Wolf Protector (8 page)

Trent made a mental note to see the ex-boyfriend and find out more about him. The picture was starting to look pretty clear to Trent. There were two dead women. Only one man had dated both girls. And they had no other suspects. It was too much of a coincidence in his book. He was about to take a bite of his chicken when he happened to look at Erica. He stopped mid-bite. She had just put a piece of chicken into her mouth, closed her eyes, and moaned.

“Oh, god. This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever had.” She groaned and slowly opened her eyes. He gulped and stared. She glanced straight at him and licked her finger, twirling her tongue around the digit slowly.

He was ready to take the rest of the chicken back to the hotel, strip her, feed her, and then bring her to orgasm with a different piece of meat. He tried to remember she’d fainted earlier, but his cock didn’t give a shit. He wanted her, and if he didn’t have her soon his balls would probably fall off. She was doing it on purpose, but he couldn’t seem to get his brain to tell her to cut the torture and eat like a decent girl. Of course, the sexual tension they’d both been under was making him feel like every move she made was intended to torture him.

“Don’t you just love some good meat?” Ms. Lipkin grinned at Erica and then at him.

What the fuck? Was the old lady helping Erica in her cruel game with his mind and, well, his cock? Because he fully believed Erica was trying to work him into a state of blue balls, though at this point it was more like purple balls. He’d gone way past blue after the massage from the night before.

“You have no idea how hard it is to find good meat, Ms. Lipkin.” Erica blew him a kiss.

Holy crap he was going to hell. Straight there with a first-class ticket, because he wanted to fuck Erica on the dining room table right in front of Ramirez and the old lady. Screw sensibility, he needed to get Erica out of her clothes. On a bed. Or in a car. Or a wall…or pretty much anywhere they could be alone. And fuck her until his cock no longer hurt from pent-up arousal.

Trent glanced at Ramirez, but the idiot was so involved with his food he’d completely missed the entire thing.

“So, er…Ms. Lipkin, do you have any idea who would want Gina dead?” He tried to bring the conversation back to the victim and help his brain and cock get back under his control.

Ms. Lipkin snickered, knowing what he was doing, and decided to take pity on him. Thank god. “No, she was really pretty but also really popular. She wasn’t stuck up like a lot of the girls that come from the city. Her family is from the Bronx, and she was the first to go to college, so they were all chipping in to help her with her expenses. She babysat on weeknights for the college professors in the area.”

Erica’s gaze lifted from her plate. “Do you know which professors she babysat for?”

Ramirez seemed to come back to the present and added his own two cents. “I’ll find out and also see if maybe any of them are connected with Lisa Summers.”

Trent nodded and finally started eating. Now that everyone’s attention was back on the case, it was easier for him to get his appetite back. His appetite for food, that is. His appetite for one sexy, curvy brunette never seemed to go away. In fact, it felt like it was growing stronger and much more desperate by the minute.

After lunch they went back to the motel to discuss their impressions of Gina Torres. They met in Erica’s room, since it was the only one with a table to spread their victim information out on. Notes and files littered the entire table and bed surface. The motel room was much smaller than they had anticipated.

“Okay, so here’s what we know,” Erica started, taking charge, “Gina and Lisa both went out with Derek Holmes. Gina was killed first, but Lisa was found first. Both show the same type of wounds, at the same exact locations on their bodies. Except Gina had some extra wounds that Lisa didn’t. Which leads me to believe he was still hesitant went he killed Lisa. But with Gina…he went further. He added wounds and carvings that Lisa didn’t have. But they are still the same type of wounds, and I can tell by the style that both women were definitely killed by the same person. Not to mention
I
know they were both killed by the same person,” she said absently and stared at the picture of Lisa’s body.

His gaze connected with Ramirez’s, who frowned at her last sentence. Trent’s next item on the agenda was finding out more about how she got her information. The dark circles under her eyes indicated she was exhausted, but her voice and speech were clear and concise. He had the urge to grab her and hold her. She looked so vulnerable, staring at the dead girl’s photo.

“We also know that Gina babysat for professors at the college on certain nights.” Ramirez bounced on the bed. What, was he four?

