My Dangerous Pleasure (2 page)

He did? Did that mean he’d been noticing her the way she’d been noticing him? Mentally, she tried out a few more ways to ask him to coffee without sounding like she was actually asking him out. She taped a set of instructions for storing and serving the cake to the top of the box, wrapped it up with her murderously expensive paisley ribbon, slapped on a gold foiled sticker with the name, address, and phone number of her bakery on it, and set the box on the counter. All her prices included tax. “Twenty-five fifty.”

“I am Rasmus Kessler.” He said his name the way people did when they came from a country where they didn’t speak English. He took a hundred-dollar bill from a slim wallet and handed it to her.

She grimaced at the bill. “I can’t break a hundred.” She could, but she was under strict orders from her accountant never to take bills larger than a twenty. Too much counterfeiting going on.

“Of course,” he said smoothly. He returned the hundred and took out two twenties.

“Thanks.” When she gave him his change, she steeled her nerve for her invitation to coffee. As she took the bills, the tips of his first two fingers touched her right wrist, and she got an electric shock. She laughed and shook her hand.

His eyes widened. They jittered again. “Are you all right?”

“Sure.” Except her wrist burned where the static electricity had sparked off her skin. She handed him his change. “Enjoy your cake, Mr. Kessler.”

“Rasmus, please.” He picked up the box and stood there silently. Watching her.

Dang it, her wrist hurt. Enough that she had to concentrate on not crying. “Can I get you a coffee for the road?” Was that lame or what? But she felt like she was talking past a steel plate between her and the outside world. Inside, pain crawled into her head.

“Yes, thank you,” he said. “That would be nice.”

She made him his usual café au lait, remembered the three packets of turbinado sugar he liked, stirred the contents, and handed it over. The pain leveled out, but her wrist still hurt and her arm trembled as she held out the paper cup. “On the house, Rasmus.”

He took the cup. She flinched to avoid him touching her again, which ended up being awkward. “Thank you again.” He hesitated. “Perhaps I can buy you a coffee sometime soon.”

“I’d like that.”

“Friday evening?”

She nodded.

“Where should I pick you up?” Rasmus asked.

“Here.” She pasted on a grin. “I should be done about five.”

He gave her his cell number so she could call him in case something came up, and she watched him leave the shop with his cake and his coffee. The near certainty of her first date in ten months floated around her. She was practically giddy. Coffee wasn’t a date, of course. Coffee meant you could bail if you found out he liked the Dodgers when this was a Giants town, or hated kids when you wanted a big family. Coffee was when you decided whether to never meet again or give a guy your cell number.

She’d have been more enthused about the uptick in her social life, except her wrist hurt like the devil. After he was gone, she pushed up her sleeve to take a look. A blister the exact size and roundness of a quarter had formed on the inside of her wrist.

Whoever heard of static electricity giving you a blister? She went into the back room and got out the first-aid kit. Burns were an occupational hazard in a kitchen, so she had the salve and bandages to wrap up the injury. A little later she popped a couple of aspirin for the pain in her wrist and the throbbing headache that went with it.

At home that afternoon, she replaced the dressing. The blister had popped, but another one looked to be forming where the first had burst. Her wrist hurt worse than ever, though the injury didn’t look like it was getting infected. She half expected to see a red line heading up her arm. She felt crappy enough to have blood poisoning. The pain wasn’t limited to her wrist anymore. Her entire arm ached all the way to her shoulder. Enough to make her sick to her stomach. She skipped dinner and sat on her cheap sofa with a cup of hot tea in her left hand because she was having trouble using her right arm.

She was sweating, too, and seeing double. Her head felt like it was in a vise. The pain crawled around inside her skull and took over. A voice in the back of her mind said she needed to get to the hospital. Unfortunately, she didn’t have health insurance. If she went to the ER, the bills would bankrupt her. Besides, who went to the hospital for a blister?

Sometime between coming home and sitting down, she’d gotten too weak to move. She put down her tea before she dropped it. Maybe the blister wasn’t the problem. She staggered to her feet, intending to find her cell phone and call 911, because dead would be worse than medical bills she couldn’t pay. She’d never been this sick in her life, and the really scary thing was that she was too sick to be properly afraid. Meningitis, she remembered reading somewhere, came on quickly, and it made you feel a lot like she felt right now. Killer headache. High fever. Stiff neck and joints. Meningitis was deadly.

The way she felt, she wasn’t going to live long enough to have a date with anyone.
Fate
. She thought back to that moment of
whoa
when she and Rasmus Kessler locked gazes. Apparently, her fate was the disastrous kind.

Her phone was on the kitchen counter next to her purse. She lurched in that direction, but she saw three phones there. All of them looked real to her. She was shaking too hard to see straight, and the pressure in her head was unrelenting. Her stomach had other ideas about what to do next. She barely made it to the bathroom before she threw up. The first time. Every time she thought she could make it to her phone, she heaved again. Her stomach turned itself inside out until there was nothing left and still it didn’t stop.

She could barely move. Her skin was hot enough to fry an egg, her ears were ringing, and every joint in her body hurt.

