A Taste of You Page 12

  I hold absolutely still and listen, stretching out all my senses until I can hear the neighbors upstairs fighting and the neighbors two floors down having sex.

  Whoever he is, he’s gone now, but not more than about half an hour.

  Not Nick. I know all Nick’s smells by now.

  No, this is some other gun-toting, dentally-hygienic adult male with dandruff. And — I sniff — new track shoes.

  This is a nice bit of box fruit. I’ve forgiven myself for sneaking into Agent Nick’s little flop, so I’m feeling practically cuddly about having him on my tail day and night.

  But I draw the line at New Shoes Guy. He bothers me.

  Especially the new shoes. Agent Nick wears proper Federal shoes, with thick crepe soles and lots of toe room because of all the standing around he has to do. Guys with guns who do not expect to have to stand around make me nervous.

  Guys with guns make me nervous.

  Scaring my cat. Goddammit.

  I go through the apartment, sniffing and looking, finding all the places where he snooped, afraid I won’t find a bug if there is one, and then afraid that I will. Because what do I do then? Dispose of it? Leave it here and try to remember that my every move is being listened to, or watched? I have no idea what the technology can do nowadays. I might tolerate an audio bug, but I’m damned if I’ll do a video striptease for any white-smiled, bad-hair gunman with new trainers.

  All this is going through my mind and, underneath it, I know that I will not be able to stay in this apartment if I don’t find this guy immediately and kill him. I’ve been living on my nerves for forty-three years, waiting for somebody to come after me. I’ve been planning escape routes, preparing alibis, envisioning scenario after scenario. And now that it’s happening, I know that I will use my biggest gun first.

  Then I find the bug attached to my land line. I find another bug in the bedroom. This makes me so mad that I turn out all the lights, go into the front hall closet, dematerialize, and sniff the whole place over once again. I find a teeny camera in the bedroom and another camera in the bathroom.

  I go back into the closet, rematerialize, and sit on the floor in the dark, breathing heavily, trying to bring down my rampaging heart rate. Then I put on my clothes.

  Then I go to turn on the computer and realize that New Shoes Guy has left his smell all over it. He’s done something to my computer. This feels worse than everything else.

  I think long and hard about this while I feed the cat.

  Not only is he a creep, putting a camera in my bathroom, dammit, but he wants information, the kind you get from watching someone’s internet traffic and email. So he’s a bad guy (gun) who doesn’t live by even Agent Nick’s rules (track shoes, camera in bathroom) who wants more than candid footage of a nekkid girl.

  If I knew doot about computers, I might be able to figure out what he’s up to, and maybe even track him, but sadly my computer savvy is pretty much limited to kiddy-grade Donkey Kong.

  I sit there for about three minutes and think, petting the cat while she eats.

  At the end of three minutes, I take my keys and my cell phone outside.

  “Get your ass over here,” I say when I hear Nick’s voice.

  He grunts. Ten minutes later, he pulls up in front.

  “I just came home and I found my place full of listening and watching devices.” I glare at him.

  He blinks. I hear his heart give one hard thump, and then he frowns. “How do you know?”

  I roll my eyes. “Come and look.”

  We go inside. Silently, I show him the listening devices and cameras, one after the other, each cunningly hidden.

  It’s only a four-room apartment, for pete’s sake. When we find the camera in the bathroom, his pulse really shoots up. This is how I know he didn’t put them there.

  That, and the fact that he doesn’t smell like my recent burglar.

  In fact, he smells pretty good.

  Nick makes me sit outside in my locked car while he goes away for about thirty minutes. When he comes back, he has a little black case with him. I watch while he walks through the apartment with things that have colored LCD readouts on them, and soon we have a pile of listening and looking devices on my kitchen table. I give him credit — he takes every single one out. I know. I found them all myself, earlier.

  One by one he puts them into this little box and plugs the box into the wall and presses a button.

  “What does that do?” I say, sitting across the table from him while he works.

