Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  “Morrison.” I said more forcefully. “Wake the fuck up.”

  Morrison jerked his head up and squinted at me, puzzlement clouding his features, hair stuck up in barf-crusted swirls on one side. “What am I doing here?” he asked.

  “Other than decorating my welcome mat with your stomach contents? Beats the hell out of me.”

  We both looked down at the dark pool staining the braided rug. It had been relatively new, purchased after its predecessor had been home to a dead cat, and before that, a rotting raccoon, both left as gifts by a would-be werewolf suitor with a cowboy complex and penis problems.

  Morrison lifted a hand to rub his eyes and managed to drag it through the slick coating of his own regurgitation. “Shit,” he said, wiping his hand on his soiled shirt.

  “Come on. Let’s get you up.” I bent down and grabbed him by the elbow, but he shrugged me off.

  “I’m fine!” he said. “I can get up by myself.” He shoved himself to his feet and lurched headlong toward the wood banister. I caught him by the back of his shirt and yanked him away, sending him staggering to the left, where he nearly put his head through the old plaster wall.

  “Yeah, you’re fine all right.”

  He took a few wobbling steps toward the stairs and straightened his shirt. “I’m going now.”

  “Going where?” I asked. “Your car isn’t even out there.”

  “Home,” he said.

  “You live eight miles away.” I shifted impatiently on my aching feet, long past regretting my choice in shoewear for the evening. “How are you going to get there?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  I held my breath as he attempted the first step, scraped it with the heel of his shoe, and went sliding down to the landing on his ass. He lay splayed out like a starfish, looking up at the vaulted ceiling.

  With a beleaguered sigh, I set down my purse and coat and descended to him. I managed to get him to his feet, where he remained for about a nanosecond before collapsing backward on the stairs.

  “Okay,” I said. “Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” Lacing my hands under his armpits, I sat him up and proceeded to drag him backward up the stairs in a kind of modified crab walk.

  When we reached the top, I propped him up against the newel post. “Stay,” I ordered.

  “I’ll do what I want,” he muttered to himself while I unlocked the door. “I’m a man.”

  “You’re an exceedingly drunk man,” I said.

  With the door opened, I shooed my cats out of the way as I helped him stagger into my apartment. He made a break for the couch, but I spun him in the opposite direction toward the bathroom. “No you don’t,” I said. “Not before we get you cleaned up.”

  I plopped him down on the closed toilet lid and he sagged against faded floral wallpaper that might be as old as some of my unwelcome fanged visitors.

  The cats followed us into the bathroom, weaving figure eights around my legs as I leaned in to get the shower started.

  “I’ll feed you as soon as I take care of our guest.” The gleaming copper pipes that had been installed to turn the claw-foot tub into a working shower released a friendly groan as they filled with water.

  Gilbert, the oldest and largest of my feline children, flicked his tail impatiently.

  “I know,” I said, testing the water’s temperature. “But it’s not like I planned on him passing out on the doorstep. I couldn’t just let him break his neck falling down the stairs.”

  The expression of disdain on Gilbert’s face made it apparent that he considered this a perfectly acceptable resolution to our current circumstances.

  “You’re not the one who’d have to answer to the cops,” I said. “And with everything else going on, that’s the last thing we need.”

  “What’s everything?” Morrison asked. Even this far gone, the dogged thread of his cop’s logic remained intact.

  “Nothing” I said. “Aside from the occasional suspended cop showing up shit-faced to my gallery show then walking all the way to my apartment for the pleasure of baptizing my new doormat, life’s peachy.”

  “Liar.” He listed forward on the toilet, grabbing onto my leg to keep himself upright.

  “Here,” I said, handing over a spare toothbrush anointed with a liberal smear of paste. “Brush.”

  Morrison moved through the process robotically, muscle memory taking over.

  “Time to spit,” I said.

  At my urging, he leaned over the sink and ejected a perfect splat of toothpaste. I admired the casual grace with which he completed this task. Even sober, I managed to splatter it down my chin half the time.

