brace, I could barely breathe, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was the escalating passion within that had my nerve endings contracting and twisting in a frenzy.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop!” I cried, but it came out as only a garbled shout against his mouth. Bones must have translated, however, because he ramped up his speed until I wasn’t even sure I was still conscious. Spasms began to shake me from the inside out as my body convulsed with the overload of pleasure. I heard Bones groan, barely audible above the thundering of my heartbeat, and then moments later felt the wetness of his release inside me.
It took a few minutes before I could speak. “Something’s jabbing me…in the back.”
I was still panting. Bones wasn’t, of course, that whole not needing to breathe thing. He pulled me away and then glanced at the offending object.
“Twig.”
Finally I looked behind me. Yes, there was a tree. With a very smashed twig on the front of it.
My legs slid down from his waist until I was standing once again. I glanced at my dress. Ruined. Guess I couldn’t complain, not with how Bones’s shirt was in strips. Then I looked-belatedly-around the parking lot to see if we’d just given anyone a free show. No one was nearby gawking, thank God. Good thing this store closed early and Bones had chosen a tree in an unlit area.
“That took the edge off years of deprivation,” I murmured, still basking in the residual tingles.
Bones had been kissing my neck. At my words, he stopped. “Years?” he asked quietly.
I felt inexplicably shy all of a sudden. Yeah, with what just happened, shyness didn’t make sense, but it was true. It was one thing to risk getting caught with my pants down-literally-in public during the heat of the moment. Quite another to get caught with my previous celibacy swinging in the breeze.
Still, it was too late to take it back. I took in a deep breath. “Yes. Noah was the first guy I dated since you, and we didn’t…well. We didn’t. Enough said.”
Bones slid his hands up my arms in a slow caress. “It wouldn’t have mattered if there’d been other men since me, Kitten. Oh, I’d have cared, make no mistake, but in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered. Yet you’ll forgive me if I confess to being very, very glad that there weren’t.”
He kissed me, long and searching. Then he pulled away with a noise of resignation. “We need to get out of here, luv. Soon someone will stumble across us.”
Yeah, and with a dead body across the parking lot, if it was a police officer, we’d get charged with a whole lot more than indecent exposure.
“Bones.” I paused. Okay, I had no right to ask, since I’d dumped him and given him written instructions to get on with his life. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I’ll say the same thing, it doesn’t matter, but…what about you? I’d rather know than wonder.”
He met my eyes squarely. “Once. Close enough to count. I’m not going to be all Clinton about it and call it by a different name. After Chicago, when I left you that watch but you didn’t come to me, I was very out of sorts. Thought perhaps you’d truly forgotten me, or didn’t care. At the same time, an old lover of mine was in town. She invited me to her room, and I went.”
He stopped at that, but I couldn’t let it go. How typical of me.
“And then?”
Even though his gaze didn’t waver, his expression tightened. “She and I were in bed, I’d tasted her, and then I stopped before it went further. I’d been imagining she was you, and I couldn’t pretend any longer. So I apologized and left.”
Tasted her. I knew he wasn’t referring to feeding. Scalding jealousy filled me, and I closed my eyes against the mental image of his mouth on another woman in
“It doesn’t matter,” I managed to say, and I meant it. But, oh God, it still hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I could hear the remorse staining his voice. “I should have never allowed it to go that far. I was angry, lonely, and feeling rather entitled. Not an honorable combination.”
I opened my eyes. The moon was in white relief against the night sky, and its rays seemed to make Bones’s skin glow.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said again, with more strength this time. “And for the record, I didn’t find out about that watch until after the fact. I’m not saying I would have run off with you had I found it sooner, but-I would have pressed that button. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.”
He smiled. Seeing it eased some of the hurt from his earlier confession. “I’ve never been able to stop myself either when it comes to you, Kitten. But we really do need to leave now.”
I cleared my throat. “Um, on foot?”
“No,” he snorted as he pulled up his pants. “The faster way.”
“I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me you could fly,” I complained. “I can think of a few times back in Ohio when it would have saved me some gas money!”
“I didn’t tell you about it back then because I was afraid to show you even more ways that I wasn’t like a normal man.”
Considering my many prejudices at the time, it was hard for me to blame him for such caution. “Can you also leap tall buildings in a single bound?” I asked after a pause.
He enfolded his arms around me, breath from his laughter tickling my neck. “We’ll try that tomorrow night.”
I nodded at the dead hit man across the parking lot. “What are we doing with him?”
“Leaving him. I’m sure your blokes will come along soon enough, so he’s their problem. We’re going back to my house to find out who employed the late Ellis Pierson.”
His arms tightened, and there was expulsion of air as he vaulted upward like his feet had invisible rockets. This time I didn’t squeeze my eyes shut, but I welded myself to him as the distance grew between us and the streets below.
“You don’t ever crash, do you?” I managed to ask breathlessly.
He chuckled, the sound snatched away by the wind.
“Not lately.”
TWENTY-TWO
BONES HAD LEFT HIS LAPTOP AND OTHER POSSIBLE incriminating information back at the house he was renting, which is where we went. For another piece of luck, his cell phone was safely inside the leather coat he still wore. We wouldn’t go back to my house anymore, for obvious reasons. With how much of a rush the mysterious source behind the attempt on my life was in, there could be another hit man waiting for me. I’d have to send someone else over to feed my cat for the next day or so.
Once we were safely inside the house and I could concentrate on more than “Eek, too high, too fast!” my mind spun with possibilities.
“Do you think Ian was behind the hit man?”
“Not a chance,” Bones said without hesitation. “Ian wants you alive so he can add you to his collection. Be a bit hard to do that if your head was in pieces.”
I remembered those three tight-knit holes in the window. “How did you know to knock me out of the way?”
“I heard the shots go off. He didn’t use a silencer.”
My head had been less than four feet away from the window at the time. Holy shit, he’d moved
He read my look. “Not fast enough. One touched your skin. That’s far too slow for me.”
I gave a humorless chuckle. “That’s faster than I even knew was possible. And the flying trick blew me away as well. Still, we can never go back to
“We both know what it has to be, Kitten,” Bones said, ignoring that. “Obviously Don decided not to trust you.”
