Читать книгу Eternal - V.K. Forrest - Страница 9

They followed the sidewalk up to the 1950s-style motel and Fia muttered something nearly incoherent about getting an early start in the morning. She fumbled for her key in her pocket as she halted at room 104. She knew she needed to get inside quickly. Didn’t trust herself with Ian.

Glen.

She jabbed at the doorknob with the key, missed, tried again.

She felt his warm hand close over hers. “I’ll get it.” His tone was light, mocking.

Ian mocking her from the grave. Not Ian.

Despite the three pints of ale he’d consumed, Special Agent Glen Duncan, unlike Fia, had no trouble sliding the key into the lock and turning the doorknob.

Her pulse throbbed, her breath tight in her chest. It had been a long time since a man had made her feel like this.

She reached for the key, moving toward the open door, inadvertently toward him.

The same height as Fia, all he had to do was turn his head slightly, and then his lips were on hers. She couldn’t tell if he had done it of his own will, or had been lured by the age-old spell of the vampire.

His mouth tasted of stout, of the excitement of the unfamiliar, and at the same time, of the smoky past. She felt surrounded, overwhelmed by the scent of his skin and the warmth of his lips.

It took every fiber of self-control for Fia not to grab him by the shoulders, push him into the room and onto the bed.

“Agent Duncan,” she heard herself say against his mouth.

It seemed to snap him out of his fugue.

“Agent Kahill.” He seemed as surprised by his behavior as she was. He cleared his throat, stepped back and made a beeline for the next door down.

She heard the rattle of his key as she closed her door and set the dead bolt. She leaned against the doorframe. Her blood rushed in her ears as she breathed heavily, her thoughts darting in opposite directions, one after another.

All she would have to do was knock on his door. She knew he would let her in.

She couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t. Too much at stake.

She tried to think fast.

Pulling her cell phone from her pocket, she made a call she hadn’t made in some time. He answered on the second ring. A moment later, she was out of her room, walking down the dark street again. She put one foot in front of the other, putting more distance between herself and the FBI agent with every stride.

Perspiring heavily, she removed her jacket, carrying it over her arm.

She couldn’t believe she’d let him kiss her. Almost kiss her…their mouths had barely touched.

Was she out of her mind?

The path of the yellow moon led her four blocks through town, directly to Arlan’s door. He was waiting for her on his back porch, a four-foot-long creature with a curling tail and slanted gold eyes one moment, a lanky six-foot-tall man the next.

“Heard you were in town,” he said lazily, leaning on the bowed porch rail. It needed paint.

“I didn’t come to talk.” She hurried up the steps.

His arm shot out, grabbed her.

She gave a little grunt of surprise. Her jacket fell as he spun her around, pushing her up against the corner post. The back of her head hit the post, smarting. She took his mouth hungrily. “Just tonight,” she warned between kisses.

He bit down gently on her lower lip, then harder. “Just tonight.”

“Don’t want to talk.” She ran her hands over his bare, muscular chest. He was barefoot, just in jeans. He must have jumped in the shower right before she called. He smelled fresh. Comfortable. Safe.

“No talking,” he repeated, forcing his knee between her legs.

She moaned, grabbing a handful of his shaggy, dark hair. Nipped at his ear lobe, then his neck…just lightly. No blood.

He slid his hand up over her breast and squeezed. She moaned again. He pulled at the high neckline of her blouse. When the silk fabric wouldn’t give way, he jerked downward and it tore down the middle, exposing her breasts in a lacy bra.

“Ass,” she muttered. “It was a Ralph Lauren.”

He grasped one of her legs, above her knee, and lifted it to wrap around his waist. She pressed her groin to his, grinding against the hard bulge in his jeans. All Kahill males were well-endowed.

He grasped the lacy edge of her bra and pulled back the cup to expose her breast to the humid night air. Her pale nipple hardened at once and she guided his head downward, encouraging him to take it in his mouth.

Arlan had been her lover on and off for hundreds of years. He knew her as well as she knew herself, and knew her body better, perhaps. He’d always had a thing for her, even before Ian; she had never been able to reciprocate those feelings. For that reason, the guilt occasionally got to her and she’d stay away from him for awhile. Sometimes as long as a life cycle. But she always came back to Arlan and he was always waiting for her.