  “Alrighty,” I said. “Shirt off.”

  Morrison looked down at his buttons like they were an advanced calculus problem. Fingers I knew to be precise to the point of pain fumbled clumsily at the stained and wrinkled fabric.

  “For God’s sake.” I left the bathroom to retrieve a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves—which I fully intended to burn later—and proceeded to undo the buttons and help him out of the sleeves. “Arms up.”

  Like a compliant child, he raised his arms so I could slide the undershirt over his head. I pulled it up his arms and had to suppress the urge to coo now where’s the bastard! Where did he go? when it briefly obscured his head.

  “Your turn,” he suggested when he was at last free of the fabric.

  “That’ll be a no,” I informed him.

  He gave me a boyish pout.

  “Shoes.” I snapped my fingers and pointed down at his battered brown oxfords.

  He successfully kicked them off and held still while I bent and peeled away his socks. With fingers hooked through his belt loops, I wrestled him to his feet and made short work of unbuckling his belt and pants.

  “You’re good at this.” From the wondering way he looked down at my busy hands, I might have been sculpting the David.

  Where Morrison was concerned, the comparison was especially apt. Before he’d become a booze-swilling gallery fly with terrible taste in women, he’d been a good cop with a secret painting penchant and superior culinary skills.

  “Years of practice, my friend.” Stripping his unsoiled belt out of its loops, I draped it over the nearby towel rack.

  “I love you.” The words were stated so simply and clearly that, for a moment, I thought someone else might have appeared in the room.

  My hands froze over Morrison’s zipper as blood thundered to my ears in a sudden rush.

  “Did you know that, Miss Know-it-all?” He poked a finger at the center of my forehead.

  “Sure,” I said. “And I love cheese. Ain’t love grand?” I yanked his zipper open and shucked his pants down his legs, trying not to look at one large, insistent reason why I had made this particular mistake.

  “But it’s even worse than that,” Morrison continued to my great horror and consternation. “I don’t just love you, I’m in love with you.”

  “You’re drunk. It’ll pass.” Down came his black boxer briefs and Morrison stood fully naked before me. The sharp lines of his body had eroded since last I’d seen them, but even now Morrison was a specimen worth a second glance. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, lean and hungry for all six feet.

  “Now,” he agreed. “But I wasn’t drunk when you ran into the back of my car. Not very, anyway.”

  “That was when we first met,” I said. It had happened on my way to my first interview with Mark, in fact. Morrison had let me off with a stern finger and a boyish grin. It had been the first good thing that had happened to me in an epic series of clusterfucks and shit sandwiches.

  “You smelled like rain,” he said. “You were wearing black pants that showed off your ass and a sweater the color of the sea. Didn’t hurt that it clung to your tits. God,” he sighed, a wistful expression sweeping over his face. “I can still see them.”

  “That’s because you have your hands on them,” I pointed out.

  He looked down and appeared genuinely
surprised that his palms had come to rest on the space covered by my bra. He gave the ladies a squeeze.

  “James Morrison!” Channeling my best and least sexy teacher/librarian/mom voice, I slapped his hands away.

  “They were already there.” He shrugged.

  “In the tub,” I ordered.

  He leaned against me as he swung one leg in, then the other, and sat down in the shower’s spray. His head came to rest on his knees as the steaming water beat down on his neck and back. Best to let him marinate until the steam pushed the fog out of his head.

  I seated myself on the closed toilet lid and listened to him ramble through my damask shower curtain.

  “You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. My world was gray. All gray. Then suddenly, there you were against that backdrop, your hair like a corona of fire. Little freckles across your cheeks. Your lip quivered. Actually quivered when you started crying. I wanted to bite it almost as bad as I wanted to see it smile. I got to do both, lucky bastard that I am.”

  Pain in my chest reminded me to breathe.