The pain gripped her like a wild animal and refused to let go. It spread through her until she could no longer identify the source. She was nothing but agony. In the back of her barely functioning brain, she knew only one thing for certain:
If she didn’t get to the phone to call for help, she wasn’t going to make it.

C
HAPTER 2

9:15
P.M
.,
the same night, Vallejo Street,
San Francisco

I
skander put up his feet and kicked back in his recliner for an evening of movies and junk food. First up,
Shaun of the Dead
. He was totally on for an hour or two of zombie killing with everything he needed at arm’s reach. Root beer? Check. Pizza, just delivered? Check. Remote? Check.

Press
PLAY
and go.

Check.

And click.

He was in his house. By himself. He wasn’t freaked out or thinking he needed to go get laid so he wouldn’t be alone. He was just a normal guy hanging out at his own house, enjoying a night by himself. Chilling like nothing had ever been wrong with him or his life.

The movie hardly got past the FBI warning when every goddamned alarm he had set on the property shrieked into his head like a subsonic bomb.

What the hell?

Iskander got out of his chair and headed for the back of the house. His skin prickled up and down his body while he did a perimeter check. Everything was in place along the fences. His garage, a separate building on the back of his lot, was secure. His house was secure. He looked up to the darkened windows of the rental unit over his garage and got hit by a wave of sick magic.

He walked into his backyard and stood at the bottom of the stairs that led to the apartment over his garage. This was not normal. The magic felt like some kind of low-level infection, and there just wasn’t any mistaking the stink. Goddamned mages. He was more than a little miffed that one of the magekind had the nerve to come anywhere near his house to do magic like that.

Hell, no.

At the top of the stairs to the unit’s front door, he stripped down to his bare skin. If he was going to shift into his other form, better if he was naked when he changed. The minute he dropped his shirt, the last of the magical wards he’d set around the rental unit gave way. He hadn’t done anything major in terms of proofing his garage from the kind of creatures that might come looking for him. Maybe he should have. He was going to feel guilty as shit if it turned out he should have protected his tenant better.

In the meantime, he knew someone was inside there who probably didn’t think someone like Iskander should continue enjoying his current freedom and good health. What the hell this person wanted with his pure-vanilla, not-a-drop-of-magic-in-her tenant was a mystery.

The faces in the medallions he’d placed on either side of the apartment door morphed from smiling woodland creatures to two silent horrors that blackened to ash before his eyes. Whatever was going on in there was heating things up magicwise, and now the occupants were paying for it. He hoped the power releasing from those medallions was putting a serious hurt on the fucker responsible.

The need for his proofing was twofold. First, it warned him about the presence of a magic user who wasn’t known and welcome at his house. Second, if the intruder didn’t take the hint and leave, the proofing set off a psychic scream capable of killing. The proofing he’d put around his rental unit was already well into the second use.

Obviously, some stupid fuck of a mage had gotten inside the apartment. About now, the mage or witch or whatever was in there wasn’t feeling so hot. The demon warlord Nikodemus had his territory pretty well controlled. Everyone knew Nikodemus came down hard on anyone who broke his rules, and he had rules about messing with humans. There were transgressions from time to time, and since Iskander worked for Nikodemus, he was sometimes tasked with carrying out the consequences of breaking the warlord’s rules.

His hand closed on the doorknob when it occurred to him that since the apartment was rented out, his tenant might be home. With a mage. She was a nice girl. Totally vanilla—no magic whatsoever, which was the reason he’d rented to her in the first place. A couple of other people who’d come by to see the apartment after he decided to rent it out hadn’t exactly been normal humans. He’d made a good choice, picking her. She paid her rent on time, let him know if something needed to be fixed, and, up to now, lived quietly. He liked that she didn’t bother him and never did much more than wave at him or say hello if they happened to see each other, which didn’t happen all that often. Friendly, but not friends.

If his tenant, who so far hadn’t done anything but mind her own business the entire time she’d been living over his garage, was getting assaulted or murdered because of what he really was, well, that just didn’t seem right. Nikodemus would agree with him on that one. He didn’t think he’d get in too much trouble if he kept his tenant from getting killed, even if it meant harming one of the magekind. He stared at the door and gave the doorknob an experimental turn. It was locked. It was possible she’d invited a mage over to her place. Maybe she was dabbling the way some humans did.

Or not.

What to do?

Coulda, woulda shoulda.

He could count on zero fingers and no thumbs the number of times she’d brought someone home with her. What were the odds that his tenant would have her first wild fling with one of the magekind?

On the other hand, if he went inside, he risked finding her getting it on with someone. Explaining why he was interrupting her booty time wouldn’t be much fun. Particularly since he’d been informed that as a landlord, he did not, in fact, have the right to enter his tenant’s unit without permission. Unless it was an emergency.

Was this an emergency? The lights were off in the apartment. He didn’t hear a sound. Not a one. Any normal person would think his tenant was either not home or in blissful slumber. Or having really great sex. On the surface at least, all was well. No human walking by would think anything was wrong.