Tempt Me (18 page)

“Two sitting council members, having a half-breed baby?” She put air quotes around half-breed with her fingers. “No shit.” She half-heartedly twirled her fork in the salad, picking up a chunk of bleu cheese on the white plastic tines. “On the other hand, if he strokes out hearing the news, his death would clearly be from natural causes. Sometimes it’s all I can do not to strangle the guy.”

Jack snorted with laughter, but then sobered. “So what’s your bone?”

Bailey gave an embarrassed half-shrug. “I thought you knew that Wyatt was an incubus and hadn’t told me.”

He shook his head, his jaw tight. “Somebody needs to knock that son of a bitch out cold.”

“I appreciate the thought, but we have to catch him first.” She poked at the salad, snagging a slice of hard-boiled egg. “So what's yours?” She was almost afraid to find out.

Jack reached into the front pocket of his khakis and withdrew a familiar-looking Ziploc bag.

She froze.

“Yeah, you should look nervous,” Jack said, scowling. “I received a refill from Sebastiani Labs yesterday. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my count was off.”

She'd remembered to put the desk key back, but she should have figured that he'd count his pill supply. “Damn it.”

“That's pretty much an admission of guilt,” Jack muttered. “It's Rafe, of course. Are you being careful?”

Her jaw dropped. “Are you asking me about safe sex?”

“No, silly. The drugs. What dosage are you taking?” He eyeballed her body, pursed his lips. “You’re a little less than half my body weight. Half a tablet? Maybe a third. You'll have to experiment.”

Jack was handling this much better than she thought he would.

“How many pills have you taken so far?”

How many times have you had sex with Rafe?
She knew Jack wouldn’t judge her, but that didn’t stop her cheeks from turning lobster boil red. “Half a tablet. Once.”

“Any wooziness? Lightheadedness?”

“No.” She remembered every wonderful, debauched thing she and Rafe had done with crystal clarity.

“Watch out for it, especially if you’re around people who smoke.” He paused, and then gave her a long sideways glance. “I wish you would’ve asked me for the pills instead of taking them.”

She eyed him back. How could she explain? They didn’t discuss their sex lives in detail, but they didn't avoid the topic, either. “Wyatt was an incubus, Rafe is an incubus. I just wanted a little insurance.” She paused. “I'll enjoy him, but it's a short-term, physical deal.”

A muscle ticked in Jack's cheek. “Did Rafe say that?”

“No,” she said, annoyed. “This is my decision, Jack. I'm allowed to have a fling. One might say I'm overdue.”

“Well, we should tell somebody at SL Pharma that you're taking the pills so they can collect data and provide some oversight. I'm the only guinea pig they've got so far.”

Bailey nodded. The pheromone intoxication meds were still highly experimental, so she fully understood the importance of collecting data and keeping tabs on her physical reactions and responses. “What data do you report? How, and to whom?” She’d collect it herself, and turn it in after her relationship with Rafe was well and truly over.

Jack gave her the name of a contact. “Wyland also gives me a check-up once a quarter or so,” he added. “Basic physical, blood work, and so on.”

Wyland was annoyed enough with her right now that she wasn't about to let him anywhere near her with a needle. “I'll touch base with him.” Much, much later. She wasn’t about to reveal to anyone but Jack that she was taking the meds so she didn’t stupidly fall in love with Elliott Sebastiani's stunning younger son.

“You done here?” He’d finished his salad, but she’d only eaten a quarter of hers. Thankfully, he was used to her bird-like appetite. “Let's shut it down for the night.”

She nodded, not looking at the futon. After Jack left, she’d catch a quick nap, then get some more work—

“I’ll walk you out.”

Making sure she actually left. Damn it, he knew her too well.

“Any chance of you not working tomorrow?” he asked. “The Council meeting’s not until Monday afternoon.”

Which was why she had to get some work done tomorrow. Dealing with Wyatt’s shenanigans had pulled her attention away from the dozens of balls she juggled, and some were about to drop. She and Wyland would have to spend most of Monday morning closeted in a conference room at SL as it was, pulling together a coherent status report on the archiving project for the Council meeting. If she didn’t put some time in tomorrow, she’d be completely unprepared.

“Bailey?”

“I’ll try.”

