by Liana Brooks
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“It never does.” She eyed the smoking wreckage of the doorway. “Care to clean this up?”
“What am I, your maid?”
“And my nanny.” Angela stepped towards the door.
“Who are you?”
She pointed. “Cool the hallway off, and I’ll tell you.”
The hero shot a jet of icy cold air down the wall. Melting metal cracked under the arctic blast.
“Very nice,” Angela said, turning her back on him and studying the remains of the door. “Very nice indeed.”
***
“Who are you?” Arktos repeated. Nothing in his vision had hinted at the fact that the woman would be another superhero. Or quite so...attractive. With their bodies pressed together he’d been far too aware of lithe muscles under him and the subtle spice of her citrus perfume. It clung to him like a phantom hand, stroking his libido.
She gave him a come-hither smile. “I’m Rage.”
“Rage?”
“Because I manipulate emotions and enrage people?” She waited with an expectant smile. “It’s sort of a joke.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“Under the circumstances I’m sure I can find it in my heart to forgive you.”
He stretched an arm across the doorway, blocking her from stepping into the hall. “You need to go home now.”
She patted his cheek. “You’re so cute. How long have you been in the business? Three years? Four?”
“Six.”
“I’ve been in it for over twenty, so let’s pretend that I know what I’m doing and you’re the newbie who still needs training pants. M’kay? Good. I’m glad we had this little talk.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him before brushing past, trench coat swaying as she walked.
He stared. “No one has been with The Company for over twenty years. None of the talent, at least.” Most heroes didn’t survive four years. It was a rough life and he’d only made it so far because he was cautious. He had Aaron to think about.
She threw him a glance over her shoulder. “I didn’t say I was with The Company. I said I was in the business.”
“Rogue.”
“I prefer the term freelance.” She shot him a coy smile. “The pay is nothing to write home about, but I set my own hours.”
“And what’s your talent?”
“I can sense emotions.”
He waited for her to add something. When she didn’t respond, he jogged along the hall to catch up. “What else do you do?”
“Nothing,” she said, resuming her brisk pace.
Arktos’s eyebrows went up under his mask. “Do you even know what’s going on in there?”
“I hear people screaming in pain and the door was booby-trapped. That’s enough for me. It’s giving me an ever lovin’ headache.”
He caught her shoulder and pulled her away from the balcony door. “I don’t hear anything.”
She didn’t flinch under his gaze, or try to pull away. “I hear emotions like you hear words. Most people are just whispers; I can sense their emotion if I really try, but usually it’s drowned out by the noise of my own thoughts. This is like having a rock concert under my bedroom window when I have a migraine. People in there are terrified. It’s a sustained group emotion and getting worse. Something has them trapped, and some of them are about to die. The human body isn’t capable of sustaining stress reactions for prolonged periods of time. It’s damaging. Now, is this door going to explode?”
“I don’t think so,” Arktos said slowly.
“Good.” Rage pushed the door open with exaggerated care and peeked inside. “Looks like a concert crowd. Maybe a benefit show of some kind?”
“Henry West was giving a speech here. It’s not campaign season yet, but he likes to make the rounds to keep the donors interested.”
Her smile was a little cruel. “Lots of old people with money?”
“That sounds about right.”
“I see two people on stage. One of them’s an emotional manipulator, but I can’t tell which, they’re too close together.”
Arktos leaned in, aware he was brushing against her body as he peeked inside. On stage was a blonde in a stunningly short red dress. Next to her stood a man wreathed in flames.
“I think the blonde’s the mind-raper. I want to talk to her. She won’t be able to manipulate me.”
“Because you’re special, right?”
He glared at her, trying not to smile when she didn’t flinch. “Yes, because I’m special. See if you can get the pyro to hold still while I talk to the blonde.”
“I have a better idea.” She pulled her jacket off, revealing an angry red wound on her arm with fresh stitches. “Hold this.” Tossing her red curls so they caught the light, Rage stepped into the room.
