The Shadow Guard Page 9

  She impulsively laid her hand over his and his kubri ear cuff immediately sprang into sight, released from the invisibility spell she’d set before.

  His expression promptly softened and he gripped her fingers. His uneaten pizza dropped back into the box.

  “Yes, I’m interested,” she said softly, warmth purring through her veins. The first, faint musical chords of magick starting to gather, sounded in her ears. “In gelato—and other things, too.”

  “Like playing Argos?” Jake teased.

  She snickered and curled her fingers through his, savoring every brush of skin over skin. Any and every willing contact between kubri and sahir was to be cherished—but this felt better than those she’d shared before in an aerie.

  “Or why you said maybe to whether you’d have the killer’s photo,” she gasped, trying to stay grounded for a few moments longer.

  His grip tightened until his rough calluses abraded her finer skin. Anger and unease lined his face until he looked ready to shatter anything close at hand.

  Without thinking, she sent a surge of reassurance mixed with magick to him.

  His nostrils flared and he swayed back, as if bowed by a great wind. To her shock and delight, his shields dropped, revealing his aura as pitted and dark.

  A chill washed Astrid’s bones. A kubri should never look so bereft.

  She had nothing to give him, since her day’s labors had sapped her resources. Sahirs could never harbor power for very long.

  Maybe something else would work.

  She planted her feet firmly and sent down tendrils deep into the house’s roots. This was not her best skill but perhaps it would answer to desperate need.

  Then she whispered an old, old spell.

  Magick flew out of the old house’s foundations, through its walls, and into her, brighter than a star’s burning heart. She’d reached for a candle and lit a supernova.

  Astrid’s heart skipped a beat. Could he survive this?

  But the magick gave her no chance to protect him. Before she could even consider throwing up wards, it dived into Jake like an incoming tide’s first wave.

  Jake shuddered and wrapped both hands around Astrid’s. He held on to her like a drowning man in a hurricane, his knuckles white.

  Wind sucked her breath away and pressed hard on her ribs. She clutched him tighter than a cowboy had ever gripped a bucking bronc’s reins.

  Slowly color returned to his cheeks and filled in his aura. Magick gradually settled back into the walls and earth, like fireworks fading into smoke.

  Astrid dared to cast a wary eye over their reflections in the window but saw only two disheveled people. She quickly cast a housekeeping charm to clean them up before Jake could wonder why they looked as if they’d been outside in a gale, rather than than cozily indoors.

  Not that her brain relaxed. Far too much power had answered her request for aid. Either Jake’s house sat on an immense ley line, which tapped a previously unknown local power source, or else Jake was so powerful that rebalancing him made his ancestral home give everything it had.

  Astrid wasn’t sure which explanation she liked least. Washington, D.C.’s ley lines were a national treasure, over which wars had been fought. No local ley lines should still remain unmapped. But houses and gardens rarely poured out their entire storehouse of magick.

  Jake gulped down his beer with the air of somebody imbibing liquid gold.

  “The killer’s photo comes from a traffic cam.” He studied the bottom of his glass and decided not to add anything more.

  Astrid considered him, more and more unsettled that he thought only one beer was enough for the evening. For one thing, he’d need more than that to wash down the amount of pizza he’d consumed.

  “Traffic cam?” she questioned softly, grateful Jake was at least talking to her.

  “This one’s a state-of-the-art beastie out on the Beltway.” He held the glass up and swirled the golden dregs around to form a brilliant kaleidoscope. “Records ten lanes of traffic with no problem.”

  She waited patiently to hear his true concern and watched him with all of her senses, both physical and magickal. If he didn’t want to say anything more, she’d assume he needed to keep his investigation sacrosanct for its future courtroom appearance.

  “Right now, all we have is the long shot where you can’t tell a person from a bear.”

  “That’s a start,” said Astrid with sincerity. If somebody or something else had seen the killer, then she could disappear from the investigation. That would be a relief, no matter what it did for her chances of seeing Jake again. “What else?”

