Hello, Gorgeous!

  “Oh, man. This day… it’s just getting better and better. Should have stayed in bed.”

  “I’m wondering if it might not be Dr. Roe,” Dmitri said thoughtfully, following her as she lunged out of the elevator.

  “The last member of the team? How come?”

  “Everyone else is dead.”

  “Yeah, but what’s her motive?”

  “It could be any of a number of things. Professional jealousy, for one.”

  “Yuck. Helluva dumb reason to plug someone. A whole bunch of someones.”

  “Someone like you wouldn’t understand the darker regions of a person’s heart.”

  “Okaaaaaaay.” Whatever the hell that meant. She was so freaked out by the day’s events that it was harder than usual to know what the hell Dmitri was babbling about. “I think it’s the swine.”

  “Really? What’s his motive?”

  “Ha! He’s so wicked and horrible, he doesn’t need one. He probably kills employees for relaxation, you know, like most guys play racquetball.”

  “Dislike Gregory Hamlin as I do, I doubt he’s the killer. He runs the department, they all do things on his orders. His annual budget is in the eight figures, and he has the ear of the president. The last thing he would do is start killing off the team that made us.”

  “Why? Because he wants to make more?”

  Again, that maddening shrug.

  “Well, fuck that! Jeez, the killer’s actually doing us a favor.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Dmitri said carefully, popping his key card into the suite’s slot. “It’s why you and I were suspects, remember.”

  “Huh.” Then, “Whoa!” The suite was amazing… dark, rich carpeting, a piano (in a hotel room!), multiple rooms, and, when she darted into the bathroom, an enormous Jacuzzi tub in dark gray marble. “Holy cow! This isn’t a hotel room, it’s… er…” She couldn’t think of anything fancy enough.

  “Their Presidential Suite is quite nice,” Dmitri remarked, already setting up his laptop.

  “Nice? Kitties are nice. This place is like a fucking palace. And I would know!”

  “Mmmm,” he said, already absorbed. Then he looked up at her. “Another suspect… now, don’t get angry…”

  “Dude, have you been paying attention lately at all?”

  “Fair enough. I’m wondering if the killer might not be your friend.”

  “Stacy?” Caitlyn burst out laughing, finally collapsing on a chair opposite the desk. “Oh, man. Thanks. I really needed cheering up.”

  “She has cause to resent the Wagner team,” he pointed out. “And now, thanks to her… ah… social connection, she can apparently enter this building anytime she wishes.”

  “Dmitri, you’re so far out of left field, you’re not even in the ballpark anymore. Stacy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Literally. She shoos them out the window. Says it’s bad karma to squash anything, even a bug.”

  He shrugged. “It’s just another working theory.”

  “Well, think of a different one.”

  She prowled around the spacious suite for a few minutes, wondering exactly what happened next. She wasn’t a homicide detective, she did heads. She had told the fink that she wasn’t qualified for this job. Watching Dmitri peck away at a laptop that was probably worth ten grand, that fact was brought home to her all over again.

  What made matters worse was, the fink wasn’t even involving the police. He thought it was an inside job—and she had to agree—and he expected her and the Wolf to clean up the mess.

  So now the Wolf was engrossed in work, the Boss was doing whatever it was he did (foreclose on orphanages? Tear down homeless shelters?), and she was… was… what?

  Tired. Very, very tired. Her sleepless night was catching up with her, not to mention jet lag and the stressful events of the day. There was a perfectly nice bed somewhere in this suite, and she meant to find it and have a nap. Couldn’t do anything while Dmitri was working anyway.

  She found the bed after searching for a minute and was asleep five seconds after her head hit the pillow.

  “Caitlyn.”

  Great. It was Dmitri, waking her up to tell her there’d been another murder. They’d have to fly back to the States, like, immediately. He was pissed at her, too, not that she could blame him, and when they were on the jet, he’d—

  Wait. That had already happened.

  She opened her eyes to find him bending over her. This was startling, yet yummy. “Guess I fell asleep. What’s up? Are you done?”