Arktos wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to do, but as she moved he was hit by the overwhelming desire to stare at her. Rage fascinated him, the way the light caressed her fiery curls, the graceful curve of her hip. He imagined what her hand would feel like as it stroked him. How soft would her lips be when he kissed her?
He shook his head and refocused on the thieves. One of them was missing. There were always three: the blonde, the pyro, and the bagman who wore a mask. Where was their bagman?
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen! Hello!” Rage waved.
Everyone turned to face her, including the criminals. Arktos eased his way into the shadows by the door and headed for the mind-raper on the stage. Katrina from the head office had sent him a detailed description of the woman who’d molested a child and injured a police officer escaping from Bugman. He hadn’t expected her to come here, but he wasn’t surprised either. California attracted all sorts of freaks.
“Boys and girls, I hate to break up such a fun party, but Mommy and Daddy need some alone time now. Sweet cheeks”—Rage pointed at the blonde with her Prada bag, no doubt filled with stolen jewelry—”It’s not Halloween, you shouldn’t be trick-or-treating. Put it down.”
The blonde dropped her bag of stolen goodies.
Arktos grabbed it. “Can you get the people out?” The pyro was shaking, and if he lost control someone would get hurt.
“Show’s over!” Rage said.
A strong desire to head for his car washed over Arktos. Then fear, which was buffeted by lust, and followed by terror. The emotions grabbed at him, worse than any childhood night terror, pulling away his focus. Rage and the pyro stood toe-to-toe, staring at each other.
He edged toward the blonde, not quite able to take his eyes off Rage.
Fear made his mouth go dry.
Rage moved without warning, bringing her knee up and dropping the pyro with ball-aching accuracy.
His head cleared and he made a grab for the blonde, but she was racing off with the crush of fleeing people.
The pyro groaned a curse. “I’m going to kill you.”
Rage tilted her head to the side. “So sweet. We’ve just met and you’re already offering me death threats. It’s adorable.”
“I’m not adorable!” The pyro lunged at Rage.
Arktos moved without thinking, diving between the pyro and the rogue, and throwing up a shield of ice. It steamed.
Something dug into his shoulder. He rolled sideways to see Rage poking him with a booted foot.
“Are you always this overdramatic?”
“He was trying to kill you.”
“So throw an ice cage over him, not me!”
“I was trying to protect you.”
She rolled her eyes. “How adorably antiquated.”
Arktos stood, brushing imaginary dust off his uniform. “I thought the pyro was adorable.”
“The pyro is getting away.”
He pivoted in time to see the pyro launch himself skyward. Arktos followed, chasing his quarry into the clouds and losing him high above the L.A. skyline. By the time he returned to the crime scene, Rage and her bike were gone.
Chapter Seven
I wish I could come home for the barbecue this weekend, but there’s a thing I need to attend for the TV show I’m now acting in. I need a dress, if you have any that you think would fit.
Ever busy,
Angela
Scrolling through the search results on her phone was a less-than-ideal way to research. Angela bit into her apple and tried again to find anything about the superhero she’d bumped into, but the best she could find were references to a Roman legend about a centaur and the Greek word for ‘bear.’
Arktos had darker skin, and maybe black hair—she thought she’d seen it curl out from under his mask. Dark skin...dark hair...a Greek name.
Jacob Kapsimolis winked at her as he swaggered off the set. “They’re almost ready for you, gorgeous.”
Angela rolled her eyes and finished her apple.
“Are you reading something dirty?” Jacob tried to peek at her screen.
She turned the phone off. “Just playing a game.”
He sat beside her on the table under the shade of a tree. “No need to give me the cold shoulder. I’m being friendly.” He bumped her knee. “Want to get more friendly?”
“I’m not looking right now.”
Someone waved to them, her red costume fluttering in the slight breeze. “Jacob! And, hi, you must be the new Carla.”
“I’m AJ.”
