by Jenn Stark
Warrick sighed, remembering the barest hint he’d gotten of his long-lost state of grace. “Let’s just say I think the archangel will be glad to have this drug out of circulation.”
Finn snorted. “Oh, I bet he will.”
“Warrick?”
He turned to see Maria standing uncertainly behind him. She held up the phone. “Stan still thinks you’re DEA, because that’s who’s breathing down his neck. He wants to check in with your superiors, coordinate response.”
Warrick winced, lifting his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Tell him that only the minimum number of operatives should be on-site. That I’ll have my guy contact him, and he shouldn’t act before that.”
“You’re going to have someone call him?” she asked, her disbelief obvious.
“Of course not.” Warrick scowled. “If he needs a name, say I’m with…I don’t know.” He searched his mind for the last government office he’d allied himself with. “Office of Strategic Services.”
Maria blinked. “Office of—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, no.” Beside him, Finn barked a laugh. “Do not tell him that. Tell whoever Stan is that Warrick’s so deep undercover that he will not be recognized by the DEA no matter what, and that Stan’s got to play it cool.”
“Right.”
Maria turned back to her phone, and Finn took another right, bouncing back onto Hollywood Boulevard. “Target is up on the right. I’m going to go back to their medical/special guest services loading dock. They know we’re coming.”
“Thanks,” Warrick said.
“Anytime.” Finn said. He stopped at a light and looked up to Warrick. Maria’s voice still murmured in the background. “The rest of the Syx aren’t going to be able to go in there, I’m thinking. Michael’s setting this up so it’s your party.”
“I know.” Warrick gripped Finn’s shoulder. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Finn turned into the bright façade of the Pinnacle Hotel. “That you will, my brother. That you will.”
Chapter Fourteen
Maria grabbed the key card from Warrick and moved toward the elevator, wondering if anyone in the hotel would recognize him. Takio might know her, but with her long black hair and Latina features, Maria was relatively inconspicuous in LA. She could blend.
Warrick could blend too, only not at all for normal reasons. At six foot six, he definitely stood out in this town of actors and musicians, so she figured he’d at a minimum present himself as shorter. But would he go for boring too? Was that even an option for a six-thousand-year-old demon killer?
She snorted. She still wasn’t sure how the glamour thing worked. If someone took Warrick’s picture, then what? It came through only as a blur? That might have worked in the early 1900s, but nobody would believe today’s cameras screwed up every shot.
Early 1900s. And the way Warrick spoke, in that deep, resonant rumble, it seemed like he was a lot older. Like thousands of years older. He’d mentioned that he’d fallen, even used the term Nephilim. Did angels still fall in today’s day and age? Or had that been a one-time party that had gotten out of hand?
It made her head hurt to think about it. And it made her heart ache to realize how foolish she’d been for doubting Cara’s faith. Maybe if she’d believed in her older cousin, had acted immediately that night…even if Cara couldn’t have been saved, perhaps some of the members of La Noche would have been taken out by one of the Syx, and so many other lives would have been spared.
So many questions Maria would never know the answer to…so much guilt she’d have to carry with her, a debt she’d spend her life trying to repay.
Maria grimaced as the elevator climbed all the way to what the hotel called the Emperor’s level. Not quite the penthouse, but not jammed in with the great unwashed either. Probably cost thousands of dollars a night, but hey. The funds weren’t coming out of her budget, and not the Feds’ budget either, since Warrick was no more an operative than Santa Claus was. So who was paying for it? Could Warrick also make illusionary money that actually worked?
The elevator chimed, came to a stop, then opened onto an elegant spill of pale, plush carpeting that led to a series of doors along a luxuriously appointed hallway. Maria moved down the corridor until she found her and Warrick’s assigned room, then stepped inside, bemused as she executed a cursory search of the opulent interior.
