A crack of thunder swallowed Ana’s cry, and her tears were lost in the rain.
No one, least of all the weather, knew or cared that Ana Alves was sobbing her heart out next to the side of the road in what was shaping up to be a torrential downpour.
Everything was just great.
Chapter 02 – Grissom
In the dark of his bedroom, Grissom woke suddenly, completely… and very, very early, if the glowing red lights of his alarm clock were to be believed.
He wanted to roll over, close his eyes, and try to get back to sleep, but Grissom was much too restless for that. Grissom felt like he was holding a lightning bolt in one hand and drawing from its energy. His legs ached to move, to run, toward… something. Hs wings, although currently nonexistent, trembled to fly him there.
Grissom didn’t know what he wanted or where there was, but the mere thought of going to it had him out of bed and on his feet before his brain had a chance to catch up. When it did, Grissom stood stock still and stared into the darkness, trying to think where he wanted, or maybe needed, to be now.
His mind remained stubbornly blank.
Scowling, Grissom decided to go to the gym instead.
But even after a hard workout, a hot shower, and a large breakfast, that sense of restlessness remained.
Blessed with eight siblings, Grissom usually had a near infinite amount of patience for the minor annoyances and disappointments that life could throw at a person, particularly one in his line of work. But that day, it felt like his well of patience had run dry. His temper was short, and his comments sharp. By lunchtime, Grissom had made an interviewee cry, snapped at his partner, glared two confessions out of two other interviewees, knocked the ‘e’ key off of his keyboard, and broken a half dozen pencils in half. Worst of all, his grip on his abilities was becoming… slippery.
“Maybe less coffee tomorrow morning,” advised his partner, Derek da Luz.
Snap!
Grissom glared down at his hands and the paperwork that he had been ostensibly reading. Cradled in one hand were the remnants of a broken pen. The paperwork beneath his hands was ruined. He was going to have to print it all out again.
“I haven’t had any today,” snapped Grissom.
Derek’s eyebrows arched. Silently, he passed a roll of toilet paper across the border between their desks, allowing Grissom to try to blot up the worst of his mess. It didn’t do much good for the paperwork or even his hands, of course, but it helped cool the worst of Grissom’s undeserved temper.
“Thanks,” said Grissom, still surly, and across from him, Derek shrugged.
“You wanna get lunch?” offered Derek.
“No thanks,” said Grissom, less brusquely. “I’m not hungry.”
Derek’s eyebrows arched again. “You sure?”
Grissom shook his head. Normally, he was as hungry as the next dragon – the next dragon in this case usually being Derek – but not today.
“All right,” said Derek as he pushed himself to his feet. “Call me if you change your mind.”
Grissom nodded.
In the quiet left by his partner’s departure, Grissom finished cleaning up his mess, reprinted his paperwork, and reviewed the Peterson case.
A month ago, the Petersons’ eight-year-old daughter and her nanny had been kidnapped from a public park three counties over. When the family had received the ransom letter, they had immediately begun arranging payment, without ever alerting their local police department as to their problem.
The family’s asset manager, although not directly clued into the specifics of his clients’ emergency, must have gleaned some understanding of their situation – perhaps when they demanded that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of their assets be converted to cash, specifically to small non-sequential bills – because he ordered their bank to both record all of the bills’ serial numbers and mark them with invisible ink before releasing them to the family.
The exchange had been made, and the little girl and her nanny returned safely home, before the family had finally gotten around to contacting the police.
A few days ago, some of those marked and recorded bills had turned up within Kunando’s city limits. As detectives on the City of Kunando’s police force, Grissom and Derek were the pair that had caught the case. They had been trying to run down the source of those bills, so far with very little luck.
Reading through the case file again, Grissom didn’t find any new leads to follow up. All he managed to do was agitate himself further.
Outside the window, the sky began to darken, as storm clouds rolled in to blanket the sky as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t even one in the afternoon yet.
Derek returned from lunch, and they continued their work, Grissom occasionally snapping and Derek enduring him with the patience of a saint. In a distant corner of his brain, Grissom made a mental note to buy Derek lunch sometime, preferably when this – whatever it was – had passed.
And all throughout the afternoon, the sky darkened as gray storm clouds gathered overhead. A rainstorm, unexpected and unpredicted, was rolling in. It was his fault – Grissom knew it, could taste it in the edge of the storm – but he couldn’t seem to stop it, let alone undo it.
Grissom hadn’t lost control like this in years.
Derek must have felt what he was doing – he was a dragon too, although a lightening dragon instead of a storm dragon – but Derek thankfully didn’t comment on it. Mentally, Grissom upgraded Derek’s free lunch somewhere nice to a free steak somewhere much nicer.
The only saving grace of the entire day was that as the afternoon wore on, Grissom’s lingering sense of restlessness sharpened into… anticipation. He wasn’t running anywhere, and yet, somehow, he still felt like he was getting closer to the thing that he had been straining towards all day.
“Get some rest,” said Derek when they knocked off for the night. “Tomorrow will be better.”
Not trusting himself to say anything aloud – Grissom had the terrible suspicion that everything he said today had been wrong – Grissom nodded and tried to smile. It was a relief to call it a day, punch out, and go… wherever he was meant to be going.