  “Nothing.” Jake shoved his chair back so hard it bunched the kitchen carpet. “We can’t magnify the image.”

  “What?” She gaped at him. That was impossible, given the million ways to pull off looking deeper into a photo.

  “It won’t work, no matter who or what tries. The Beltway camera system won’t zoom in. FBI systems suffer software errors if you ask them to magnify. Ours just babble hex code and demand a reboot.” His voice was harsh enough to sharpen steel.

  “Holy shit,” she muttered. A photo that couldn’t be magnified stank of magick.

  But she’d worry about what to do with the picture later. Jake was more important right now.

  His aura was so smudged. No wonder, since that kind of frustration must be destroying him from the inside. “What will you try next?”

  “The FBI is still looking into it.”

  “But you’re not very hopeful.”

  “Not really.” His broad shoulders were rigidly erect in front of the coffeemaker, where nothing was turned on. “If nothing else, it will take extra time. We need to try something else.”

  “Like what?” She made her question as gentle as possible. If he didn’t want to be more specific with a civilian, he could always change the subject.

  “Look deeper at the obvious suspects, of course.” He turned to face her and leaned back against the counter. “She had a half dozen siblings, who are all married, plus a dozen or more cousins.”

  Astrid whistled softly, remembering the enormous families of her childhood. “Lots of room there for misunderstandings to ripen into hatred and feuds.”

  “Yeah. Everybody denies it so far, but you never know until you check them out thoroughly, especially the spouses.”

  “The killer seemed like a pro. How he held her and especially how he wielded the knife.” Astrid started to be more specific, then stopped abruptly. She flushed, biting her tongue like a Sunday School student caught reciting the wrong hymn.

  Jake didn’t notice, thank God, since he was staring at his wine cellar as if it held the murderer’s identity in addition to fine beverages.

  “I’d bet on that, though I can’t prove it.” He pounded his palms on the granite counter, then shoved himself away. “I can at least rule out money problems for Ms. Williams. She had no big debts—but no real savings either until she moved in with her fiancé.”

  “So she was clean.”

  “Just a boring bureaucrat, except for her tendency to pick up speeding tickets.”

  Jake started to clean up and Astrid joined him, working silently together as if this was another Argos quest. Too efficiently together.

  “What about Melinda—Miss Williams’s—job? Have you checked that out?”

  The garbage disposal roared happily. It could shred useless items, unlike Astrid—or Jake.

  “That’s the FBI’s job, since she was a federal employee.”

  “Shit.”

  Jake shrugged. “They’re my partners in this investigation.”

  “Are they treating you like a partner?” Astrid demanded. She was suddenly, fiercely—stupidly!—angry on his behalf. She spent too much time with the Feds not to know just how arrogant and self-centered they could be.

  “Usually.”

  His wry tone stopped her an instant before she exploded.

  “Usually?” She considered the implications. “You�
�re very lucky.”

  “Don’t I know it.” He snorted and grabbed a coffee mug from the top shelf. “Do you want anything else to drink?”

  She wanted to kiss that proud, unhappy, stiff back and whisper that everything would be all right. A vagrant heat tiptoed through her blood and brushed her most delicate skin, until it simmered like a banked campfire.

  Surely she could ease him a little, without exposing what she truly was.

  “Coffee would be fine, if that’s what you’re drinking.”

  “I’d like to ask around at Miss Williams’s job,” he told the coffeemaker a few minutes later. “Start out by checking into her coworkers.”

  “The obvious questions, the same ones you’d ask no matter where somebody worked.” Astrid wrapped her arms around his waist and snuggled her face against his back. Sahirs couldn’t infuse kubris with magick very easily, except through direct physical contact.

  “Yeah. GSA doesn’t have many scandals.”

  Laughter bubbled up through Astrid until she quivered. Trust her experienced homicide cop to be disgruntled by an absence of crime.

  Jake spun and caught her into his arms. Astrid’s heartbeat exploded in delight, then settled into a fast, sweeping dance, which stole her breath.

