Sam walked toward me. I watched him approach, my wariness increasing and my heart racing with increasing speed. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
“I’m sorry, Red, but you can’t stay here.”
“Why the hell not?” My throat was dry and my stomach was beginning to churn more thoroughly. “This is our room, not yours.”
“That’s true, but this is our investigation. You and Miller were warned not to interfere.”
Alarm ran through me. I stepped away from him. Fire flickered across my fingertips, little sparks ready to explode at the slightest notice. “What the hell are you intending to do, Sam?”
“Catch you,” he said.
As if his words were a trigger, my head began to spin and my knees buckled. He caught me one-handed, retrieving the wineglass with the other.
The wine, I thought. He’d drugged the wine. “Bastard.”
“Totally,” he agreed. “But it’s not like you didn’t already know that.”
The room began to fade in and out of focus. It took me a few moments to realize we were moving, and by the time I did, we’d stopped again.
Cool hands touched my forehead, and an odd sort of buzzing ran around my brain. Vampire Adam was attempting to access my mind. Good luck with that, I thought, and wasn’t entirely sure whether I said it out loud or not.
Then the touch was gone, the room was gone, and all that I was left with was darkness.
Waking was hell.
There was a madman armed with a vice intent on squashing the hell out of my head, and my stomach seemed determined to lodge itself somewhere in my throat.
I groaned and rolled over onto my back. My bare back.
I was naked. In bed.
The thought had me lurching upright, but the movement was too sudden and my stomach rebelled.
“Whoa,” a familiar voice said. “Aim for this.”
A bucket appeared under my nose, and I promptly lost everything I’d previously eaten that day into it. When there was nothing left, it was whisked away, and I lay back down on the bed, flinging an arm over my eyes and groaning lightly.
After a moment, footsteps approached. “Where the hell are we?”
“Still at the Crown.” Jackson’s voice was grim. “Just in the room next to ours.”
“Did they drug you, too?”
“Yeah. It was in the wine, apparently.”
Bastards. “Did they also try to erase your thoughts?”
He laughed softly. “They certainly tried, but the mind of a Fae isn’t as easily influenced as a human’s, and mine less so than most.”
And a phoenix couldn’t be influenced at all. We were spirit, a totally different life-form from human, vampire, shifter, or were. I scrubbed the back of my hand across my eyes, wondering whether I had enough energy to go find my bag and grab some aspirin out of it.
“I’m guessing they put us into bed together?” I asked, wondering who’d undressed me. And why it even mattered.
“Yeah.” The bed dipped as he sat down next to me.
“Here, take this.”
I opened my eyes. He was holding out a glass of water and two white pills. Aspirin. “God, I think I love you.”
He laughed softly. “I’m a Fae. We don’t do love, just plain old lust.”
I downed the painkillers, swishing some of the water around to take away the lingering bitterness. “I know, but you’d be quite safe from me emotionally even if you did.”
“Good.” He plucked the glass free from my hand. “But I just wanted to make sure we both understand where we stand. Hate for either of us to want what they couldn’t have.”
“What I want is sex. But not,” I added hastily, as a lusty gleam appeared in his eyes, “right at this particular moment.”
He laughed and rose. I noted in amusement that he was more than half-ready for action. I resisted the temptation and dragged myself into a sitting position. “I don’t suppose you gleaned any information from them before you were knocked out?”
He shook his head as he dumped the glass back in the en suite. “Those two were clams. What about you?”
I grimaced. “Not really. The drug took effect before they began questioning Radcliffe.” I hesitated, remembering my brief conversation with him. “Is he married?”
Jackson plopped down next to me and stretched his long legs out beside mine. “Not that I know of. Why?”
“Because when I asked him, he said no, but his body language said yes.”
“Why would he lie about something like that?”
I shrugged. “Given he’s into the black market, maybe he doesn’t want anyone to know about her. Maybe he fears she could be used as leverage against him.”
“Possible.” His expression was contemplative as he began to run his fingers idly up and down my leg. My head might be locked in pain, but the rest of me seemed to be in fine working order. “Did either of the cops hear him say that?”
“Not that I know of.” I hesitated. “But Adam—the vampire—would have read his thoughts. He’d surely know.”
“Not necessarily.” His touch was slowly moving around to my inner thigh. Anticipation began to thrum through me. So much, I thought wryly, for the headache. “Despite what humans think, not all vampires are telepathic, and the ones who are usually need to be very specific in what they’re looking for. They haven’t got carte blanche access to the mind, especially when it comes to weres.”
“Yeah, but knowing Sam, he’d have someone on his team who was one of those few who did.” I paused. “So Radcliffe was a wererat?”
He glanced at me, his expression surprised. “You couldn’t tell?”
“I thought he was, but the senses of a phoenix aren’t that specific.”
“But they’re very prettily packaged.”
I smiled at the compliment. “So our next course of action is looking for the wife?”
His hand slipped between my legs and the caressing continuing, running up and down my inner thigh, sending shivers of delight racing through my body.
“Either that, or we attempt to find out who else Sherman Jones worked with. He’s our only other lead.”
“He’s missing.”
“Someone on the streets will know something. They always do.”
His fingers lightly brushed the junction of my legs, then moved away again. I resisted the urge to growl in frustration. “We do have one other option, although I daresay the cops have already checked it.”
“What’s that?” His voice was becoming more and more distracted. This time, his fingers didn’t brush. They slid through my slickness, caressing and teasing.
I took a somewhat shaky breath and somehow managed to say, “The waitress.”
“The waitress?”
“The one my boss used to chat with every morning.”
“Then she’s definitely an option.” He shifted, grabbed my hips, and tugged me down the bed. “However,” he added, as he slid his body over mine. “There’s only one woman I want to talk to right now.”
Except there wasn’t a lot of talking from that moment on, just a whole lot of loving, until an hour had passed and we were both replete and exhausted.
“Best cure for a hangover ever invented,” he said, his breathing a harsh rasp as he finally lay down beside me. “Unfortunately, we now have less than half an hour to be out of here.”
I glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten fifteen, which meant I was more than a little late for work—if I had a job left, that was. I shifted onto my side and propped my head up with my arm. “I need to go to the lab and report in.”
“I’ll drive you there, then walk across to the café and apply some Fae charm to the waitress.” He hesitated. “She got a name?”