0449474001339292671 4 fighting faer (9 page)

“When this…is…over,” she panted between instinctive cries, “I…am…going to…make…you…pay!” He chuckled against her ear and worried the lobe between sharp, white teeth. “I’ll look forward to that.”

“Just…remember.”

His tongue teased the hollow behind her ear and felt her reaction in the trembling ripples around his cock. “By the time this is over,” he said softly, “you won’t have the energy to curse my name.” That was her only warning.

Rearing back, he dragged their joined hands down to the bed beside her hips and braced them there as he launched himself into a breathless, frantic rhythm. He pounded against her cunt, cock slicing deep in time with their racing heartbeats. The tension had taken over, lust guided his movements and all it wanted was moremoremore, fasterfasterfaster. He threw his hips against her, vaguely hearing the slap of his hips against her ass over the roaring in his ears. He felt his muscles coil tighter and tighter, felt her cunt close hotter and hotter around him. She cried out, something desperate and incoherent and he answered her
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with a powerful thrust that reached the mouth of her womb and sent them both spinning into the dark sunburst of climax.

She trembled beneath him and he poured himself into her. When they were done, his muscles melted into hers, and they collapsed to the bed as one body, one breath, one soul. Heartmates.

Corinne woke to the feel of clever teeth nibbling at her spine and silky dark hair tickling her skin. She frowned. “That was a damned sneaky way to avoid being thrown out of somebody’s apartment.” Her voice sounded raspy with sleep, what little of it she’d gotten, and her muscles felt soft and pleasantly achy.

“Mm, maybe,” he said from somewhere around the bottoms of her shoulder blades, “but it was effective.”

She snorted. “Yeah, and you saved on your hotel bill.” She could feel his mouth curve against her skin. “Last time I checked, Graham didn’t plan to charge me for the room. But you never know. He’s damned capitalistic for a werewolf.” Surprise had her craning her head to look at him. “You’re staying at Vircolac?”

“Uh-huh.” His tongue traced a pattern between two vertebrae and his hands slid up and around to close over her breasts. “I usually do when I visit. It’s convenient. And his cook is damned talented.” She rolled her eyes and turned her head to stare across the room at the closet door. “I can’t believe Missy didn’t warn me about you,” she muttered.

“Graham’s mate? I haven’t met her yet.” He slid back up the bed and curved his body around hers, like spoons in a drawer. His hands squeezed her breasts affectionately, and his lips brushed lightly over the top of her head. “But I heard a lot about her. He’s smitten.”

“He’d better be, after everything she went through for him.” She flipped onto her back and leveled a meaningful glance at Luc. “Fair warning, the minute you tell me about some weird Fae sexual tradition involving being hunted down like a stray dog, or fucking in front of a live studio audience or something, I’m outta here.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So then I imagine you don’t want to hear about the four purified virgins, the consecrated gourds and the chocolate pudding, huh?” She felt her eyes widen for a second before he broke down and laughed. “Don’t worry. No mate hunts for the Fae. Although we do really like chocolate pudding…”

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She punched him. “And I like butcher knives, so watch it, beagle.” He grinned unrepentantly. “I couldn’t resist. You have some of the most ridiculous notions about Others.

And you’re so cute to tease.”

“Remember how cute I am when I’m amputating body parts.” She mumbled the threat more out of a sense of obligation than any real intentions, and he must have understood, because he looked remarkably unafraid. She would have to work on her delivery.

A glance at the bedside clock told her she was half an hour late for work, which mattered not a lot.

Technically, she had set this day aside for interviews, so she didn’t need to go to the office at all, unless she drew a complete blank with tracking down any of her witnesses. Still, as attractive as the naked man in her bed might be, she did need to get up and get started.

Hiding an enormous yawn behind her hand, she pried Luc’s arm from around her waist and pushed herself out of the bed. She stood for a minute beside it, making sure everything worked before she headed toward the bathroom. “I’m going to go take a shower,” she called over her shoulder. “If you’re still here when I get out, I suggest you at least have breakfast ready. It’ll go easier on you that way.” She heard him laughing through the closed bathroom door and contemplated opening it to tell him she hadn’t been joking. Oh well. He’d figure it out.

