Tempt Me (30 page)

Once she got rid of Wyatt once and for all, she’d figure out what to do about Rafe, and the rest of her life.

Lukas stood. “Bailey, do you need more equipment?”

She shook her head. “Not if I work at The Bunker. Let’s pack it up.” If Penn and Melvin wouldn't spring her, she'd leave against medical advice. Cheyenne was right; she felt disgustingly healthy.

Except for her sore heart.

The meeting broke up, with Cheyenne hurrying off to scheme against Wyatt. Lukas and Antonia each took equipment with them when they left. With Jack following her, she returned to her barely-used hospital room to pack up her things.

“You didn't stand a chance, either, you know.”

Opening a drawer, she removed yoga pants and wispy panties, stuffing them into her duffel bag.

“Think about it,” Jack continued. “As a human
,
you had even fewer natural defenses available to you than Cheyenne did. Plus, you were a teenager—a socially stunted one, at that.”

Now probably wasn’t the time to mention her succubus blood to Jack—especially when she didn't know what, exactly, that meant yet—but some reason, knowing about those few scattered chromosomes made her feel much more confident about her ability to deal with Rafe.

If
he
still wanted to deal with
her
when all this was over.

“I, for one, would love to put Cooper away for using his incubi pheromones to influence your behavior back when you were in school.”

She sighed. The fact that she had succubus lineage would undoubtedly complicate their case. “I’ll do my best to get him to confess.” Because that was the final stage of the plan—her, talking with Wyatt one on one, and recording the conversation. A laugh slipped out. “Do you ever think about how utterly weird all of this is? We're both human—and they’re not—but with them, I feel more at home, more a part of things, than I have for a long time.” Stuffing the last pair of cobweb-thin underwear in the duffel bag, she gave it a vicious zip. “I should feel more concerned about how set apart I feel from humanity. But—” she shrugged “—I’m not.”

“Friends are the family you choose.”

True. Somehow, the Sebastiani family, and her work colleagues at Sebastiani Security and Sebastiani Labs, had become her family—the family she’d chosen. And Jack had simply always been there.

“Have you talked to Rafe today?” he asked quietly.

“And say what? I don't think Rafe wants anything to do with me right now.” Or maybe ever, but she couldn’t think about that right now. “Come on.” She handed him the duffel. “Let's blow this pop stand.”

“Aren't you going to check in with Melvin and Penn?”

“Nope.”

Jack raised a brow. “Leaving against medical advice? Pretty gangsta.”

Linking her arm with his, she thought about the long hours of code-slinging to come. “Dude, you ain't seen nothin’ yet.”

***

R
afe closed the bamboo blinds with a whoosh. The sun, hard and bright, hurt his tired eyes. He closed them and rubbed, which had the added benefit of blocking out the view of his tiny tyrant of a business manager making her second meandering lap around his studio, examining his work.

Tearing open a vein would be less painful.

His gallery show was less than two weeks away, and they’d finalized some last details: choosing the wine and champagne, selecting the hors d’oeuvres, and thankfully Brooke had located more of the fabric he needed to drape the pedestals with. They’d finalized plans to transfer the sculptures to the gallery, an intimate space on Hennepin Avenue, where he’d personally oversee the installation.

In less than two weeks, Bailey’s nude body would be on public display, on red crushed velvet, for every critic, invited guest, and family member to see.

Brooke’s sensible shoes tapped an erratic pattern against the concrete floor. She was starting her third lap, stepping back occasionally, holding a finger to her lips as she considered. He barely held back a sigh. His deadline loomed like a tsunami wave, several miles offshore but visible, and making its ominous, inexorable approach. If he didn’t get back to work soon, it would crash down on his head. But Brooke was his first, best, and most exacting critic—and damn it, now she was moving the sculptures around. He bit back a yelp as she separated the series he mentally called the Shower Sequence: Bailey’s arms, gracefully reaching overhead toward the stream of water. Her hands as they slipped through her own hair, then his. Her body, leaning weakly against the tile as he, on his knees, bathed her most intimate flesh with his tongue.

He couldn’t stand it any longer. “Brooke, you’re moving them out of order.”