“AJ, this is Amarilla, she plays the Scarlet Starlet. The good version of my Red Death,” Jacob said.
Amarilla dropped beside her. “I’ve heard all the gossip about you. Now, give the good stuff.” Her eager smile was slightly off-putting.
“What do you want?” Angela asked.
“Why are you here? Who are you with? How’d you get the job? All of it. Oh, and is it true you and Tyler Running Fox had a fling?”
Angela felt her cheeks heat with a blush. She brushed a strand of hair back from her eyes and began inventing wildly. “I, um, I’m from New York. I was...in a relationship, and things went bad. Really bad. So I decided a change of scenery and some time single was the cure. I came to LA, and voila! Here I am.”
Amarilla leaned on the table. “Confirm or deny, you are The New York Girl?”
Angela frowned. “What do you mean The New York Girl?”
“Tyler left New York a few years ago,” Jacob put in. “All the tabloids said it was because his one true love had spurned him for another man. Now you’re here, a girl from New York, and rumor has it he was ignoring Glee for you.”
“Oh! No!” Her blush deepened. “No. Um, no. Tyler and I, we, ah, we aren’t...aren’t anything, really. I think he hates me, actually. We’re not friends. At all.” She shook her head. “I’m not that girl.”
Amarilla leaned in closer. “Who burned you in New York?”
“You probably wouldn’t know him,” Angela said. She tucked a stray hair behind her ear and tried to remember what Delilah’s fictional history said she did. “I was on stage. Strictly chorus stuff, background frippery really. There was scenery with better billing than me.”
“And the man behind the heartbreak?”
“Chris,” Angela said without thinking. Chris Freeman and his temper were to blame.
Jacob whistled under his breath. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Christian Sajemel and Tyler Running Fox were best friends before The Girl.” Amarilla bumped her shoulder against Angela’s. “I guess Christian’s kinks weren’t enough to keep you from Tyler’s powerhouse.” She winked.
“It’s not like that at all!” Angela’s face burned with more than the hot California sun. “Let’s talk about something else. Jacob! Tell me about you. All about you.”
Amarilla scooted closer to Angela. “He’s named for a bed sheet.”
Angela waited for one of them to start laughing. Neither did. “Okay. Now I want you to tell me she’s lying.”
“She’s not,” Jacob said. “My mom was a Twihard and obsessed with one of the characters.”
“Tell her!” Amarilla urged, clapping her hands. “It’s gross!”
Jacob rolled his eyes and grinned in a sheepish way. “Promise to still go out with me after I tell you?” He hit her with a smoldering come-hither look.
Dark eyes? Check. Dark hair? Check. Shameless flirting? That was a new twist. “I didn’t promise you a date at all.”
He gasped dramatically. “I haven’t won you over with my stunning physique yet?”
“Nope.”
Jacob sighed. “If you must know, my mother’s high school bedroom was decorated entirely with the face of a certain character from the Twilight series who shall remain nameless. I was conceived on sheets bearing his likeness.”
“Ewww!” Angela laughed. “Wow.”
“That’s not the worst part.” Amarilla poked Jacob. “Tell her the rest!”
“My mom kept the sheets, and my nursery had the same decorating scheme until I was thirteen.” Jacob hissed through his teeth. “Yeah. It’s embarrassing.”
Angela and Amarilla fell into a fit of giggles.
“Jacob!” someone shouted from the studio’s dark interior.
“And that’s our cue to go wow them. Do you think you can toss your hair around in the wind?” Jacob asked, holding out a hand.
Angela hesitated.
Jacob stuck out his bottom lip in a pout. “No?”
“It’s not you,” she hurried to assure him. “It’s... I was hurt, and I’m not ready to jump back in the ring.” Not to mention that the chances of a rogue and a superhero finding true love were one in a million, and her parents had used that one chance up. On her way to the studio, she tossed her apple core in the outdoor compost bin. Jacob was a perfect Arktos, she decided as she watched his movie-worthy rear end saunter off. But was it her imagination, or had he looked bulkier the night before?