“Right,” Erica said, snapping out of her trance. “So what we need to find out is if any of those professors were linked with both victims. I know we have an ex-boyfriend we need to go question, but I want to know if there is anyone else the girls might have in common.”

Trent could see the wheels turning behind her tired eyes. If the killer wasn’t the ex-boyfriend, who else could have access to both women and have a motive to kill them?

“Alright.” Ramirez put the papers back in the files on Erica’s bed. Once he’d cleaned the bed of the multitude of pictures and notes, he placed the remaining documents on the chair by the stacked table. He walked to the door. “I’m going to go make some calls. Find out more and give Donovan a shout-out to see if she’s got anything on the social media side.”

Trent watched him leave. Once the door shut behind Ramirez, he turned back to Erica. She stared at Gina Torres’ photo. Because she’d been staring at it, Ramirez had left it behind on Erica’s bed when he’d cleaned up. Thankfully she hadn’t decided to touch the thing.

Trent took a deep breath and decided to ask the question that had been burning his tongue for the past two days. “So how exactly does it work?”

She lifted her gaze from the photo and blinked at him with a puzzled look. “How does what work?”

“Whatever it is you do to find out about the victims.” He saw her start to shake her head in a negative and continued, “I know it has to do with touching their things, but I can’t figure out what it is you see.” He grabbed the photo and placed it back in the corresponding file. Somehow he knew if he left it out she’d continue to stare at it.

She gulped and clenched her hands into fists. Finally after a few moments, she looked back up at him. The anguish he saw in her eyes made him go to her, grab her hands, and hold them in his own.

“Tell me.” He drew circles on her palms with his thumbs, hoping to help calm the distress he saw on her face. The scent of her anxiety diminished with each stroke of his thumb.

She took a deep breath. “It’s very simple, really. I touch something of the victim’s, and I see their last moments alive. It could be anything from how they got killed to who killed them. Whatever they saw, I see. If it’s a missing person who’s not dead, it’s usually their last lucid memory from a few hours past. I don’t see things in real time, which is why it’s so important that when I see someone still alive, we try to find them that way.”

He thought about what she said for a moment. “Do you feel their pain too?”

She jerked, turning back to him, and nodded. “Yes.”

Fuck. No wonder she’d been crying every time she touched the victims’ stuff. She was reliving their deaths in full color, complete with a side of physical and emotional torture.

“How long have you had this…ability?” He wanted to know more about the woman who fascinated him like no other ever had. He needed to get to know her before he bound her to him.

“Always.” She pulled her hands from his grasp and started to pace. He was sure she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

“Is that why people think you profile?” That was what Brock told everyone in the department. That Erica was the profiler in the team, and she led every investigation with whatever she pieced together. No wonder they depended on her so much. She knew what happened, but it came at a pretty hefty price.

She continued to pace to the door and back toward the bed, stopping only to look at him and then slowly turning away. “Yes. Only Brock knows what I can see. He’s…he’s aware I’m more than just a profiler.”

Jealousy made his blood burn. She was his. His woman. His mate.

“What’s the side effect of this…this ability of yours?” He knew sleepless nights were a given. She’d never looked as exhausted as she had in the past forty-eight hours.

Face scrunched in thought, she hovered by the bed. “What do you mean side effects?”

“What does it do to you to see what you see?”

“Well…”

It seemed she didn’t want to share, but he wasn’t stopping now. “I know you can’t sleep. So what else is there?”

Erica turned away from him and spoke while walking back to the door. “It’s not that I can’t sleep. It’s that I keep seeing the victims in their last moments over and over again in my dreams. It doesn’t make for restful sleep to keep seeing that.”

What the fuck? She wasn’t lying. Her words shocked him immobile. “You mean you don’t just see them that one time? You keep seeing the same thing over and over again?”

“Kind of. The initial contact, the first time I see while touching something is a crisp, clear view, almost movie-like, and it gives great detail, if that’s what the victim saw. But after that…” She bit her lip in thought before continuing. “…I guess we can call it first touch, the images become distorted, blurry, and blend together to form flashes of cries and pain. Almost like a compressed set of layers of the entire event. It can be tiresome to keep trying to make the view as clear as it had been in first touch, but all you have is indistinct and confusing images. It muddles in my mind and gives me migraines.”

