Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale (14 page)

Luc sat back in his chair, cradling his cup and watching her with an expression of baffled amusement.
“I didn’t realize you needed fortification.”

“I do if I’m going to spend my day interviewing people about the elf-who-got-away.”

“Fae.”

“Whatever.”

Before the coffee finished brewing, she pulled out the pot and poured herself a cup.
She’d taken her first sip before she even sat back at the table.

“Did the info about the models change your game plan?
Or do we still plan to hit the sex shop owner at ten today?”

Corinne popped a piece of kiwi, decided it was just fine plain now that he’d removed the fuzzy rind, and chewed thoughtfully.
“Well, I think we should run down the list and compare thoughts, but my gut tells me that Walter Hibbish is our best bet.”

“The rabbi?
So we are changing our plans.”

“No, Hibbish is the sex shop owner.”

“What’s the rabbi’s name?
Paddy O’Brien?”

“Cute.
It’s Levi Aaronson.”
She gulped down another mouthful of coffee, then went to the living room to retrieve her notebook from her backpack.
The sight of their clothes scattered across the floor gave her a warm, rosy feeling that had nothing to do with embarrassment.
Why be embarrassed about such a delightful evening?
She did frown, though, as she sat back down at the table and examined his fully clothed form.
Clothes different from the ones he’d been wearing yesterday.
“Do you always carry spare jeans around in your pocket?”

He grinned.
“You mean the clothes?
I conjured new ones.
I like a fresh T-shirt in the morning.”

“Conjured?
You mean they’re magic?”
She reached across the table and fingered the heather-gray cotton.
“Are they like the emperor’s new clothes?
You’re really naked, and only you and I are the ones who know?”

“Sweetheart, we’re all naked underneath.”

She laughed and drew back.
“That must be a pretty handy skill.”

“It saves time.”

“Right.”
She flipped open her notebook and sipped her coffee.
“Okay, so altogether we have six names.
The models Ava gave to us are Leena Thomas, Marlie Hasek, and April Brodeur.
Plus Hibbish, Aaronson, and the bartender, Mark Ingram.
I called and asked Hibbish if I could stop by this morning at ten, so it makes sense to keep that appointment, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to give a call to the others on the list to see if we can set anything else up.
I’m assuming that the sooner we talk to all of them, the better.
Right?”

“Absolutely.
Do you want to make the calls, or should I?”
He glanced at the digital clock on her microwave and waggled his eyebrows at her.
“We have an hour and a half until we have to be at the sex shop.”

“Stop trying to make it sound dirty.
We’re going strictly on business.”

“I said nothing different.”

She handed him her cell phone and pulled the kitchen landline onto the table beside her.
“We’ll split them up.
It’ll take us half an hour or so to get to the shop.
This way’s faster.”

“Someday I’ll have to teach you that fast is overrated.”
Another waggle.

She rolled her eyes.
“And you really think we’re going to get anything done if you spend all day thinking up sexual innuendos?”

He shrugged.
“Think of it as our own personal version of good cop, bad cop.”

Corinne sighed into her coffee to hide the fact that bantering with him had quickly become one of her favorite pastimes.
“Yeah, if we can’t win them over with charm, we’ll baffle them with non sequiturs.”

The blazing pink neon should have been their first clue.
Of badness.

Walter Hibbish’s sex shop, The Pink Pillow, turned out to be one of those places people gave directions to using the phrase,
You can’t miss it.
And Corinne couldn’t.
No matter how much she would have liked the opportunity to protect her poor, unsuspecting retinas.
She spotted the storefront from a block and a half away.

She strolled through the East Village beside Luc, stubbornly taking her time, both because they had the time to kill—having left early, as she’d been trained to do by her obsessively punctual mother—and because a part of her just wanted to savor the feeling of walking beside a man who actually inspired fantasies about having him as a permanent part of her life.

The thought first ambushed her in the lobby of her apartment.
She’d stopped at her mailbox on their way out, and the jerk in 507, who had the box next to her, had elbowed her trying to wrestle a padded envelope out of his box and hadn’t even apologized.
Luc had tapped him on the shoulder, informed him of the oversight, and waited until 507 got a good look at him, went pale, and hastily apologized.
That’s when Corinne caught herself thinking that she’d forgotten how nice it was to have someone around who cared enough to defend her from the small realities of everyday life.

When she’d realized what she was thinking, she’d gone a little pale herself, being a largely independent sort, though she’d shaken it off as an aberration and moved on.
But then when they were walking down the street—with Luc deliberately positioning himself beside the street, to keep her away from the curb—she had read through her mail, and he had asked her what about the junk mail that had filled her box was making her laugh.
Corinne had found herself reading parts of a particularly ridiculous flyer to him out loud.
They had laughed together, and she’d thought how much she enjoyed talking to someone who seemed to understand her slightly warped sense of humor.