  He shook his head, but his intense blue eyes never left her face. “I’m crunching data right now. Nothing to do but wait.”

  “Okay.” She yawned. “So we wait.”

  “Yes. Forgive me, but I’ve been wanting to do this for hours.”

  “Wanting to…? Mmmph.” His mouth was on hers again, his fingers twined in her hair. She broke the kiss after a delightful long minute and gasped, “You—you want to? Again?”

  “More than anything.”

  “But… I thought you didn’t like me. You seemed really mad before. You seemed…”

  “I was mad,” he said soberly, playing with a hank of her hair. “I was… a fool. Of course I like you. I adore you.”

  “Dmitri… I’m not trying to rub anything in, but if you felt that way, why—“

  He shook his head sorrowfully. “You’re quite right. I shouldn’t have taken you in the jet like a—but I was… I was angry. Upset about last night. As a matter of fact, if you send me away again, I don’t think I’ll survive it.”

  “No pressure though,” she teased. “Lucky for you I’m on the Pill. And I didn’t get a chance to ask you this earlier, but I assume the nanobytes keep you from being crawling with disease.”

  “Quite,” he said dryly, then laughed as she tugged him toward her. Not by his hand. “Wait, I still have my shoes on. Not to mention everything else.”

  “Well, jeez, come on!” She was tempted to prolong the scene with pouting and listen to him beg for forgiveness, but frankly, she was too eager for sex to torture him. Maybe next time. “Come on, come on, come on!”

  “All right, all right, don’t tear my shirt off… well, all right, do that if you wish. I have lots of shirts.”

  “What a relief,” she said, and pulled so hard, buttons went flying and skittering across the room. She heard the double thud as his shoes hit the floor, and then, oh glory be, his hands were on her, the hands she’d ached for all last night, the hands that were on her for all too brief a time in the jet. They were in her hair, they were running over her limbs, they were caressing her breasts, and she was kissing him and running her own hands across his broad, hard shoulders.

  “Don’t stop,” she groaned as he licked the tender undersides of her breasts. “Oh, God, I don’t want you to stop.”

  “Again, we are of like minds.” His voice was muffled against her flesh. “Oh, Caitlyn. You are sublime.”

  She was sublime? Had he looked in a mirror? Ever? His strong hands were everywhere, his mouth was everywhere, the clothes were everywhere, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  Now he was moving lower and was kissing the light fuzz over her pubic bone, and now his tongue was opening her like a flower, stroking and licking the damp folds.

  Oh, God, he was better than her vibrator, Big Blue! In her vast sexual experience (more than the late Mother Teresa, fewer than Stacy), most men would go there to get her wet so they could stop as soon as possible and get what they needed, but Dmitri showed no signs of leaving, almost like the act itself was pleasurable to him.

  His tongue and lips were amazing, and when she felt his mouth settle over her throbbing clit at the exact moment a finger slipped up inside her, she nearly screamed at the bold sweetness of it.

  He worked her to orgasm again and again using fingers and tongue, chuckled when she shuddered and clutched at his shoulders, laughed outright when she begged him to fuck her, to stop what he was doing down there and come up here and fuck her n
ow.

  Finally, oh, finally, he was licking her stomach and then her cleavage and then his broad chest was settling over hers and she wrapped her legs around his waist and whimpered into his neck when he parted her with trembling fingers and slowly slid inside her.

  He was whispering into her hair as he eased into her, whispering in a language that sounded sweet and dark, and when he started to thrust, she thought she would die, die with a silly grin on her face, die happy, die well.

  She rose to meet him, and their stomachs slapped together in a beat that was as old as the family of man. He was still whispering in that secret language, but now his tone was more urgent, his thrusts more demanding, and she met him with everything she had, met him and wordlessly demanded more.

  “God,” he said when she shuddered and clenched around him. “God, God… Caitlyn , my bold one, my own…”

  “It’s so good,” she gasped, almost wept. “It feels so good.”

  Her words seemed to do something to him, push him over some edge that he couldn’t come back from, and he stiffened in her arms and then shivered all over.

