High Voltage (Fever #10)(58)

“Any theories on where the bookstore went?”

I offered five: “Mac and Barrons moved it for some reason. Someone else took it. The Silvers inside were changed by the Song and swallowed it up into a Fae realm. An IFP devoured it and moved on.” I couldn’t resist adding a Douglas Adams theory, “It got fundamentally fed up with being where it was.”

    “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.”

“I loved that book.”

“The airport that blew up.”

I nodded. Ryodan read books. The kind I liked.

“I think we can rule that one out.”

“I’m okay with that.”

Suddenly, it felt like old times. Light banter, easy comradery. “Examine the scene tomorrow, Robin?” I said lightly.

He cut me a look. “As if I’d wear that suit. Sherlock. BBC version.”

My eyes narrowed. “I am so not Watson.”

“I’d pegged you more as ‘that woman.’?”

I nearly preened. That woman was badass; sexy and lethal and one of the few to ever give the epic detective a run for his money. She’d stormed into conflict with the penultimate deductive brain wearing the most daring and formidable battle dress of all—nudity, from which he’d been able to draw not a single clue about her person or intentions. My near-preen turned into a scowl as I considered the rest of her story. “No way. Sherlock broke her code. You be ‘that woman.’?”

“Sherlock broke her code because she refused to admit that she wanted him. If she’d been honest about it, if she’d acted on it, there’d have been a different code—one he might not have been able to break. Instead of ‘Sherlocked,’ it would have been wisely nonsensical and undecipherable.”

That he had a valid point pissed me off even more. “Your point is that if she fucked him she might have been thinking more clearly? Do you know how insulting that is?”

“If the shoe fits.”

“Implying not fucking you makes me stupid.”

“Not quite what I was saying,” he said dryly.

    “You do not in any way affect or dilute a single cell of my magnificent brain.”

“Merely observing that we deny, at our own peril, that which we desire.”

His words were eerily similar to what Shazam had said before I’d left the flat. “I. Am. Not. That. Woman.”

“Hit a nerve, did I?”

“And if I was, I’m bloody well entitled to be. Sherlock wouldn’t even return a single one of her bloody texts. Not one.” And the alert tone she’d programmed into his phone for her texts should have melted him, at least from the waist down.

“Am I missing something? Did you text me?”

I was not ready for this argument. “Your timing sucks.”

“Time has always been the problem with us.”

“Am I missing something?” I mocked. “Did you text me? I’m not the one that left. The person that leaves bears the onus. Period.” God, I sounded just like Dancer, when I’d finally come back from the White Mansion with Christian. I thought, My love, I’m sorry, I get it now. I get it in spades.

“I’m not the one that never called. You had a phone. You didn’t call once. You were just out there having—” He terminated the sentence abruptly.

“What? What was I having that you want to throw in my face? Because I wasn’t having much of a good time, I can tell you that.”

“Define ‘good time.’?”

“Fuck, you, Ryodan.” And here we were again. I don’t think I ever once said those words to Dancer. I never felt the need.

“There’s no reason not to. I’m here. You’re here. We both want to.”

I gaped at him. Christ, he’d just put it baldly on the table.

    “You think I won’t put it baldly on the table?”

I said with acid sweetness, “I rather thought you’d try to put it on a desk. Isn’t that where you usually put it?”

He flinched imperceptibly and I regretted the words instantly.

Jo.

As if summoned from a grave, her ghost was there, standing between us. I could almost see her shaking her head with sorrow, telling me Ryodan was a good man and I wasn’t seeing him clearly. Her gravestone loomed in the air, a solid concrete wall separating me from him. The heat of innuendo died and his gaze shuttered.

“Mac carried that one hard,” he said. “I suppose I carry it, too.”

I gaped again, it seemed like all I was doing tonight. “Mac ate Jo?” I practically shouted.

“When she was possessed by the Sinsar Dubh.”

I ached for her, understanding too well the pain she carried. Bridget, all the others, my ghosts for the rest of my life. “Why the bloody hell did no one tell me? Why am I always the last to know things?”

“I’m doing everything in my power to make sure you’re not,” he clipped, driving his point home.

Ryodan wanted me. And he wasn’t going to conceal that fact. What did he think? That he could just stroll back when I was grown up, have sex with me, then one day saunter up and tell me he was leaving again?

“When you fuck a man,” I said with quiet venom, “you’re giving him a motherfucking gift.”