Something Wicked. Julie Leto

Hadn’t she expected this? She’d prepared herself for the jaded darkness that had to come with a man who’d just learned that the evil he’d been fighting all his career was a drop in the bucket compared to the evil that existed in secret. So why was a lump forming in her throat, which was so tight she was scared to breathe?

      “Mac wants to meet with you,” she said, having practiced this speech to so many hotel mirrors since she began her search that she had it down pat. Mac Mancusi had been the Chief of Detectives when Rick had disappeared. He’d also been the only other Chicago cop to have witnessed the murders that had sent the city into a tizzy. The mayor dead. The lifeless body of one of the most powerful defense attorneys right beside him. Obviously, a murder-suicide. Obviously—only because Regina had manipulated the scene, with Rick’s reluctant help, to reflect just that scenario.

      In reality, the mayor, a murderous warlock, had tried to kill Mac and Lilith so they couldn’t stop him from using the city’s criminals to do his bidding, and the attorney, a rogue witch, had been his right-hand man. Mac and Lilith had stopped the evil plot, but at great cost. Particularly to Rick.

      “Mac, huh?” he asked coolly. “I figured he was the one who was two steps behind me this whole time.”

      She eyed him quizzically. “No, that was just me.”

      “I had no idea you had bloodhounds in your Latina genes,” he snarled, emphasizing the Cuban-American accent he’d long ago learned to play down.

      She, on the other hand, suppressed the instinct to tell him off in rapid-fire Spanish.

      “Our ancestors did find the new world,” she snapped back. “What’s one rogue cop to a whole continent?” She cursed. Now was not the time for petty exchanges. She did not have a lot of time. “Mac nearly died that night, Rick. Took two months before Lilith recovered completely. If not for them, a lot of people would have fallen under the influence of a very evil man.”

      “He wasn’t a man,” Rick corrected, his frown revealing new lines on his once smooth and youthful face. He’d aged in six months. Physically and spiritually.

      “He nearly killed your best friend,” she insisted, her heart cracking for the degeneration of the man she’d known, the man she knew he could become again, if only he could see she was here to help.

      “Why do you think I left Chicago?”

      “To play vigilante?”

      His eyes widened at the snap in her tone.

      “You think that’s what this is?”

      “I think covering up the crime cut at your soul,” she admitted. “I think the magical world bursting into your ordered, ordinary life set you on a difficult path you don’t know how to get off of.”

      For an instant, she thought she might have hit a nerve. But a split second later, the flash of surprise in his eyes disappeared.

      “Go home, Josie. This is no place for a sweet kid like you.”

      Okay, that crack made her fingers itch. By nature, she was a pacifist. But every woman had her limits. And one was being called a kid by a guy who’d had to take a very cold shower after the last time they were alone together.

      “You’re kidding, right?” she asked, incredulous. “Who do you think you are, Humphrey Bogart? John Wayne? More like John Wayne Gacy, if you ask me.”

      “I’m not a killer,” he spit.

      “According to whose reality? I’ve seen the bodies, Rick. I’ve smelled the stench.”

      “It’s not killing when the monsters aren’t human.”

      “I don’t give a damn about them, you idiot,” she said, marching across the room until she stood at the edge of the bed. One glance into his liquid ebony eyes and her anger abated. He wasn’t doing a bad thing. Destroying evil was something he should be proud of. But he wasn’t proud— he was desperate. And that desperation was going to get him killed.

      Even after all he’d been through, Rick still managed to look gorgeous. His chest, so naturally tan and sculpted, glistened against his towel and the white sheets beneath him. Josie’s body stirred, reacting to his as it had before. As if no time had elapsed. As if nothing had changed, when honestly, everything had.

      Good Goddess, she ached to launch herself onto him, press her body tight against his, kiss him soundly and erase all the dark ugliness haunting his eyes and the sardonic lines framing his former devil-may-care mouth. This wasn’t Rick. Not the Rick she remembered. Not the Rick she’d fallen for so hard. Not the Rick she could have loved, if they’d only had the chance.

      Still, his newly hardened edges made her belly flutter. Not to mention the effects of his naked chest and that oh-so-loose, oh-so-easy-to-remove towel. She had to contain a little sigh and fight the impulse to touch him and see how her pale flesh contrasted against his natural darkness, to tangle her fingers in the hair that spiked across his chest, then grew into a narrow line that led to areas she’d once felt pressed tight against her but had never had the chance to take into her hands.

      He looked askance, but when he finally allowed his gaze to linger on hers for more than a split second, she saw a shadow of regret flit through his eyes.

      After taking a deep breath, she sat down on the bed beside him.

      “Tell me what happened. Tell me why you left.”

      He shook his head. “I can’t look back, Josie. And you need to leave. I’m not the same guy you met six months ago.”

      “Tell me about it.”

      He cursed.

      “No,” she said, laying her hand on his, trying to ignore the way his bare flesh glistened in the dim light. “Really. Tell me about it.”

      He moved to get off the bed, but Josie held his hand so he couldn’t escape. He tugged and turned, revealing a gash across his arm. The skin was pink and puffy. Healing, but with jagged edges that told her he hadn’t sought the best—if any—medical help.

      He chuckled when he spied the horrified look on her face. “Just a scratch.”

      “That’s what the black knight said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur chopped his arm off.”

      Surprisingly, Rick laughed. Not a hearty guffaw by any means, but more than a snigger, which had to mean something. Like he wasn’t totally lost.

      “I haven’t thought about that in—”

      “Six months?” she questioned.

      “Longer.”

      He sat back on the bed and Josie couldn’t help but notice that the edge where he’d tucked his towel had begun to loosen. Her heartbeat accelerated. The idea of seducing Rick in order to lure him back to Chicago had come to her as naturally as breathing. The possibility of finally confronting the sexual tension that had first drawn them together made her nipples tight and her inner thighs ache. She’d wanted him for so long—the man he was and the man he’d become, even if she wasn’t entirely certain yet who that man was.

      With shaking hands, Josie slid out of her leather jacket, revealing the snug tank tops beneath.

      He eyed her suspiciously.

      “What are you doing?”

      “I’m hot.”

      “Then leave,” he said, jerking his head toward the door even as his eyes begged her to stay. Or was that her imagination?

      Did it matter?

      She smiled. “It’s hotter outside. Unseasonably hot for New York City in February. Or haven’t you left this hotel room lately?”

      “I’ve left,” he muttered.

      She stretched, lifting her hair off her back, then arching her shoulders so that her breasts curved enticingly. Cheap trick? Oh, yeah.