  “I told you to go,” he continued. “You were so relieved. Hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would break. Like there was something good enough in me to deserve it. I wanted to ask you your name, to know anything about you. Instead, I watched you drive away. It took everything I had not to follow you.” His laugh was dark this time, smoked with bitterness.

  “Imagine my surprise when I ran into you again, in his office. Half of me wanted to shoot him on sight. The other half was grateful he murdered his ex-girlfriend, if it was the reason I got to see you again.”

  Helena isn’t dead! I wanted to scream. She’s about as not dead as you can get! She’s pregnant and happy and rosy with love and life! And also a werewolf.

  It was this last bit that always made saying the rest impossible. But I knew better than to disagree with Morrison’s assessment of Mark. We’d done this dance until our feet were blistered and minds numb with repetition. I’d let him swing it solo this round. Thankfully, he meandered on to a different topic.

  “I had a dream about you the other night,” he said.

  “Oh?” I wanted him to stop.

  “I was in a vineyard,” he began. “Walking hip deep in groves of purple-red grapes.

  An engine roared, and I saw an Aston Martin weaving up the back road to the villa. There was this flash of red hair tangling with the wind and I knew it was you, coming home to me. And you were mine.”

  “Sounds nice,” I whispered, unaware of the tears pressing at the back of my throat until I heard them in my voice.

  “We could do that, you know. I’ve been saving for years,” he said. “Investing. So I could buy a rundown villa in Tuscany and restore it. Paint, and grow grapes.”

  Painting was a hobby he’d kept closely guarded for reasons I understood the second I saw his work. It belonged to the part of him that spoke like a poet and worshipped my body like he himself had sculpted it. The part of him that still mourned the loss of a child.

  “James—” I said with as much gentleness as I could manage.

  “I know,” he said, heartbreaking heaviness in his voice. “I know. You can’t.”

  Apologies felt like they would do more to insult than they would to soothe. I rose from the toilet and scooted the shower curtain away, perching on the edge of the tub. He was still folded in on himself, face between his knees.

  “Sit back.”

  Quiescent for once, he obeyed.

  I squeezed a dollop of shampoo in my palm and worked it through his wet hair, paying particular attention to the side that had been afflicted with the gastric ointment.

  My fingertips explored his scalp at their own pace. The chaotic mix of longing, regret, and affection seemed to escape from my fingertips into his skin. I was part mother, part lover, both halves equally aware of the man who sat completely defenseless with his head in my hands. I’d seen him impassioned, enraged, ecstatic, and envious. Never before had I seen him afraid. He’d always worn his agenda like a second skin beneath his clothes, and now he’d shed them both.

  “Rinse,” I said.

  He leaned forward and hung his head in the shower’s spray. “No conditioner,” he mumbled.

  “Right,” I agreed. “You’re a man, after all. Men don’t even use shampoo, do they? I thought y’all just beat your head on a rock to dislodge any dirt.”

  “Cinderblocks,” he replied. “They’re more abrasive.”

  “Well, someone’s coming around, isn’t he?” I pushed the wet hair off his forehead and slicked it away from his face. He caught my hand at the wrist and pulled it to his face.

  “Another thing I love about you,” he said, brushing his lips across my wrist, then planting a kiss in my palm. “Your hands. So delicate.” He kissed the pad of each finger.

  I marshalled my willpower and pulled my hand away. “You’re getting me all wet.”

  “That’s the idea.” He managed a smirk. His finer motor functions were returning.

  “With water,” I said.

  We looked at my chest precisely the same moment. My thin blue cocktail shift, now wet, did little to hide the anatomy beneath.

  I clapped my hands over my chest and scooted away from Morrison, who was still staring with lust-darkened eyes.

  “Did you buy a gun like I told you to?’ he asked.

  I was stunned and speechless by this rapid shift of topics. “No.”

  “Okay then.” He swung an arm around my waist and pulled me into the shower, onto his lap.

  “James!” I screeched. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you wet,” he announced.