She tried to remember being in his arms, the curve of his biceps blocking light and shrapnel from the explosion. Yup, definitely more mass. She’d have to tease him about padding his suit later.
There was a loud crunch behind her. Pivoting slowly, she scanned the empty courtyard. Not even a squirrel managed to get through studio security.
There was another crunch, like something small and warty eating an apple core out of boredom. She knew that sound. Leaning sideways ever so slowly she peeked behind the compost bin and saw the unholy offspring of a frog and a water balloon. It looked like an escapee from a kid’s cartoon, a rounded squarish body with spindly arms and legs, bulbous eyes, all in eye-searing orange with blue polka dots. A second-generation minion.
Daddy had sent shock troops.
Of course he had. She grabbed the minion and squeezed. “How many of you are there?”
It tried to squirm out of her hand.
“Tell me, or you’re confetti.”
“Five!” the minion shouted. “Just five!” Its twiggy arms were surprisingly strong, or would have been if she hadn’t been arm-wrestling minions since she was four for pennies.
Angela loosened her grip.
“Can I go now?”
“Oh, you’re going all right.” Straight back to Texas in the first box she could find. Her father was an excellent man in many ways, but he was a super villain and had been using minions since he was sixteen. Was there such a thing as rehab for minion abuse? “Learn how to communicate without spies!” or “Six steps to not taking over the world and mowing the lawn yourself!”
Not that she really wanted him to change, she assured herself as she snuck into the wardrobe room and dumped a two-thousand-dollar pair of black sandals onto the floor. It was just hard to maintain cover when hideous mini-monsters started stalking you on set. She stuffed the fussing minion in the shoe box with a sigh.
“AJ?” Jacob’s voice filtered through the dressing room wall.
“I’ll be right there!” She wrapped the box with a belt from the communal dressing table and shoved the minion in her locker to deal with later. The Hollywood promotional machine stopped for
no man, woman, or minion.
***
Angela’s eyeballs were fried. Hair billowing in the breeze sounded like a wonderful concept on paper, but the reality of staring into a fan with an open mouth and enough lip gloss to drown a goldfish wasn’t a sexy one.
Jacob winked at her from his chair by the door.
“I thought you were done an hour ago,” Angela said.
“I had time to wash the makeup off. Want to go get some dinner? There’s this great little Greek restaurant on West Third that you’d love. The dolmades are to die for.”
She scuffed her shoe on the cement floor of the studio. “I wish I could.”
“But?”
“I’m still filling in as Glee’s stunt double and there’s another night shoot today. Tonight. Whatever.” She rolled her eyes at her own rambling. “I need to take a quick shower and get down there. They still haven’t found Glee’s blonde wig so I’ve been standing in for all sorts of random things.”
“Why don’t they just buy another wig?” Jacob asked as he picked up a black leather riding jacket.
Angela shrugged. “Search me.”
He stepped close. “Is that an invitation?”
Angela’s heart skipped as she remembered strong muscles cradling her. But she shook her head. “Not tonight.” Or any other night. Not between them.
She risked opening herself up to catch his emotions. Frustration and excitement emanated from the next lot over, where Glee’s action movie was filming. Jacob seemed quiet, although she caught a whiff of lust and dominance. Jacob brushed her arm with a finger. “I could wait for you to finish.”
She stepped away. “That’s sweet, but by the time I finish whatever it is I’m doing for Glee, I’m not going to be good company.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“You’re persistent, aren’t you?”
Jacob crowded her again, his body heat making the small hall connecting the studio lots uncomfortably warm. “I always get what I want.”
Angela’s pulse quickened again, but this time it wasn’t pleasant. “Good for you,” she said, turning to walk away. “But I just left an abusive relationship and I’m enjoying some quality Me Time. When I’m interested in adding a man to my life, I’ll give you a call.” Angela left, walking just a little too fast, hoping the brush-off would be enough to cool Jacob down.
