SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (183 page)

“Whatever you say. It’s your choice.”

She looked in Leia’s eyes and thought,
yes, she is
.

The man got her a fresh towel, and Evelyn wrapped the dog in it and held her snug to her body to keep her warm. When she walked into the reception area, she saw Jesse immediately. His back was to her but with his height and wide shoulders, he was impossible to miss. “Jessop…” she said close to his ear.

He turned and smiled. “I found the one. I just finished up the paperwork and their bringing Caesar out in a minute.”

Evelyn frowned, trying to compute his words. “You chose a dog without me? I thought we were supposed to do it together?”

He looked slightly ashamed, but not ashamed enough for her liking. “When it’s the one, you just know. I’m sorry. But he’s perfect. You’ll like him.”

Princess Leia chose that moment to peek her head out, and Jesse almost jumped. “Holy shit, what is that?”

“This is my dog—Princess Leia. She’s a Chihuahua mix, and she’s my choice.”

Jesse shook his head. “That is not your dog.”

“Yes, she is.”

“No.” Just then a kennel worker walked through the door with a monstrous beast. Jesse poked his finger in their direction. “
That
is your dog.”

The woman approached them, but she didn’t seem happy about getting yanked through the room. The dog however, was ecstatic. He went immediately to Jesse and stood, putting his paws on Jesse’s chest. “There you go,” the woman said. “He’s all yours.”

Evelyn forced a smile, but she was shaking her head. “No, he’s not ours.”

Jesse’s nostrils flared. “Honey, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Evelyn clutched her Chihuahua to her chest. They could pry Princess Leia from her cold dead fingers if it came to that. “Yes, my darling?”

Jesse took the gray beast’s leash and came closer to Evelyn’s ear. “Listen, Doc. I need a big dog like this for a running partner. And get this, he’s been available for two months. Another month and his time was up.”

She held Princess Leia up so Jesse could see her. “You see this dog—her time was up five minutes ago.”

Jesse looked up at the ceiling and ran a hand over his face. “Fuck. I’ll start filling out the paperwork.”

Immortal Possession: Chapter Twelve

Over the course of a couple of weeks, Jesse and Lauren had finally started talking about her passing. She’d told him he was crazy if he blamed himself for her death—that just because he was in charge, didn’t mean he was responsible. She said there was a difference, but he couldn’t see it. He felt responsible for both her and Evelyn, and trying to protect them both made him feel cleaved down the middle.

“Did you put sunscreen on her?” Jesse asked, and it pissed him off that he even had to think about these things. He was a fucking Sentinel commander—not a nurse maid. And yet, even though things were still a little rough between him and Lauren, he couldn’t let his guilt over her death keep him from protecting Evelyn’s body.

Evelyn’s beautiful brown eyes looked back at him from her position in the lounge chair, but Evelyn wasn’t there. Instead, Lauren was soaking up the sun in his short stack’s body. The black bikini she wore contrasted with her pale skin, and the look of it was so damn sexy, it made goose bumps break out over every inch of him.

“Give me a fucking break, Hayes. When did you get to be such a boy scout?”

He couldn’t miss Evelyn after only two hours of her being under, could he? Because if the empty spot in the pit of his gut meant anything, he was pretty sure he did. What was wrong with him? He’d never felt this way about a woman before, especially a woman he worked with.

They had lived together little more than a couple of weeks, and he knew it was all just part of the assignment for her… And yet, every morning when he went downstairs and saw her sipping coffee in the kitchen—with the ugliest dog in God’s creation curled up in her lap—he thought to himself that he could happily be greeted by that image every day for the rest of his life.

He’d never wondered if there could be more to life than being a bounty hunter. But he wondered now.

Panting hard, Caesar came trotting back with the tennis ball and dropped it at Jesse’s feet. Jesse patted his head, picked up the ball, and gave it another mighty throw.

If Evelyn had been in her body, Princess Leia would have been snuggled against her right about now, but when Lauren was around, the little dog just hovered near, giving her the stink eye. Evelyn joked that Leia was like a service dog, because she had a keen sense of spirit activity and a watchfulness for souls in a state of unrest. The previous weekend, at the Parkfield Pavilion, she’d growled and alerted Evelyn that a spirit was fast approaching before Evelyn had even had a clue. That saved her and Jesse both from an embarrassing, or perhaps even dangerous, public possession drama.

