“You and your friend foiled an attempted robbery.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s what I saw.” He loomed over me. He’d showered and, from the feel of it, wrapped his wound.
I thought of what I’d said to him when time had stood still. Embarrassed, I lowered my head to nudge a piece of loose baseboard. “You didn’t see anything else? Or, maybe, hear anything else?”
“Like what?”
I still had my hand on his side, careful not to press. He reached out and hooked a finger into the belt loop on my jeans. It felt so natural, so fulfilling, to be there with him. To talk with him as if we did it every day. As if we’d been doing it every day for years. Not even the heat of Ian’s fury could penetrate the warmth I was getting from Reyes.
He inched closer. I saw his inch and raised him a three.
“What should I have heard?” he repeated.
“Nothing. It’s… dumb.” I gazed up at him, pleading. “But I saw the blood.” I grazed my thumb over his bandages. “What happened?” Could he have fought the angel? How would that even be possible? It wasn’t like he had a sword hanging from his belt. But it was getting harder and harder to deny the fact that he was shrouded in darkness. It cascaded off him. Pooled at his feet. And looked exactly like the black smoke that had taken the woman from the storeroom. That had stopped the angel from slicing me into bite-sized chunks.
I had so many questions. Possibly most important of all, why the hell had an angel, a celestial being, tried to kill me? That was wrong on so many levels.
“Please tell me what happened.”
A grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. “You first.”
I dropped my hand and stepped back. I couldn’t. There was still a chance that I was as crazy as a soup sandwich, and I had no intention of spending the rest of my life locked in the mental ward of a hospital. Or, possibly worse, downing a cocktail of psych meds everyday.
He let go of my belt loop, then put his fingers under my chin to tilt my face toward his. But he didn’t say anything. He just perused. Studied. Ran his thumb over my mouth. Caused quakes of hunger to shudder through me.
“Reyes —”
“This is a crime scene,” Ian said, his hand resting on his gun.
I snapped to my senses. Reyes dropped his hand but didn’t look at Ian, almost as though he knew that would infuriate Ian more. Reyes could have argued. Hurled insults. Physically attacked him. None of those things would outrage a man like Ian more than being ignored.
And boy, did it work. Ian’s anger shot out of him like a lightning strike. Reyes either didn’t know or didn’t care.
“If you aren’t part of this investigation, you need to leave.”
Francie was watching us, too. Well, pretty much everyone was watching us by that point, including Dixie. She’d been at the bank when everything went down and came back to a plethora of flashing lights and police units. That had to be a little disconcerting.
“Officer, he works here,” Dixie said. “I asked him to come in to help me with some boxes out back.”
Ian stepped closer to Reyes. “Then help.”
“Thank you,” Dixie said, tugging at Reyes’s shirt.
Reyes winked at me, then obeyed the harried woman. She was genuinely worried about him, even though he wasn’t.
I was still recovering from the wink when Ian walked over to stand beside me. He rested a puppy-dog gaze on me. An expectant one. I got the feeling he thought I’d fall into his arms with relief that the ordeal was over. That he’d come in on his day off to see about me. That I was now even more indebted to him and couldn’t deny the fact that I owed him my life no matter how cra-cra he was.
“Excuse me,” I said to him, a sharp edge to my voice.
I’d spotted Francie and wanted to know if any of that did the trick. If she didn’t fall for Lewis now, one of the bravest men I knew – and one of the only men I knew – then it just wasn’t there. You couldn’t force another person to like you. No one could. I took Ian as a prime example of that. But if she didn’t see what was in front of her, she didn’t deserve him anyway.
“What did you think of Lewis?” I asked Francie.
She was leaning against the drinks counter, tapping a text into her phone.
“Pretty brave, right?”
“Please,” she said. “I know what you’re doing. This doesn’t change anything.” She offered me her best smirk. It was really pretty. Right before she left me standing there, she whispered, “Game on, bitch.”
Uh-oh. I had a feeling we just became enemies. Oh well. Every girl needed a harmonious balance of good and evil in her life. Otherwise, we’d take everything for granted. And if she thought she was going to wrest Reyes away from my hot little hands, the game was most definitely on. I couldn’t fight a ghost, a lost love that haunted Reyes night and day, but I could fight a redhead who cared more about her hair than the environment, four-inch advantage or not.
Speaking of brave, I tried Erin next. We had yet to speak after the picture debacle, but she’d rocked that whole man-waving-a-gun thing. I thought she was going to tackle him for a minute. We might not have been on speaking terms, but nothing brought people together like tragedy.
I walked up to her, a timid smile on my face.
“Don’t even,” she said before I uttered a syllable. She turned and walked away with a roll of her eyes.
I let a sigh slip through my lips. Maybe it was two tragedies.
I wondered how Lewis was holding up and found him in the storeroom, sitting on the cot, with a furious Shayla-fairy tending to his swollen elbow. He’d landed on it when he fell.
“I hope your arm falls off,” she said, her feisty side surfacing under all the pressure.
The look that Lewis gave her had me believe that all things were possible. He was smitten in the worst way. I stood befuddled. It took something like this for him to see her? Who’d’ve thunk?
I could only hope he wasn’t too late. She seemed pretty pissed.
Tears filled her crystalline blue eyes, eyes so light they almost looked clear. Add to that a tiny freckled nose and bow-tie mouth, and you had one gorgeous fairy. She was about two feet shorter than he was, but that would make their coupledom all the cuter. I saw good things coming from this.
“You want my arm to fall off?” he asked, wincing when she slapped on an ice pack.
Or not.
“Why? I won’t be able to play anymore. Something Like a Dude needs me.”
She turned and walked away from him, a bright spark of anger lighting the room. For me, anyway.
When she walked back to him, she hit his arm with a doll-like fist.
“Ouch,” he said, rubbing the spot though it couldn’t have hurt that bad. While he was confused, he was also hopelessly intrigued.
She hit him again. Then again, her punches barely making contact. It was all for show, an outlet to filter her anger. Her feelings of helplessness.
He held up a hand to stop her and said in his own defense, “I could’ve died today.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Tears slid past their gilded lash cage and over her freckled cheeks. She slapped his hand away and hit him again, her frustration palpable.
In a movement that surprised even himself, he bolted up and pulled her roughly into his arms. She fought him at first, then buried her face in his chest and hugged him to her. Her shoulders shook softly, and he kissed the top of her head.