A hot, hot shower managed to steam away most of her morning brain fog and a good bit of her temper as well. Somehow with the water beating down over her head, relaxing her muscles and pinkening her skin, she found it a lot tougher to hold on to last night’s anger with Luc. After all, it wasn’t technically his fault that she’d been forced to acknowledge the things in the stories her grandmother used to read her before bed every night actually existed. That had happened when Dmitri and Graham had barged their way into her friends’ lives and opened her eyes to a side of reality she’d never really had any desire to see. Clearly, this wasn’t about what she wanted.

If it had been, she would be happily living her life, secure in the knowledge that vampires and werewolves didn’t exist and fairy was just a derogatory word for a homosexual male. Life had been simpler, then, and a whole lot more appealing.

Working a handful of herbal shampoo into a lather, she acknowledged that as much as she would prefer not to be in the position of having to help find an escaped Fae and return him to his homeland, the fact that she was in that position really wasn’t Luc’s fault. And as convenient as it was to blame him—his shoulders were
more
than broad enough to bear the burden, after all—it wasn’t really fair to do so.

Damn her for being conscientious.

In the end, as much as she wished she could go back in time to the part of her life before her best friend had become a vampire, and her other best friend had gotten knocked up by a werewolf, it just wasn’t going to happen. She’d learn to deal. But honestly, that was almost the worst part—the fact that she
could
learn to deal. Shouldn’t there be some sort of psychological syndrome that described the reaction of a person’s mind to something that it couldn’t handle? An impressive-sounding condition that made a person retreat to a sort of catatonic state where she sat in a room all day drooling and drawing crayon pictures on the padded walls? Because Corinne could understand if that’s where she had ended up. The fact that she’d ended up in bed with a Fae warrior and had no real problems with it…that was the part that freaked her out.

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But aside from the pointy ears—and the glowing and the magic and the being a different species thing, a less than helpful voice in the back of her mind pointed out—Luc seemed like a nice, normal guy. The sort of guy she’d been hoping she’d meet one day. He was sane—or at least as sane as she was—employed, handsome, sexy and he could do things with his hands that… She shivered. Never mind that, the point was that no matter where Luc came from or what sort of being he admitted to being, it barely fazed her.

She didn’t know whether to feel proud or panicked.

She ducked her head under the shower to rinse away the shampoo and the remaining soapsuds and flipped off the water. She toweled dry, wrapped her long hair in another towel and padded cautiously back into the bedroom to dress. Luc was nowhere to be seen, so either he really had taken off, or he was at least pretending to take care of breakfast. Somehow, she saw him as more the roast a hunk of flesh over an open fire type than the scrambled eggs and freshly squeezed juice type, but since she couldn’t hear the fire alarm, she decided to go with cautious optimism.

Panties, bra, red tank top and khaki shorts passed for her ensemble of the day and she carried a pair of white tennis socks and white canvas sneakers with her into the kitchen. She braced herself for Luc’s potential absence, then had to brace herself again not to let him see how pleased she was to find him piling toast onto a plate and carrying it to her tiny kitchen table. He looked up at the sound of her footsteps.

“Honey?”

Corinne cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, snookums?”

He grinned. “I meant, do you have any honey?”

“I dunno. Check the cabinets.”

He started opening doors while she sat down at the table and pulled on her socks and shoes. By the time she finished tying the laces, he had the honey on the table along with jam, butter and a plate of segmented apples, chunked bananas and the neatly sliced corpse of the kiwi she’d bought on a whim and hadn’t figured what to do with.

“Thanks.” She popped a piece of banana into her mouth, swallowing just as a thought occurred to her.

“Um, are you a vegetarian?”

Luc looked up from spreading thick layers of butter and honey onto his toast. “No, why?” She nodded at the meatless breakfast, and he smiled. “No, I’m just a lousy cook. I never saw a stove until the first time I came to Ithir. We don’t have them in Faerie.”