He shook his head, but didn’t press. “Meet you at the front door in ten.”

“Okay.” After Jack left, she collected the equipment she’d need to work from Sasha’s place. Maybe if she closeted herself in the bedroom, she could put some flesh on the bones of the idea she’d gotten during the power outage up at the Sebastiani family cabin about how to access the tech unit Lorin had found up at the Isabella dig last year.

Technology was pretty much ubiquitous these days, but if she could find a place so remote, so unpopulated, that there’d be no ambient network for the tech unit to attach to...yeah, the idea had some legs. Too much scientific research was being done in Antarctica, but north? Canada, Alaska, the northern Rockies? Definitely some possibilities there.

She’d discuss the idea with Wyland on Monday, scoping the work so she could accomplish it solo. She’d need something productive to do after Rafe decided it was time for him to move on.

***

W
yland lifted his gaze from the laptop screen. “Very...intriguing.”

She’d just walked him through a draft of the proposal she'd knocked out yesterday. After hours of research, she’d found three feasible locations on the North American continent where she could work—locations so remote there'd be no technological infrastructure for hundreds of miles—and her wild-assed idea to create a rolling Faraday cage out of a tricked-out RV had some definite possibilities. She’d also spent the evening watching part of a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
marathon with Antonia, so if Jack happened to ask, she could tell him she’d relaxed without it being a complete and total lie.

“A couple of weeks ago, I was up at the Sebastiani cabin when the power went out. No electricity, no network access. I was limited to battery power, working completely local. The idea came from there.”

She and Wyland were working in one of the smaller conference rooms near Elliott's office, which meant they’d had had hours of uninterrupted time, all the privacy they could want, and thanks to Willem Lund, Elliott’s executive assistant, an endless supply of coffee—or she had, at any rate. Wyland had made do with parsimonious sips of water all morning.

He flipped the proposal back to the first slide. “The individual who performs this work would be alone for months, with little to no communication with the outside world. No internet, no phone...”

“Wyland, until I can get at the device’s innards, I can’t know what kind of tech it can compromise. Given what I saw when it was out of the box at Sebastiani Labs last summer, we have to assume that all technology is susceptible.”

“So your only technology, under this proposal, will be a couple of laptops?”

She nodded. “Loaded with my tooling. Strictly local access.” She’d be kicking it old school.

“What if you had an emergency? How would you get help?”

Yes.
If Wyland was poking holes in her plan, he’d accepted it in concept. She—they—would not walk into today’s Underworld Council meeting empty-handed.

“Which reminds me.” Wyland stood and walked towards the door.

“We’re not done working yet, are we?” They hadn't even started talking about the archiving project.

Wyland closed the blinds on the narrow slice of window, stepping out of the room momentarily. When he returned, he was carrying a black doctor’s bag.

Shit.

“If you won't go to a doctor, a doctor will come to you,” Wyland said. “Let's start with your wrist. Extend both arms, please.”

She pushed back both sweater sleeves with a put-upon sigh. He eyed both wrists before focusing his attention on the left, carefully flexing the wrist and fingers, pressing on her ligaments and tendons, watching for any sign of guarding or wincing. “I'll have you know that I used voice recognition software for work yesterday.” For some of it, at any rate.

“Good. Are you remembering to use ice?”

“Yes, doctor.” Her sarcasm had no effect. His initial training may have occurred before the War of 1812, but he was, indeed, a doctor.

“Hop up on the table.”

“What?” she squawked.

“Right here.” He patted the end of the table they weren't using for their work. “I want to check out that ulcer you're brewing.”

“So, my appetite’s a little off. It's just stress.” She glared at him. “I’m experiencing some boundary issues with my work colleagues.”

“Up on the table.”

Fuming, she climbed onto the table, and lay flat on her back. Before she could huff another annoyed sigh, Wyland's chilly hands were under the hem of her sweater, professionally palpating her abdomen. She held back a hiss of pain as he pressed just south of her sternum, but just barely. He narrowed his icy blue eyes. “Try to relax,” he said, pressing again before unbuttoning and unzipping her dress pants so he could continue his examination of her lower abdomen. “Look how loose these are,” he admonished. “Are you having regular periods?”

Her jaw dropped.