  “It’s not that funny,” he protested, although a small tremor at the corner of his mouth belied his words. “Stuff has disappeared from their huge warehouses.”

  Astrid pursed her lips and nodded slowly, determined to string together a sober conversation. He’d shown no signs tonight he wanted more than friendship, so she must have moved too fast the other night. Although men’s dicks usually did most of their thinking . . . It was probably safer to go for a slow seduction.

  “All those enormous warehouses, filled with tens—or hundreds? —of millions of dollars of government goods.” What examples would impress Jake? All that interested her right now was the chance to unbutton his crisp, long-sleeved, cotton shirt. She swallowed hard against the urge to rub herself over him like a cat.

  “Nice, juicy stuff to steal and sell for big bucks. Like, maybe, the Ark of the Covenant?” she offered, remembering one of Hollywood’s wilder suggestions.

  Jake choked and waved her suggestion off. “Think bigger. Computer parts, for starters.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head to consider the notion, rather impressed. Her body shifted with the movement, rotating her hip against his.

  Suddenly she was tucked much more completely into the crook of his arm. Rich masculine scents enfolded her, evoking his hard-edged work and his ancient house. His strong chest rose and fell quickly until his stiff cotton shirt teased her breasts through her thin sweater more thoroughly than his mouth could have.

  Some lucky woman would one day have him for more than a fuck buddy. All Astrid could do was rebuild his strength and snatch a few memories.

  She rubbed his arm and dared to give herself the luxury of relaxing against him. She enjoyed standing astride his leg far too much to move away easily. But that didn’t mean she wanted to talk about her odd feelings of contentment.

  “I always thought of GSA as being more inclined to drown the world in catalogs of stuff to buy, or pages of turgid prose on how the government should spend its money.”

  “Uncle Sam’s Sears Roebuck?” He rubbed the small of her back just above her belt and small fireflies dove into her spine. She was very wet between her legs.

  “Something like that,” she agreed. She’d spent decades serving her country and had always been very happy that the Shadow Guard looked after its own, not Uncle Sam’s minions.

  More important, her ability to form long sentences was disappearing, the longer she snuggled against Jake.

  “No matter what GSA locks up for Uncle Sam, I think Ms. Williams worked for a different group.” Jake kneaded Astrid’s shoulders lightly. Her eyelids slid shut, the better to enjoy his touch. Unfortunately, it also allowed his sinfully rich voice to pour through her like a mint julep. “The folks who looked after buildings.”

  “That’s different.” Astrid blearily considered the appeal of the broad chest so close to hers and sighed. All she wanted to do was unbutton his very crisp shirt and give her starved senses the delight of exploring his bare flesh.

  If she opened his shirt now, she wouldn’t speak again for a very long time. “Has that bunch at the GSA had any big scandals?”

  “Not lately.”

  He widened his stance until she slid down his leg. The harsh fabric of his jeans caught her clit through her trousers at exactly the right angle—and she burned rich and slow, like the flame under a pot of chocolate sauce. More cream flowed down her thighs and every fiber hummed with lust.

  He dragged her back into a standing position, his eyes dark with anticipation.

  She spread her fingers over his heart to steady herself and hunted for a coherent thought.

  “Maybe she was a recent transfer and you could focus on her old group.”

  “Williams had a degree in business and one in architecture.” Jake kissed, then nibbled on Astrid’s palm. She trembled, tremors unrelated to murder and investigations running through her spine. “She hadn’t done much with the architecture degree, except help remodel her sister’s house.”

  “But she used it on the job to help oversee contractors for federal buildings,” Astrid said slowly, fumbling her way past Jake’s accelerated heartbeat to thoughts of the case. “That’s commitment.”

  “Good way to get ahead, too,” said Jake, more cynically. He nuzzled the top of Astrid’s head.

  “Yes,” Astrid agreed, far too breathlessly. “But you can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “True.” Jake pulled her closer to him. “Like right now.”

