Loose Ends Read online

  He watched her leave, fighting a sense of futility. Even if he wanted his old life back, he didn’t want it as much as he wanted Lancaster, and that truth still begged the question he was facing tonight.

  How much did he want her?

  Too much.

  Fuck. He stepped into the bathroom and stripped off his makeshift bandage and his T-shirt in order to give his knife wound a good look-see. He’d gotten off easy this time. Despite King’s ultimate warrior skill set, he’d gotten only one good strike in, right in Con’s side meat, missing all his vitals and his ribs.

  Without giving it a thought, he opened the door to the linen closet and found exactly what he was looking for, a plastic tub full of first aid supplies, including a suture kit. In the other room, he could hear Jane opening cupboard doors, and he went to work.

  About halfway through his fourth stitch, he realized he wasn’t alone.

  He glanced up and found her standing stock-still in the doorway, staring at him.

  “Why don’t you wait for me in the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “S-sure.” She choked out the word, but she didn’t move, not one inch.

  Hell. He didn’t blame her for staring. He knew what he looked like, and he was a mess. More mess than she would want to deal with, and he didn’t blame her.

  “Was it King who cut you?” she asked.

  “Yes, and if you’re going to faint, you’re on your own until I’m done,” he warned her, finishing off the stitch and reaching for the povidone-iodine.

  She didn’t budge.

  “Who did that to you?”

  He had a lot of scars, but he knew which one she meant, the epic track running down the center of his chest.

  “Maybe a guy named Dr. Souk, maybe not,” he said, disinfecting the stitches. “I try not to spend a lot of time wondering about the things I don’t remember. In this case”—he shrugged—“I think it’s best that particular memory is gone.”

  He pressed a thick gauze bandage over the sutures and started wrapping more gauze around his waist to hold the bandage in place.

  “How’s the coffee coming?” he asked, glancing up.

  She was really looking him over now, cataloging every wound he’d ever suffered, every cut of the knife.

  Good.

  She needed to see it all.

  Some of the butchery he remembered, being strapped to a gurney, going under with Souk’s face looming over him, and waking to a new set of bloody bandages—and, without fail, a new level of strength and power and speed that in the end wasn’t worth the price to be paid.

  He was glad someone, somewhere, had blown that bastard’s brains out.

  “The coffee?” she said. “It’s, uh, coming along fine.” Moving another step into the bathroom, she reached into the tub for the first aid tape.

  He ran out of gauze, held the end, and waited while she tore off a piece of tape and smoothed it into place. Her fingers were cool to the touch, sweetly feminine, gentle—and enough to make him want all the trouble she could deliver.

  “Thanks,” he said, deliberately moving away. “We should—” He stopped in the same instant that her gaze flew up to meet his. The stark look on her face told him she’d heard it, too, the creaking sound of someone stepping up onto the front porch.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  He wanted in.

  Beneath the oddly rotten stench of this end of the block, Monk could smell the woman from the alley, the one in the golden dress with the bangles on her wrist. He’d followed her trail up the hill, and it had led him to exactly where he’d known she would be: 1822 Secaro Street, Alazne Morello’s house, an address and a name he’d found in J. T. Chronopolous’s files. The golden woman’s scent seeped through the walls of the house, and he wanted her.

  The other strong scent, the one reeking of testosterone, had enraged him every step of the way. It would be good to have Conroy Farrel dead.

  But first the woman.

  Monk walked through the gardens surrounding the small house at the end of the block and stepped up onto the front porch. The rotten smell immediately became even more disgustingly intense, like overripe fruit left in the hot sun for far too long.

  He spied the smoldering brazier, the apparent cause of the reeking stench infusing the whole street, and reached for the door, intending to make quick work of his prey—but the smoke thickened and caused him to pause.

  Odd.

  Unexpected.

  Maddening.

  In less than a second, he ran through the series of thoughts, all of them inadequate until he reached the last one: maddening. He understood maddening. He felt it often, the bone-deep anger that pushed him beyond his ability to reason.

  But this wasn’t reasonable.

  This place … this place … he looked to either end of the porch, still trying to ignore the smoking brazier. There was something about this place, something impenetrable, something disturbing, something besides the smoke threatening to gag him.

  He brought his arm up and buried his nose in the crook of his elbow, reaching for the door with his other hand.

  Sickening.

  More than sickening, the smoke burned his nostrils and made his eyes water. The smell of it made his skin crawl and curled around inside his stomach, tightening it into knots.

  He kicked the brazier off the porch, but even in the wet loam of the gardens, the coals smoldered, and now the smell was at his back as well as lingering around the door in wisps of the nauseating, gut-churning smoke.

  He coughed and gagged, and backed down off the porch, stumbling away from the assault on his senses.

  The woman who lived here, the one from J. T. Chronopolous’s past, was a bruja, a self-proclaimed witch. Alazne Morello called herself a sorceress. Monk had dismissed the claim out of hand, but he sensed a woman’s presence in this place, a fierce, disturbing presence.