Corinne swallowed a bit of toast. “How do you cook?”

“We don’t. We use magic.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that’s gotta be convenient.”

“Very.” Her kitchen was so compact that he didn’t even have to get up to fetch the thermal carafe from her counter. He just twisted around in his chair and snagged it before turning to offer it to her. “Want some?”

Her mouth was full of jammy toast, so she just nodded and held her mug out for him. He poured it full
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before topping off his own and filling his plate with more toast and fruit.

Because she was watching him, Corinne didn’t notice anything wrong with her coffee until she took a big sip. Then she sputtered. “What the hell...?”

Luc look up. “What’s wrong? If you don’t like Earl Grey, why was there a boxful in your cabinet?” She choked, reached reflexively for her coffee mug, and jerked back as if she’d been stung. “Tea?” she coughed. “You made me tea?”

“Is that wrong?”

“It is if you want to live to see tomorrow.” Holding her mug at arm’s length to be sure the foul, watery brew in it wouldn’t do her any further injury, she carried it to the sink and dumped it down the drain before pulling her Krups automatic drip to the front of the counter and putting on a pot of coffee. “How the hell am I supposed to get through the day with nothing but leafy water to fortify me?” Luc sat back in his chair, cradling his cup and watching her with an expression of baffled amusement. “I didn’t realize you needed fortification.”

“I do if I’m going to spend my day interviewing people about this leprechaun thing.”

“Fae thing.”

“Whatever.”

Before the coffee even finished brewing, she pulled out the pot and poured herself a cup. She’d taken her first sip before she even sat back at the table.

“Who are we going to talk to first?”

Corinne looked at Luc and sighed. “Why are you so determined to get in my way?”

“I’m not. I’m just determined to do my job.” He sipped his tea and raised an expectant eyebrow. “Well?

Who’s first?”

She gave in quickly, if not particularly gracefully. “Walter Hibbish.”

“The rabbi?”

“The sex shop owner.”

Luc blinked. “Right. Was his the most recent sighting?”

“Of course. I’m not an amateur at this kind of thing. That’s why my business cards say, ‘Investigative Reporter.’”

“I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you really think we’re going to get anything done if we spend all our time bickering like this?”

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He shrugged. “Think of it as our own personal version of good cop, bad cop.” Corinne sighed into her coffee to hide the fact that bantering with him had quickly become one of her favorite pastimes. “Yeah, if we can’t win them over with charm, we’ll baffle them with non-sequiturs.”

* * * * *

Walter Hibbish’s sex shop, the Pink Pillow, turned out to be one of those places people gave directions to using the phrase, “you can’t miss it.” Corinne couldn’t. No matter how much she wanted to. She spotted it from a block and a half away.

She strolled through the East Village beside Luc, stubbornly taking her time, both because the heat could choke a horse and because every step they took away from the cocoon of her apartment made her more uncomfortable with the situation. Here she was, not just accepting the existence of the Fae along with vampire, Lupines and werecats—oh my!—but she couldn’t seem to keep herself from fantasizing about one particular Fae warrior becoming a permanent part of her life.

The thought first ambushed her in the lobby of her apartment. She’d stopped at her mailbox on their way out and the jerk in 407, who had the box next to her, had elbowed her trying to wrestle a padded envelope out of his box and hadn’t even apologized. Luc had tapped him on the shoulder, informed him of the oversight and waited until 407 got a good look at him, went pale, and hastily apologized. That’s when Corinne caught herself thinking that she’d forgotten how nice it was to have someone around who cared enough to defend her from the small realities of everyday life.

When she’d realized what she was thinking, she’d gone a little pale herself, but being a largely independent sort, she’d shaken it off as an aberration and moved on. But then when they’d been walking down the street, he taking the outside to keep her away from the curb, she reading through her mail, he had asked her what about the junk mail that had filled her box was making her laugh. And she’d found herself reading parts of a particularly ridiculous flyer to him out loud. They had laughed together, and she’d thought how much she enjoyed talking to someone who seemed to understand her slightly warped sense of humor.