Grissom was halfway across the parking lot when he felt the storm’s first raindrops spatter against his cheek, his shoulder, and the back of his hand.
Across the length and breadth of the parking lot, humans scurried to their respective vehicles.
Grissom’s steps slowed to a saunter, and he breathed deeply, pulling the scent of the storm – his storm – deep into his lungs. He hadn’t meant to bring it, and he was sorry that it would inconvenience so many people, but at the same time, he couldn’t help but to savor it, this storm that he had made.
Grissom was deliciously damp by the time that he made it to his car, and it started raining in earnest before he even finished pulling out of his parking space.
Normally, he would hit the gym after work – Grissom liked to sweat away the stresses of the day and go home relaxed – but he had already worked out once that day. And it wasn’t the gym that he craved anyway.
Grissom longed to go flying in his storm. He was a storm dragon, after all. That was where he was supposed to be.
Later, Grissom promised himself. Determinedly, he turned his thoughts towards what he might like to eat for dinner, except he was too restless to eat and he didn’t particularly want anything, anyway.
Outside of his SUV, the storm worsened. It was soon a deluge, complete with thunder, lightening, and torrential downpours.
Now, the storm pulled at Grissom in the same way that he had pulled at it, and Grissom shivered. His human form suddenly felt too small, too tight, and too confining. He was too low, too near the dirt, when he should have been up high, soaring among the winds and rain and lightening. Just thinking about it – where he was versus where he should have been – sent an instinctive frisson of dread through Grissom.
He might have pulled over then and temporarily abandoned his SUV
by the side of the road while he went flying, but the restlessness that had plagued Grissom throughout the day twisted tighter in him, holding him in place – and in his present form.
The conflict in his instincts was nearly enough to make him dizzy. Grimly, Grissom pushed both away in favor of focusing on his most immediate surroundings.
Ahead of him, a red pickup truck was driving too fast – both for the conditions and the speed limit. Grissom was so focused on the pickup that he nearly missed the flash of its headlights across a small, miserable figure on the side of the road.
On instinct, Grissom pressed his foot to the brake pedal, slowing for the pedestrian’s sake.
The driver of the pickup truck didn’t share his instinct. As Grissom watched, the pickup truck sped up. It blazed through an enormous puddle, sending a wave of dirty water crashing over the unfortunate woman. She was utterly drenched by it.
The pickup kept right on going.
In its wake, the woman threw her head back and shouted. Whatever she was yelling was lost in the storm’s fury – his fury, to be more honest. Then as abruptly as it had come, the woman’s fury left her and she hunched down over her hands. She looked… distressed.
Grissom slowly rolled to a stop next to the unfortunate woman. She didn’t seem to notice.
Closer, and despite the driving rain, he could see that she had her face buried in her hands, her long hair hanging in limp clumps around her bare shoulders. Her long legs were as bare as her arms, and her strapless party dress clung to her every curve and hollow. And she was covered in mud.
Despite the circumstances – and his every better intention – Grissom couldn’t help but think how slammin’ her body was. In other circumstances, he would have enjoyed personally warming her up. In their current circumstances, Grissom carefully tucked that thought away to the furthest recesses of his mind.
Grissom clicked on the overhead light and rolled down the passenger side window, calling to the shivering woman, “Need a lift?”
The woman didn’t respond. She probably didn’t even hear him. Raising his voice, Grissom tried again.
“Hey! Need a lift?” he called again, much louder this time.
The woman finally lifted her face from her hands, allowing Grissom to see her face for the first time in the SUV’s weak overhead light. At the sight of her, Grissom’s breath caught in his chest.
The woman was sopping wet with her dark hair plastered to her head and neck. She had a heart-shaped face, a pert nose, and enormous eyes. Her plush lips were tinged blue and she was pale beneath her lovely olive brown skin, likely from the cold. She was shivering fit to shake herself apart. Yet, she was still the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen.
Grissom wondered what she looked like when she was warm and happy.
“Hi,” he said breathlessly – stupidly, Grissom realized a moment later. “Need a lift?”
Third time was the charm – or so they always said.
Chapter 03 – Ana
She was wet. She was cold. And she was utterly filthy.
Of course that was when the handsomest, kindest man that she had crossed paths with in awhile would stop to offer her a lift. It was so unfair. Ana wondered, half despairingly, who or what she had offended that she was doomed to have such terrible luck.
Her voice still heavy with tears, Ana said, “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Her would-be rescuer snorted. “I’m sure you are,” he said.
Between the flashes of lightning and the shadows thrown by the SUV’s weak dome light, it was impossible to say for certain, but Ana thought that his eyes were lingering on her. Whether he was admiring her muddy self or her sodden everything, she couldn’t tell.
It’s so unfair, thought Ana again.
Between the driving rain and the terrible lighting, it was impossible to see much in the way of details, but everything that she could see of the stranger was trim, fit, and muscular. He had dark hair, shadowed eyes, and a strong jaw line. Under almost any other circumstances, Ana would have been very happy to see him.
Instead, she only felt misery and embarrassment.
