Bite of Envy (Just One Bite #4) (13 page)

Ten minutes later, tempers had cooled a bit but body
temperatures had risen. Instead of starting her with the typical exercises to
test her skills, Diandra had let her anger flare a bit and started her with
self-defense training. It was petty, but as Sandra landed on her rounded ass on
the sand for the fourth time, she had to admit that it felt really, really
good. “You’re not even attempting to get me,” she called. “The point is to
block me, if you can’t turn it around and flip me instead.”

Sandra stood up and tiredly wiped some of the sand from the
back of her pants. They were a much darker shade of green now, damp from the
droplets that came in off the ocean and struck the beach. “Isn’t there
something else we can do instead? I’ve had enough of this for the day.” She’d
spent her excess energy, in both exertion and fury. Now she was resigned to the
fact that she couldn’t best Diandra, at least not yet. She just didn’t have the
strength.

Dia smiled. “Sure.” She went to stand next to the tired,
bedraggled woman. “Race me to that rock over there,” she said, pointing about a
mile down the beach. Sandra gaped at her, and Diandra let out a delighted
laugh. “You should be able to do this with no problem. I need to see how fast
you are,” she continued reasonably. “Go ahead- I’ll give you a head start.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before Sandra took
off, pumping her legs and arms as fast as she could. She was a quarter-mile
toward her goal and thrilled with her progress. She’d never been so fast, she
marveled. She threw back her head and whooped with pleasure, but the laugh died
just as quickly as it had begun as Diandra’s stride carried her quickly past
Sandra. When she reached the half-mile mark she could see Dia was already at
the goal- a large, flat rock as big as Lizbeth’s Nissan. She growled low in her
throat and pushed herself harder, arriving at the other woman’s side in about
six seconds, she estimated. “You’re fast,” she gasped out, bending over and
panting, trying to regulate her breathing to a more normal rhythm.

Diandra smiled, and it was almost kind. “Yes, but you are,
too. I just happen to be faster.” She brushed a lock of her fiery hair back
from her forehead where it had escaped the messy bun it had started the morning
in. “Don’t be down about it. I’m faster than Eamon and Lizbeth as well. I
happen to be faster than most everyone,” she said without a trace of arrogance.
She said it as a statement of fact, and that soothed Sandra’s ruffled feathers.
She clapped her hands briskly. “Now lift this rock.”

In an echo of Lizbeth and herself that had Dia grinning,
Sandra groaned and said, “That’s not a rock- it’s a boulder. A fucking boulder-
I can’t lift that.”

Dia dried the light sweat on her palms off on her tap pants
and gripped the rock where it dug into the sand. With a deep breath, she hefted
the rock, lifting it slowly a foot at a time until she held it over her head.
She nodded at Eamon where he peeked around the corner of the deck, and he
twitched his ears in response. Then she lowered the large rock back to the sand
and turned to Sandra once more. “See, not a big deal. I need to see how strong
you are, so now it’s your turn.”

Sandra stared at her, stunned to see that this petite,
sophisticated woman had managed to hoist the rock that high. With a resigned
air, she dug in and found herself unable to budge it so much as an inch. “I
can’t do it,” she said, sitting down at the base of it- she was tired to her
very bones.

Diandra reached down and bodily lifted her to her feet
again. “That’s because you’re doing it wrong,” she said reasonably. “If you’re
convinced that you can’t do it, you won’t be able to. There are lots of things
I can do that should be impossible yet they aren’t.”

Sandra looked at her, curious despite her determination to
hate her. “Like what?”

Without a word, Diandra sort of levitated; first a foot off
the sand, then three, then she soared up with the seagulls that provided a
soothing background noise to their work. Laughing at Sandra’s shock, she made
her descent in a slow dive, landing gently on the sand before shifting herself
into a large, red wolf. Sandra instinctively crouched into a defensive position
and snarled, baring her fangs at what she perceived as a threat.

