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“Is that a promise?” He followed her into the backyard. “Because I’ve got a list of firsts I’d like to try with you.”
She kept walking with her back to him, but he could feel her eye-rolling. Which only made him grin, of course. Until she actually threw a spell at him or drew blood with her words, her annoyance couldn’t have reached critical levels yet.
“So I’ve been thinking,” he said as she stepped up to the half-broken back door sealed with official tape.
“Oh, you tried that for once?” She didn’t even look at him, her hands busy weaving a spell to unlock the rickety door and open the seal without breaking it. “Wonders will never cease.”
All right, time to shake her up a bit.
“Speaking of wonders,” he said and swiftly stepped in front of her, leaning one shoulder against the doorjamb and catching her startled eyes. “Here’s another one for you: I’m sorry.”
That visibly stumped her for a moment. She recovered a second later, but not before he’d glimpsed something fragile in the fractures of her composure. “For what, exactly?” she asked with a raised brow, her power a tangible force between them.
“Being a presumptuous ass.” He shrugged one shoulder. “My suggestion was all sorts of disrespectful, and I apologize.” Inclining his head and giving her a sheepish smile, he turned and strolled into the house.
He counted the seconds, keeping his back to her.
“If you think,” she said, coming after him, “tossing an apology at me will change my mind and prompt me to accept your ridiculous proposal, you’re even more of a buffoon than I thought you were.”
Five seconds. Not bad.
He clucked his tongue. “I’ll take it as a compliment that you think me cunning enough to come up with a ruse like that. Sorry to upend your assumptions, but my apology is sincere.” He faced her, smoothing his features. “No hidden agenda.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, her mouth pressed into a thin line. She’d put on lipstick tonight, the color matching the red of her sweater as well as her earrings. A glance down told him her flats picked up the accent—a red bow decorated the tip of each shoe, the hue an exact match to the other accessories. Perfectly styled, yet again.
She was about to say something when he cut her off, deliberately so.
“Why did you come back here?” He sauntered past her, just close enough that his power would stroke her senses. “The police collected the body and all the evidence.” He indicated the empty space where the dead human used to lie, the bloodstains on the wooden floorboards now the only sign of the crime. “There’s nothing left.”
Her gaze weighed heavy on him, her attention palpable even though he had turned his back on her once more. “If my suspicion is right, there’s more here. They would have missed it.” The floor creaked as she moved around. “As did we.”
Stopping on the other side of the room, he chanced a glance at her. As always, the sight of her was like a punch to his gut underlaid with an infusion of maddening want, bringing up the sensory memories of her curves pressed against his body, her power an electric caress sinking into his every cell. He shifted position, adjusting his hardening cock while he clamped down on the desire to close the distance to her and make sure she remembered, too.
Brows pinched, she scanned the floor, the walls, her movements careful as she canvassed the room. Always in control. Always so measured, so conscious of where to step—literally and figuratively. He’d only seen her lose her composure twice.
Once when she’d first met him and interrogated him with her truth spell, the image of her—fierce, seething with rage and unchecked power—burned into his mind, an impression that overlaid her usual appearance like a shadow flickering in and out when he looked at her.
The second time her calm had cracked completely, he’d had her pinned against a tree, lost in lust and burning at his touch.
Both times she’d lost her cool in response to him. He was counting on the implication of that to help him tonight.
Hazel paused and tilted her head, her focus on the wall in front of her. “Does this look…off to you?”
He examined the wall from where he stood several feet away. “Something hung there but was recently removed?”
A nod. “This is the only bigger stretch of wall in here with nothing obscuring it.” She pursed those lips he wanted to lick. “Makes for the perfect canvas, doesn’t it?”
She pulled a small jar from her handbag, and before he even knew what she was doing, she’d also produced a knife and cut her wrist open.
* * *
“What the fuck are you doing?” Tallak’s voice sounded strangled behind her.
Hazel didn’t turn and instead watched calmly as the blood flowed from her wrist into the jar. “Investigating.”
“How quickly you’ll bleed to death?” He was suddenly right next to her, grabbing her arm and squeezing underneath the cut to stem the flow.
A muttered word from her made him hiss and step back, shaking his hand. To ease the sting of the magical current she’d just sent to him, no doubt.