  “Shocks them dead. Kills the sensors and drains the batteries,” he says when the last one has been zapped.

  He’s got his pulse down to about normal now, but he looks troubled. Which for Nick means he is slightly more wooden-looking than usual.

  But he can’t hide anything from me. I can smell worry in his sweat, and tamped-down rage, and oh yeah, his perpetual boner. I’ve never met a guy who could be this horny for this long and not try to jump me.

  “You seem pretty calm,” he says.

  “I know you will handle this,” I say. “Because if you want me involved in this project one minute longer, you will see to it this doesn’t happen again.”

  “Oh, please,” he bursts out. “You’re stung and you know it.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Apparently I don’t. Explain to me why I can’t walk away from this nonsense.”

  “Principally because you need the money,” he says.

  I shrug. “I need half a million dollars. You’re offering me a measly seventy thou and I haven’t seen a dime yet. Add that to the aggro?” I shake my head. “Not worth it.”

  “All right,” he says hastily, and now I know that I will probably never see any money at all. “Your paper trail sucks. Social Security says you’re twenty-four, but you can’t be legal yet. Your grad school records are incomplete, your high school records are missing. You call that woman in the hospital your mother but she’s got to be your grandmother. When we get the DNA back we’ll know if you’re even related to her at all.”

  “When ‘we’ get the DNA back?” I’m bluffing tough. My tummy roils. I always knew I’d never get away with fudging my records.

  Now I’m worrying about this DNA thing. Jilly’s DNA is easy enough to come by, all they’d have to do is send a fake nurse into her room with a swab, but where would they get a sample on me? I haven’t had so much as a pap smear in forty-three years.

  I say, “If you think I’m submitting to a DNA test for you, think again.”

  “Dental hygienist,” he says with a straight face. I hear his heart kick up. He’s lying.

  That pisses me off. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to get a new dental hygienist. I love my dental hygienist.

  I’m really pissed off.

  I lean forward and put my hand over his wrist. I look deep into his eyes. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  He looks down at my hand resting like a tiny pink starfish on his big tan wrist, and he smiles.

  He’s not afraid of me at all.

  A lifetime of thinking I could be Barbara Steele, and this is my awesome power. I can raise a woody on a forty-year-old Fed.

  I scowl and take a little energy hit off him. Then a bigger one. My God, he tastes fabulous. Touching him is like falling face-first into a vat of chocolate mousse. There’s just so much, and it tastes so good.

  With a big deep breath I grab one more hit of that delicious, delicious energy. Then I pull my hand away and sit back across the table.

  He’s smiling at me. He’s not even fazed. Hot sweet prana is boiling off him like a cloud of sparkles that only I can see.

  “Don’t,” he says, “bite off more than you can chew.”

  What do I say to that?

  I pause to regroup.

  “I’ve seen Dr. Katterfelto,” I say, and wait for the tells that he already knows. He doesn’t react at all. That’s a tell. “He seems like a really nice guy.”

  Nick rol
ls his eyes. For goodness sake, why?

  I say, “He makes sense. He understands magic better than you do,” I add, when Nick’s lips tighten. I’m throwing punches at random and I have no idea why. “You’re handicapped because you hate it. He doesn’t hate magic. He just accepts it.”

  “He wouldn’t be a suspect if he weren’t plausible.” Oo, good comeback, Nick. Attacking my gullibility.

  Although there is the Doc’s thriving elixir business, delivered through hobo dealers.

  But I act cool. “What, he seems to like helping little kids, so of course he’s a bad guy? In that case, how am I supposed to react to a rude, sneaky, bullying, lying Federal agent?”

  I feel every word hit him in the gut. He has no idea that I can see the micro-tension pulsing up into his shoulders and his face.

  “When have I lied to you?” he says.

  I raise my voice. “When haven’t you lied to me? For example, I’ll never get paid for this.”

  He reacts inside again, and my heart sinks. It’s true. “Such a pessimist,” he says smoothly.

