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“No offense, Princess, but you don’t really seem like the fighting type.” He paused as he patted the toilet paper across her skin, cleaning off the blood and excess peroxide. “You’ve got the attitude, and don’t get me wrong, you handle yourself well in a brawl, but....” He hesitated. “Something tells me you don’t like to do that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. It’s my duty to my pack.” She cocked her head to the side and eyed him up and down. “You’re not going to pull the whole ‘I’m a big bad wolf’ and ‘I don’t need any help hunting this monster’ crap, are you? This is my fight too now.”
Jace shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather not draw you into this. But considering you want revenge and you could use someone by your side protecting you, I think us working together is the best solution.”
She shook her head. “I already told you. I don’t need anyone to protect me.”
“I know you don’t, but I want to.” He swallowed the nervous lump in his throat. “Humor me?” he asked, echoing her words from the other night.
Her eyes lit up, a beautiful burn behind them like when they’d…made love? Was that what they’d done? His stomach dropped down into his feet, and he looked away. Son of a bitch.
“Although, who am I to make your choices for you?” he grumbled.
For a moment, she didn’t say anything until...
“Un amante.”Her voice barely registered above a whisper.
Jace froze. He didn’t speak Italian, but he sure as hell knew what that meant.A lover.His mouth went dry, and his stomach churned as if someone had grabbed his insides and twisted his intestines into knots. Slowly, he released her hand.
Rushing to the other side of the room, he searched through his trench-coat pockets for his cigarettes. “You mind if I light up in here?” He pulled one out and stuck it in his mouth before she could answer. “I’ve been trying to quit.” Not that it was going too well at the moment.
He glanced back toward her, the way she was watching him whispered a thousand things he wasn’t certain he wanted to hear. Fumbling, he grabbed his lighter, flicking it several times before the flame caught and sweet smoke rushed into it his lungs.
He shouldn’t be doing this.
Shit. Shit. Shit.He glanced in her direction and his stomach flipped again.One night. That was all it was supposed to be, and yet...
He burnt halfway through the cigarette before he could stop himself, sucking the gray fog into his lungs. The smoke gave him just enough calm to keep his cool. A bucket of ice dumped over his head would have been better.
He took another drag. “Pack your bags. We need to get out of here.”
Her head snapped toward him, her eyes wide-open and attentive. “We’re going huntingnow?Don’t you think that’s a little stu—”
“Don’t get your panties in a knot. We need to get our shit together first. But we can’t talk here. We need to be prepared before we go at him, and because he’s a sexual sadist and gets off on all this, it’s likely he’ll come back here to…” He shrugged.
She walked over to her wooden wardrobe and sifted through the clothes. “To what?”
Jace sighed. “Flog the bishop.”
Her long hair whipped through the air as spun to face him, gaping like a waterless fish. “You can’t be serious?”
“Who knows what this bastard is capable of? You’ve heard of crimes of passion? There isn’t much that’s more passionate than sex, and everything this guy does is so he can yank his own chain. Much as I’d like to camp out here and stake him out, we’d be just as likely to trap ourselves. We do this, we do it right.”
“To vindicate your name?”
“And get the heat off your pack.” He shrugged, flicking his ashes. “In my world we call that a win-win scenario.”
She nodded in agreement, before she turned and bent down to grab something from the bottom drawer, treating Jace to a prime-time view of her tight, round ass squeezed into a pair of low-cut jeans. His cock jerked.
Damn.
He’d thought one night would be enough to satisfy the ache. What a fool he’d been...
He ripped his gaze away and shook his head. He shouldn’t be ogling her in the middle of a crime scene after she’d been traumatized by a serial killer. He scanned the room. The sound of Chet’s voice mocking him pounded in his head. One more thing to mess with him.
“That’s disgusting,” she said, interrupting his self-loathing, clearly still caught on the killer’s motivations.
Jace shifted his weight and rearranged himself. The last thing he needed was for Princess to think he was some creep who got his jollies off scared women. “You bet. Now grab your things and let’s get outta here.”
