After removing the book I’d swiped from Helena’s apartment from my back jeans pocket and tossing the volume into the rear seat, Islid into the driver’s side, then turned the ignition. The Judge flared to life with a snarling roar.
Pete got to his feet. Then he got the finger.
Then, because Helena and I had things to talk about, shit that actually mattered, I peeled the fuck out.
30HELENA
I should not be turned on by any of what had just happened. At all.
ButGodI was.
As Grim drove down Third Street, The Judge’s now-familiar rumble reverberating through me, I gripped the sides of the leather seat and tried like heck to ignore the subtle vibrations of the vehicle, the gentle tremoring of that powerful engine as it rattled up my bones and teased all the parts of me that he’d just lit up like bumpers in a pinball machine.
“Peter… seemed okay, but I… he…” I shook my head, rephrasing the question. “Did… you kill him?”
“Just for a second,” he grumbled.
I gaped at him—andat myself, galled. Because why wasthathot, too?
“Can’t you get in trouble for that?” I asked.
“At this point,” he muttered, “it’s in for a penny, in for a pound, Hart.”
Hart?
That was new. And more distant than I liked.
He kept his eyes on the road, that white patch of hair swept back above his pierced ear, darker strands teasing the collar of hisbad-boy jacket. The aroma of him, filling the cab, had my memories bouncing from one moment of closeness to the next and back again.
I’d never been high in my life. Never until now. And oh my God, thiscar.
The ceaseless rumbling of my seat made it all the harder to wrangle my imagination away from wandering beneath his clothes. And picturing those strong and sinewy, ring-lined hands all over me.
I cleared my throat when a sobering thought allowed me to get a handle on myself.
“Is this… a business call?” I asked him. “Reaper Man?” I added after a beat. He did a double take at me, and I shrugged because turnabout was fair play. “That’s what I called you in my head before I knew your real not-real name.”
“I’m not here for your soul, if that’s what you’re asking,” he replied, which had me relaxing a little. “I think you’d know if I was.”
He had a point. This was the first time he’d come to find me in my world ahead of any disastrous event. It was also the first time he’d approached me in his burn-the-world-down-and-me-with-it, hot-as-magma, sizzler human form.
I should roll down the window. Maybe I had a mint.
Who was I kidding? Neither of those things was going to help.
“I thought… I wouldn’t see you again until it was time,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, “I thought so, too. Who the fuck was that piece of shit?”
“I work with Peter,” I said. “We have… a history. I shouldn’t have told him you were my boyfriend. I’m… sorry. It was the first thing that popped into my head when he asked about the car, and…”
And maybe I wished it was true.
“He’s not going to try bothering you again,” Grim assured me.
“Is… he going to be okay?”
“You told me not to hurt him,” Grim said.
