“What do you want?” I asked, suspicion shading my voice.
Pike leaned toward me and gingerly edged the tip of the knife into a piece of muslin, directly between my breasts. “Nothing, Nina. Just a nice, normal, honest-to-goodness photo of you.”
I glanced down at the tip of the blade resting an inch from my chest. He could plunge the thing in with all his might and nothing would happen. I’d keep (not) breathing, blinking, and looking very much alive.
But the blood-free wound would be a little bit more difficult to explain than my completely plausible spontaneous combustion explanation.
“What are you?” Pike asked, his voice slow, his eyes wickedly alive with something that looked only vaguely human.
“A San Franciscan,” I tried.
The blade came a hair closer, and I heard the distinctive sound of muslin starting to split. “What. Are. You.” Every word was its own sentence, each punctuated by Pike’s wild eyes.
I considered letting him stab me, then breaking out of my mummy costume and ripping his idiot throat out. But UDA law strictly forbade that kind of thing, even if your local breather was a nosy asshat.
Or so fiercely handsome that this completely unfortunate situation left a fire between my legs while I tried to lean into his blade. There was something sexy, something so undeniably hot about Pike’s hard-set eyes, about the danger of that slick blade resting between my breasts.
I locked Pike’s eyes, hoping my coal-black ones were as hard or as deep as his. I ran my tongue over my teeth and my mouth dropped open as Pike leaned into me. I could hear his heartbeat speed up. I could hear the blood as it pulsed through his veins. Could feel the hot moisture from his lips as he breathed.
“I—”
“Apartment sixty-one A, right here on the right.” It was the landlord, his voice a combination of asthma and Jersey—and he wasn’t alone. Another voice—low, gruff.
“Detective Moyer,” I whispered to Pike.
His face paled when the doorknob rattled and before I knew it, I was staring at Emerson’s ugly carpet while Pike carried me over his shoulder and shoved me—and then himself—into the bedroom closet.
“What the hell are you—” I started to hiss but he stopped me with a scathing look and a finger pressed to his lips as we heard the landlord, the detective, and, I figured, one or two of the pup cops, filing into Emerson’s living room.
“Shut up or they’re hauling us both off to jail,” Pike said with a low hiss.
There was something about his sudden slip into alpha male that was sexy and, growing slightly more comfortable in my muslin shackles, I leaned back into Emerson’s patchouli-scented clothes until my shoulder blades went flush with the back wall. Pike ducked and joined me in the black depths of the closet, our bodies hidden by the shapeless black clothing. I would have commented on the horror of it, but Pike had to press up against me to stay hidden. His back was to the door, his front pressed against mine, his outstretched arms essentially caging me in.
Something inside me started to flutter.
Something inside him started to harden.
“I guess we know what turns you on,” I said slyly.
Pike rolled his eyes, edged over, and fished his knife from his pocket. I hoped he couldn’t see my face fall in the darkness and went back to my pissed-off girl expression. “How are we supposed to—”
But Pike clapped a hand over my mouth and pressed himself against me yet again. I trained my eyes to focus on the ceiling, suddenly glad my arms were bound to my sides because they were aching to wrap around him even as I tried to ignore how perfectly our bodies seemed to fit together.
“Looks clear in here, boss,” one of the pup cops was saying. I could hear him turning fabric swatches in his hands, then I chanced a glance at Pike. His eyes were hard and round, drawing me in, his lips a half-inch from mine. I watched him purse them into a small pucker and for a fleeting second I weighed the idea of mauling this man right here in a dead girl’s apartment. It seemed like the wrong thing to do, but I found myself pulling toward him, a stripe of desire running like razor wire down my spine.
“Gibbs,” Moyer barked, “this way.”
When Pike pressed a single finger against his puckered lips, I thought my innards would explode—with embarrassment, rage,