Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set Read online

  “She’ll go. I remember what it was like to find out I wasn’t as weird as I’d thought I was,” Stephanie told him.

  Kent tugged her by the wrist until she was pressed against him. “Are you about to reveal to me that you had a lifetime of crime before I met you?”

  She laughed and kissed him. “No. I was a huge nerd. A real Goody Two-Shoes. I never even kissed a guy until I was in my early twenties.”

  “You got really good at it,” he said against her mouth.

  The kiss lingered, getting deeper. Breathless after a minute, she pulled away to look up at him and felt the creep of heat in her cheeks. “Kent...”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s real.”

  “I didn’t even ask...”

  He kissed her again. Then once more. His hands on her hips anchored her against him. His mouth moved from her lips to her throat to press against the pulse beating there.

  “Yes,” he said again. “It’s real.”

  * * * * *

  DARK FANTASY

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  CHAPTER 1

  Jason Davis did not want to look inside the closet. Something disgusting was inside it—he could tell that already by the smell. The odor, a toxic mix of garbage and unwashed human body, was strong enough outside the closed door to make his eyes water.

  “Think he’s alive?” his partner asked. Reg Bamford had drawn his gun, ready at Jase’s back.

  “Hope so, or else this case just escalated.” In the past month they’d been covering a spate of freakish attacks and injuries that seemed to be related, but none yet had resulted in a death. Jase pulled his knife, ready for whatever happened.

  Reg shot him a grin. “On three?”

  “I don’t think we need to kick it down, Reg. Maybe just open it slowly.” Jase gave his partner a raised eyebrow, knowing how much Reg wanted to go in full force.

  “Fine.” Reg didn’t holster his gun. He gave Jase a nod. “Go.”

  “Hey, buddy?” Jase eased open the closet door, bracing himself for the stink. Shit, it was bad. Worse even than he’d anticipated. He put up a hand to cover his mouth and nose. “Hey, guy. You in here?”

  Nothing.

  Reg moved a step closer. “Careful, Jase. He could—”

  Something launched itself out of the closet. Hulking, reeking, arms flailing. Fortunately, it wasn’t very strong, and a double one-two attack from Jase and Reg got it on the ground with Reg’s gun pressed to the back of its head.

  “Please,” the thing said. “Please, don’t hurt me any more.”

  CHAPTER 2

  He’d stalked her for days. Weeks. Watching her through the windows. Following her to the bus and then to the train, where he sat several seats behind her and counted the number of pages she read in the book she carried with her everywhere. He wanted to touch her hair.

  He wanted to cut off her hair and keep it in his pocket, where he could touch it whenever he wanted.

  But when he came up behind her and tried to touch her, the woman turned. Fists clenched. Teeth bared. She fought him, hard, in a way none of the others ever had, and he found himself on the ground with a mouthful of blood before he knew what had happened.

  * * *

  Chelle Monroe paused, her fingers lightly resting on the computer keyboard. This book wanted to be dark and fierce, edging toward the gory side. The problem was, she hadn’t started out to write a serial-killer novel. She wanted to write a romance.

  Shit.

  There was a satisfaction in writing this, though. The guy at the bus stop had been a creep. She didn’t think he wanted to keep her hair in his pocket, but you never knew.

  It figured the only male attention she’d had in the past few months had been from some wild-eyed dude who’d thought flirting meant standing too close and breathing on her neck while she waited to catch a ride to the bookstore. Or in the form of the random dick pics she got every so often in her inbox, though she hadn’t updated her profile on the LuvFinder site in forever. Dating had started to seem like so much freaking...work.

  Yet here she was, trying to write a romance novel, and why, when her heart seemed more inclined to come up with stories about serial killers or creepy clowns or natural disasters? She had bunches of those stored away in her files, unfinished, as all the other pieces were at this point. It had been a long time since she’d gone on a date but longer since she’d actually finished writing something she felt was good enough to submit to a publisher. Grant would’ve pushed her, probably until she got annoyed, to stop screwing around and just finish something already. But Grant had left her behind a long time ago.

  “C’mon, Chelle, get to it,” she said aloud, working her fingers open and closed before settling them back on the keyboard. “Write the damned book.”

  With a sigh, she opened a fresh GOLEM file. The usual prompts came up—character, plot, research. There were places for her to add photos for inspiration. A word-count calculator. The program had been designed to make plotting and brainstorming a story as easy as possible. The only thing it couldn’t do was actually write the damned book for her.

  She tried again, typing a few words, but they came out sounding like a really awful late-1980s soft-core porn movie. She erased them. Tried again. Nothing.

  The problem could be that she’d been suffering a distinct lack of romance in her own life for the past couple years and, in fact, had probably stopped believing in it. At least the hearts-and-flowers kind of romance you were supposed to read about in novels. Nope, for Chelle, love had come with a lot of baggage. She knew she wasn’t alone in that, obviously. The world didn’t go around without a whole lot of heartbreak along the way. It made writing about falling in love difficult, though.

  Then again, she didn’t believe in monsters or aliens, and she’d written horror and science-fiction stories that had gotten critical acclaim, if not a lot of money. Romance shouldn’t be so hard, right? At least at the end you could be guaranteed a happy-ever-after, and that was something to aim for. Bringing a little joy into the world, even if it lasted only as long as it took to read four hundred pages or so.

  It took staring at the blank computer screen for five solid minutes without typing a word before she gave up and opened the Works in Progress folder where she’d been keeping all her false starts. She’d tried a murder mystery, a comedy of errors, an experimental novel written entirely in iambic pentameter—that one she was proud of, actually. She’d made it to five whole pages before giving up on it. Not because the idea sucked, but because honestly, who the hell would sit through an entire novel written in iambic pentameter?

  Chelle sighed, then clicked out of the folder and toodled around a bit online, but it was a lost cause and after a few minutes of being sucked into reading click-bait articles, she thought maybe the future lay in writing deliberately misleading headlines attached to lists that tried hard and usually failed to be clever. Oh, and stock photos, she thought. You had to have a sort-of-appropriate stock picture to go along with the list.

  “C’mon,” she said aloud again. “You got this. You can do it. You’ve done it before—you can do it again.”

  Except what if she couldn’t?

  With a frown, Chelle put her computer to sleep and pushed away from her desk. She wanted chocolate but would settle for a seltzer water and some grapes. She’d been spending more time in her chair than runni