He looked so good, and she probably looked like that creepy little girl from The Ring, except older and heavier. There was absolutely no way that her dress, originally carefully selected to emphasize her strong points and hide her weak ones, wasn’t currently betraying her every flaw to the handsome stranger’s no doubt handsome eyes. And hunching over probably wasn’t helping anything.
Forcing herself to straighten up, Ana said stiffly, “I can walk.”
That was a blatant lie, but she had already made too many stupid mistakes that night. Ana wasn’t about to make another one. Getting herself murdered because her feet hurt and the man offering her a ride was unfairly handsome would simply be too much.
But somehow, turning down the offered ride made her feet hurt worse. It was like they knew.
Ignoring her stupid feet and their stupid throbbing pain, Ana started walking again. Well, she tried to stalk away with her dignity intact. Her shoe was sunk so far down in the mud that when she stepped forward, her foot came out of her once pretty little shoe.
Hastily, Ana stuffed her bare foot back into her high heel, her toes squelching in the mud that had somehow founds its way into the shoe in her foot’s brief absence from it.
“It’s not like that,” chided the man, the pleasant baritone of his voice immediately drawing Ana’s attention back to him. “I’m no creep. I’m a police detective.”
Ana squashed her first response – which was complete and utter relief that she might be rescued – and tried to be more suspicious. She always trusted everyone, and look what that had gotten her.
If she had been more suspicious of Rodney, she probably wouldn’t have ended up in this situation in the first place: cold, wet, hungry, alone on a practically deserted stretch of road, and now effectively stuck in place there. There was no way that she was going to walk barefoot down the side of the highway. Who knew what people tossed out of their windows as they zipped by?
She really needed that ride. But she also really needed not to get herself murdered during a moment of weakness.
“Look,” said the man, and Ana could barely hear him over the frantic patter of her heart. “If I show you my badge, will you let me give you a ride somewhere?”
Once again, Ana squashed her first response – to gladly get in the car and let the nice stranger drive her home – and reminded herself to be careful. He could just be trying to lure her closer. He might not even have a policeman’s badge. Or it might be a fake. And his car probably wasn’t as warm and dry as it looked.
Vainly, Ana wished for the purse – and cell phone – that she had left safely at home. She wouldn’t even be here, trying to make a decision like this, if she had just brought them with her in the first place.
The handsome man in the SUV shifted his weight, pulling his wallet from somewhere.
“Can you catch?” asked the handsome maybe-a-police-detective.
“Yes, of course.” Growing up in the same house as her sister Julia, learning to catch and throw had been a matter of self-defense.
The handsome stranger tossed his wallet to Ana, surprising her so much that she almost fumbled the catch. Luckily for him, though, she didn’t. Ana’s fingers closed around the wallet, the leather still deliciously warm from the heat of his body. The lingering warmth in the leather allowed Ana to realize for the first time just how cold she really was.
Her teeth chattering, Ana flipped open the wallet.
On the one side, there was a clear plastic card holder; on the other, a badge shaped like a shield. As hard as it was raining, it would have been impossible to read the card under the plastic sleeve. Instead, Ana ran her fingers over the cold metal of the badge feeling the words with her fingertips.
Everything seemed to be spelled correctly, at least. And it was heavy. It was probably a real policeman’s shield.
Should I get in the car wit
h him then? Ana wondered, wavering. She didn’t know, and it was hard to think. She wanted to, so badly, but –
Ana bit her lower lip, hard.
“Please don’t make me get out of this vehicle and walk you home,” said the cop – no, police detective. He had said that he was a police detective. “You’ll probably catch your death of cold.”
“Walk me?” parroted Ana, feeling stupid. She looked up from the badge, right into the face of her would-be savior. “Why would you walk with me? You have a car.”
“How else will I know that you made it home safely?”
“That’s not any safer for me than getting in your car!” exclaimed Ana, indignant. It felt slightly warmer than being bewildered.
“I’m willing to take my chances there.” When Ana continued to hesitate, he said, “Look on the bright side, things can’t hardly get any worse for you.”
“Don’t say that! Things can always get worse,” said Ana with a quick look towards the sky. The last time she had dared to think that, it had started storming. She didn’t want to know how things could get worst for her.
Ana flipped his wallet shut. Decisively, she hoped. Folding her arms across her chest, Ana popped her hip out to one side and frowned at her would-be rescuer. She tried to look like she had a choice.
“You’ll seriously walk me home if I don’t get in your car?”
“Yes, I will seriously walk you home, if you don’t get in this car,” said Detective Hottie. He flashed a quick smile at her, boyish dimples appearing in either cheek. “But if you do get in this car, I’ll turn on the heater, full blast.”
“Okay,” said Ana. “I’m coming in.”
“Thank you.”
His wallet clutched in one hand, Ana reached for the door’s handle with her other. She pretended not to notice when stepping up into the SUV meant stepping out of her ruined shoes. Fuck me pumps were a stupid idea, anyway. She had never once gotten lucky in them.
Now safely ensconced in a comfortable seat, Ana sighed with relief.
Her Detective Dragon_A Paranormal Mystery Romance Page 2
