As soon as she left, I flipped the security latch and booted up my computer. I went first to the members-only, password-protected, super-secret Web site of the federation.
Members logged in and entered what information they’d gleaned on every Nephilim and breed combination they came across—specifically how to kill them. Unfortunately the federation was down to a skeleton crew, most of them doing the best they could to stem the demon tide but instead being washed away by the flood. Which meant not too many had the time to add new information to the database.
On Mait I didn’t find much, so I was forced to go about this the old-fashioned way—trial and error by Google search. My luck there wasn’t any better.
I rubbed my eyes. I needed a shower, coffee, and food, in that order. Then I’d make some calls.
The hot water felt heavenly on skin that had been stretched and released, sprouted feathers then regrown skin. My shoulders were a little sore from flying.
My stomach growling and my head beginning to pound with a lack-of-caffeine headache, I wasn’t paying attention when I strode back into the room sans towel. My only warning was a slight shimmy in the air.
I rammed my elbow backward. The blow should have sent whatever had snuck up on me flying into, if not through, a wall. Instead that elbow was grabbed so hard my bones crunched, and I was spun like a top. An instant before my eyes registered the sight of him, my nose caught his scent—cinnamon and soap.
“Sanducci,” I growled.
Jimmy wrapped his arms around me, one hand circling both wrists and holding them still at the small of my back. “You gonna hit me, Lizzy?”
My breasts crushed against his thin overwashed T-shirt—this one with jagged red lettering I’d had no time to read. With his knuckles teasing the curve of my ass and my mouth a mere inch below his, I couldn’t help but whisper, “You want me to?”
Lust flared in his eyes. It had always been like this between us. One touch, one word, one whiff and we were lost.
His neck was so close, the warmth of his skin drew me in, making it impossible not to press my face to the curve and just breathe. His scent flooded me with memories—first kiss, first love, first time. He’d been everything.
That scent was also betrayal and heartache, mistrust, murder, and mayhem. Jimmy was both danger and safety, hatred and love, violence and the first gentleness I’d ever known in a man. For the rest of my life whenever I smelled heated skin and fresh soap, or tasted hot cinnamon toast, I’d think of Jimmy Sanducci.
His cheek touched my hair. His thumb stroked the tip of my tailbone, and I couldn’t help it. I licked his neck.
Without any warning, Jimmy shoulder-checked me into the doorjamb. I managed to grab it before my spine, or the back of my head, connected.
“I like my jugular just the way it is,” he said. “Intact.”
I didn’t bother to explain that I’d been more interested in kissing than killing him at the time. The same couldn’t be said of right now.
“Vampires who live in log cabins shouldn’t throw burning stakes,” I muttered.
He frowned. “What?”
Yeah, that hadn’t made much sense, but—
“If you weren’t thinking with your dick you might have gotten the allusion.” He still appeared confused. “Glass houses and stones, dumb-ass. You’re a vampire, just like me.”
“I wasn’t licking your neck,” he said.
“No, you were too busy grabbing my ass.”
I walked across the room, purposely brushing his arm with my breast as I passed and sat on the bed. I didn’t bother to get dressed. He’d seen it all before. I wanted him to remember what he might never see again if he kept it up. “What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you are.”
Somehow I doubted that.
“I didn’t—” I paused in the middle of saying I hadn’t told anyone what I was doing, because I had told one person. “I am going to kick Luther’s bony behind.”
Jimmy’s gaze began to drift below my neck. Then he stiffened, turned, and strode to the still-open veranda doors. I stifled a smirk. I was getting to him. “Wasn’t Luther,” he said.
“Ruthie.” Jimmy didn’t answer what hadn’t been a question. “What did she tell you?”
“That I’d better haul myself down here to help you before she blistered my backside with a paddle.”
Ruthie continued to threaten us as she had when we were children even though we hadn’t been children since . . .
I sighed. Jimmy and I had never really been children.
Ruthie had made a game of thinking up colorful ways to intimidate us into doing what she wanted. She’d rarely laid a hand on us, and when she had, we’d deserved it. In truth, every kid who’d ever spent a moment with Ruthie Kane would have done anything she asked just because she’d asked.
Take Jimmy for instance. Ruthie had told him to break my heart, and he’d run off to do it so fast, the door hadn’t even brushed his ass on his way out of my life. I needed to get over that.
Eventually.
“I don’t need help,” I said.
“Ruthie disagrees.”