Being with Luc just felt…good.
Never mind that he had popped into her life without a by-your-leave, had turned her world upside down, had given her the most amazing orgasms of her life, and had recruited her for some sort of top-secret Fae mission.
The man just seemed to fit, at her side, in her apartment—even if he did hang off the end of her bed—and into her thoughts.
She couldn’t remember ever feeling so comfortable with a man before.
Certainly not with one who stood on the other end of a vibrating current of sexual tension that seemed to arc between them constantly.
Even with the electricity of that burning up the atmosphere, she felt relaxed with Luc.
He made her feel more completely herself.

And if she thought about that too hard for too long, she was going to tie herself up in the kind of knots Boy Scouts earned merit badges for mastering.

She thought she was doing fairly well living in the moment as they strolled down the street to the monstrously colored shop in the middle of the block.
Then she yanked open the glass door and stepped into the pink hell of her foulest nightmares.

Apparently someone had taken the shop’s name a little too seriously.
The walls glowed with a high-gloss paint the same sickeningly intense shade as Pepto-Bismol.
They seemed to radiate an unearthly light that even the dark, cheery red trim around the windows and doors and along the floor and ceiling couldn’t moderate.
Everywhere she looked, she saw evil, and she wasn’t talking about the sex toys; she meant the decor.
Pink marabou and dyed faux fur clashed hedonistically with silk, satin, velvet, and brocade in all the horrifying shades of pink, rose, red, scarlet, mauve, and the occasional purple a body could imagine, and Corinne had a damned fine imagination.

Unfortunately, another five minutes in this place, and she’d need that imagination, because she could feel her retinas being seared off where she stood.
She heard Luc’s pained inhalation beside her and hoped his own sense of taste was as offended as hers.
If he suggested bringing a single drop of this virulent mess into her apartment, she was going to have to kick him.
In the nuts.

It took a second to even remember what they were doing here.
The decor was that big an assault.

Since they had decided that Corinne—as the one with a legitimate reason to be poking around and asking questions—should be the one to poke around and ask questions, she took a deep breath and mustered up the resolve to walk deeper into the abyss of bad taste.
Swallowing back a surge of nausea, she blinked her watering eyes and fixed her gaze firmly on the maroon carpet, not looking left, right, or up as she made her way across the floor to the counter in the corner of the shop.
Luckily, her field of vision remained broad enough that she could see the counter getting closer to her knees before she walked into it, and stopped.
Bracing herself for the sensory onslaught, she looked up to meet the entirely disinterested gaze of the clerk behind the register, a young woman with black-tipped blue hair, purple lipstick, and enough shiny silver facial piercings to give an airport metal detector a heart attack.

Sighing, Corinne fished a business card out of her pocket and slid it over the counter.
“We’re here to see the owner.”

Shiny and Bored barely looked up from her puffy pink emery board.
“Yeah?
Who’re you?”

Corinne glanced down at her card and back up at Shiny.
She waited a heartbeat.
“We’re with the
Chronicle.
He knew we’d be coming by.”

So it was a little fib.
She had called and left a message.
Walter Hibbish should know, if he’d checked his machine.

“That so.”
The clerk snapped her gum and went back to filing.

Corinne resisted the urge to take out several days of frustration on Miss Unconventional and Uncooperative.
Instead, she leaned over the counter and bared her teeth.
It was supposed to look like a smile.
Sort of.
“Why don’t you go tell him we’re here.
Don’t worry.
We’ll wait.”

This time, Shiny actually lifted her head and sized them up.
Well, her glance slid right over Corinne and chose to invest its energy into sizing Luc up.
To mentally try him on for size, judging by the way Shiny’s eyes widened and glazed over just a bit once she’d taken in his full glory.
If the amount of time she lingered there was any indication, she seemed to be conjuring particularly vivid mental pictures of his crotch.

Corinne was about to get Shiny’s attention by yanking hard on the silver ring in her eyebrow when Luc distracted her.
He leaned over the counter, flashed Shiny a charming and patently insincere smile, and added his weight to Corinne’s.

“Please,” he purred.
“We’d appreciate it.”

Corinne wondered how much the flirtatious Fae would appreciate a trip to the emergency room.

Her mouth curving in what might have passed for a smile—had she been about three days past dead—Shiny nodded, slid off her stool, and gave Luc a smoldering look.
“Wait while I tell him you’re here.”

She disappeared through the door behind the counter without another word but with one last, lingering glance at the fly of Luc’s jeans.
She just missed hearing the new nickname Corinne invented especially for her, but that was likely a good thing.