  She could feel him pulsing within her and, for an odd moment, wished she weren’t on the Pill, wished he were making her pregnant at that very moment, pregnant with his baby, a boy or girl with his hair and her eyes. A strange thought and one she had never had at such a moment, not with any man.

  She wept, and she didn’t know why, and he held her, and kissed her tears, and when she slipped back into sleep, he was whispering in that dark language again.

  Chapter 31

  “You had sex! Again!” Stacy cried as soon as Caitlyn stepped through her front door.

  “Cripes. What are you, a witch?” Caitlyn had been planning on giving Stacy the cold shoulder, being chilly and distant and standoffish and absolutely no margarita parties until her friend regained her senses, stopped taking drugs (was there any other explanation? Caitlyn thought not), and killed the Boss. Or dumped him. No, killed him.

  But she had forgotten Stacy’s uncanny instincts and had been startled into answering her. “You and I are not talking about my sex life until you fix yours. And I mean, like, yesterday.”

  Stacy hurried toward her from the couch and peered at her. “Wow, you totally did it! I mean, I knew this morning, but I was kind of distracted by trying to stop you from squishing my new guy like a bug.”

  “Don’t remind me. And don’t call him the new guy. Let’s call him the dead guy.”

  She ignored that. “Greg said you were back in town to do some work for him—“

  “I. Will. Kill! Him! How many times do I have to tell people, I don’t work for him!” Her fingers plunged into her hair and she had to actively restrain herself from pulling hard. “Arrrrgggghhh!”

  “—and here you’ve been bumping hips… you did it with that unbelievably delish-looking guy in the office, right? Right? Oh, man! That hair! Those eyes! Those shoulders.”

  “Well…”

  “Oh my God, he is so gorgeous!” Stacy rhapsodized. “All tall and cool and yummy, and those big hands and those eyes…”

  “All this is true,” Caitlyn said modestly, calming down and pulling her hands out of her hair.

  “So…?”

  She knew where this was going. She also knew Stacy would be merciless until she’d gotten all the answers. Quicker—and easier—to just come clean. “Best in my life.”

  And not just because of the sensations Dmitri had aroused in her. Not because she was so desperately, wildly attracted to him. The jet had been fine, but their time in the suite… it had been… more. The way he looked when she came, the way he whispered dark, delicious things into her ear, the way he held her after. For the first time, she truly understood the phrase “making love.” It hadn’t been fucking, that was for sure. “Very, super, amazing, ultrabest.”

  “I’ll bet. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

  You don’t know the half of it. Force of habit—she’d been telling Stacy all her secrets for over five years—almost made her say, Best of all, most wonderful of all, he’s a cyborg like I am. The only other one in the world.

  But no. Tempting as it was to unload on her friend, that was Dmitri’s secret to tell. Not hers.

  “Let’s get off the subject of my sex life and get back to yours.”

  “Let’s not. I had enough of that this morning. You’re not going to throw me into a wall, are you? Because that looked, like, so massively painful.”

  “Good. I hope I cracked all his ribs. I hope bone shards are puncturing his lungs this minute. If he’s sore or, even better, in the ICU, he won’t be able to… um… I mean he won’t…”

  “Never underestimate the inventiveness of an older man,” Stacy said solemnly, ignoring Caitlyn’s all-over shudder.

  She managed to get herself under control long enough to whine, “Why, Stace, why? That’s the one thing I gotta know. Out of all the men. All the bad, sucky, disastrous choices you could make. After all the things I told you. Why him?”

  “Gome into the kitchen,” Stacy said gently. “I’ve got coffee made.”

  When they were seated at the kitchen island, Caitlyn sulkily sipping coffee heavily laced with cream and sugar, and Stacy drinking nothing at all, she continued. “Honestly, Jimmy, I couldn’t even tell you. How can I explain it to anyone, even my best friend, when I don’t know myself? I was always grateful to those government weenies for saving you.”