  He dug his fingers into the ticklish spot where my legs met my hips until I was squirming, laughing, in imminent danger of wetting myself in an entirely different way. “Stop!” I begged.

  When he relented at last, I was face down on top of him, soaked to the skin, wavy wet hair clinging to my neck, dress plastered to my thighs. He clutched a handful of cloth at the small of my back.

  “You don’t laugh enough,” he said.

  “Been short on reasons,” I answered.

  His heart beat beneath my chin. He rested his ear on the crown of my head. The water’s rush had quieted the world. There was only the warmth beating down on my back, the skin against my skin through the thin fabric of my dress. He put a finger under my chin, urging it upward until our eyes met. The planet of sadness lodged in my chest seemed to be rising, gliding up my throat, hemorrhaging through my gaze. Salty tears mixed with the water dripping down my cheeks.

  “There are those freckles,” he said, a small, sad, smile breaking on his face.

  The tears came harder then.

  For me. For him. For the pain he felt and I couldn’t fix. For the sudden and sure knowledge that I didn’t, couldn’t, love him the way he loved me.

  With one hand on the side of the tub, and the other pressed against the wall, I peeled myself away from him and shut off the shower. Wrapping myself in a towel, clothes and all, I tossed another at him.

  The cats stared at me from the kitchen counter as I padded through, leaving a trail of water from my sodden dress.

  “What?” I said. “It’s not like you do the laundry.”

  In the combined living and bedroom of my studio apartment, I dragged the wet dress up my hips and managed to get it stuck on my shoulders where it clung to me like a second skin.

  “Shit,” I grunted inside my cocoon of cold, wet fabric.

  “Allow me.” Morrison’s hands skimmed my ribs, sliding under the dress, prying it up my shoulders and over my head.

  “Thanks.” Clad in only bra and panties, I crossed the living room and hung the dress over the radiator to dry. Morrison leaned against the wall, naked save for the towel wrapped around his hips.

  “You could turn around,” I suggested, digging in my closet for dry skivvies and a nightshirt.

  “Could,” he said. “Won’t.”

  “You didn’t fe
el like making a night of it with Jess?” I asked from my station in the closet.

  “She took off. Left with those pretty boys I saw Abernathy talking with.”

  Hope they like extra-crispy.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Kirkpatrick,” he replied. “Told me she left with them when he saw me walking around. Which reminds me. Who is that woman who was hanging all over him? She looks so damn familiar.”

  My throat went all dry and scratchy. That woman was the one whose murder Morrison had been investigating when he’d come to Mark’s office for the first time. Her throat had healed well enough—a handy side effect of her transformation into a werewolf. She’d also put on about twenty pounds, a handy side effect of falling in love and getting knocked up with Kirkpatrick’s ginger werewolf spawn. That, and the expression of perpetual bitchiness that hardened her features had melted into something like domestic contentment. She looked just different enough to ensure deniability.

  “Oh, Kirkpatrick’s new lady friend,” I answered. My casual shrug would have been far more convincing had I not been topless and freezing to death.

  “No shit?” he asked.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “She could do better,” he said.

  “Like you?” I asked. I considered the neatly folded stack of nightgowns on the shelf and selected the faded green knee-length oversized t-shirt adorned with little gray mice and cheese wedges. Let’s see Morrison find this sexy.

  “If I were going to knock someone up,” he said, folding his arms across his chest, “it wouldn’t be her.”

  “I’m sure Jess would make a stellar mother.” I bent at the waist and used my discarded towel to squeeze moisture from the ends of my tangled auburn mane.

  Fingers slid over my hips and I was pulled back against Morrison’s chest. Apparently, the mice were falling down on the job. I’d have to invest in something in a floor length flannel.

  “How about it?” he asked.

  “How about you quit being a letch?” Peeling his fingers away from my hips, I shoved my wet towel at him. “Hang this up, would you?”

  Once he was otherwise engaged, I wrestled a blanket down from the top shelf and tossed it onto the couch.