Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (64 page)

He didn’t seem to like her answer. He hesitated, looking at her, then grabbed her shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth. As soon as she tilted up into it—
yes, more
—he pulled away. “For now? God, Jordan. Don’t try anything without backup. Don’t cross anywhere.”

“But you do.” The marshal had said Michael followed psychotics and killers. “You cross dreams. You crossed into mine. Are you going to teach me how?”

“If I can, yeah. But you’re nowhere near ready. There are very bad people Darkside.”

“The ones you go after.”

“
Used
to go after. I’ve had enough.” He shrugged, the frustration easing out of his expression. “I like recruiting now.”

Hmm. She didn’t want him going into any other woman’s dream. Made her grumbly inside. “You could be a marshal like that other guy.” Just a suggestion.

“Well, technically, I am one already. I’m just assigned to a different task force. Usually I work alone.”

Oh. She looked away to cover her disappointment. She’d been thinking how awesome it would be to go to sleep every night and find him here waiting for her. There were lots of things she wanted to try, and the first thing on her list required his participation.

But this was his job. She was his job.

The memory of their kiss tingled on her lips.

Well, not
just
his job, she hoped. He’d felt something, too. She had to cool her jets, was all. Infatuation was what this was—the excitement of all these firsts. All of them amazing. Out of everything the Rêve had to offer, his kiss had definitely been the best. She was pretty sure seconds were going to be better. And thirds.

She wanted to hurry up and take it slow at the same time. She’d never been with anyone like him. For good reason, probably. The crash when this ended was going to be brutal. But she didn’t care. Nope, not one bit.

“Okay, so what would you like to start with?” Michael had called up a lightpanel in front of the column and was flicking though the screens. “Did any of the Rêves Fawkes mentioned appeal to you?”

But Jordan’s attention was caught elsewhere. There was someone else walking toward them in the dark space between the columns. Another marshal?

“You pick,” she said to Michael as she took a step away to get a better look.

It was a kid.

His torn jeans and dirty shirt said he was tough, but he still had that childlike, almost girly smoothness to his face. No hormones going on yet, so maybe ten?

What the heck was he doing out in the middle of the Agora? A person had to be eighteen to be able to participate in shared dreaming. Marshal Fawkes wasn’t doing his job.

She bent her knees and leaned forward as he came close. “Hey, are you lost?”

The kid’s eyes filled with tears—poor little guy—and he drew a breath to speak. Michael would know what to do. She almost turned to get him, but the longer she looked at the boy, the less kidlike he appeared. His eyes seemed old and sick. Very sick.
So
not a kid.

“Jordan!” Michael roared.

The kid leapt on her, rolled them both in mid-air, and brought her down in a dizzy drop, straddling her belly. He drew an arm back, as if to strike—

—but Michael grabbed his wrist and yanked him up and off her. Threw the kid a couple of yards away, where he hit another column with a bone-crack and collapsed on the floor.

Jordan was trying to sit up, when Rook reached forward, presumably to help her up.

But instead he pushed her hard on her chest. “Wake up!”

She fell backward into a stunned collapse, her vision momentarily blanking. When she opened her eyes again, the early pink of dawn illuminated her bedroom curtains.

Vince Blackman clicked through the file he’d found in his morning email. “Yeah, Dad, tell them this should work well.”

The file detailed the history of the other guy who’d been following Jordan Lane. Hell of a childhood. He had to be Chimera, what with the way he’d disappeared from his life so long ago. There was no record of him past seventeen.

Chimera were supposed to be able to do strange things—both in Rêve and in real life. They were ghosts. They had powers. Or they had really good PR people making them into urban legends. The spin was smart, psychological. Would carry into dreams, where they were supposed to dominate.

“I’ll show it to her this morning,” Vince said.

“They think you should already have her,” his father growled. “Does it always take you this long to land a woman?”

“There are Chimera everywhere watching her.”

“We have people watching her, too.”

We?
That was a laugh. His father wasn’t one of them, no matter how much he wanted to be.

“I can’t get close,” Vince said. “She has to come to me.”

“And here I thought you were a Blackman.”

