“Would you just let it go? In a few more hours none of this is going to matter. A few more days and neither of us will be who we are right now. So what does anything I say or do matter?”

She had grown increasingly agitated with every word, with every statement. She wanted to blame it on him and the way he was harassing her, the infuriating way he was pressing at her, but even she knew it went beyond that.

Vincent settled back a little … calmed, it seemed, as he cocked his head and studied her briefly. Then his right hand came away from the wall and he took her chin, tipping it up until she was looking straight into the golden eyes she would have preferred to avoid.

“Docia, are you afraid of disappearing?” he asked her quietly.

There was no need to define what he was talking about. She knew what he meant, just as he knew what she meant by her remarks. She nodded into the touch of his fingers, loosening their grip on her a little.

“Don’t you disappear when Ram is there?”

It wasn’t an unfair question. Nor was it based on inaccurate observations, he thought with a frown. But she had it wrong. Just as his frantic behavior to delineate himself outside of Ram was wrong.

“No,” he said softly, touching her forehead and the contours along the side of her face. “It’s as true a symbiosis as you can ever imagine,” he promised her. “Ram would falter without me, just as I’m faltering and f**king up without him. Selena knew that. That’s why she did this to us.” And by “us” he clearly meant Ram and himself. “Ram knows things, amazing things, and thinks in ways far beyond what I knew on my own. And Ram doesn’t know half the modern fighting techniques that I do, nor does he have a head for computers and electronics. But together we know it all. And together we make up for each other’s weaknesses in other ways. For instance, when I was just Vincent, it was all about winning, no matter who got trampled in the process.” He sighed. “I don’t want to trample you, Docia.”

“Y-you confuse me,” she stammered, the warm nut brown of her eyes tugging at him in peculiar ways, making him feel guilty when he didn’t want to … when he rightly deserved to.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Ram, too,” she added, making sure he felt the equality of it in her eyes. He could hear it in her voice. She wasn’t trying to coddle him. She was telling the truth. “This whole thing has been confusing. But, I think more than anything, the way I felt as though I should instantly trust you … even when I had nothing to go on except the assurances of a man who’d just kidnapped me …” The way she looked up at him, the closeness of her, he couldn’t help noticing the gorgeous fringe of her dark lashes around those sweet, vulnerable eyes of hers. Thank God he and Ram had found her first. Selena and her sect would have turned her inside out.

And he’d almost allowed her to fall into their hands.

“Because you should trust us, Docia. If not me alone, then certainly Ram. He … we … I would never let anything hurt you,” he promised her.

She giggled suddenly, and it made him smile a little in bemusement, even though he didn’t understand what was so funny.

“I’ve never heard anyone use so many different personal pronouns to refer to themselves before.”

His smile grew. “I know it must seem confusing. But I’m so used to it, to shifting all over the map like that, that I rarely notice it. But usually it’s just I. Me. Myself. We phase back and forth in dominance, who has more control at any given moment changes like … the perfect balance between the clutch and the gas when driving a stick. Sometimes more of one, sometimes more of the other. But I can tell you this …” He reached with his thumb and drew it over the corner of her mouth. “We … both Ram and Vincent … are utterly fascinated by you. By the way you’ve made us both feel. I guess I don’t have Ram’s phenomenal self-control when it comes to you.”

Odds were he was going to get smacked or he was going to freak her out all over again, but Vincent just could not resist any longer. He lowered his mouth to hers, touching their lips together in what had to be the barest of kisses.

Docia’s breath started to come quicker the minute she saw the change of intent come over him, the minute she appreciated the desire in his eyes. But somehow this honest, more bare-souled version of Vincent’s advances had far less frightening aspects to it than the groping aggressive Vincent had.

Oh great. Now she was splitting Vincent in two on top of him already being, essentially, part of a duo.

But in the end, it was a single pair of lips coming into contact with her own and a single, focused intent. And unlike the obnoxious kiss in the Templar church that had done little more than irritate her, this had the opposite effect. There it was again, that peculiar and wonderful sensation of having heat blown through her body, like a glassblower shaping molten substance into something wondrously beautiful. And instead of feeling it along the outer edges of her skin, she felt it all along under the surface, sliding between skin and muscle, slithering snugly and wildly inside every corner she had. Her blood began to sparkle in its veins as he pressed a little harder, danced with her lips a little deeper. She lifted her hands but was afraid to touch all that large, wonderful maleness right within her reach, afraid because she couldn’t fathom right then being able to manage any more than what she was already feeling.

Her breath hitched in her throat and she pulled her head back, although not because she really wanted him to stop. It was more like a flight response in reaction to the fear of not knowing what to do next, of not knowing if she could handle this. But she was relieved when he chased her back down almost instantly, his hand lifting to cup the back of her head so she wouldn’t be able to move away again. Yet he was not bruising or brutish, was not trying to dominate the hell out of her. It was more like a discourse, a sweet conversation using the lips and tongue that conversation depended on so very much, where her input and arguments held just as much weight as his. There was respect every inch of the way. She sensed this just as deeply as she felt that energizing heat and arousal stirring throughout her body. And just as she was beginning to wonder if it was the same for him …

“My God,” he murmured into her mouth. “I’ve never felt anything like this. It’s like calling power from deep within myself, this feeling.” He kissed her harder, deeper, her head turning and tipping to absorb the impact of it. Now she did touch him, her fingers reaching to curl into his shirt to provide some sort of anchor for herself … only he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and she was left with nothing but smooth, hot skin over tense, curving muscle and the lightest crisp of hair. It had been so fair, so close to the tone of his skin, that she had not even noticed it on his chest. It gleamed like gold on his forearms, but here she had barely noticed it.

