“Really? Interesting. I wonder why they gave up.”
“Too cold?”
“Hopefully it’s that and not another incident.”
“Good point.”
They were silent for most of the walk down the short block down I Street to Fourteenth.
“I worked in the North Tower,” she said, finally. “When it came down, I was crushed under the concrete.” She didn’t look at him when he pulled her closer, held her tighter. As if it were just small talk, she continued. “The Sh’Aitan retrieved me. Healed me. Obviously I’m a little older than I look.”
Now she did look at him. Her smile was a bit fragile. A little bit wobbly, but that was the only emotion she showed when talking about the impossible.
“I spent six or seven years in coldsleep.”
“Coldsleep. Holy gods and guardians.”
“Yeah. Tell me. And magic and monsters, oh my.”
“But your shields…” he began.
She waved a hand. “All mechanical, like I said, not magical. They’re dampers or resistors or something like that. They prevent any Earth-level tech scanning. As far as I knew, as far as the Sh’Aitan know, Earth has no magic.”
“Your shields are designed to block it. Pretty strange for someone who doesn’t believe in it. And for someone who can see my sigil.”
She looked up, frowning. “Your what?”
“The mark I drew in the air.”
“Ah. So that’s what it’s called. You freaked me out with that one. How do you do it?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you, remember?”
She laughed and he grinned, and they walked on, but she had to admit, she still wanted to know. Wanted to understand his world. How his power worked. Finally she said, “It’s a serious problem if my employers find out you know about them.”
“Don’t even let it cross your mind,” he said. “Your secrets are safe, as I hope mine will be.”
She nodded. “You have my word.”
“Want me to go with you tomorrow?” Aiden asked as they turned onto Fourteenth. They’d come around the block and up K Street, past the cross street that led to Georgia Brown’s, as they’d talked.
“Where?” she asked, puzzled by the change of subject. She was usually sharper, but he was affecting her, like an insidious drug. His story made her hurt for him. Understand him. Relate to his pain.
“To the towpath, along the canal,” he said. “You need to catch this Ty-Op thing, right? Any special equipment besides luck?”
“Several things, yes,” she replied, still mentally shifting gears. “I’ve got cases, gear for it. I wasn’t going to go tomorrow, even though I need to. I figured my hauling out steamer trunk-sized boxes of equipment isn’t going to make the Federal boys all cheery, then they’ll get pissy when I won’t open them and show them the contents. You know how that ends up.”
“Yeah, I get the picture. I figure they’ve got warrants all ready and waiting. Better not to push it. After another day or so of down time, they’ll be less watchful. I hope. What about Thursday?”
Her mind had gone to logistics, the Feds, and the Ty-op, so once again, she was off balance. “Thursday what?”
“The canal. We’d better go early. Even on a cold day, the path gets a lot of traffic.”
“I don’t think I agreed for you to go with me,” she said.
“You want to see how persuasive I can be?”
Crap. Resigned to the fact that he was going with her, she shook her head and saw him grin. Fine. If he could help her pinpoint and catch the Ty-Op, she could get out of this mess, and maybe head for the Riviera for a few days.
The thought was less appealing, until her traitorous mind put Aiden, in swim trunks, in the picture.
“Okay,” she said, shoving the visual aside. “It will be boring, but yes. It’ll be nice to have some company.”
“Good, now that we’ve got that settled, tell me more about your work.”
“Can’t I just show you my etchings, instead?”
Aiden grinned. Her laughter was rich and warm, like good brandy.
He tucked her back against his side. “So is the Opthi-doodle dangerous?”
He felt her giggle escape before he heard it. “Makes it sound like one of those fancy poodle crossbreeds. But like any animal, it can be dangerous, if it feels cornered.”
“Good to know,” he said, as he handed the ticket to the valet.
Aiden slowed the car in front of the building, scanning the front portico and street as they turned to go down into the garage. Cait leaned forward, checking it out as well.
