kill him. Like he’d warned her that they might kill her, too.
Hell, maybe Bernie’s warning hadn’t been so outlandish. Maybe there were humans—that weren’t really human—that could fly. And that man had been one of them. That was about the only explanation for how he’d disappeared.
She shook her head, disgusted with herself for wanting to believe Bernie’s wild, alcoholic dementia-influenced story. But what was the alternative? Angels? If she was spiritual enough to believe in them, they flew. But she doubted the man she’d shot—who had been so intent on killing his victim—was an angel.
“So where did you go?” she mused, pushing her sweat-dampened hair from her forehead. She had gone back to that alley nearly every night since it had happened, but she had yet to figure out how he could have just disappeared. “I looked for you everywhere...”
“Not everywhere,” a deep voice murmured.
Kate jerked upright in bed, one hand clutching the tangled sheets to her chest—the other sliding under the pillow next to hers for her gun. She pulled out the Glock and directed the barrel toward the shadows in the corner of her bedroom.
He stepped away from the wall and moved into the glow of the moonlight streaking through the partially open blinds. His mouth curved into a mocking grin. “What are you going to do, Kate? Shoot me again?”
She shivered and tightened her grasp on her gun. She was too shocked over his appearance to ask any of the questions she should have. Who the hell are you? How the hell did you get in? All she could do was murmur, “I did shoot you.”
Sometimes she had wondered if she’d missed. But that wouldn’t have explained the blood. The crime techs hadn’t been able to explain it, either—except to say that some animal must have been killed in the alley.
The man lifted a hand to his chest and patted it. “Did you?”
“I know I did. I saw you bleeding.” Blood had gushed from the bullet wound in his heart. She swallowed the lump that had risen up the back of her throat.
She hadn’t just shot him; she’d killed him.
“I saw you die.”
So how was he in her room, stepping closer to her bed?
“Then I must be a ghost,” he said. As totally unconcerned about the gun as he had been the night she’d shot him, he settled onto the mattress next to her, his muscular thigh rubbing against her hip.
“I don’t believe in ghosts.” But she couldn’t deny that he was haunting her. With the glimpses of him she had been catching in crowds. With these strangely erotic dreams...
But she was awake. Wasn’t she? So she couldn’t be dreaming.
“Maybe I’m your conscience,” he suggested.
“My conscience isn’t bothering me,” she said. But he was. He had been ever since she’d bumped into him on the street and looked up into those eerie topaz eyes. She had lost herself in that intense gaze of his, and she had yet to find her way back.
She should have already placed him under arrest for his older crimes—assault and leaving the scene of that crime—and his latest crime: breaking and entering. He must have come through her window; she felt the breeze blowing through it and she hadn’t left it open—not this late in autumn.
But if she tried arresting him, he would undoubtedly resist. And she’d have to shoot him. For some reason she didn’t want to shoot him again—because then he might disappear again, like he had that night.
Even now she wasn’t certain that he was real, that she wasn’t dreaming. Thoughts of him and that night had kept her awake for so many nights that she was beyond exhausted. She was probably just dreaming...
* * *
Heat flashed through Warrick James, radiating from where his thigh rubbed against her hip. Only denim and a thin satin sheet separated his skin from hers. The sheet was so thin that it was obvious she wore nothing beneath it. The dark areolae of her full breasts were visible beneath the champagne-colored satin, her nipples peaked on the shapely mounds—probably from the cool breeze blowing through her open window. She couldn’t want him...as much as he wanted her.
His body hardened as blood rushed through his veins, hot and heavy. He would have to be crazy to be attracted to her—the woman who had tried to kill him and obviously felt no remorse. “Don’t you have a conscience?” he asked. He shouldn’t have been surprised that she didn’t. Apparently nobody he knew had one.
“Yes, but there’s no reason for it to bother me,” she murmured, her brow furrowing with genuine confusion. A lock of silky-looking black hair fell across her forehead and skimmed her jaw. Her hair was dark, her skin pale and her eyes a sharp, clear blue.
Hell, maybe he would be crazy if he wasn’t attracted to her. But this attraction did nothing to cool his anger with her.
He barely resisted the urge to reach out and shake her. But she was still holding that damn gun. And while she couldn’t kill him with it—permanently—the bullets still hurt. He grimaced in remembrance of the pain that had burned so fiercely in his chest that he had actually lost consciousness. “Because you shot me.”
“And if the situation was the same, I’d do it again,” she replied. “Shooting you was the only way to stop you from killing that man. Even after I identified myself, you wouldn’t listen to my commands to let him go. And you had this look on your face...” She shuddered.
“You didn’t understand what was going on,” he said. “You should have given me a chance to explain.” That he had been doing her job for her. He had been protecting and serving all the citizens of Zantrax—both human and superhuman—as well as his home village of St. James.
“You were too busy strangling the life from that man,” she reminded him.
“Yes,” he said, frustration gnawing at him that she had stopped him from doing what had to be done, what apparently should have been done years ago so that other lives wouldn’t have been lost and destroyed. Now the bastard, Reagan, had gone underground. He hadn’t been easy to find the night Warrick had chased him into that dead-end alley; he would be even harder to track down now. Thanks to Detective Kate Wever.
“Why?” she asked. “I fired the first two shots into your shoulder, but you wouldn’t stop. You were in such a murderous rage.”
He couldn’t deny that he had been. “I had a damn good reason.”
“You should have stopped beating him when I told you to,” she said, “then I would have taken a report and you could have explained your actions.”
But he had been beyond explanations. Beyond reason. All he’d known was his hunger for vengeance, the exact same hunger he should be feeling for her—just for vengeance. But, despite the gun she held on him, another kind of hunger gnawed at him—and only that thin sheet separated her naked body from his gaze, from his touch. His fingers itched to reach for the sheet, to tug it off. But she would undoubtedly shoot him again.
“Explain the situation to me now. Why were you trying to kill that man?” she asked. “You called him a killer.”
Reagan