The tiny faerie glanced at him with bird-black eyes. “Just trying something.” Her frizzy head, her hair dyed an improbable red, barely came up to his chest. She was as short as Bailey was, but more than made up for her lack of stature with her outsized personality. Her loud caw of a laugh could clear a room.

“I—”

“Could you get me a Coke?” she asked. “None of that diet crap, either.”

He sighed. Chadden had consumed the last can in the studio’s mini-fridge, but he had more upstairs. If he left, she’d move more sculptures, but he could always put them back in their original order. “Sure. Be right back.”

He hurried up the stairs and opened the refrigerator, but didn’t see any red cans. “Shit.” He had a case in the pantry. Retrieving it, he poured a can of the room-temperature beverage into a glass, added a few ice cubes, and trotted back downstairs again. He felt like a parent rushing home after leaving his infant with a babysitter for the first time.

He handed her the glass, and she took a sip. “Thank you, hon.” Stepping back, she gestured toward the sculptures she’d arranged on the long center table. “So, what do you think? Take some time.”

He did as she asked, slowly assessing her progression. Circling back, he repeated the circuit. “Damn it,” he finally muttered under his breath. Brooke, her eye honed by decades as an art scene insider, had discerned something he hadn't. He gave a single, curt nod. Her arrangement
was
better. It said more, revealed more.

Of him, damn it.

The first grouping of sculptures featured Bailey alone—standing, sitting, reclining. In the next group, there was something in the curve of her legs, or a subtle depression in her skin, that suggested the presence of another body.

His.

“Now, this.” Brooke walked past the most erotic grouping to the end of the table, to get a better look at the sculpture he’d started working on last night. “This is interesting. It doesn't feel like the others.”

Probably not. His hands disembodied from his conscious brain, he'd molded the lump of clay into a figure of the two of them together: her, on her knees and writhing in pain, and him, cradling her in his arms. Thankfully only he could see the blood. He’d never be able to scrub the image out of his mind.

Brooke covered his hand with hers—to comfort, or to stop him from slamming his fists down on the still-damp clay? “You have a week to finish the cycle.”

“What cycle?”

The hand smacked him on the shoulder, and then gestured to the first sculpture, the one he’d worked on at the cabin. “There, she's alone. Alone, but...you’ve captured a glimmer of awareness, an almost innocent sensuality. Here—” she pointed to the next sculpture “—awareness dawns. She’s...poised. Waiting. And this sculpture here?” She indicated one of the reclining poses, with Bailey’s head thrown back in abandon. “You've obviously just slept together for the first time. And here? The emotional tone shifts. Notice here, in the curve of her hip, the slightest depression—like an arm is draped over her, but there’s no arm? Just a suggestion. Very clever.” She slowly walked down the row, pointing to a sculpture of Bailey sitting atop an abstract male form. “And here’s where you appear for the first time.” She flicked him a cheerfully lascivious glance. “Though you might have rendered yourself in greater physical detail.”

“I think I feel violated.”

A caw of laughter. “I'm bonded, not dead, Bubbeh.” She paused. “It’s a turning point in the relationship, for both of you. Do you really not see it?”

Of course he saw it. He'd completed the sculpture the day after they'd made love on his crushed velvet couch, right across the room.

She followed his glance. “So that's the place, eh?”

His cheeks heated. She saw too damn much. No doubt she’d connected the dots between the couch’s upholstery and the fabric he’d insisted she locate for the pedestals.

She walked back to his work in progress,
Bailey, Bloody
—a horrible, horrible name, but he couldn’t scrub it out of his head. “Here’s another turning point, and this time, there’s a lot more emotion from you than from her. You’re frightened. Frantic.”

Damn right he’d been frantic. Turning away from Brooke, he jammed his hands into the hair at his temples. Would everyone at the show see his emotions, spilling like he’d been gut-shot? Now he knew how his models felt.

“So, what's next?”

He thought back to their shouted words, to the uncomfortable discussion they'd left unfinished, to the way Bailey hadn't even noticed he’d left her hospital room. “I wish I knew.” Yesterday, Lukas had let him know she’d left the hospital. There’d been no communication from Bailey herself, so he’d buried himself in work.

“Well, you can't leave the cycle unfinished.”