  I lean forward. “You’re on a shoestring budget. You drive a crappy car. You’re staying in a flop-house.” He flinches as I make each of these points. “Your trade rivals have better gear than you do,” I say, flicking a finger at the pile of bugs and cameras on the table. “I should be doing business with them.”

  He’s gone red. It really bothers him that I think his agency is a joke. “You didn’t follow me. I’d have seen you.”

  “Oh, please.” Now, finally, he’s beginning to realize there’s more to me than a high-school-student face. I should back off now. I should try to be satisfied with this reaction. But his energy is leaping out of him in foot-high invisible flames and, like a kamikaze pigeon, all I want is to get close.

  I watch him pull himself together. “Stay on task,” he says heavily.

  I shake my head. “Doesn’t fly. Go get yourself a chimp who will obey. Or a golden retriever.” Where did that come from? “Did you pick me for this cockamamie mission because I look young and stupid?” I don’t want to know the answer to that. I hurry on, “For once, why don’t you try to talk me into doing it your way?”

  He sighs. “Because there are things you would need to know so you could understand, and you don’t need to know.”

  “Or maybe your way is simply indefensible.”

  “The places I go, the things I see—”

  “Yadda yadda, more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. You’re so used to breaking the law, breaking the rules of civility and common decency, you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong. You think the end justifies the means.”

  “And you think you know everything, because in your short life you’ve never met anybody you couldn’t irritate,” he bursts out, and I feel a thrill rage over my entire body, because I’ve cracked Agent Nick’s self-control at last.

  Just when I think he’s going to reach across the table and shake me, his eye falls on the pile of expensive and hopefully-now-dead spy gear.

  And bang, he’s back under control.

  “Get me a grocery bag.”

  “Get it yourself. They’re under the sink.”

  Nick gets up and takes a plastic bag from under the sink and sweeps the spy gear into it. His heart is thundering.

  He doesn’t say a word. I let him pack up all the stuff. It’s as if we have each realized that one more word is going to push us past all the really very useful walls between us, and we know we haven’t thought through the next step yet.

  Speaking for myself, I haven’t thought at all. I’ve just been reacting. Smelling, tasting, feeling. It’s like I’m skating on a tight-wire over hell, doing sixty, and just realized I’ve never been on skates before. Nightmares go like this.

  But I feel good, so good.

  I follow Nick to the door. The sight of his broad back and the smell of fight-or-flight in his sweat make me mad. I throw away all fear. I put on my vampire command voice. “Wait.”

  He unlocks all the locks and swings the door open.

  “Dammit!” I grab him by the wrist and this time I use some strength. He tries to pull away. The guy has muscle. I tighten my small fingers around his wrist, and he stops pulling.

  Under my dim hallway ceiling light, our eyes lock.

  I don’t want to use my super-strength on him. My heart is banging in my chest so hard, it hurts. With an effort that is more emotional than physical, I force myself to release him and slide my hand into his.

  “Please,” I say. “Stay.”

  Somewhere outside all this, my instinct for self-preservation is screaming like a fender-bumped Mercedes in a mall parking lot.

  “Hel.” His voice is so deliciously hoarse I want to bite chunks out of it. “You’re too young.”

  I kick the door shut behind him and pull myself closer to him. “I’m not. I’m not young at all. You have no idea.”

  His back is utterly rigid.

  Dammit, he’s going to resist me.

  So I climb up his shirt, wrap my legs around him, and kiss him. I squeeze nice and hard with my thighs, hard enough to make him doubt again, that little mental question, How does she do that? Just long enough to get my mouth on his.

  And thank God, thank God, he surrenders.

  Chapter Nineteen

  For the first time since that kiss in the bar, Nick lets go with me. I lay my hand on his back and I can feel the muscles in his back and stomach relaxing, smell relief sweetening his sweat, hear the little grateful noise in his throat as he opens his mouth to mine. He tears his mouth away and kisses me on the cheek, behind the ear, on the back of my neck, groaning. I hear a whispering in my head. Then it’s in my ears. Thank you. Thank you. “Thank you.” It’s me. I can’t stop saying it. I’m so very, very grateful.