He pushed her bra strap down, covering her breast with his warm hand, massaging her nipple with his thumb. “Inside or here?” he panted in her ear.

She nipped his neck a little deeper this time, feeling his pulse against her lips. He would offer her his blood. He didn’t always, but tonight, he would. “Inside,” she whispered.

The following morning, Fia met Glen at the breakfast buffet inside the lobby of the Lighthouse Motel. He was already at a table, drinking coffee, eating scrambled eggs and sausage links, when she walked in. She made herself a cup of hot herbal tea, grabbed a plain bagel and sat in the chair across from him.

An elderly couple stood at the breakfast bar arguing over the fat content of a blueberry muffin; the other tables were empty.

“Morning,” she said.

He didn’t look up over the edge of the newspaper he was reading. “Morning,” he said cheerfully.

Cheerful enough that she wondered why she was feeling so awkward and he wasn’t. Had he really tried to kiss her last night or had that been a figment of Fia’s overactive imagination, spurred by the fact that she couldn’t get over how much he looked like Ian?

Or had it happened and he didn’t remember? Maybe he didn’t hold his liquor well and he really was drunk last night. Or maybe he was just embarrassed and good at covering for himself.

For whatever reason, it didn’t appear they were going to have one of those clumsy morning-after conversations, for which she would be eternally grateful. She dunked her teabag in the hot water in the Styrofoam cup in front of her and nibbled on the uncut, untoasted bagel.

Glen finished reading whatever had been holding his attention and folded the newspaper and set it aside. “Sleep okay, Agent Kahill?”

There was something in the tone of his voice now that made her think he had tried to kiss her last night, and he remembered it all too well.

“Fine. You, Agent Duncan?”

“Like a baby.” He scooped up one last forkful of scrambled eggs and pushed it into his mouth. He wasn’t exactly avoiding eye contact, but he wasn’t looking at her, either. “You have a plan for this morning?”

“Of course, but you go first.” She pulled the teabag out of the water, wrapping it around a spoon.

“No, no. Your hometown, Agent Kahill. Your connections with the senator’s office. Go ahead.”

She dropped the bagel onto her napkin, instantly annoyed. Fine. They’d do it her way. Her way was usually better in most situations, anyway. “While we’re waiting on the autopsy report—”

“Which should be interesting,” he interjected.

“We take another look at the crime scene, get some additional photos, clear it so the federal building can be reopened, and then we start interviewing anyone who saw the victim the evening of his death and work backwards from there.”

He took a drink of coffee from the white mug. “We order a background check on the vic. Have a look at his bank accounts, credit cards, nose around in his personal life.”

She worked her jaw, raising her cup to her lips. He’d have to know about Mary…Mary his girlfriend, not his wife. Of course, his wife had a steady thing with Joey Hill. Tuesday nights. Had for twenty-five years, at least.

Men and women of the sept remained with their own spouses or partners life cycle after life cycle, but were free to have sex with whomever they pleased…so long as he or she was not human. It was the way they had been doing it for centuries and it made everyone’s lives less problematic.

This investigation in Clare Point was going to get complicated. It wasn’t going to fit into any neat FBI investigative-techniques box. She really needed to get Glen Duncan out of here before he got hurt.

She took another sip of tea, the taste of Arlan’s blood still cool and metallic in her mouth.

She had to resist the urge to pat her lips with the napkin.

Arlan had come through when she needed him. No questions asked. Multiple orgasms included. His arms had felt good around her. He was good for her. He thought so. Everyone in the town thought so. So why had it been Ian’s face she had seen last night when she closed her eyes?

Or had it been Glen’s?

She suppressed a groan. “My plan work for you, Agent Duncan?” She rose from her chair, balling the uneaten bagel up in the napkin. She’d take the tea with her.

They stopped at the waste can at the end of the buffet bar to leave their trash. He was watching her. No…staring.

“You okay?” He touched his luscious neck with his fingertip. “Looks like you’ve got a spot of blood there.”

She turned away, headed for the door, resisting the temptation to rub at the mark. She had told Arlan to be careful. “Cut myself shaving.”