  “But—“

  “I know, I know. Don’t you think I understand how you feel? I was there when Gregory sent those goons after you. I saw what had changed, how you were changed. I mean, cripes, in school you couldn’t even do the five-hundred-yard dash without needing, like, transfusions afterward, but now all of a sudden you’re like Supergirl. I know you like to go your own way and I know you don’t like to be under obligation… to anyone. But still. I couldn’t help it… I was so glad you were alive.”

  Caitlyn took a moody slurp.

  “So I always told myself if I ever ran into him, this guy who took over your life, the Boss, I’d thank him. Fat chance, right? How’s someone like me ever going to meet someone like him? I didn’t expect to see him at the party last week, to say the least! And I really didn’t expect to find him… to think he was…” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it. And it wasn’t like it sometimes is, all heat and nothing else. We talk, you know, and discuss things, and have fun, and he has the greatest laugh and the sweetest smile…”

  He has a nasty chuckle, Caitlyn thought, and he doesn’t smile, he smirks. But she didn’t say anything. Her anger at her friend was rapidly fading, to be replaced by a kind of dull despair. Stacy was falling for the Boss. Soon the world would burst into flames and then things would really get sucky.

  “And like I said, I don’t know where it’s going with him or even if it’s going anywhere, but I’m kind of interested in sticking around for the ride, you know?”

  “Umf,” she replied. “Stace, um, I heard every word you said…” And the chip in her head would probably play it back a thousand times, putting her in her own special hell. “But do you ever wonder what the—what he wants out of all this? What he’s up to? It can’t be just, you know, getting laid. I mean, I know guys are nuts about you, so I figured ages ago you must be a great lay…”

  “Yeah, well,” she said modestly.

  “But don’t you, um, think it’s kind of weird that out of all the women in the world, he picked my best friend?”

  Stacy’s dark eyes met Caitlyn’s without flinching. “It’s not like that, Jimmy.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t expect you to be happy about it, but I expect you not to break his neck or run him over or crack his spine or whatever you’d like to do in order to let off steam.”

  “Umf.”’

  “What are you doing back here anyway? I thought you had a bunch of murders to solve. I mean, I was hanging around hoping you’d show, but I was still kind of surprised when you ca
me in the door.”

  “Well, yeah, I do—I mean, Dmitri and I do. But what am I supposed to do, Stace? I’m in that lab, looking at the dead guy and trying not to puke, and I don’t even know how to dust for fingerprints. Like I’ve been saying, I’m not a cop. This isn’t my thing at all. We looked at dead Dr. Miller and putzed around the lab and then Dmitri started with his computer thing and then I had the best sex of my life and took a nap, and now I’m here to shower and change my clothes and get my own car. But as far as solving the murders, I dunno. I really don’t.”

  “Fair enough. Like you said, it’s not like you didn’t warn everybody, right?”

  “Right. And next time you’re cuddling with the Boss, you might want to remind him.”

  “Nope. We promised each other not to talk about you when we’re… you know. Together.”

  “You mean, the one thing that might make this horribly nasty situation work for me, and you won’t do it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fuck a duck!”

  “On your own time, sweetie. Now. Let’s talk about Mr. Yummypants.”

  Caitlyn scowled, then said, “He’s from Lithuania, he has his own castle, he’s helping me on a case, he likes me, he’s fabulous in bed, and I’m in deep, deep trouble.”

  “Oh, good,” she sighed, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Tell me all about it.”

  Chapter 32

  “Well, you’ve fixed things fine, haven’t you?” Caitlyn snapped, slamming the door so hard, it rattled in its frame.

  The Boss didn’t look up from his paperwork. “Fine, thanks, dear, and you?”

  “Aw, shut the hell up. I don’t know what you’re up to with Stacy, but when you’re done torturing me and you toss her aside like yesterday’s meat loaf, your ass is mine. You can’t even imagine the things I’ll do to you. They’ll write books about it.”

  At last he looked up. His hair was sleeker and darker than ever and his eyebrows just as weirdly pale. He still looked like an evil egg to her. What Stacy saw in him… she just couldn’t imagine it.