Grumbling under her breath, Corinne gave the door a sour glare and slung around the backpack she used in place of a purse.
She knew Luc wasn’t to blame for the walking corpse’s blatant ogling, but rationality didn’t seem to have a lot to do with the uncomfortable level of jealousy that had fallen onto Corinne’s head like a cartoon anvil.
God, she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been so wrapped up in a guy that she’d managed to get irrationally jealous over him.
When had that been?
High school?

To distract herself and hopefully shock herself back down to earth, she pulled out her notebook and decided to do her job for a few minutes.
Might as well make use of the time it took Shiny to deliver her message to scope out the store.
If she was going to write an article that would pacify Hank without compromising the security of the Others’ secrets, Corinne would need to pack in as much color as possible.
She doubted there was a place on earth more colorful than this one.
Frankly, if such a site existed, she prayed she’d never have to go there.

Rummaging for a pen and wishing she could put her sunglasses back on without feeling somehow rude, she looked around the shop, this time tuning out the horrendous decor and the presence of the Fae warrior beside her.
She didn’t need to notice the decorating scheme again to know it would play a prominent role in her description of the place.
Some things a girl could never forget.

In a city full of sex shops, they tended to boil down to three categories.
On one end of the spectrum, you had the kind of place that flourished in Times Square during its heyday, before Giuliani and Disney got hold of the neighborhood and cleaned it up nice for the tourists.
Those were the sleaze museums, the places where anyone in their right mind wore rubber gloves, a biohazard suit, an impenetrable disguise, and still thought twice about touching anything.
They catered to the lowest sort of hustlers and vagrants, along with anyone with a quarter and a strong stomach who wanted a couple of minutes alone in a dirty viewing booth.
Come to think of it, no one in their right mind would step foot in one of those to begin with, biohazard suit or not.

At the opposite end of the scale, you had the upscale shops, the ones that made the papers for reasons besides their indecency arrests.
They had well-lit, tastefully decorated retail spaces, with polite, well-educated, and well-informed staff who took care to be both helpful and non-intimidating.
They carried quality products and catered to couples looking to add spice to their relationships, or to women who were too intimidated or embarrassed to venture into a less welcoming environment.

Then you had places like The Pink Pillow.
Somewhere between trash and good taste, it sold a huge selection of goods at reasonable prices in a neighborhood you wouldn’t be afraid to walk through under normal circumstances.
The staff were iffy—clearly—but they probably didn’t have any serious criminal history and they could ring up a sale easily enough, even if they couldn’t discuss the chemical components of lube like a Nobel scholar.
These shops retained just enough of the sleaze factor to  give the average conservative a thrill, but not enough to scare him or her away.
In fact, if she hadn’t been so off balance, Corinne might have had some fun browsing.
While she appreciated the Toys-in-Babeland-type places of the world, her pocketbook appreciated the Pink Pillows.

In reality, aside from all the…pink…there really wasn’t anything wrong with the shop, or its merchandise.
Looking around, Corinne spotted half a dozen brands she recognized, from the maker of flavored massage oils on a small multi-tiered shelving unit, to the silicone dildo manufacturer occupying a prominent place against the wall.
She wondered briefly if that much familiarity with the world of sex toys said something about her character, but shrugged it off.
Everybody had to have a hobby.

“Are you going to ignore me for the rest of the day?”
Luc spoke from right behind her, apparently bent on following her through her tour.

Corinne jumped.
“I’m not ignoring you.”

“Because it’s not my fault that woman was staring at me.”

She forced a laugh.
“I’m really not upset about someone leering at you.
Sheesh, do I look like I have time to even notice every time a woman gives you the eye?
I have a day job, remember.”

Luc raised a brow, but he let it go, for which Corinne felt grateful.
How was she supposed to explain to him that she wasn’t upset by the ogling, only by her own reaction to it?
She wasn’t sure it made sense even in
her
head.

She scribbled down notes as she walked through the shop, which turned out to be a good deal bigger than the average Manhattan storefront, or at least the average storefront in the East Village.
There seemed to be plenty of room for attractive displays and for the half a dozen other customers to avoid one another as they browsed.
In fact, if it weren’t for the god-awful pink everywhere, Corinne might have made it a point to come back, but she couldn’t think of a good reason to risk permanent vision impairment when she already had Blowfish bookmarked on her web browser.

She raised an amused eyebrow at the life-size blow-up boyfriend who stood propped up next to a colorful display of condoms, but her attention really caught on the far side of the shop and the table stacked high with edible goodies.
She had a deep weakness for the combination of sex and chocolate.
But oddly enough, she’d never experimented with chocolate pudding.
With or without the ceremonial gourds.