  There was power beyond the merely human in the world, and he had it in spades, hard-won and paid for in blood and pain. This Latina in Denver did not have that kind of power. No one did, except the men who had come out of Souk’s and Patterson’s laboratories. Men who had paid a price no woman could have borne.

  And yet he barely made it to the sidewalk before the churning, cramping agony in his gut had him retching out the contents of his stomach.

  The pain was brutal, like a beast clawing at him from the inside, something he thought he’d left behind in Bangkok. The bitch, to have done this to him. He would come back for her someday and make her pay.

  Rising from his crouched position, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and started back toward the house. But the smell hit him again, cloying and rich, and so thick he could barely breathe.

  He tried another route to get inside, skirting the property from a distance and coming around from the back. But the smoke, the insidious smoke curled around the whole damn place. He didn’t know how. He’d dumped the brazier, but the smell and the smoke were everywhere, wisps of it winding through the gardens and hanging from the eaves of the house.

  He tried approaching the back door off a small stone patio but was turned back once more by the nauseous cramping induced by the smoke. Standing at the edge of the garden, he used the tail of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, mindless of the viscera and blood splattered on it.

  There was another way.

  He turned his face into the wind, felt it rising from the west and bringing rain in its wake. Soon it would be upon them, and the smoke and smell would dissipate. He would have them then, Farrel for slaughter and the woman … perhaps the woman for something else, something he hadn’t experienced since before Bangkok. She was Farrel’s, reason enough to want to take her like a man, but even more, this woman, unlike the ones he’d killed, teased his lust to life.

  He would capture her and use her, and when he was done, not even a beast like Farrel would want what was left.

  Turning away from the house, he broke into a run, heading do
wnwind to higher ground where he would watch the house and wait.

  Con reached over Jane’s shoulder and hit the bathroom light switch, plunging them into darkness.

  Whoever the hell was out there, he wasn’t going to give them any kind of advantage. Far from it, he was going to break them in half.

  Holding tight to Jane’s arm, he escorted her back out into the hallway, the most protected place in the house.

  “Stay here,” he said, and got all of half a step before she grabbed him.

  “No,” she said, pulling him back into the corner. “You’re staying here with me.”

  No, he wasn’t.

  “This won’t take long.” And it wouldn’t. He’d caught a scent, the same rancid sweat and oddly metallic smell from the darkened alleys behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, and whoever that sonuvabitch was, he’d made his last mistake. “I’m only going outside for a minute.” If it even took that much time to bust this guy.

  “The hell you are,” she whispered harshly. “So help me God, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Jane—” he began, only to get cut off by a clattering sound coming from the porch.

  She swore and shifted her hold to his waist, grabbing onto his jeans.

  Dammit. He needed to get out there.

  “I need—”

  “You’re not leaving me here alone.” Her hand curled around his waistband.

  “I’m going to be right outside the front door.” She wouldn’t be alone. He reached down and took hold of her hand, intending to pry her loose, but she just held on tighter.

  “No,” she insisted, whispering fast. “It never works that way. The guy always leaves, and then something terrible happens to the woman. You’re not leaving me in this house, where … where anything could get in here and … and … you’re not leaving.” She moved in closer, making it all that much harder to get away.

  But honest to God, he could have put up more of a fight.

  She was scared, really scared, which was all the more reason for him to get out there and take care of business. He heard the guy move off the steps, and then there was silence for a moment, before he picked up the sound of someone walking around the outside edge of the garden.

  The bastard was trying to flank them.

  He could slip out the bedroom window and come up behind the guy, or be waiting for him when he came in the back door, but either option entailed somehow extricating himself from her grip.

  “Where’s your purse?” he asked. “I’ll get your gun for you.”

  “It’s in the kitchen. I’ll go with you.”

  “No.” He didn’t want her exposed through the windows.

  “Yes, I’ll—”

  “Shhhh …” he said, touching his finger to her lips. Something had changed outside.

  He turned his head toward the back door and listened, waiting, but there was nothing, not a sound, and the rancid, chemical smell of sweat and metal was quickly fading.

  If he didn’t move fast, he was going to lose the bastard. He turned to tell her as much and then realized with a dawning sense of inevitability that it didn’t matter. If he chased the guy down the street, then he really would be abandoning her—and he’d already done enough damage in that quarter for one night.

  “Hell,” he muttered, dragging his hand back through his hair.

  “What?” she asked, still with that death grip on his jeans. It was crazy, the way she was holding on to him. “What?”

  Damn, he thought. This was never going to work.

  “He’s gone,” he said. “Whoever was out on the porch is gone.”

  “That’s good?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I wanted to talk to him.” To put it nicely. Not so nicely, things probably would have gone down a completely different way.

  “So you think it was the ghost guy?” Her face paled a little more at the thought.

  “No,” he lied. “Could have just been a neighbor, wondering why the cops were here.”

  She nodded, like she was working that idea around and maybe not quite buying his story.

  “I … don’t think he’s much of a talker, the ghost guy,” she said.