Leia was curled up under the lounge chair in a ridiculous blinged-out dog sweater that Evelyn had put on the company card. He was pretty sure the dog had more clothes than Evelyn now. He just hoped accounting didn’t take the receipts to Clark when the bills for dental care and dermatology came up.

Leia glanced up at Jesse again and her ears perked, as though asking when Evelyn would be back. He felt Leia’s pain, but technically, the longer Lauren was able to stay in Evelyn’s body, the better. Yesterday, he and Lauren were able to deliver some cookies to the neighbors across the street, and they’d even been invited to the couple’s back patio for some refreshments. An hour into it, Lauren had said she had a headache and they’d had to leave. Jesse was hoping she’d picked up on some clue, but it turned out…she had a headache.

After another chuck of the tennis ball, Jesse strode over to Lauren and pressed a finger to Evelyn’s knee, watching her skin go from pink to white then back to pink in an instant. “You were a pasty redhead, Lauren. You didn’t even sunbathe when you were alive. What are you doing?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t want to get skin cancer and die young. Isn’t that ironic? Besides, I was too busy cracking skulls together. This assignment is like a vacation for me.”

“Yeah? Well, that body belongs to Immortal Bounty, and you’re letting it burn. Get your ass in the house and put some clothes on, Jacobs.” He would have offered to rub sun lotion into her skin, but he’d discovered that he had a real aversion to touching Evelyn’s body when she wasn’t in it. And considering their mission and their cover story, that was a serious problem.

The other problem was that instead of Lauren learning to stay in the doc’s body longer and longer each day and draw on Evelyn’s energy, her stays were getting shorter and shorter. They’d called Sasha for help yet again, but at this point, she was stumped.

“I’m wearing a hat,” Lauren muttered, than added a little louder, “and trust me, this woman could use a little color.”

“Lauren…”

She sighed. “Fine. Whatever. I’m burning up out here anyway. No one ever told me that living in someone else’s body would be so damn miserable. Headaches, body aches, and I swear, you’d have to be in menopause to have more hot flashes than her.”

“Since when did you become such a whiner?” he teased.

“Bite me, grandpa. If I wasn’t so hot, I’d get up and kick your ass right now.”

He knew he owed Lauren big time. She’d been an amazing partner on so many important assignments. If he could have traded his life for hers, he would have. But how could he trade Evelyn’s? Evelyn Vale was as brave and good as they came. Most people with a threshold for possession so low would have gone to live in a haven where they could be safe, but she’d stuck it out and dealt with it to take care of her family. What he felt for her was growing by the day, and already, he had no words to describe just how much she meant to him.

It ate at him like a lion tearing into his innards that in order for his old partner to be here, his new partner couldn’t be. He’d even gone so far as thinking about contracting another body for Lauren when this assignment was up. But no matter how that might lessen his guilt, he dismissed the idea immediately. He’d always felt there was something inherently wrong about possession, even when the participants were willing.

Seeing Evelyn’s skin glistening with sweat, a memory came back to him of his and Lauren’s time together in Blue Unit. “Anyway, it can’t be as sweltering as that time we had to spend all day hiding in that fugitive’s attic in Chino.”

She raised a brow. “You know that was one of the hottest days on record, right? Clark is such an asshole for making us do that job. The bounty barely paid for new tires on my bike.”

He chuckled. “Remember when Gage almost passed out and Luna had to come pick him up?”

“Gage is a wimp,” she said, but she was smiling. Gage prided himself on being tougher than nails, and the fact that he’d almost lost consciousness had pissed him off to no end.

“And then Luna showed up…” He chuckled at the memory. When their best tracker and Gage’s friend, Luna, had been sent to retrieve him, the Sentinels in Blue Unit had made some choice comments within Luna’s earshot, because, well, it was funny and they all suspected Gage had a thing for her. “I swear I thought Gage was gonna use his camouflaging mutation to come back and kill us all in our sleep.”

Evelyn’s lush mouth curved into a smile, but the laugh was all Lauren. “That shitty attic was totally worth it for that alone.”

She ran a hand over her brow, and it came back covered in sweat. It wasn’t even that hot out. Was that normal for spirits to feel hot inside of their host’s body? “Why don’t you go inside and get out of the sun. Maybe let the doc come back for a while, and you can take a break.”