He stared at her. Deep sorrow pierced his heart with every word out of her mouth. “How long do you see these visions for?”

“It usually takes days, sometimes weeks, for it to stop.” She creased her nose, still not looking at him. “So when I see more than one in a short period of time it…it’s exhausting. I feel their pain over and over, and it drains me. Trying to shut out the screams and the visions takes a lot out of me.”

Holy fuck. The woman was insane to keep her mouth shut all that time. He wondered if she was getting any time with the paranormal psychiatrist. Brock had made him go to therapy the time he’d tried to sink his claws into a predator who’d abducted a woman and kept her hidden from her family.

“You mean to tell me you’ve been dealing with this on your own and you didn’t think to share it with me? I could’ve helped.”

He was hurt that she suffered in silence. All the years they’d worked together and he had had no clue she had been going through that. It made him want to kick his own ass. If he hadn’t been so involved in trying to get into her pants, he would’ve noticed something sooner. Instead she’d always worked alongside Brock, and he, Ramirez, and Donovan had been the action team. It had never occurred to him that Erica was much more vulnerable than what she portrayed.

The image she showed the world of a tough, bitchy profiler was just that: an image. Underneath it all she was suffering, and it hurt him to know that. He’d decided the moment he met her that he’d allow her to come to him when she was ready. It was clear she was his in his mind, but he would never push her. He was done waiting.

She seemed confused by his anger. “How would you have helped?”

His heart broke for her when he realized she was genuinely confounded. She’d been dealing with this on her own for so long she didn’t think someone giving her a shoulder to lean on or emotional support would help her deal. She was his mate for crying out loud. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know it, he did. And he needed to let her see that he was there for her, always. He walked toward her in slow measured steps, and then he stopped when he was a foot away. Her eyes widened when he lifted a hand and curled it around her jaw. He caressed her cheek with his thumb. “I would have been there for you. I could have helped you deal with it. You didn’t have to do it alone.”

“But…I’ve always dealt with it alone,” she whispered, and his heart cracked some more.

“You don’t have to anymore.” He lowered his face and stopped inches from hers. “Never again.” He leaned in and brushed his lips over hers, their gazes locked in a tempestuous embrace. “I’m here for you, Erica. You can lean on me.”

He pulled her body flush to his in a slow move. And then he kissed her again. This time with enough passion to show her how much he wanted her. He hoped she could see that she meant more to him than any other woman ever had.

Chapter Five

Erica sighed into the kiss and allowed her lips to soften under Trent’s slow invasion. Sparks bubbled in her blood and fired her veins with each swipe of his tongue. He drew slow circles over her lips before moving into her mouth. Tingles coursed through her body, going straight to her pussy. Their tongues caressed each other in a sensual ritual that left her breathless and panting.

His hands moved under her top, tracing the curve of her waist and crawling up her sides. Urgency for him, the only man she’d been wanting for years, made her pull at his T-shirt. Her hands gripped the cotton material and lifted. He must’ve gotten the hint, because his hands left her body and he stripped off the shirt. And good lord was she happy to see him without the offensive cloth. She knew he was hot, like really fucking hot, but seeing all those muscles up close and personal made her want to purr.

She licked her lips while trailing each bulging bicep with her fingers. Her gaze darted up to meet his heated one.

“Your turn,” he said in that deep, sexy voice that made her want to beg him to talk dirty to her. The wicked grin on his mouth was pure sin. She grabbed the sides of her tank top and pulled it over her head. His look? Priceless. His eyes zeroed in on her breasts. She was no little woman, and when she arched her back his nostrils flared. Her body was full of curves, and she had no problem with it.

Their lips met again in another scorching kiss. A kiss that deepened the strange connection they seemed to have. All this time she’d felt the pull to him. She knew there was something strong between them. Her mind and heart told her she was delusional if she thought she could deny the deep connection to Trent, but her rebellious side refused to acknowledge it. Sex.
Si
. This was only sex, because she didn’t do relationships. Pushing the strange thoughts out of her mind, she wallowed in the feelings he aroused in her body.