By three o’clock, Fia knew this wasn’t going to be an open-and-shut case. By three the following day, the prospects for solving Bobby McCathal’s murder within the week were looking dismal. No one had seen or heard anything at the post office that night, and there was still no sign of the decapitated head or severed feet.

Fia and Duncan completed their photographs, and Paddy’s Cleaning Service of Clare Point was called in to remove the bloodstains from the floor at the crime scene. Sixty-one-year-old Catherine Kahill, one of two mail carriers in town, agreed to run the post office as soon as it was cleared by the FBI and reopened by the postal service. The two agents then began their interviews.

For the most part, Glen and Fia just stayed out of each other’s way, which was fine with her. She did, however, manage to convince him to hold the interviews inside the post office lobby, rather than going door-to-door. She suggested that the police station was too small, too crowded, and they wanted to keep their investigation as separate from local law enforcement as possible. Fia didn’t tell Glen that part of her reasoning involved keeping her Uncle Sean out of the fray. He didn’t know that the police chief was too loose a cannon for her to trust entirely. The bonus that came with not operating out of the police station was that she didn’t have to deal with any of Uncle Sean’s armchair COPS advice.

The tricky thing was that she didn’t want Glen in Kahill family members’ houses, either. Everyone was used to behaving in a certain manner in public places; it was the way they had been coexisting with humans since their arrival in the colonies. But inside their homes…Fia wasn’t so certain they would keep their guards up as well. Besides, with her and Glen both interviewing in the post office lobby, she could keep an eye on him.

Fia’s gaze strayed from Anna Ross, whom she was interviewing, to her notepad, where she had made no notes in the last twenty minutes. Anna was going on about how Bobby’s dog had barked in the yard. She had not seen Bobby the day of the murder and knew nothing about it, but Fia couldn’t get her to budge out of the chair no matter how many times she thanked her for taking time out of her busy day of watching game shows and soaps on her new big-screen TV.

“Some kind of mixed breed,” Anna continued. “A dumb mutt, not smart enough to…”

Fia glanced at her wristwatch and then her gaze strayed across the room to where Glen was interviewing Anna’s sister Peigi. Fia could tell by the look on his face that he was having a difficult time ridding himself of his interviewee as well.

Just as she looked down at her notebook again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Glen abruptly rise from his chair. Fia got up, looking in the direction he was looking. The back room.

Both sisters, oblivious to the fact that their respective agents were out of their chairs, continued to chatter.

“Agent Duncan?” Fia called out from across the room. He was closer to the rear entrance than she was.

He held up his finger. He was still watching something or someone in the rear of the building.

Suddenly, he took off across the lobby. “Stop, FBI!”

Fia sprinted after him.

There was a crash in the mail room. Something fell. An unidentified object slid across the freshly mopped and sanitized marble floor. By the time Fia made it through the archway, Glen was going out the back door into the alley.

“You! Stop. FBI!” he hollered.

Fia leaped over a box of spilled envelopes. “Agent Duncan, wait!” She burst out the back door, down the steps, through the fluttering strips of freshly acquired yellow police tape the local police had used to block off the building. Glen ran ahead of her, down the alley, toward the street that ran behind the post office. He was chasing a pigtailed teenager.

Fia immediately recognized the girl from the back of her head. This is getting better by the second. This young lady was not someone in Clare Point the human needed to meet. She was an important woman in the sept, but in a vulnerable place right now, which made them all vulnerable. “Kaleigh,” she called. “It’s Fia. Stop.”

The teen flew around the corner and down the block.

Fia pushed to catch up with Glen, but he had almost half a block start on her. “Duncan,” she called. “Slow down. I know her.”

He continued at an all-out run.

They crossed the street and Kaleigh zigzagged, cutting through another alley, down the next block. Dogs barked. Pat Hill stopped his pickup in the middle of the street to watch the two FBI agents in suits chase down the teenager in shorts and a tank top. They had picked up a yellow lab, that ran behind them, barking excitedly.

“Duncan, for Pete’s sake,” Fia hollered. She was fit and a good runner, but she had not packed her running shoes and she was going to be pissed if she broke the heel on her new loafers. “I know where she lives!”