His father had made his bed and was looking for anyone other than himself to lie in it. “Careful, Dad.” His own threat. Jordan Lane didn’t deserve a life of fear. Neither did Vince.

“Son, I’m sorry. I saw them hurt someone last night.”

Case in point. The only way to do business with people like that was to refuse to do so from the beginning. It was ego and greed that had driven his father to accept to so much money without the ability to repay.

“Please, son. For me. Bring the girl in.”

***

Rook glanced up at Jordan’s tall apartment building, a knife-twisting feeling in his gut. The kiss had been spontaneous—he didn’t regret it—but the nightmare that had followed him? Shit. That the kid would attack her? And in the Agora?

She’d had a very rude awakening.

Jordan seemed like someone who did a lot of hard thinking in the cool light of day, making decisions and coming to unshakeable, maddening conclusions. With every second that passed, it felt like she was moving farther and farther from him.

He’d know when he saw her.

Beside him, Coll sipped his coffee while they waited for a break in traffic to cross the street. Coll (aka Conner for the time being) had an appointment with the Lane sisters at 7 a.m. Maisie Lane had evidently told Jordan about Coll, and Jordan had asked to meet him herself. Jordan didn’t trust her little sister’s instincts where people were concerned.

Rook hoped she didn’t mind if he tagged along. All things considered, it wouldn’t hurt if she knew he and Coll worked together.

“Fawkes tells me there was a rogue incursion in the Agora last night.” Coll took another pull from his coffee.

The incursion in question was not a rogue. It was the nightmare that followed Rook around, and its name was Joshua. Joshua Kenneth Rook, little brother, deceased eleven years.

But Coll couldn’t know about that. He wouldn’t understand anyway, sticking as close to the surface of dreamspace as he did. To Rook’s knowledge, Coll had never gone deep Darkside. Never seen those kinds of nightmares or stirred them within himself. As far as Coll knew, some Reveler had simply broken into the Agora.

“I booted him,” Rook said.

“Did you track him?” Traffic broke and they both cut across the four lanes of the street.

No need to track. The signature of the rogue was his own, so Rook knew exactly where it came from. Himself. Which is why he’d switched from Special Cases to recruitment. If he stayed near the surface, in silly Rêves or orienting Jordan, then maybe the nightmare would fade away.

“Lost him at the Scrape,” Rook said, though he’d never lost anyone there, ever. Other trackers did. Not him.

Coll opened the glass door to take them inside the building. The agent posted in the atrium nodded good morning to both of them. Coll and Rook nodded back.

“All right. The Agora marshals have been warned to keep an eye out. We’ve got more and more people trying to sneak in. Had to shut down a website last week that gave step-by-step instructions on how to build a shared dreaming interface.”

“I’m glad that’s not my problem.” Rook hit the elevator button.

“Not mine either, but we are going to see more rogues. Did he bother Jordan?”

“Got a little too close. I woke her.”

Not the Rêve send-off he’d have preferred. He’d been going over and over the night in his mind, second-guessing himself.

The rules against fraternizing with marks, for example. He’d always been going to touch her eventually—that was a given—but maybe he should’ve waited, gone slow. She didn’t seem like the type to do things on impulse.

But the electricity between them—that was just how it was. She’d have to deal with it, accept it. Or, hell, he would, when she shook her head and said,
I made a mistake.
In the waking world she was so stubborn. So reserved.

The elevator dinged, the door slid open, and the guard posted on her floor murmured the okay into his throat mic.

Had she been scared? What if she was scared today? He just didn’t know any girls like her, so he couldn’t speculate on what her reaction might be.

The knife in Rook’s belly twisted again.

Guess he’d just have to find out.

***

Awake.

Michael had woken her up.

Which meant that super-creepy kid had to have been bad news.

But Michael could handle him, was handling him. He just didn’t want a newbie in the way, which kind of disappointed her—she wanted to see the man in action
so
badly—but she understood. Another time.

Please, pretty please, let there be another time.
It was going to kill her if she had to wait a whole day until she could see him again.

