Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels (76 page)

He set his jaw. “You shouldn’t put yourself in danger for something like that.”

I squared my shoulders. “It takes a real reporter to stay on the front page, week after week, or so I hear.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

I looked down at my stomach. “Well, yeah. Maybe a little bit.” My legs felt shaky. I wasn’t sure if they were going to hold me up.

He crossed to me.

And I collapsed into his arms.

I was sitting on a padded black bench, and Vigil was applying antibiotic ointment to my wounds.

“I was worried you were going to take me to your secret lair,” I said, looking around.

“It’s not a lair,” he said.

We were underground somewhere. We’d come in off an abandoned subway tunnel. We were in a vast room that was full of state-of-the-art gadgets. Screens lined the walls. Row of weapons—knives, clubs, and ropes. There were several different vehicles parked in here. Two motorcycles. One car. Something else that might have been a glider.

“You don’t have a collection of women’s legs, do you?” I said.

He set down the ointment. “You don’t really still think I’m the killer.”

“Well, it would be a clever ruse,” I said, “pretending to save people from yourself. It would be quite a plot twist if it turned out you’d been the bad guy all along.”

He unrolled some gauze and cut it with a tiny pair of scissors. “Who says I’m a good guy?”

I gulped. “You’re not?”

He pressed the gauze against one of my wounds. “I seem like a good guy to you? Running around at night wearing this?”

“Well, you’re trying to save people. You said you wanted to clean up the police department.”

“You took that out of context.” He began taping the gauze down. “I said that the police department was too corrupt to do anything about Barclay.”

I didn’t understand. “You implied that you were going to do what the police couldn’t.”

“Well…” He spread his fingers gently over the tape on my stomach. His fingers grazed my bare skin. “I don’t want Barclay to kill anyone else.” He looked up at me. “I wondered why you left him out of the article you wrote. We discussed him, but you didn’t put that in print.”

I noticed that he hadn’t moved his fingers away from my skin. “It was only a theory. I didn’t want my theory going out until I had proof.” And I might have that now. I’d seen Barclay running around in The Phantom costume. He’d stabbed me. I could write the article I’d been planning on writing.

He traced a finger over the curve of my waist.

Goosebumps jumped up on my skin. “What are you doing?” I breathed.

He shook his head. “You make it hard to think.”

I agreed.
He
made it hard for
me
to think. There was something about his presence. He loomed, larger than life. His virility overwhelmed me. I touched his chin, turning his face up to mine.

His blue eyes sliced into me. “I don’t want you to go public with Barclay.”

I ran my fingers over his jaw. I could feel the faint prickle of stubble beneath his skin. “Why not? He’s obviously the killer. He needs to go to jail.”

He caught my hand, held it there. “That’s the thing, he won’t go to jail. At worst, they’ll lock him up in Chilton.” Chilton Center was a treatment facility for people with mental illness. “But he’s been in and out of there more than once. It will only be a short stay in the facility, trust me.”

“He’s dangerous. Something has to be done.”

He moved closer, his lips inches from mine. “I’m doing something.”

“What are you doing?”

“I watch him. I keep girls away from him. They haven’t found any more bodies in weeks have they?” And then he was kissing me. His tongue darted into my mouth.

His lips were warm. I felt like I was sinking into him. And he was delicious.

His mouth moved away from my lips. He kissed my chin. My neck.

I gasped. “It’s not enough. You can’t watch him all the time. He has to be off the streets.”

“There’s no way to do that,” said Vigil in between kisses. His mouth found my earlobe.

Shudders went through me. “There has to be.”

“No.” His tongue ran around the rim of my ear. His voice was husky and soft. “Not unless I kill him.”

The words hung heavily between us.

I closed my eyes.

“And I won’t do that,” he said.

I turned my face to his. I captured his lips again. “Because you’re too noble to kill?” I murmured.

His mouth claimed mine. For several seconds, there was nothing in the world but the sweet darkness of his kiss. Then, he pulled away. “Because… he and I are connected.”

He sat down next to me.

We weren’t touching anymore.

I was tingling all over, still worked up from his kisses. I took an unsteady breath. “Connected?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “You can’t see it?”

“What, just because you’re both wearing masks and running around in the city at night?” Okay, so maybe they were connected. Maybe they had a lot in common.

“Not just because of that.” He sighed. “I guess that’s a symptom, not the cause.”

I struggled to collect my thoughts. “So, you want me to sit on the biggest story of my career because you have a… a connection with a serial killer?” That was a ludicrous idea. What was even more ludicrous was that I was actually considering it. If he started kissing me again, I’d probably agree to everything he said.

He turned to me. “I know that breaking the story about Barclay would be big for you.”

“It’s a career-making story.”

“What about me?” He folded his arms over his chest. “I got you on the front page, didn’t I? Am I a career-making story?”

Henry seemed to think he was pretty damned important. “I…” My gaze ran over him. Damn it, why did he have to be so distractingly gorgeous?

“I’ll cooperate with you however you want. I’ll give you as many interviews as you want. I’ll even give you a phone number where you can reach me. I’ll be at your beck and call.”

My breath caught in my throat. Did he mean that to sound as sexy as it did? And would there be more kissing if I agreed to interview him?

