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I tried to shake my head, but it still felt heavy. Instead I took his hand and wove my fingers between his. “Not always. But sometimes. ”
“Was it like that with Lucas?” He knew I’d bitten Lucas before, but I’d never told him I’d bitten Lucas during sex. I guess it was a fair assumption for him to make.
I kissed his fingertips, and his skin burned under my lips. “No,” I replied honestly. “It’s never been like that with anyone but you. ”
Chapter Thirteen
I was probably reading too much into things when I noticed Desmond’s bedroom didn’t have any windows. The pity of it all was that even without windows, I wasn’t going to be able to sleep over. I also wasn’t stupid enough to believe that one hot night would be all it took to fix our fractured relationship.
Baby steps, though. And this one had felt like it was in the right direction.
“Where are you going?” he asked, his voice still lazy and raw from our romp in the sack.
After I’d retrieved my clothes from the living room and hunted around his dark bedroom floor for my missing underpants, I sat next to him and brushed a kiss over his cheek. His skin remained hot to the touch.
“Oh, you know. Find a missing heiress. Figure out if my fairy godmother is a psycho killer. The usual. ”
“Let me help. ” He sat up, the sheet covering his lower body slipping away, and he swung his legs off the side of the bed. Any resolve I had to leave began to fade with every new inch of him made visible. I swallowed hard.
“Help me how?” I tore my gaze away from his crotch and looked at his face instead. It didn’t help my plans any. He could wear a parka and I’d still get woozy looking at him. Love drunk. That was the best way to describe it.
“You need to find Kellen. Lucas threatened you with banishing me, but he never said I couldn’t help you, did he?”
“No. ” I was willing to bet Lucas didn’t think I’d tell Desmond about his threat.
“I can help you find Kellen. ”
“What makes you think you can find her when no one else can?”
Desmond gave me a sardonic smirk. I knew perfectly well why he was being so cocky about his odds. Kellen herself had confessed to me once about her teenaged crush on Desmond. He was banking on her former lusty feelings to give him the upper hand in the search.
Sad thing was, he was probably spot-on in his logic.
Kellen was, after all, a simple creature.
And Desmond had only gotten better with age.
My phone rang shortly after midnight, and caller ID informed me I should expect some sort of tongue-lashing from Keaty when I picked up. I hit the answer button on the touchscreen and braced myself for yelling. I wasn’t sure why. Keaty wasn’t a yeller, nor had I done anything to deserve being yelled at. All the same, I was getting pretty accustomed to people shouting at me lately.
“Keaty?”
“Am I interrupting anything?”
I gave Desmond a surreptitious glace, worried Keaty could somehow tell what I’d been up to recently. At the moment, however, Desmond was driving us towards Kellen’s apartment complex on Central Park West, and I wasn’t actually up to no good.
“No. ”
“A shame. I thought perhaps you might be working. ”
“Oh, my bad. I thought you meant anything important. ” My pause gave me plenty of time to imagine Keaty’s humorless scowl. “I’m working. Don’t freak out. ”
“Good, then you have time to hear about a call I got from a young woman named Becca Trout?”
Becca? It took me a second to remember the bubble-gum-snapping girl from Papa John’s. The card I’d given her last night had been a number for our office line, so it made sense Keaty would be the one around to get the call rather than me.
“What did she say?”
“Do you have a pen…? Oh, wait, you won’t need one. She listed a few dozen regular customers. A cursory background check on them turned up little of interest, just some obese families and a fraternity house. But I think the one that will prove to be unsurprising to both of us was the regularity with which a certain coffeehouse called for pizzas. ”