“No reporters out front.”
“Guess they’re still chasing O’Reilly’s death,” she speculated as they pulled in. As they walked up the interior stairs from the garage to the lobby door, she was trying to figure out how to say good night. How could she part with him before they got to her door?
If he came inside, she knew good and well he wouldn’t leave. The pull was too strong, and Cait had been lonely for too long. She reached for the lobby door before he could.
“Wait,” he said putting his hand on her arm, keeping them in the garage stairwell. Zing. The electricity rocketed through her and desire sizzled between them.
“Aiden, I…” she started, but Aiden pulled her close.
“I want to kiss you goodnight, Cait. However,” he said with a wink, “I don’t want to do it under the watchful eyes of the Feds.”
“Security camera?”
“Ve haf our vays.” He mock-leered. He flicked a finger up toward the tiny mechanical watcher. That must have done something because he said, “Taken care of. Now come here.”
He drew her in and she fit against him like a matched set. Where she was soft, he was hard, and his lean, strong body felt like heaven. Better, in a lot of ways, than anyone she’d ever…
Don’t go there.
For right now, she didn’t want to think about who she was, or what he was. She wanted to feel. He lowered his head, surprising her by kissing her forehead first, then the tip of her nose, before finding her lips with his own.
At first, he kept it light, a teasing brush and release. She was the one who pushed further.
So much for saying no. Fire exploded between them and she ran her hands under his coat, pressing him tighter to her body, sliding along all that muscle, wanting to feel the heat of him.
When he finally pulled back, she realized he’d lifted her. Her legs were twined around him, her back pressed to the wall of the stairwell. His erection was huge and hard and when he shifted, she slid agonizingly along it, torturing herself with the feel of him.
“Holy gods,” he groaned against her mouth, and then went for her jawline, headed for her neck.
“Aiden wait.” She was panting.
Not what I’m here for.
He stopped, but he was breathing as hard as she was.
“Some goodnight kiss,” she said, resting her had on his chest as he eased her back to the ground.
“You’re good at that.
“We’re good at it together.”
He kissed her again, and as soon as their lips touched, all engines throttled back up to full-out passion. But he seemed to catch himself. Her whole body screamed don’t stop as he pulled back and put his hands on the wall beside her head. He closed his eyes and eased a few inches farther away, as though he had to force the distance. Her body missed the heat of him like she’d miss air if she couldn’t breathe. “If we keep this up, we’ll be here till morning,” he murmured.
The sudden visual of him throwing her over his shoulder and hauling her to his bed hit her mind so hard she gasped. She had the uncanny sense that it was his visual, not hers, and that was weird as hell.
The mental image was far too vivid for her peace of mind.
“Tell me your top five favorite action flicks,” he said.
“What?” She tilted her head back to look at him, puzzled.
“I have to think about somethin
g besides hauling you off to bed, or kissing you again.”
She frowned. What was he talking about? He grinned, glanced down. He nodded wryly when she followed his gaze. “I really don’t want to walk through the lobby with a massive hard-on. We do have to walk past the lobby guard, you know.”
Cait muffled a bawdy laugh. “Oh.”
“Yeah, you laugh, wench. Just because you’re not so obvious…” he teased.
She held up her hands in surrender. “You’re right. Okay, action adventure. Anything with Bruce Lee,” she began. When she’d managed to narrow it to five, he’d relaxed. A little.
He flicked his finger at the camera again, and twitched off the spell. “Surveillance is back,” he commented, as he pressed the bar on the exit and held the door open for her.
“Thanks. What are your top five?”
Before he could rattle them off, Mrs. Potts came down the stairs and called across the lobby.
“You’ll never believe what’s happened now!”
Chapter Twenty
Mrs. Potts hurried toward them, her face alight.
“You’ll just never believe it,” she said, then came to a stop. “Oh my, I forgot! You were going to have your date tonight. Did you have fun?” Her gaze swiveled from one to the other as she scanned their faces intently.