The place was bigger than her apartment—even the one back in Sylmar—with a complete seating area, kitchenette with dining nook, and enormous king bedroom. The bedroom alone was worth the price of admission, whatever that admission price had been, and…
She rounded the corner into the artfully designed bathroom—and stared. There was no tub in the Pinnacle’s Emperor’s suite. Instead, a shower opened up with no doors and fully six spigots sticking out from the wall, exactly like Lucy’s locker room shower yet totally not, with the inlaid stone floor and walls, the fact that the spigots were arranged in a vertical and not horizontal pattern, the low lighting, the heavy spa robe hanging invitingly on the shower hook over an honest-to-God puffy satin hanger, the luxurious towels…
Before she could stop herself, Maria started pulling off her expensive new clothes, laying them carefully on the granite counter of the sink—T-shirt, Dolce & Gabbana jeans…Dolce & Gabbana! Bra, underwear, boots, socks. She stared at the small, expensive pile, missing her gun. She wasn’t in the barrio anymore, after all. She didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t a cop. As soon as she was done with her shower, she was going to get back on the phone with Stan and ask for her weapon. He owed her details about where they’d meet for the pill pickup anyway, and she needed something tangible besides Warrick to defend her from whatever goons Takio had around him in this place.
Takio. Her lips twisted as she considered the guy. She’d still never met him, she realized. He’d sent his agents into her world three different times, and she’d been witness to the death and damage they’d rained down around her, and she’d never even seen the Big Bad himself, had nothing to go on but sketchy photos and Cedo’s and Jack’s vague descriptions.
Were those photos, those descriptions so terrible because he was a…
She snorted. Try as she might, she couldn’t use the words, not even in her own mind. No matter what she’d seen in the Citadel’s basement, what she’d seen Warrick do, the idea of demons coexisting so closely with her own world was—impossible. She was willing to believe the hallucination idea more easily than the idea that there were real demons walking the streets.
Maria’s glance strayed back to the shower. She was safe for the moment, anyway. Safe…and in desperate need of any shower that rocked six showerheads.
She padded across the cool tiled floor and into the shower space. She could reach the faucets while avoiding the main thrust of the sprays, and she quickly turned the knobs until a waterfall was unleashed against the terra-cotta-and-cream-patterned enclosure. A quick reconnaissance of the bathroom yielded all the fancy soaps and shower products a girl could need, and she dumped them onto one of the three—three!—different ledges in the shower, then quickly stepped under the spray.
“Oh…”
Maria placed her hands on the walls of the bath, willing the heat, the pressure of the water to pound her into oblivion. She had enjoyed her fair share of showers—and Lucy’s water pressure was a minor miracle in and of itself—but she knew for a fact that never in her life had she experienced bliss like this. If this was how the other half lived, she might be needing an upgrade.
As she picked up one bottle, then another, however, her mind quickly moved on from its paroxysms over the shower and back to the problem at hand. They still needed to take down the drug lord Takio nee Holkeri. Maria still needed to wrap her mind around the reality of demons walking the earth…now more than ever before, apparently. And she would very quickly need to reconcile herself that this op was well and truly busted. For a good reason—they were about to get their man. But that meant more than Maria returning to
her small apartment in Sylmar, her work on the force, her life.
Because she really didn’t have a life. She’d spent the last fifteen years building her strength, accumulating all the information she could about Takio and his lieutenants. She’d finished high school, taken enough college courses to enter the police academy in good standing, become a cop. And she’d been a good cop. Not a great one, but a good one. Good enough to get the undercover job when it came up, good enough to be dropped back into her old neighborhood with no one the wiser, good enough to flip Jack with a speed and efficiency that had impressed her handler and surprised herself.
But all that was done, she thought, as she tilted her face up to take the full brunt of the spray. All that was…
Maria heard the door open to the hotel room like a crack across her senses. Immediately, she whipped her hair back, cleared the soap from her eyes and hands, and slipped out of the shower, missing her gun more than ever. There wasn’t anything sharper in the bathroom than a nail file, but she picked that up and slipped it between her fingers. Not great, but at least it was something.