Shifting back quickly to human form took a bit out of her,
not that she’d admit it, but she’d need a bit of blood when she went back
inside. For now, Diandra looked at Sandra and nodded. “Nice work- you have
sharp instincts. You knew who I was, and you knew even though I was a wolf I
probably wouldn’t actually attack you as that would defeat the purpose of
keeping you alive, but you automatically followed your instinct to treat me as
a threat. That’s good. Your survival instincts are already intact.” She turned
on a heel and headed for the house.

“Where are you going?” Sandra called, struggling to match
her steps to Diandra’s much quicker ones.

“We’ve done enough for the day- you’ve done well. Tomorrow
we’ll continue. I want you to work on some positive visualization in the
meantime. Picture yourself heaving that rock into the air. Picture yourself
crushing it to dust between your hands. Picture yourself flying with the gulls.
If you work on that, and actually believe you can do it, then tomorrow you may
well be able to. We won’t know until you try- really
try
.”
And with that she took off to the house to see if Adrian minded sharing a bit
of his blood, as shifting took a lot out of her, even after months of
continuous practice. Sandra merely stood where Dia left her, shaking her head
at all she’d learned that day already. Her life would never be the same again,
and she had yet to decide if that was a blessing or a curse.

When Lizbeth got home from work, she wasn’t in the best of
moods. True, there were no new scenes for her to work, as the lesbian murders
were no longer happening in Bethany, but they’d moved back to their original
location in Rehoboth Beach where she had no jurisdiction. She’d been called for
a consultation, but there was little she could tell them. It pissed her off
beyond belief that she knew who was committing the crimes. She knew who, and
how, and was helpless to stop them. She had to lie to her fellow officers, and
she hated to lie, but what could she do? It wasn’t as if she could tell them
all about Giles Carson, the media’s favorite district attorney. They’d lock her
up in a psych ward, and the crimes would continue. At least out here she stood
a chance of eventually stopping him.

She kicked off her shoes just inside the door, as was her
habit, and walked into her office to set her briefcase on the desk. She didn’t
know why she bothered- it’s not like she spent much time in here working, as
there was little she could do when the majority of her cases these days all had
to do with Carson and no amount of research would stop him. Unless…

She hurriedly sat behind her desk and dialed a number from
memory. “Hey, kiddo, it’s the cop. I’ve got a job for you, if you’re
interested,” she said without preamble.

Andrew let out a laugh. “Hey, Liz, how’s it going? Yeah, I’m
always interested in earning some scratch. Does it have to do with taking down
a certain someone?” he asked casually. He’d come to like and trust Lizbeth
Snyder, even though he didn’t really know her. He’d researched her after their
meeting, and knew she was someone who cared more about her badge and closing
cases to get justice, not about rising through the ranks of bureaucracy. He
knew her sordid past, probably better than she’d ever dream, and he had mad
respect for her. To go back to a job where her teeth had been figuratively
kicked in, that took massive balls. She was one cool chick, in his book, and
he’d gladly help her any time she asked.

“Oh yeah,” Lizbeth replied, propping her sock-clad feet up
on the corner of the desk and settling more comfortably in her chair. “It most
definitely does. How much effort will it take for you to screw with his phone?”

“Screw with it how?” he asked, as he was already tapping
keys on his laptop to work his way into the DA’s phone system. Any chance to
avenge the death of his father was a huge deal for him, so he’d do what he
could if it would play a part in bringing the man down.

Lizbeth smiled. “I want this for all his phones, okay, not
just the one. I want you to route all his outgoing calls so that any time he
makes a call, no matter who he tried to call, he reaches this number,” she
said, reading it to him from the phone book she’d retrieved from a desk drawer.

“That’s a piece of cake,” the kid said. “Fifty bucks, since
it’s no biggie. And some info,” he said, a smile of his own evident in his
voice.

“What kind of info?” she asked, cautious now. There was
little she could tell the kid. Oh, not because of the illegality of it, but
more for his safety, she mused.

“No worries. I don’t want you to pass along anything that’ll
get you into trouble. I just want to know why this number?”

Lizbeth let out a laugh. “Because it’s time someone played
some games with him. He’s fond of games, and I’m his favored playmate. This
turns the tables just a bit. I’ll wire the money to the account you told me
about,” she said, already setting it up from her own laptop. They ended their
call, and she headed for the smell of dinner wafting from the kitchen. She
should have a night’s uninterrupted sleep, she thought with a sigh of relief.
After all, every time he tried to dial her tonight, his calls would
automatically be routed to the morgue.

