Crowe noticed Joell’s grin and couldn’t help smiling, as hard as he tried to squelch it. As soon as Rick had stormed out of the room, Joell and Crowe hugged each other. What a wonderful feeling, to put his arms all the way around her warm body and hold her so close to his chest that her breasts squished against him. To feel their hearts beating against each other. An unusual sensation flooded his body. He could feel his sex extending and thickening.Oops. I’m getting my first human hard-on.
25
It hardly seemed fair to have to wait for something so urgent, but taking her right there in Rick’s room would have felt all wrong… more like perfectly disgusting, so Crowe relented when she asked him to wait.
He still couldn’t believe he’d confessed his needs to her. Even crazier, he couldn’t believe she was cool with it! Now he just had to hope she wouldn’t change her mind when sanity returned in a few hours.
They had gathered ALL the League members from the mission, plus an ecstatic Stan Gold, the agent, to deliver the good news. Four models were huddled in a corner of the hotel lobby, away from listening ears.
“I can’t believe I missed most of it,” Sahara, still jet-lagged from flying the red-eye from Egypt, said. “So how did it go down?”
Joell took a deep breath. “We followed a lead that brought us to the hotel where we thought they were being held. I couldn’t intimidate the perps into spilling their guts since pirate-boy took me out of the room too soon.”
“Why did he do that?” Rayna asked.
“Because he doesn’t know how we work. We charm what we can out of perps, then put the screws to them until we get the rest.”
A communal chuckle affirmed her assessment of the League’s tactics.
“He was hung up on having no reason to barge in there without a search warrant, yada, yada… Anyway, a quick sweep of the place showed no models, but I could sense their presence. I was afraid we’d lose them if we didn’t act fast, so I rushed back here, dropped Rick like cargo, and grabbed some of the model’s possessions for the K-9 police dogs to sniff.”
“Who called the K-9 unit?”
“I did. But it was Rick’s suggestion… Probably his only valuable contribution.”
Victoria, who’d just arrived that morning, spoke up. “I suppose it would have been easier to have one or two of us covering your derriere.”
“Totally. But the hotel manager finally called in the cops, and Stan at least managed to convince them to go about it undercover. By the way, thanks for doing that, Stan.”
“You’re more than welcome.”
Crystal ran her hand over Stan’s proud chest. “Can you imagine uniforms roaming through the convention questioning everyone? It would have been a disaster.”
“I know. We’d be so hampered by police procedure we’d wind up looking after our own asses,” Lioness said. “Not only that, but the romance readers wouldn’t know if they were looking at real cops or more cover models!”
Group laughter said they knew exactly what she was talking about. Crowe reflected how glad he was to be on this side of the law, meaning the League of Amazing Witches, of course.
Magda tipped her head to the side. “What was it like when you found them? Set the scene for us.”
“Okay. The dogs were waiting when I got there. I was glad it didn’t take forever, because I would have had to bust them myself with my empty Derringer if they’d tried to move the models. Especially since I was already pissed off, I didn’t trust my aggressive use of magic.”
“Understandable,” Stan said.
Funny how he could accept the babe’s superpowers without question, yet Rick, who could have used the advantage, continued to be skeptical, Crowe thought.
“I gave the officers the items, and they did their thing with the dogs. Crowe could have done the sniffing, but with the absence of firepower, having the armed police and attack dogs was the way to go. You should have seen their faces when we burst in on their makeshift studio.”
“What studio?” Rayna asked.
“They were shooting porn movies. Now I don’t have a problem with that as long as the actors are willing and paid for their work. However, these guys werenotgoing to be doing the ‘pizza delivery guy meets the woman of the house in her negligee’ movies. They had planned to use them for gay and slash porn.”
“Jesus,” Stan exclaimed. “Thank God you got there before they began shooting.”
“Or slashing. Yeah, I know. The models were damn glad to see us.”
“I’ll bet!” he said. “And I’m damn grateful to all of you too. When I first heard you might not take the case, I was desperate. At first, it was only to save my own pride, but now…” He shook his head with his mouth hanging open, as if he didn’t have the words to say more.
Crowe had been quietly standing with his hands at his sides, and no one questioned his presence since he’d arrived with Joell. They probably figured he was with the hotel or the police. He didn’t want to get into a long explanation of his human presence,and apparently, neither did she. She turned to him and smiled briefly.