He glared at her. “Maybe it’s an existential statement about how relationships inevitably hit the wall and become utter fucking train wrecks.”

She lifted her hands to his cheeks—then pinched, hard.

“Ow!”

“You don't believe that, and neither does she.”

He dragged an impatient hand over his three-day beard. “Maybe you see something I don't, Brooke.” Maybe he’d sculpted what he wanted to see instead of what was really there.

“What's wrong with your nose, hon? You love her. She loves you. So, where will this turning point lead?”

“I have no bloody idea.”

“Well, where do you
want
it to lead? Communicate that in three or four sculptures.”

“Oh, that’s all,” he said sarcastically. Complete four sculptures in a week? At the quality level he insisted upon? He’d be working around the clock, with no time for anything or anyone else—not that Bailey would even notice. “How the hell do I communicate eternity in three or four sculptures?”

Brooke patted him on his cheek. “You’ll figure it out. I can't wait to meet your little human.” She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think she’s returned her RSVP card yet.”

“She probably won't.” If the flurry of activity he'd seen back in her hospital room was anything to go by, The Queen Bee’s hive was a-buzzing. “I wouldn't count on her.”

Brooke glanced at the sculptures and smiled. “And I wouldn't count her out.”

––––––––

S
low up. Calm down.

Though it was dark and had been for hours, Wyatt paused in the shadows half a block away from Crack House Coffee. Less than an hour ago, Bailey's car had finally moved from Sebastiani Security's parking lot to the Sebastiani Building’s underground ramp, and his surveillance team just reported in that she and Antonia Sebastiani had gone downstairs to the coffee shop.

He’d be able to verify for himself that she was okay.

The night Bailey had gotten sick, he'd been at home, updating dossiers and writing his final report for Winston, Inc., when the real-time feed had popped to life.

So much blood, and so little information.

Why had Sebastiani taken her, a human, to Memorial? It was very odd. And even hospitalized, she'd somehow managed to shut their hack down cold. Cheyenne, who’d assisted her, had been absolutely voracious last night. This morning in the shower, he'd noticed a distinct imprint of her teeth in the skin just above his cock—acceptable payback given he’d mentally superimposed Bailey’s face over hers all night long.

Déjà vu struck as he scanned the coffee shop’s windows. The evening rush hour was over and the place was absolutely packed, which had its pros and cons. He'd have a better chance of blending in with the crowd, but his preferred table, partially tucked behind a wooden beam, probably wouldn’t be available.

A sheet of long, black hair caught his attention as Antonia Sebastiani gracefully rose from the leather love seat next to the fireplace. Carrying two heavy mugs, she went behind the counter to get refills—no waiting in line for a member of the Sebastiani family. Curled up on the other side of the love seat, Bailey stretched her arms overhead, rolling her head to work the stiffness out of her neck muscles. A heavy black three-ringed binder lay open in her lap, and the coffee table in front of the love seat was littered with books, papers, and the stack of magazines provided by the restaurant for guests to read. She looked tired, but beautiful. Whatever health problem had sent her to the hospital seemed to be resolved.

He knew she hadn’t seen Sebastiani in days.

He tugged his black knit skullcap down to his eyebrows. Between the hat, two days’ growth of beard, his baggy pants and a beat-up Trollhaugen Ski Patrol hoodie, he shouldn't rate a second glance.

He waited for Antonia to sit back down with the steaming mugs before entering, shivering in pleasure as the heat leached through his clothes. Over near his preferred table sat several couples on dates, a woman typing on a laptop, and two guys dressed a lot like him. A group of laughing women crowded around at the table for eight, empty plates and full coffee cups sharing space with e-readers and well-thumbed paperbacks. Behind the book club, his usual table was open.

Nodding at the women—they'd provide excellent camouflage—he sat down, plucked up a menu, and opened it. Over at the fireplace, Antonia read
Dissecting the Hack
. Bailey scribbled something in a spiral notebook and showed it to Antonia, who narrowed her eyes, nodded, then tapped something out on her tablet.

Had The Queen Bee found a protégé? Was she teaching Antonia? Using her? Both?

Was Bailey working a very long con?

“Hi, there. Are you ready to order?”