“Bailey, I’m a doctor.”

“Not
my
doctor,” she snapped.

“Well, if you’d go to yours, we wouldn’t be here, would we? Up,” he said, helping her into a sitting position before digging in his bag for a blood-pressure cuff and stethoscope. Pushing the sleeve of her sweater even higher, he wrapped the cuff around her upper arm and rapidly squeezed the flexible black bulb. The cuff tightened, its Velcro fastener gnashing its tiny teeth, before air left the cuff with a relieved hiss. “Slightly elevated.”

“Gee, I wonder why. I’m half-stripped in a conference room, and a vampire’s asking me questions about my menstrual cycle. Can I zip my pants now?” She didn’t wait for his permission, zipping and buttoning her pants with emphatic motions.

“It's a wonder they stay up. You're losing weight you can't afford to lose.”

“I—’

“Probably have an ulcer,” Wyland finished matter-of-factly. “I'd like to run some tests to confirm my diagnosis.” Whipping out his mini, he started tapping. “I have an open block at 2:00 p.m. Thursday. How about you?” He waited until she grudgingly grabbed her mini, opened her calendar, and looked at Thursday. Finally, something positive about back-to-back meetings all day long. “Sorry. I'm slammed.” She probably could shift some things around if she wanted to but... she didn't want to.

“Friday morning, 10:00. Change of location. “ He swiped and tapped. “Incoming.”

She and Wyland met weekly, Fridays at 10:00 a.m., to work on the archiving project. With a standing meeting time, they were able to get a couple of hours of work in per week on the long-running and long-suffering project, the job Lukas had originally hired her to do. Unfortunately, the project had received a miniscule slice of her attention because she had so many competing projects.

When her mini blipped, she read his update. That wily bastard. This Friday’s meeting was now taking place at Memorial Hospital’s endoscopy lab.

“We might want to make this our regular meeting location,” he mused. “With a scope snaked down your throat, I might finally get a word in edgewise.”

Had the chilly vamp just made a joke?

“In the meantime, please eat non-spicy food, and try to push some calories. You’re no good to anyone if you're sick.”

There was a soft tap at the door. “Come,” Wyland called.

Willem poked his head inside. “Lunch is set up in the boardroom if you're interested.” The council members usually shared a collegial meal before their meetings. Now that the conference room door was open, she could smell lasagna.

Her empty stomach audibly growled. “We done here?” she asked Wyland. “I could choke something down.”

“Make sure you do.”

She didn't miss the look the two men exchanged. She had a feeling that between the two of them, she’d eat whether she was hungry or not.

***

S
prawled face down on his bed, annoyed by the cheerful morning sun, Wyatt couldn’t find the energy to move. Yesterday, on a jagged, euphoric high as he watched SkoolHaus’s clever worm bore its way through SL’s outer security layers, he’d called Nicola, the yoga-toned admin he’d flirted with at Winston, Inc., to see if she was available for lunch. They’d met at Wisteria, a quiet, posh restaurant on the ground floor of an equally quiet and posh boutique hotel, but they’d barely ordered drinks before she suggested they have their meal delivered to a room upstairs. Then, alone and back at his place that evening, slapped in the face by failure yet again, Cheyenne had called, asking if he wanted to get dinner and a pint at Kieran’s. In no mood for a noisy pub and pleading the need for a quiet night in, he suggested they share takeout at his place instead.

He’d been the beneficiary of her voracious sexual appetite—and, ironically, at least some of her euphoria had come from beating back his hack.

Why had he let so much time pass since he'd had a werewolf lover? Cheyenne positively lit him up sexually; she was strong, raunchy, and generous, up for anything. He hissed in a breath as he remembered her adventurous tongue, lapping at his most sensitive flesh—flesh that was, at this very moment, flexing and stretching awake. He snaked his hand under the covers—

“Mr. Cooper.”

He lurched to a sitting position, his hand fumbling for the handgun he kept in his bedside table drawer.

“You won't be needing that.”

His eyes darted around the empty room. He didn't hear footsteps, or anyone rustling around out in his living room, kitchen or office. Where...

“Finally awake, I see.”

A familiar, chubby face beamed at him from the screen of the laptop he kept on the desk in his bedroom.