“But you keep Barclay out of it, and you let me handle it the way I’ve been doing it.”

I tore my gaze away from him. “I can’t.”

He sighed. “Because it’s personal.” I heard him get up. When he spoke again, his voice was further away. Across the room. “You want him dead, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Maybe I did want Barclay dead. But I mostly wanted him locked up.

I looked up at Vigil, who was standing with his back to me. He was just as exquisite from behind. I had the sudden urge to go across the room to him and press myself into him, flattening my breasts against the hard muscles of his back.

But I didn’t move.

“I can’t let you write about him.” He turned to look at me. “I promise he’ll never kill another girl again. Can’t that be enough?”

I didn’t know. I tangled my hands in my lap. “Things are more complicated than that, though, aren’t they? What about…? You and me, we keep… doing things.”

He glanced at the floor, looking almost abashed.

“Not that… I mean you’re a very good kisser.”

He chuckled. “Do you want to write about that too?”

“No,” I said quickly. “It’s only that it… introduces bias, and good reporter should never allow her personal feelings to—”

“You have personal feelings about me?”

“Well, not like that,” I said. “I barely know you. And you obviously have… issues.”

He chuckled again. “Issues?”

“You know, because of the mask and the costume and the connection with…” I sighed.

“I frighten you.”

“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. At all.” I took a deep breath. “And I think
that’s
what frightens me. The fact that you
should
scare me, but you don’t.”

He crossed the room to me and pulled me to my feet. “No.” He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You should never be frightened of me. I would never hurt you.”

I looked into his blue eyes. He was so close.

I put my hands on his chest, running my fingers over the swell of his pecks. He was so solid. So firm. Being this close to him, I felt lit up like a fuse.

He put his arms around me. He engulfed me.

I kissed him.

His gloved hands roamed over my back, guiding me closer, pressing me into him.

Oh. That was nice. That was so nice. For a minute, it was all I could think about.

But then the wheels in my brain began to turn. Vigil was right, wasn’t he? If I got Barclay arrested, he’d be back on the street in months. He was too rich. He had too many connections. The entire system of Aurora was infected with the money from organized crime.

I massaged Vigil’s tongue with my own, bliss shooting through me. And I thought that maybe it would be okay if I didn’t break the Barclay story.

Maybe.

I pushed him away. “One condition.”

He looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll agree not to reveal anything about Barclay. To interview you instead as a consolation prize. But on one condition.”

“What?”

“As long as no other girls die. The minute that they do, the deal’s off.”

He nodded slowly. “All right. That’s fair.”

“Good,” I said. I traced the places on his chest where his muscles were knit together. His costume was so tight that I could see every plane and valley.

He closed his eyes, drawing in a long, slow breath.

His reaction made something inside me tighten pleasantly.

His hands moved on my body. The halter top I was wearing left so much of my skin bare, and his gloved fingers dragged themselves over my shoulder blades, down my back, and over my waist.

“Why?” I whispered. “Why are you touching me?” I knew why I wanted him. He was walking, talking sex. Just being near him made me feel bothered. He was a mysterious man in a mask who’d saved me more than once.

“Do you want me to stop?” His mouth was on my neck again.

I moaned. “No. But I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” he murmured into my skin. “Something about you…”

His lips found mine again.

I surrendered myself to him, kissing with abandon.

The police were in my apartment when I got home.

“You didn’t check in with me,” said Airenne. “And it’s after two.”

I’d been with Vigil for a long time, it was true. I had to conduct an interview, because Henry wanted another story. And for some reason, the he and I had found it difficult to concentrate on the questions. We’d done a lot of kissing.

A lot of really intense kissing.

I stood in the doorway to my apartment, staring at the police officers, wondering how I looked. The makeup I’d put on earlier than night was probably smeared all over my face. My clothes were a little wrinkled. And I had bandages on my bare midriff from where The Phantom had cut me. What must they be thinking?

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”

“You scared me to death,” said Airenne.

“Where were you, ma’am?” said one of the police officers.

“Working on a story,” I said. “I’m an intern for
The Sun-Times
.”

“Oh, that’s why I recognized the name,” said the other officer, a woman. “Cecily Kane. You wrote the story about Vigil.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“Were you out looking for him tonight?” asked the female police officer.

“I found him,” I said. “Well, he found me.”

She grinned at me and nudged her partner. “You hear that? She was with Vigil. You believe that?”

He gave her a sour look. “He said the police were all corrupt. I don’t like him.”

“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” said the female. “You and me are a few of the only straight shooters out there. Anybody who’s trying to clean things up, well, I figure he’s on our side.”

The male officer pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything.

“You keep it up, honey,” said the female. “And you tell Vigil that we’re grateful. Can you do that?”

“I can,” I said.

I’d created a Vigil that didn’t exist. The news stories I wrote were about a man committed to justice, who was only motivated by a desire to set things right. The real man was complicated and secretive. He wasn’t doing what he was doing out of any sense of justice. He was only obsessed with and drawn to The Phantom, his distorted mirror image.

Perhaps I wasn’t being quite fair to him. He did have some sense of justice. After all, he was protecting women from getting killed. So he didn’t take any joy in death.

Unlike The Phantom, who mutilated and killed for fun.