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“Whatever you want it to be.”
“And the same for theBurn Outon your back?”
“Sure,” Jesse said with a yawn. “Why not?”
Emory kissed the corner of Jesse’s mouth and sat up with a sigh. “I’m very sorry, but my working day is only just starting.” He stood and moved to the bathroom. He paused in the doorway. “You’re welcome to sleep here.”
An odd hopefulness humanized his expression. Jesse looked around the room, feeling both sorely tempted and extremely out of place.
“I’ve got some stuff to check in my own room.”
“Okay,” Emory said with a quiet smile. “Whatever’s best for you.” He frowned as Jesse ran his hands over the covers. “What’s wrong?”
“We won’t ever actually sleep together, will we?” Jesse raised his eyes. “I mean sleep. Really sleep.”
Emory’s face shifted. “No, dearest, we won’t.”
Jesse nodded.
“Is that okay?”
“It’ll have to be, won’t it?”
Emory didn’t reply straight away. “I’m going to clean up. Would you like to join me?”
“I don’t think I have a third go in me,” he said, wincing slightly as he moved off the bed.
Emory held his hand out with a smile. “That can wait until tomorrow night.”
They showered, rubbing lemon-scented shower gel on each other, not talking, just exploring each other in intimate silence. By the time they were dressing and leaving the room, it was all Jesse could do to stay awake long enough to return to his own. There were reports to read and searches to check on his computer, but his bed was calling. He collapsed without undressing.
Chapter Fourteen
Jesse wasn’t sure where he was. The room he was in was pitch dark, but he knew there was a peach coat hung on the back of the door. He knew makeup was lined up on the dressing table in an orderly line. The blinding light of a laptop screen shone from the desk. There was a document on the screen. He didn’t want to read it but he was moving forward, unable to stop. He sat. He was reading a list…a list that made his blood run cold.
He choked and sat up, gasping for air. He was in his own room at Oswald House. He was sweating. The stretch of Emory was still hot in his arse but the rest of him was cold. He rubbed his face.
His phone was buzzing somewhere in the bed. He squinted at the clock in the low light. It wasn’t even seven. He grumbled and scrabbled for his phone, blinking tired eyes. By the time he found it, it had stopped ringing. There were seven missed calls from Anton.
His blood chilled all over again. It was then he noticed the warning symbols blinking on his computer monitors.
His legs were shaking as he scrambled to his desk and opened the notifications. His deep searches of Emory’s name had trawled thousands of hits in the last two hours. His stomach dipped like he was on a rollercoaster. He desperately searched through tweets, posts and reaction vlogs until he found the article that had sparked it all.
It was an online article on a small local news site.
The Undying Baron Kidnaps Human Child.
It took several moments for Jesse to bring the text into focus. Dimity wasn’t named and neither was Helena. But one sentence had Jesse’s heart climbing into his throat.
Sources now confirm that Baron Emory Von Magnusson engineered the kidnapping of a human girl from the mayor’s residence on Christmas Eve and is holding her hostage at Oswald House.
The hit counter was ticking up as he watched. The Twitter chatter had reached around the world. The membership of online haemophile hate groups had shot up and was still rising. Jesse jumped when the sounds of shouting came from outside.
He hurried to the window and jerked back the curtains. The police cars were just visible in the pre-dawn gloom. Beyond them was a crowd so dense it filled the road for several meters. Shouts and curses rose and fell. The ground inside the gate was littered with bottles, cans, bricks and broken glass. Jesse watched, horrified, as someone tried to scale the wall, only to be pushed back by the joint efforts of the police and Oswald House’s own security.
A frantic knock on his door then Tom came in without waiting for an answer. His hair was rumpled, and he was hurriedly fastening his jeans.
“We have a situation.”