His pulse picked up every time he thought he might be seeing Evelyn in her own body again sometime soon, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Was it disloyal to Lauren to want Evelyn around? Out of all the people that the steward could have picked for this job, Jesse had been the worst possible choice. Then again, if the steward had paired Evelyn with someone else, she wouldn’t even know Jesse existed…and that didn’t sit well with him. Not at all.

A bark in the distance got his attention. He and Lauren both looked up, past their glittering pool, to the fence line separating their neighbor’s yard from their property. A golden retriever pawed at the fence then wriggled under and headed in their direction.

“I didn’t know they had a dog,” Lauren said, but it was hard to hear her over Leia’s shrill yapping.

He hadn’t known they had a dog, either, but his larger concern was his big gray pit bull charging in the retriever’s direction.

“Caesar!” he yelled, but his dog was already upon the other, his hair on end, sniffing the retriever and nudging him back with his powerful body. “Caesar!” he called again, trotting in their direction.

He grabbed Caesar’s collar, just to be safe, but the dogs were starting to relax and there was a little spring in their steps. The retriever play-bowed and barked in Caesar’s face, then it took off running through his rented yard with Caesar in joyful pursuit.

Lauren walked over to him and adjusted the straps of her bikini. “Well, that was anticlimactic. Maybe bring Leia over here, and she can bark him to death.”

The dogs circled the yard, barking and bowing and leaping at each other, then they ran back toward Jesse and he patted both dogs on the head.

“Must be an indoor pet. He’s sorta cute, if you like fur balls,” Lauren said.

The retriever yipped and jumped up on Lauren. If she had been in her own body, the dog would have come up short when he tried to lick her face, but in the Evelyn’s frame, he was able to drag a big, wet tongue across her cheek. “Eww…no! Stop!”

Jesse laughed. Lauren could kill the dog with one snap of its neck, but thankfully, even she wasn’t that much of a hard-ass. “You made a friend,” he said.

She frowned and pushed back at the dog. “Get it away. It’s pawing my tits and its breath stinks. I’m having flashbacks to my bar-hopping days.”

His snicker probably didn’t help. “I don’t touch stray dogs. You know, diseases and such.”

Lauren glared at him out of the corner of her eye. “He’s scratching Evelyn’s body. She’s gonna be burned
and
scratched when she wakes up later.”

Oh, damn. She was right. Evelyn’s chest had pink streaks down it from the dog’s nails, but the dog was oblivious. Even up on two legs, his whole back end waggled during the assault.

“Bad dog!” Jesse nudged the dog away with his hip and reached down for the retriever’s collar, then Caesar pushed his body against Jesse’s leg, wanting in on the attention. He turned the shiny new tag over but there was just an address. “Do you have a name, you little shit? How am I going to explain scratches on the doc’s chest? She’s going to love that.”

Out of the edge of his vision, he noticed movement along the fence line and turned his head to look. A woman and a man were walking toward the fence, looking their direction. The woman waved her hand. “Hello, there! I’m so sorry for my dog! Gizmo—come!”

The man smiled stiffly. “Sorry about that. Gizmo! Come on, buddy!”

When the dog made no move to return home, Jesse gave his collar a light tug toward the fence and glanced at Lauren. “Let’s go meet our neighbors, honey.”

Lauren blinked. She was still dripping sweat and her coloring was off. Jesse paused, to really look at her. “Hey, are you okay?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m just hot. It’s like the Mojave desert out here.”

He put a hand to Evelyn’s skin and sure enough, she was burning up. “Maybe she’s getting sick,” he whispered. “We may need to call Clark and get someone out here. But we need to meet these neighbors first. Do you feel up to going with me?”

“I think I can handle saying hello to some rich yuppies and returning their vagabond dog.”

The retriever followed them to the fence line, stopping to smell some newly planted flowers and mark the artificial turf as his own. Caesar promptly marked over it. “How charming,” Lauren muttered. As they approached the fence, she plastered on a smile.

“Hello!” Jesse stopped several feet back to get a better look at his new neighbors as Gizmo crawled back under the fence and sat wagging by his owner’s side. The woman had artificially blond hair that didn’t exactly go with her tanned skin, but the rest of her wasn’t anything to complain about. Someone had paid some good money for those breasts, because waists as small as hers didn’t usually come with a chest like that.