Of course, that could have been because she was far too busy palpitating over his physique overall.…

He broke away from her lips only a second to catch his breath. Or to let her catch hers. She couldn’t quite tell. He tipped her head back so he could find her eyes under the hooded sweep of her heavy lids and lashes.

“And it stops here, if you say the word, Docia.”

Word? What word? she wondered numbly. There were words? How could there be words on the very same lips that were full of the fire of kissing him?

All she could do was shake her head.

No. She refused. Refused to stop. To be afraid. To hesitate. Not one second longer. Who knew when the next bridge would come along? What if everything ended right then? Would she want the words no, stop, or I’m afraid to be the last ones she spoke?

“No. Don’t stop. I’m not afraid,” she said breathlessly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jackson didn’t let himself feel exhausted, although that was very much the feeling snarling at his heels. He hadn’t slept since the night before his conversation with Docia, the silly, relaxed one he’d had with her just like dozens of silly relaxed conversations he’d had with her every single morning on her way to work. Only after that one had ended, he’d come in to work and been told she was dead.

He hadn’t slept since. Not even after knowing she was safe, alive, and in the hospital bed next to him. At most he’d drifted off, but at just about the point of actual sleep, he’d hear the sound of her screaming for him. The sound of her terror. The sound of her last moments on earth.

He got up from his desk and moved to the coffeepot, angry with the damn thing for not providing the level of juice he needed to keep going in a fewer number of cups, because at this point his effectiveness was hindered more by his overworked bladder than his weariness.

Now it was, what? Six a.m.? Seven? He was no closer to finding Docia, though he felt he was just a hair behind her, close enough that he could feel the warmth in a chair she might have sat in or the faintest scent of the crisp, clean botanical shampoo she used. Or so he’d imagined, as her former host explained oh so calmly and oh so believably how a bunch of people completely out of her social sphere had come to have her at their home … only to have to hastily remove her from that home after a sketchily convenient gas explosion had taken out the fireplaces, the dining room, and the whole right side of the house.

Henry Kamin had had an answer for everything. The guardhouse vandalism had taken place the night before, supposedly, when the guards had gone to walk the perimeter of the house. They had not reported it, preferring to handle it privately unless it happened again. This Vincent Marzak had Docia but had not had time to grab a cellphone before leaving to bring her elsewhere, and Kamin assured him she would probably contact him as soon as she was able.

Apparently, Kamin was an upstanding citizen and a huge donor to the local PBA, so the Windham cops had swallowed every bit of his story readily.

Even Jackson’s fellow cops had decided there was nothing else to be done about it and had gone home for the night. But he didn’t bother. He’d only be coming back on shift in a few hours anyway. Unless, of course, he got sent home by the boss when Landon got wind of what a mess this was turning out to be. Those Windham cops were used to dealing with insanely rich and privileged people, who, it seemed, deserved a whole different level of consideration. If Henry Kamin said there was an explosion, there was an explosion. If Henry Kamin said Docia was being well cared for, well, that had to be true.

It was all a load of horseshit as far as Jackson was concerned. But now even the cops from his own department were looking at him cross-eyed when he insisted on pressing forward with finding Docia. Go home, they said. She’ll probably call in the morning, they said. Get some sleep, they said.

“Yeah, right,” he snorted into his coffee cup. Mr. Coffee understood. He was a longtime veteran of this station. He knew what drove a good cop. Well, besides caffeine-infused brew, that is.

Oh, crap. Now he was anthropomorphizing the frigging coffee machine. Was this what it had boiled down to? Was his only friend in the world a Mr. Coffee machine?

“Dude, this place smells funny. Anyone ever tell you that?”

Leo threw himself into Jackson’s desk chair, the impetus rolling him back a little. He kicked his legs up, crossing his feet on the corner of Jackson’s desk. His wet, muddied feet.

“Christ, Leo!” Jackson pulled out an abused file folder from under Leo’s boots and wiped it off against his jeans. “It smells like law in here. You know, that thing you so inherently like to work against?”

“Untrue. I am a very law-abiding citizen.” He grinned. “As long as the law makes sense. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of the greater good. And tell me something, Dudley Do-Right, just what kind of law are those guys practicing up there in Windham?”

Jackson hated to admit it, but he was right. Something wasn’t right up there. Besides the obvious explosion, there were things … things that didn’t make sense. And a whole hell of a lot of them.

“They aren’t me,” Jackson felt the need to point out.

“If you mean they aren’t running on caffeine fumes and zero downtime, then yeah, you got that right.”

“What the hell, Leo?” he burst out in a shout, somehow refraining from throwing his cup against the wall. “What do you want me to do? Go home, curl up, and sleep like a kitten, all content and worry-free? While she’s out God knows where with God knows who doing God knows what?”

Leo waited a long beat after Jackson’s explosion of temper, long enough to make Jacks feel a little awkward for letting loose in the first place. It was much better when Leo got just as mad as he did and they fed off each other. Then usually he would play the cooler head and all would be right with the world.

But the world was about to change.

“I’m not saying you forget. I’m not saying you go home. There’s bunks in the back room behind the break room and nothing you can do until the world starts to wake up, so why don’t you let Red here take you back and give it a try for two hours?”