  “Probably not,” he agreed, refraining from a weary sigh. She was so damn beautiful. “How’s your head? Still hurting?”

  “A little.”

  “And your knee?” He’d never seen it coming, that he would end up in a house tucked into the middle of nowhere, hell and gone in the Denver suburbs with a woman who broke his heart just by standing there. It made him feel uncomfortably exposed, vulnerable.

  Edgy.

  “It smarts … a little.” She shrugged her oh-so-elegant shoulders, a gesture of such profound, unfolding grace he felt an echoing ache in his chest.

  He was so screwed.

  “But I’m okay,” she said.

  Yeah, sure, him, too.

  “Good.” It took a lot to get the word out, and in the ensuing silence of his failure to voice another one, she cast her gaze downward—which pretty much fascinated the hell out of him. Like she needed any more help in that department.

  They were probably both in over their heads.

  “Look at me,” he said, and, after a slight hesitation, she complied, tilting her chin up.

  This was the time to tell her he needed to go after that guy, whoever he was. To tell her the ghostly tracker wouldn’t get by him—and the bastard wouldn’t, no matter what kind of laboratory had made him. To tell her she was safe in this house, and that he’d be back.

  But, God, she was exquisite.

  Abso-fucking-lutely irresistible.

  He knew better, but “better” didn’t seem to matter, not in the heated shadows of this hallway with her hands practically in his pants, still holding on to him so tightly.

  Geezus, baby, do you know? He lifted his hand and slid the tips of his fingers across her cheek, feeling the softness of her skin, watching her eyes darken to an even more verdant shade of green. Do you know what you’re doing to me?

  He’d be crazy to get involved with her. With half a chance, he could still make a break for it.

  But she didn’t give him half a chance. Without another move, without so much as the blink of an eye or a twitch of a smile, between one breath and the next, she captured him completely.

  There was no help for it and no escape.

  None.

  She was the Wild Thing, everything he remembered and something he hadn’t known for a long time. The lush, alluring scent of her awareness filled his senses, all of it female. Every fiber of her being was alert to their closeness. She fairly vibrated with it, and it was turning him inside out with longing.

  “I’m not the man you knew.” No matter what happened here tonight, he couldn’t afford to be anything less than honest with her.

  “No,” she said. “No, you’re not.” Her voice was soft, barely audible, but her gaze was direct, and the temperature of her skin subtly rose with a blush, a more telling confession than the words themselves.

  “I don’t know how much time I have, maybe only weeks, maybe months.” More brutal honesty. He really didn’t think he would live out the year, not the way things had been going for him lately.

  Distress flattened her expression, but her gaze stayed locked onto him.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “I understand.”

  He doubted it. Hell, he didn’t understand it himself, how he could be so strong one minute and crash the next. Souk had been such a sick bastard. In the hands of a humanitarian, of a doctor who cared, Souk’s research could have changed the world. He could have helped people and saved lives.

  Instead, along had come another crazy sick bastard working somewhere out of Thailand, jacking warriors up for profit and unleashing a monster on the earth.

  Lancaster had a lot to answer for.

  “Six years in the wasteland,” he said, gently rubbing his thumb across the soft fullness of her lower lip. “And then there you are, walking down Wazee Street, turning my w
orld inside out, and things start coming back to me.”

  Maybe this was it, he thought, maybe he was dying and this thing with her was his whole-life-flashing-before-his-eyes setup, except his “flash” was going in slow motion, one memory at a time, starting with Corinna and Hawkins, and Kid, and Denver, memories of 738 Steele Street and this house on the west side, and especially of her, Jane Linden, Robin Rulz.

  His recollections of her were so clear, but sex had a way of focusing a guy’s mind like a laser beam—and his feelings for her were very sexual.

  “So,” he said, “this guy you had the date with tonight …”

  “Wouldn’t have gotten me into half the trouble you did.”

  Sweet thing, she said it with a straight face, as if there might actually be somebody out there who could have gotten her into even more trouble.

  He doubted it.

  “An accountant?” he guessed.

  “Cop.”

  Geezus. He couldn’t help himself, he grinned.

  “Yeah,” she said, a small grin lifting a corner of her mouth, as well. “I know.”

  “Steady boyfriend?” He needed to know, not that he thought her answer was going to make too damn much of a difference—not when she was still holding on to him like she was never going to let him go.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Blind date.”

  Good, he thought, feeling the last of his safeguards slide out from under him like so much shifting sand. The poor cop was never going to know what he’d missed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Crazy, crazy night.

  J. T. Chronopolous back from the dead, and he was getting ready to kiss her all over again. Jane saw it in his eyes, felt it in her own response and the heated tension filling the hall—and for no known reason on the face of the earth, she found herself tightening her grip on his waistband.

  Wrong. The smart money told her to back off, to be the good girl, to play things safe. She really didn’t know him, which didn’t begin to explain why she had hold of his pants. He wasn’t who he used to be, not even close, this stranger with the scars and the missing finger, the one who didn’t know his own name or his own brother.