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“We can put the car in my garage, if you want.”
She thought about it. At least it would be close to hand, and whoever was doing this didn’t know about the car in the first place, so it should be safe. “Okay. We’ll move it when everyone leaves.”
She didn’t look at the Viper as she walked by it, but she stopped. Staring hard at the blue lights on top of the patrol cars, she asked Sam, “Is my car okay? I can’t look.”
“It looks okay. I don’t see any scratches or anything, and nothing’s broken.”
She heaved a sigh of relief and sort of sagged against him. He hugged her, then sent her back to his kitchen and the care of Sadie and Eleanor.
It was dawn before she was allowed to enter her house. She was surprised at the amount of attention given to what was essentially vandalism, but she supposed Sam was responsible for that. Of course, he didn’t think it was just vandalism.
Neither did she.
She couldn’t. Walking through her house, looking at the destruction, she noticed immediately how personal it all was. Her television hadn’t been touched—strange, since it was an expensive item—but all her dresses and underwear had been shredded. Her jeans and pants, however, hadn’t been touched.
In the bedroom, her sheets and pillows and mattress had been hacked to pieces, her perfume bottles broken. In the kitchen, everything made of glass had been broken, all her plates and bowls, glasses, cups, even the heavy lead-crystal serving trays she had never used. And in the bathroom, her bath linen was untouched, but all her makeup was destroyed. Tubes were smashed, powder dumped, and all the compacts of eyeshadow and blush looked as if they had been stomped, then ground to pieces.
“He destroyed everything feminine,” she whispered, looking around. The bed was kind of generic, but her bed linen was feminine, in soft pastels with lace-trimmed edges.
“He hates women,” Sam agreed, coming to stand beside her. His face was grim. “A psychiatrist would have a field day with this.”
She sighed, exhausted from lack of sleep and the sheer size of the task before her. She glanced at him; he hadn’t had any more sleep than she had, which amounted to nothing more than a couple of short naps. “Are you going to work today?”
He gave her a startled look. “Sure. I have to get with the detective working Marci’s case and bring him up to speed on this.”
“I’m not even going to try to work. It’ll take a week to get this mess cleaned up.”
“No, it won’t. Call a cleaning service.” He put a thumb under her chin and tilted up her face, looking at the bruises of fatigue that shadowed her eyes. “Then go to sleep—in my bed—and let Mrs. Kulavich oversee the cleaning. She’ll be thrilled.”
“If she is, then she’s in dire need of therapy,” Jaine said, once more surveying the wreckage of what had been her home. She yawned. “I also need to go shopping, to replace my clothes and makeup.”
He grinned. “The kitchen stuff can wait, huh?”
“Hey I know what’s important.” She leaned against him and looped her arms around his waist, reveling in the freedom to do so, reveling also in the way his arms automatically went around her.
She suddenly stiffened. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t once thought about Luna and T.J. tonight. Her brain must be misfiring, that was the only explanation.
“I
forgot about Luna and T.J.! My God, I should have called them immediately, warned them—”
“I did,” said Sam, folding her back in his arms. “I called them last night, on my cell phone. They’re okay, just worried about you.”
She yawned and relaxed against him once more, letting her head nestle on his chest. His heart thump-thumped in her ear. She was exhausted but couldn’t stop her thoughts from circling like buzzards around a fresh kill. If she couldn’t wind down, she would never be able to sleep.
“How do you feel about medicinal sex?” she asked him.
Interest lit his dark eyes. “Does it involve swallowing?”
She chuckled against his shirt. “Not yet. Maybe tonight. What this involves now is relaxing me enough so I can sleep. Are you interested?”
For answer, he took her hand and placed it over the fly of his jeans. He had a long, thick growth under his zipper. She hummed with pleasure as she ran her fingers up and down the length of it, feeling the tiny, spasmodic movements of his body that he couldn’t control.
“God, you’re easy,” she said.
“Thinking about swallowing always gets me hard.”
Hand in hand, they walked back to his house, where he relaxed her.