Lizbeth found herself studying Sandra intently over dinner
that night, and her curiosity was piqued by her behavior. She did her best to
not talk with anyone. In fact, she barely looked up from her plate the whole
night. When Lizbeth attempted to draw her out, she answered her as briefly as
possible. She was tempted to pass it all off as exhaustion from a day of
training with Eamon and struggling to adjust to her new life, but she often
caught Sandra flicking sidelong glances at Diandra, especially before replying
to anything Lizbeth asked her.

Determined to get to the bottom of things, Lizzie waited
until Diandra headed up to bed before following her. She shut the bedroom door,
turning on the baby monitor in a gesture that was more a reflex than anything
else. “What gives, Dia?” she asked, and the woman jumped. Lizbeth knew Diandra
had known she was there, but apparently she didn’t expect the question. That
made her even more interested in what had happened while she was at work that
day.

“What do you mean?” Dia asked, but the tone in her voice let
Lizbeth know it was a stalling tactic. The two women stripped and got ready for
bed, but Lizzie wasn’t about to let that interrupt their conversation.

“I mean,” Lizbeth said patiently, “that I’d like to know why
Sandra was sitting there sneaking glances at you like she was afraid you were
going to put her through a wall if she said something out of line.” She pulled
back the covers on her side of the bed and lay down without taking her eyes off
the woman she loved beyond reason.

Diandra pulled out a bottle of body lotion and proceeded to
apply it carefully. She often did things like this to avoid eye contact if she
feared they’d argue about something. After a year together, Lizbeth knew her
almost as well as she knew herself. “I just had a talk to her today during
training, that’s all.”

That got Lizbeth’s attention. “I thought Eamon was training
the both of us.”

Diandra shook her head, and her copper waterfall of hair
draped itself across her face like a shroud. “No, he’s training you, but I’m in
charge of Sandra. He has his hands full making sure you’re fully prepared for
the battle we both know is coming with Carson. He doesn’t need to be in charge
of the prima donna as well,” she said, and her words had bite to them.

Lizbeth raised a brow at that. “You do realize she isn’t a
threat, right?” she asked, thinking they’d settled this before they’d gone
after Sandra the other night. She didn’t think Dia was still feeling threatened
by the woman after all of this, but apparently she was wrong.

“Of course she’s a threat,” Dia spat at her, giving up all
pretense of caring about moisturizing her body when she heaved the bottle
across the room. The cheap plastic container shattered and the room was
instantly full of the smell of cocoa butter, heavily perfuming the air from the
gobs of lotion that decorated the wall.

Lizbeth stared at the mess in shock for a moment, and then
hilarity struck. She couldn’t do anything but laugh, so laugh she did- she
clutched her stomach, balling up into herself as tears of helplessness rolled
down her cheeks and stained the pale pink pillowcases a darker rose color. She
was gasping for air, and the situation was only made worse by the petulant
expression on Diandra’s face.

Dia was furious. How dare Lizbeth belittle her feelings this
way? Then she studied the mess she’d made and scented the air. She watched her
lover strive for control and fail. The corners of her mouth twitched and a
chuckle escaped. The chuckle grew until she collapsed in the bed next to Lizzie
and the two of them held on to each other as though the world would tear itself
apart.

When they finally regained control, Lizbeth wiped the tears
from her face and attempted to become serious once again. “Sweetie, I love you.
You’re the woman of my dreams, the one who makes my life complete. You’re the
mother of the little girl I feel is just as much mine as yours. You saved my
life- literally. I couldn’t have lasted much longer the way I was going.” She
pulled Diandra close. Obligingly, Diandra went up on an elbow and leaned over
Lizbeth. “Sandra is part of my past. The past, Diandra- I’m no longer the same
woman I was back then. My life with her, the time we spent together, that was
before I went through Hell and back on the streets. I’m not the same person I
was back then, and neither is she. She and I grew apart, and baby, you and I
grew together.”