  “Hel,” he murmurs, and my name sounds sweet in his voice, for once not like a curse.

  I kiss him again, hoping to keep him from asking questions.

  He doesn’t ask.

  He just kneads me all over with those big strong hands, and I flex against him, holding myself in position, wrapped around him like a monkey, grateful that he is so strong, so hot, so hungry, so horny.

  And it’s all physical, too. So very physical. I’m drunk on his energy. He massages me hard wherever his hands go. A nervous twitch between my legs turns into a drumbeat, coming closer, pulsing louder, dragging me somewhere, but where?

  I hear myself growl.

  When he hears that, Nick lets go and begins stripping my clothes off. I grab the pocket of his khaki pants and yank. The whole pant leg rips away. Now he growls, and we meet halfway, bumping noses, laughing and growling together.

  I have no idea if this is, like, normal sex. I’ve learned that TV and movies don’t tell you anything real. How should I feel while we do this?

  We are surrounded by a storm-cloud of chi, full of lightning-flashes and stabs of pleasure. I drink in this chi with every breath, deeper and deeper, until I am gasping, but it doesn’t stop. There’s always more. For perhaps the first time since I discovered roller derby, I breathe in all the prana I can hold. And yet this is more intense by far.

  Because there are only the two of us here.

  I know him better now. With every puff of breath he tells me the wordless tides of his soul. As I breathe in, drawing his life through me, I read every secret, I feel it as if it were my own. His thigh is starting to cramp, so I try to slide down his body. He hitches me up higher into his arms and carries me through my apartment into my bedroom. I can feel his arms trembling. He doesn’t speak. Our mouths are busy, kissing, nuzzling, tongue and tongue.

  We’re not talking, yet there is a conversation going on between us at a level I can’t quite hear, though I can feel it shaking me like the roar of a train shaking a bridge. Nick is telling me how much he wants me. I can feel it through his hands. I feel fire running up and down his body in big, loud bursts, and every time he takes a breath I feel like passing out from pure j
oy. I’ve never been so connected with anyone in my entire life. It’s as if every part of being an energy vampire was designed to do this, this joining, and I never realized it before because I hadn’t met Nick.

  For the first time, I can actually perceive, with senses I’ve had all this time but barely used so far, that I am made for giving. All I have to do is open this door inside me and all the life and love I’ve been hiding and hoarding can come gushing out to fill someone else for once.

  Can he feel this? Does he know what this is doing to me?

  Yes. Thank God, thank God I’m an energy vampire and I can feel the pulse of our lovemaking in us both, in a way I never could have done if I were merely human. I can feel the energy roar between us and know it as if it’s blood pumping through a firehose, but it’s also words, it’s saying things, beautiful true things I never thought I would ever get to say to anyone.

  After a long time studying this flow of truth between us — maybe twenty or thirty breaths — I surrender to my body. Miraculously, wonderfully, we fuck like minks until we are both shattered, and I do not suck him into a powder.

  I’ve exploded and exploded and exploded. He’s still alive. I’m giddy with relief.

  I’m so giddy in fact that before common sense can kick in, I start telling him who I really am.

  “Nick,” I say, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m not as young as I look.”

  He touches my face tenderly. “I know,” he says. “Nobody is.”

  “No, really.” I’m falling to earth, and it’ll be a crash landing.

  He smiles. When Nick smiles, the cop look vanishes, and he radiates this sweet, joyous vibe.

  I can’t stop now. “I’ve never told anyone this before.” I’m terrified he’ll believe me and annoyed at how hard he’s making it for me.

  The guilty look comes back into his face. It’s as if only sex can clear his mind of all the crap that goes on in his head. I want to yell STOP THINKING, but that won’t get me anywhere. Not with a bullheaded specimen like Agent Nick.