Cait smiled, nodding.
“We did,” Aiden answered for them both as he took the older lady’s hand. “Now what’s all the fuss?”
“Oh, my goodness, you’ll never believe,” she said for the third time as she slipped her hand free so she could use both to gesticulate with dramatic glee. “They found the missing former senator, the one from New Mexico. He’s been killed!”
“No.” The word popped out of Cait’s mouth in a flat denial, causing them all to turn their attention to her. She frowned and tried to turn her annoyance into a look of concern. Not that she wasn’t concerned, but jeez, couldn’t she catch a break? “That’s terrible!” she exclaimed. “How did it happen?”
“I’m not sure yet. CNN and Fox are playing the same thing over and over. They found him about seven this evening, but no word yet on when he died or how.”
“Was his aide killed too?” Aiden wanted to know, asking the same thing Cait wanted to know. Was it about cheating senators?
“No, no, he was all alone,” Mrs. Potts explained. “They found him dead in his vacation home. Very bloody, is all they’ll say. One of his security team went to check to see if he was at the vacation home—don’t know why they didn’t think of that before. They won’t say if it was like Senator Hathaway, God rest his soul, or the other one, but…” Mrs. Potts paused dramatically. “Being dead would certainly seem to connect them.”
“That’s why the press abandoned the front gate and the garage,” Cait said, her face set.
“Exactly!” Mrs. Potts beamed at her as if she were a particularly bright pupil. “I’m so glad they’re gone. The press that is,” she clarified. “I rather enjoyed all the company with the police,” she said wistfully. “The CSI folks were here for most of the evening, but they’ve gone as well.”
Aiden took her elbow to steady her as they mounted the stairs. “Quieter then, I guess,” he said, and Cait caught him scanning the upper foyer, ceiling to floor. A lone uniformed man sat in a chair, his cellphone balanced in one hand, sitting outside the door to Three-A.
“Hello,” Cait said, but the man didn’t respond. He just gave them all a nod and returned to some sort of beeping game.
“Now then, you all have a good rest of your evening,” Mrs. Potts seemed to suddenly remember once more that they’d come from a date and needed to say good night. “I’m going to go see if CNN has anything new.”
By mutual accord, they waited until Mrs. Potts’s door closed behind her, then Aiden walked Cait to her door. The guard was ignoring them.
“Let’s compare calendars before we say goodnight,” he said, “And make some notes for that next meeting we were discussing.
Cait glanced at him, startled, and he bent to whisper in her ear. “I remembered something.”
“Yes. A good idea. Okay,” she managed, slightly off balance at the thought of his being in the apartment.
She fumbled with her locks, hyperaware of Aiden. She felt the energy that still sizzled between them, knowing he was coming inside, and wanting him there for all the wrong reasons. He felt so real. So alive. He’d made her feel alive. More than she had in years.
She recovered her wits when the guard shifted in his chair.
Cait finally got the door unlocked and shut it behind them, focusing on her breathing. She had a serious problem. Aiden had knocked her off balance even before he kissed her. Now that he had, holy cow. How was she going to get back to center?
Not what she needed.
She threw the bolts and tossed their coats over the back of the sofa. She was headed to the kitchen when he said, “I need to ask you about that smell at the murder scene.”
She spun to face him. “What? You want to talk about that now?”
“Yeah, I’d forgotten about it, but given the speed this killer is moving with, I don’t think it can wait. Remember the night of the murder when we were in my kitchen? Detective Herman interrupted us, but you said something about the smell.”
This time when she turned toward the kitchen, he followed, still talking. “This is the first time we’ve been alone in a place where I could ask you about it. I noticed it too. I think it’s important.”
She pulled a can of Coke and a can of ginger ale from the fridge and waggled them. He took the ginger ale and popped the top.
“Okay then,” she said, regrouping to focus on murder. “I can’t place it, but it pinged something in my memory. It was sharp. Acrid. Rotten.”
