Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)(49)

There. That sounded sensible. Responsible.

He lay his head against the back of the seat and looked at her sideways, chest heaving, hand gripping his side. His eyes were nothing but dark slits. Those merry mouth corners she’d kissed now lifted in tandem. “All right. But let’s get one thing straight. We’re not finished pretending.”

SEVENTEEN

After a long, unrestful sleep punctuated with morphine-crazed dreams, Bo was still sore the next morning. But it was a good kind of pain, one that cleared his head and made him decisive. Ready to move ten mountains. Which is probably why he was now standing beneath Old Bertha the shark in the warehouse office, letting Velma rub an herbaceous magical poultice over his stitches.

“That should do it,” she said, accepting a towel from Winter to wipe the dark green sticky substance off her fingers. “Now, over the next few hours, you might notice a strange itching sensation. That’s the muscle knitting back together. The wound should be completely closed by tonight. With any luck, you can cut out the stitches tomorrow.”

“Why do all of your cures smell terrible? I hate mint.”

“It’s not mint, and I didn’t beg you to let me speed up your healing,” Velma reminded him. “Did I mention it’ll leave a nasty scar? Winter can attest to that. This is the same poultice I used on his eye a couple of years ago.”

“Scarred me up good, but I didn’t lose my eyesight,” the bootlegger bragged, tapping the break in his eyebrow, a reminder of the automobile accident that had killed the Magnusson parents and left Winter with mismatched eyes.

“I don’t give a damn about scars,” Bo huffed. “I just need my full strength back as soon as possible.” Being injured was not an option. Not when there was a wild man with a knife out there, eager to cut Astrid’s throat.

The first thing Bo had done this morning was tell Winter everything that had happened with Max and the idol—wisely leaving out the part about putting his own hands all over the man’s sister . . . and her putting her hands all over him.

But.

He did confess everything else, and to his great surprise, Winter did not rip off his arms. All he had said was, “Just keep her safe. If that means we need to pay Mrs. Cushing a visit, say the word.”

Winter’s visits were never genial, but Bo didn’t want his help. He could take care of it himself. And he suspected that the reason Winter was so forgiving about the whole situation was because the man was convinced something was going on with Aida. But if she hadn’t told Winter about the potential pregnancy, Bo damn sure wasn’t going to. None of his business whatsoever.

But he’d take whatever distraction he could get because he had things to do. Calls to make. Witch doctors to see with their cloyingly minty-smelling sticky cures. Astrid to follow . . .

He’d heard her voice before he woke that morning. She’d been in the stairwell, arguing with Greta. From the sound of things, she’d been trying to get down to see him and give him one of Dr. Doom’s morphine tablets. Greta had no idea he was hurt and was too busy being aghast that Astrid wanted to stroll inside his quarters while he was still in bed. If she only knew what they’d been doing in the car last night, her head would surely rotate on her shoulders and explode.

His head might do the same if he kept thinking about the way Astrid melted in his arms when he kissed her ear. The way her legs pressed together. He could still see it now, the beautiful Y shape made by the dark crease of her skirt trapped between her clenched knees and how it ran between her legs and molded the apex of her thighs. And to feel that Y rub against his—

He really must stop. His cock hadn’t stayed down a solid hour all morning, and he’d already had to pleasure himself twice. So much for honor.

The first time was upon waking from a morphine dream in which Astrid was a blond fox who cornered him in an elevator that never stopped ascending. She stood upright like a human, but what started with her licking his wound ended up in a confused coupling that had him waking in sweat-soaked sheets before dawn.

The second time was after he’d woken for good. Upon forcing himself to shake off the druggy haze of the pain pill, he’d remembered a word he overheard Astrid saying when she’d been confessing to Le-Ann in the Moons’ parlor: My feelings for him are sempiternal.

He had no idea what that meant. But like anything else he didn’t know, he sought the education he required between the pages of his humble library. He was able to sound the word out and find it in his battered Webster’s.

Sempiternal: eternal, everlasting.

My feelings for him are sempiternal.

That did it. He was probably the only man alive to masturbate after reading the dictionary. Clearly his self-control was in shambles.

Perhaps Velma’s foul-smelling cure would help to restore it.

He’d found out not a half hour ago that Astrid was on her way out—as in, going out in the city alone, when she damn well knew that Max could be anywhere. Sure, Bo had put one beautiful bullet right through the man’s leg. Two inches lower, and he’d have shot out the man’s kneecap—which is what he’d been aiming for and had unfortunately missed. A bullet in the leg wasn’t as devastating. Max could be up and about today. Not likely, but who knew what kind of weird magic animated the son of a bitch.

It just wasn’t safe. Astrid wasn’t alone. She’d gone out with Jonte. And Jonte, like Greta, took care of the Magnussons like they were his own flesh and blood, but he was sixty-two and had a bum leg. The old Swede also refused to carry a gun. At least he had the sense to telephone Bo and warn him that Astrid had asked him to drive her around town. When Bo found out where they ended up, he was going to give her a piece of his mind.