensations.
“This is so creepy,” Storm said, more than ready to get back to the station. But her curiosity was peeked about Aislinn’s father.
She found the music that Aislinn had mentioned, but there was no picture of the band on any of the six CDs. In fact, after Storm did another hasty tour around the apartment, she knew that there were no personal pictures anywhere. No awards. No anything, other than the drawings, that provided a clue as to Aislinn’s life.
That made the cop in Storm extremely nervous.
She liked Aislinn, but the lack of personal memorabilia bothered Storm on a profound level. Only people with something to hide were so thorough in getting rid of everything from their past.
As far as she could tell, the only thing that tied Aislinn to anyone were the CDs. Storm frowned. Who was to say that Jessie Wolf was Aislinn’s father? She didn’t have his last name.
Storm didn’t like where this was going. But she was a cop and there was no way that she could just look the other way. Maybe it was time to do a background check on Aislinn.
She thought about the drawings with the strange script. The language might hold a clue to her origins.
Damn, she hated this. Aislinn was Sophie’s friend, but when it came to police work, friendships couldn’t matter.
Storm retrieved the drawings, telling herself that she could justify taking them since Aislinn had said that she needed to finish some crystal work for her clients and there was no way she could come to her apartment and get them herself.
It was a stretch. Storm had thought Aislinn was talking about actual crystals and tools, but at least this gave her a chance to find out more. And it wasn’t as though she was looking for admissible evidence.
Storm grimaced, for the first time thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have asked the Captain to let her on this case. But it didn’t stop her from checking the files under her arm in order to make sure that there was no hint of what they contained before she left the apartment.
She wasn’t surprised to find the reporter—Colvin—lounging against the railing in a position that would force her to pass within inches of him. She tightened her grip on the files. If he forced her to drop them, then she was going to haul him in—media feeding frenzy or not.
* * * * *
Trace heard his cell phone ringing somewhere in the hallway, probably where his pants lay near the front door. The image made him grin.
Since his number wasn’t common knowledge he didn’t need too many guesses to figure that it was work-related. Damn. He could stay like this, cuddled up to Aislinn with his cock snugged into her tight little pussy all day. He grunted and pulled away, hating the sensation of being outside her body.
“Dilessio,” he said after he got to the end of the hallway and retrieved the phone.
“I take it that you’re still interrogating Aislinn.” Conner’s mocking voice had Trace grimacing. If he wasn’t careful he was going to be the butt of a lot of jokes.
“Just about to leave. Anything new?”
“Yeah, the Captain wants you to bring her to the station.”
“What!”
“Yeah, I knew you weren’t going to like it.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line before Conner added, “There’s more. You want it now, or when you get here?”
“Spit it out.”
“Dylan’s ready to bring the Morrisons in. By the time he called to set up an appointment they were willing to talk—as long as the psychic from Inner Magick was present. Shocked the shit out of Dylan.”
“Don’t drag this out, what does it have to do with Aislinn?”
“The Morrisons think the psychic at Inner Magick is the one who located their son and they want to meet said person—in exchange for all the details of their meet with Dean. They have us and they know it. The last thing the department needs is for people to think we’re harassing them.”
“Christ, these people want to be in the spotlight.”
“Yeah, that’s what I would have thought, too. But some new information has come in. So when Dylan called, the Captain agreed, as long as the Morrisons were willing to come to the station.”
Fury settled in Trace’s gut. “What new information?”
“Look, just bring her in. We can settle it here. See you in a few.”
Trace snapped the cell phone closed, pissed at Conner for dodging the question and hanging up. Fuck, this whole case was spinning out of control. He felt like his head was going to explode. He settled for storming back to the bedroom and hovering over Aislinn as he said, “The Morrisons want to see you.”
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