“Musky too,” he mused. “It was here in the building the morning before you moved in. That’s one of the things I couldn’t get past when I was trying to figure out what you were, why you were here, and what you were doing.”
Cait faced him. “I didn’t smell anything like that when I arrived.” She matched him, leaning back on the counter across from him in the neat, galley-style kitchen.
“Understandable. It was fairly faint, and it was hours before you arrived. I have a heightened sense of smell, partly because of what I do. Whatever it was, it was here, in the upper lobby. I could smell it even over the blood and smoke on my clothes.” Aiden winced and looked away, and Cait realized he’d revealed a whole lot more than he’d meant to.
“Blood and smoke?”
He looked pained. “Yeah. I’d been out of town, helping a…friend with a problem.”
“A house fire?”
Aiden’s grin flashed. “No.” He heaved in a deep breath. “Ah, hell. In for a penny, in for a pound.” As he told her about what he’d fought the night before she moved in, Cait felt the mental shift. Adjusting to the knowledge that what he faced, and fought, was as real and quite possibly as dangerous as the races she came up against.
She’d had plenty of adjusting to do when she woke up in the medical suite of the Kith ship and learned there were not a few, but hundreds, of other races out there in the universe. So what, exactly, was giving her so much trouble about other things on her own planet?
It popped into her mind like a balloon. Earth was her safe haven. The solid, steady place of her childhood. The unchanging sanctity of terra firma.
But it had always been magical, if Aiden was telling her the truth, and he was. Just because she hadn’t known it, that didn’t make it untrue.
Suck it up and deal, marine.
He was taking the first step. He offered her something of his world so she could feel better about sharing the strangeness of hers.
“Anyway,” he finished, “I wasn’t exactly freshly showered when I got back. But I smelled it when I hit the top of the stairs. It cut right through the smoke and sweat. It was that strong.” He shrugged. “Later that day, you moved in.”
“And the next day three people are ki
lled in the apartment next door,” she stated the conclusion, and even more pieces of Aiden’s logic clicked into place for her.
“Odd sequence of events,” he said, and set his can of ginger ale on the counter. He crossed his arms. “I’ve smelled my share of human death. The smell wasn’t human, but I’ve never come across it before, and you noticed it too. I think it’s important, and I’ve never believed in coincidence.” Cait took a long drink of Coke as she considered. “I don’t either,” she said. “And there were the claws Mrs. Potts mentioned. If she said she heard claws, I believe her.”
“Very perceptive of you,” Aiden said. He looked straight at her. “What has claws and smells like that?”
Cait shoved both hands into her hair and held on, like she could somehow give her brain support in jogging loose the answer.
“God only knows. I’ve been trying to figure it out. It’s like it’s dancing around right on the edge of what I know—something I remember from my training–but I can’t quite reach it.” She swiped at the air in a physical demonstration of trying to catch the elusive memory.
Closing the gap between them, Aiden caught her hand.
“That’s way more than I’ve gotten,” he said. “You’ll get to it.” He stroked his thumb across her palm, a gesture probably meant as reassurance, but Cait felt like she’d hit a live wire. Her gaze rocketed to his and she saw a flare of surprise in his eyes. He stepped closer. His clothes brushed hers, but they didn’t touch.
He took her other wrist gently, disentangling it from her hair. Watching her, he brought that hand to his mouth, kissed the palm, and made everything in her scream yes!
Their mouths met and the kiss was searing, demanding. He lifted her onto the counter and her legs went around him automatically. He was already hard. Ready. Everything they’d tamped down after their first fiery connection in the stairwell roared to life, and threatened to consume her.
Suddenly, she wanted him fiercely, wanted to feel the substance, the reality of him. She tightened her arms, and he gave a grunt of surprise but returned the favor. He let one hand trail up to caress her hair. The other went down to her ass.
Modern Magic Page 109