  He kissed her and sanity fled. Sheer, silky pleasure swept through her every time their tongues entwined. The taste of his mouth, the sharp clack of his teeth—everything about him was somehow new and wondrous and different from anybody she’d ever kissed before. Nothing existed beyond his hand in her hair urging her closer and his lips’ harsh pressure, which somehow incited her mouth’s desperate race to join him.

  She couldn’t snatch enough of him too soon to satisfy her greedy senses. She stretched her leg over his hip and tried to wiggle closer. His chest rose and fell against hers, pumping his heartbeat into her. He shoved his hand down the back of her pants and yanked her closer, up his leg until he shamelessly rolled his hips under her.

  Motes of magick swirled around them, like tiny dragonflies, drawn close by Jake’s pleasure.

  “Ah, Jake.” Astrid whimpered and tried to reach that tempting, red-hot bar lurking behind his fly. So close and yet so far when he still held both of her hands.

  He abruptly released her hands and yanked her sweater over her head. Astrid blinked in surprise, then smiled in anticipation when he dropped his head and nuzzled her breast through her silk camisole. Lust heated and centered under his mouth into a slow, fiery crescent between her nipple and womb.

  His fingers tightened on her hips—and the magickal motes thickened around them until the kitchen was a distant memory. But who cared about where two humans stood, when pleasure thrummed so strongly through a girl’s veins?

  Astrid moaned again and rubbed herself over his leg, fierce as any tigress marking her mate.

  “You’re still dressed,” she muttered, irritated beyond measure.

  He gave a harsh bark of laughter, which the top of her head stifled.

  She tugged his shirt out of his jeans and pulled it open, too eager to worry about upsetting delicate farasha sensibilities with an unusual show of strength. His lack of undershirt made her sigh in pleasure. Ah, what delicious opportunities his nudity presented.

  In that instant, Jake peeled her camisole over her head and captured her breasts in his callused hands.

  “Jake.” His name was more gasp than word. Her head fell back and her fingers gripped his shoulders. She kneaded his shoulders for strength and pleasure—and magick rippled to
meet her, invoked by his pleasure and the link between them.

  “You are so magnificent.” She kissed the strong muscles girding his chest, the ancient bullet scar below his collarbone, the tattoo on his upper arm, the flat male nipple that needed so little encouragement to tighten—and make him shudder.

  She lingered to lick and kiss it, swirl her tongue over it or flick it like a light switch to brighten more and more magickal motes. Then she turned her attentions to the other one.

  “Astrid, for the love of God!” Jake grabbed her head between his palms. “You wretch, my turn now.”

  Her eyes widened at his commanding tone. But he wasn’t looking at her face. Instead his gaze lingered lower down, where her nipples promptly perked into aching buds.

  He rubbed his thumbs over them—and Astrid whimpered a wordless, desperate plea.

  He bent and suckled her breast, first one, then the other, until she became a creature of pure sensation, living in a world where nothing existed except him and hunger for more of his touch. Lust pulsed through her, sweeping between her breasts and her womb, firing her lungs to breathe air colored by the scent of his musk, heating her skin against his and the magnificent hot shaft locked away inside his jeans.

  “Astrid.” Jake’s tone was more feral than civilized. It thrummed through her bones and she quivered in response. More cream heated her core.

  “Face the counter.” His fingers bit into her hips and he turned her around.

  A granite counter. It was made of natural stone, so she’d be grounded. Perfect.

  Astrid’s eagerness raged brighter, like magma in sight of the caldera.

  She leaned forward across the beautiful golden rock. Jake fondled her, teasing her eager flesh as if only passion existed, not clothing. He removed her trousers easily and she kicked them off, glad she hadn’t worn boots.

  His hand cupped her pussy from behind and his fingers teased her clit. Astrid keened and arched her back, driving herself down on those talented digits.

  “Oh yes, do that some more!”

  Thought didn’t matter, magick didn’t matter, his needs as a kubri didn’t matter—only gaining the orgasm that lurked so appallingly close and yet not quite close enough.