No one spoke; no one called out. Surely Warrick would have called out, right? Had they covered that in demon covert ops training?
Rolling her eyes, she considered her options. If the new arrival was Warrick, which it almost certainly had to be, she was safe, she was protected. If it wasn’t Warrick, she was screwed.
She clamped her teeth around the hilt of the nail file as she pulled the robe off its hook, quickly lashing the thick terry cloth garment around her. Then she returned the file to her hand and walked to the open door of the bathroom, grateful she’d left it ajar. She bent low. If a bad guy was looking for movement, he’d be expecting it at head height. She glanced out quickly, pulled back, and straightened.
Okay, it was definitely Warrick out there. She stepped out from the doorway but still hesitated, content to simply watch him for a moment. He was standing with his back to her, his attention riveted fully on the view over downtown LA, his entire body looking taut enough to spontaneously combust. Marie realized that she hadn’t truly looked at him again since the attack at the Citadel. Now she indulged in the luxury of it. Warrick’s long, thick frame was poured into a black T-shirt and expensive draping trousers that hugged every curve and dip of his broad back and tight backside. The material stretched over his heavy thighs in a way that unaccountably made Maria’s mouth water.
This is a demon, she reminded herself. I’m seeing what he wants me to see.
But…didn’t there have to be some truth at Warrick’s core, to even present an appearance that resonated so strongly with her? It wasn’t his body that she was reacting to—at least not entirely. It was his dedication, his drive, his fierce need to protect. And then there was how he treated her…
He had legitimately reacted to her, she found herself thinking unexpectedly, first in the shower at Lucy’s, and then again last night on the couch in her apartment. She hadn’t imagined that. And right now, staring at him, a longing stole over her that started out as simple desire and quickly grew into a need strong enough, she almost staggered. It went beyond the quick gratification of sex, though that was certainly there, and well into the simple craving of another person’s touch. Of Warrick’s touch. A man who’d fought beside her, a man who’d protected her. A man…or something like a man…who’d come when she’d needed him most.
Maria had spent most of her life walled off from any sort of relationship, even the most fleeting. But she didn’t want a relationship, she told herself. She merely wanted—that touch.
And she knew, at least at a minimum, that Warrick would be willing to touch her. To hold her. Wouldn’t he?
Maria swallowed. What was she going to do now?
What the hell am I going to do now?
Warrick stared out the window with the intensity born of six thousand years of training and focus, but he was almost laughably inadequate to the task. He needed to get his bearings, needed to adjust his body to accept the fact that Maria was standing alone in a fall of overheated water, wet and naked and—
Stop that.
The moment he’d entered the suite, he’d stopped cold, surveying the space quickly to reassure himself it was uncompromised. It was, save for the fact that water was running full tilt in the next room, and Maria had been nowhere in sight—though the scent of sky was everywhere in the hotel suite and even now wafted out on billows of steam from the bathroom. It didn’t take an expert to figure out that she was taking a shower.
Otherwise, she hadn’t left so much as a footprint in the main area of the suite. Warrick had dropped his purchases on the small dining table, quickly searched the living room and bedroom. No one there. No one really could be there, not this quickly. He’d walked into the clothing boutique and made his selections with a speed and entitlement the store attendants seemed used to, and he’d contacted Finn to get him the other supplies he’d need now that he’d seen the layout of the hotel. He’d even poked his head into the nightclub, ignoring the cordoned-off ropes and hurrying waitstaff preparing for the night’s shift. It was a long way from the strip club in Compton, but perhaps not so different in the end.
Now he needed to make sure Maria was ready for the night ahead, make sure he was, for that matter. But he hadn’t expected to return to his hotel room and be faced with—
“Warrick?” At Maria’s voice, Warrick turned, bracing himself for the sight of her naked. Instead, it was actually worse: She stood wrapped in a white fluffy-looking robe, her hair swept back, every inch of exposed skin rosy with steam. Her eyes were wide and almost pleading in a way that deeply unsettled him.