Jordan rolled over in bed and put her face into her pillow to stifle a squeal. All of her was smiling as if she were sixteen years old again and contemplating going all the way.

Michael Reese, the sexy bad boy of her dreams. He was the opposite of her type—the type she’d carefully weighed and decided upon a couple of years ago. She still had her Must List of qualities around here somewhere, now totally irrelevant.

She wiped the happy smile from her face. Time to get real. Set some parameters.

Rule number one: She wasn’t sleeping with him until they’d shared at least one meal together.

Smart decision. She felt good about it. Solid.

Rule number two:

Nothing else came to mind, and she was in no mood to strain herself. She’d had a very busy night.

She bounced out of bed and into the bathroom. She had a half hour to get ready for work. Had to choose clothes that were equal parts flirty, in case she saw Michael, and serious, for the first meeting with Vince Blackman’s SpiderSly team, the appointment set yesterday at lunch.

She’d grab a banana and some granola and eat while she got ready.

She burst out of her bedroom door and into the front room, where Maze sat cross-legged on the sofa, chowing on a bowl of cereal while staring at her laptop screen. Her magenta hair was in a messy bun on top of her head, no makeup. Wearing her bunny pajama top with slouchy fuzzy socks.

“He’s coming over soon.”

Jordan froze in her tracks. “Who is?”

Belligerently, Maze lifted her gaze. “The total prick who’s helping me. I told him that he had to pass the Jordan test, so will you be a good sister and give him Jordan-style hell?”

Jordan blinked. “One more time?”

Maze groaned. Put her bowl on the coffee table to grab for a soda can. In the morning. “You know, the ‘official’ guy I told you about who was going to help me with my Rêve issues?”

Oh. “He’s coming here
now?
” Jordan looked at the barricaded door. Who set meetings so early in the morning?

Michael had said that others would want to recruit her, too, maybe even by making her disappear from her life.

So, no.

“Call your guy and reschedule,” Jordan said. Maybe Michael could help her assess him. “I have to work. Real people go to work in the morning.”

Sis rolled her eyes. “That’s why he’s coming so early. To catch you.”

“Maisie, I’m not opening the door to a stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger. He’s an asshole. There’s a difference.”

Sure enough, the doorbell rang,
bing-bong
. Jordan looked at the door, then back at Maisie, then down at her own pink pajamas. “No.”

Maze threw her hands up. “Fine. Actually, I’m glad. I didn’t want to work with him anyway. We’ll go with your guy, Michael. I like him a lot.”

“I like him, too,” Jordan said, returning her attention to the door.

“Oh-ho-ho,” sang her sister. “So the night went well, did it?”

The doorbell rang again. There was no way she was opening the door, but she could look through the peephole.

“Get 9-1-1 ready on your phone,” Jordan commanded. If what Michael said was true, this guy might try to force his way in.

She tiptoed, breathing fast, and put an eye to the little circular glass. Spotted a man in a suit and tie. Clean cut. Shaven. Could be a missionary, for all she knew, since they came in pairs, and there were two of them. The first guy shifted, so she could glimpse the one behind him.

Then she pulled back. “Oh, God. I’m gonna die.”

Behind her, Maze said urgently, “Police, please. We have an intruder.”

Jordan whipped around. “No. It’s fine.” It was so
not
fine. “I didn’t tell you to
call
them.”

Maze still held the phone to her ear. “You sounded scared.”

A loud knock rattled the skinny console table blocking the door.

Jordan started back a few feet. “
Michael Reese
is out there with another man, who I guess is your asshole.”

Maze ended the call to EMS and dropped her phone in her lap. “Hmm. I didn’t see that coming.”

“And I look like this.” Jordan gestured from her head down.

They stared at each other in silence.

“All right,” Maze said, standing. “I’ll get the door and buy you five minutes.”

Little sis was in a sleep shirt herself, but at the moment, Jordan didn’t care. “You should’ve warned me someone was coming. Woken me up!”

“I didn’t know it would be your
lov-er
,” Maze shot back. “Now get.”

Jordan dashed back into her room, and closed and locked the door. She heard the loud scrape of the console table moving. A pause, then the low murmur of male voices.