He slowed and Fia caught up. He was panting pretty hard. Fit, but not as fit as Fia. Most humans weren’t.

“She was in the post office. In the back,” Glen panted, jogging beside her. “I don’t know what she was doing, but she took off the minute she realized I saw her.”

Fia looked up ahead, shooting thoughts in the girl’s direction. What are you doing in the post office? What are you doing, running from a federal law enforcement agent?

If the teen heard Fia, she didn’t respond. Kaleigh leaped a line of waist-high azalea bushes, cutting across Victor Simpson’s scraggly lawn.

“Damn it, Kaleigh!” Fia called out, skirting two garbage cans turned over on the sidewalk. The lab had caught up and was leaping in front of her, still barking wildly. “Don’t make me run another two blocks to your house. Your da will have your hide,” she threatened.

The girl, tennis shoes flying, threw a glance over her shoulder. “Fee? That you?”

“How many FBI agents do you think we have in town? Yes, it’s me,” Fia answered, aloud.

Kaleigh halted on the far side of Simpson’s lawn, eyeing Glen suspiciously.

“Get over here!” Fia stopped just short of the hedge, waving her hand, then shooing the dog. Take a hike, buster, or I’ll be having doggy burgers for dinner tonight, she warned.

The lab tucked his tail between his legs and took off down the sidewalk in the direction he’d come.

Glen pulled up and walked around in a circle, trying to catch his breath.

“Did she take anything?” Fia asked him.

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know, but she ran when she saw me.”

“You probably just scared her. Let me handle this,” she said. Then to Kaleigh, “I said, get over here.” She pointed to the grass beside her.

Kaleigh squeezed between two bushes, still considering the male FBI agent warily.

“He’s with me,” Fia assured her.

“Something of interest to you in the post office, young lady?” Glen demanded.

“Special Agent Duncan, please,” Fia said. “This is Kaleigh Kahill.”

“Another relative?”

“Distant.”

Glen studied the teenager. She glared back.

Please, be careful, Fia warned telepathically. “Kaleigh, do you mind telling us what you were doing in the rear of the post office? Didn’t you notice the door was taped off? Surely you knew you didn’t belong there.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the redhead flung back. “I was just looking around.”

“Do you know something about Mr. McCathal’s death?” Glen asked.

“No more than anyone else in town.”

Fia brushed her hand against the girl’s arm. “You didn’t touch anything?”

“No. I just wanted to see if the blood was still there. Meg said her Uncle Mahon said there were gallons of blood. I said she was lying because you don’t have gallons of blood. Everyone knows that!”

Fia glanced at Glen. He seemed to be relaxing a little. He was obviously pissed off, but she could see that he was beginning to see what this was, and that was nothing more than a nosy teenager being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Where’s your mom and dad?” Fia asked.

“I don’t know. Home, I guess.”

Fia looked to Glen. “Why don’t I walk her home, speak to her parents. You better get back to the sisters. Officer Hill was the only other person left in the building and those ladies are liable to tag-team him and take him down with their armored purses.”

She said it with a straight face and heavily laced with sarcasm. To her surprise, Glen grinned.

She liked being surprised by humans. They didn’t do it often.

“Count yourself lucky this time, Miss Kahill,” he warned Kaleigh with an accusing finger. “I catch you poking around my crime scene again, I don’t care who you’re related to, you’ll be arrested.”

Kaleigh opened her mouth to respond, then, wisely, clamped it shut.

Fia grabbed the teenager and steered her to the sidewalk and toward home. “Give me a couple of minutes, Special Agent Duncan. I’m going to escort Kaleigh home and speak with her parents. You can tell Miss Ross—my Miss Ross—she’s free to go. I don’t have any more questions for her.”

He hesitated, then lifted his hand and headed off in the opposite direction. Fia hustled Kaleigh down the street, waiting until Glen was out of earshot before she spoke.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Fia demanded from between clenched teeth. “Didn’t you hear me telepathically?”

The girl looked up with bright blue eyes. “No, I didn’t,” she said in the same indignant tone Fia heard from human teenagers. “I’m only ten months old, remember?”