“What is it?” he asked, instantly alarmed. Maria flushed, bit her lip, and gestured back to the shower, which was still blasting. He didn’t miss the fact that tucked into her hand was a pathetically small nail file. She’d been scared, he realized. He’d scared her.
“Would you—would you mind standing guard? In there?” she asked, the question sounding so obvious, so straightforward, he found himself agreeing without fully working through the details.
“Of course.”
Maria swiveled back toward the bathroom and, a second later, disappeared, and Warrick drew in a long, tortured breath. He could do this. Of course he could do this. Maria was a human in need of protection, and he’d been assigned as her protector. Whatever she required, however she required it, he was honor bound to give. If she asked for anything that he felt he couldn’t give, of course, he could deny her…but denying a well-intentioned human any request was counter to everything he had been created and forged for.
And she was taking a shower. He could handle a woman taking a shower.
Resolutely, Warrick stomped up toward the bathroom, stepping into its dimly lit interior. The way it was set up, he couldn’t see Maria from his position by the door, but the robe she had been wearing had been tossed onto the counter along with her clothes—along with the nail file, he noticed.
He stood for a moment, unsure. He could hear her in the shower, he didn’t need to have eyes on her to protect her, and his heightened awareness covered the full length and breadth of the hotel suite. If anyone tried to get in, he’d know it. He didn’t need to see—
“Warrick.” His name floated out to him so softly on the heavy mist, he wasn’t sure Maria had even said it aloud, but he could no more resist its pull than he could stop breathing the air of this plane. He moved without thinking to the edge of the shower, then stepped around the corner.
His blood roared to life, the needs, the passions of his physical form nearly swamping him.
Maria stood facing him, her body bared to the cascading stream of water. No, not stream—streams, jets shooting out from above her but also to either side, blanketing her in a cascade of sensual, wet heat. She stared at him with huge eyes, her stance at once beckoning and vulnerable, her need so crystal sharp, it seemed to cut him like a hook, piercing him, then drawing him closer to her, every step an exquisite m
ix of pain and pleasure.
“Join me,” she whispered. “Please.”
The command was real, absolute, and impossible to ignore. Warrick stripped almost without consciously realizing it, shucking his shoes and socks, shirt, pants and briefs, then moved again toward her. He didn’t stop until he was a bare inch from her body, his hold on his own form as ruthless as he could make it, though there was no denying his reaction to her. He couldn’t seem to stand within five feet of the woman without going hard and ready, but this—this was so much worse.
Maria lifted her palms and placed them flat on his chest, her attention apparently mesmerized by his presence so close to her. She splayed her fingers wide, skimming the hard planes of his pecs, drifting her fingertips over the flat nipples. He grimaced. This, he could withstand. This, he could endure, this—
Maria sighed, the sound of such pure feminine contentment that Warrick’s sight began to fracture. As a Fallen, he had been reborn to meet the needs of mortals, the needs—and the desires. But he had long ago conditioned himself against those needs. He served in other ways. He gave of himself differently.
Now, however, his entire body burned for her to ask of him what he was nearly turning himself inside out to give. He couldn’t—wouldn’t force her. The idea was anathema to him. But he also couldn’t—wouldn’t deny her. And not because of how he was made, but…because he wanted to. For the first time in millennia, a human would whisper for him to protect, to defend, to give, and he would do it with every ounce of his being, not out of obligation, but out of his own base, carnal need.
But she had to ask.
“Thank you,” Maria said, the words so quiet that Warrick nearly lost them in the rush of his own blood in his ears, the spray of the water. But as she slid her hands down his chest, circling his hips to rest on his ass, he swallowed. He wanted the woman so badly, it had become a physical presence between them, a presence compromised further as her fingers left his hips and found his hands—hands which were hanging uselessly at his side.
