Page 58 of Mystic Justice
God, but he was exhausted; even with her enthusiastic touches, he was spiralling towards sleep. It would be embarrassing if he couldn’t get it up. She’d be the type to spread it around. She’d fucking tell everyone.
He tried to open his eyes, tried to sit up, and alarm bells rang when he could do neither.
Something is wrong,Brogue said urgently.
I know, buddy. I can’t move.He tried to hand the reins to Brogue, to let them shift, but nothing happened. Fear spiked through them both. He tried again to open his eyes, to look at her, but all he could do was let out a vague moan.
Next to him, she laughed.
My alarm screamed me awake at the god-awful hour of 6am. My eyes were gritty and sore, and everything in me wanted to hit snooze, but I pushed back the covers and stumbled into my en-suite bathroom to shower away the cobwebs.
I was pleasantly surprised not to have been woken with news of another dead body. Maybe Elvira and Bland’s visible presence in the barhadbeen enough to deter our killers.
Clean, warm and feeling sharper, I tied my dressing gown around me and started for the kitchen. I wasn’t a coffee girl, but this was definitely a coffee morning.
I walked into my open plan living-room kitchen-diner and stopped abruptly as I found Krieg stretched out on my sofa. I stared at all seven feet of him curled up uncomfortably on the beige cushions. One arm was slung over his eyes, blocking out the lights I’d turned on for Loki.
He was wearing the same white T-shirt from the day before and he had my blanket slung low over his hips, though the legs that were sticking out told me that at least he’d shucked off his leather trousers. I tried not to ogle him, but this was my first glance at some of his actual skin. His legs were lightly covered with hair that was as dark as that on his head, and even in sleep his quads and calves were clearly defined. His feet, as he’d once promised, showed no signs of having had a pedicure but still looked neat and tidy.
As I stepped forward for a closer look a floorboard creaked and he instantly went from being relaxed to wholly alert. His eyes flicked open and immediately locked on mine. There was no trace of tiredness in them despite the shitty hour. ‘Good morning, Inspector,’ he said, unruffled. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘What are you doing here?’
His smile softened the hard lines of his face. I tried not to notice how nice his dark hair looked when it was tousled by sleep. ‘I thought it likely you would awake early and it would save us both some time if I just crashed on your sofa.’ He hesitated. ‘Besides, Loki was still restless. I used some of my piping skills to settle him.’
Krieg was half-ogre, half-piper: the latter meant that he could speak to and control any creature he chose – which included ogres. If his people found out he could control them like that, his head would be on a spike quicker than you could say ‘coup’.That he had entrusted me with his secret still felt like a big deal, and I was grateful that he’d told me. He’d done so in order to balance the scales between us when he’d found out that I was an unregistered subterfuge wizard: I kept his secret and he kept mine. We both had the power to destroy each other, but I was finding that was a little less terrifying the more I saw of him, the more I trusted him.
‘Thanks for helping Loki,’ I said finally.
‘You’re welcome.’ He paused. ‘Your ghost was unhappy with me staying, but once I explained why I was here it stopped trying to pull the blanket off me.’
The matter-of-fact way he accepted the ghost’s existence told me he’d encountered one before. Since this was my first ghost, that intrigued me no end but at that moment I had bigger mysteries to contemplate.
‘May I use your shower?’ Krieg asked politely.
His question reminded me that I was completely starkers beneath my dressing gown. ‘Sure,’ I managed. ‘Have you got clean clothes with you?’
He sat up and gestured at the duffle bag resting at the end of the sofa. ‘I have.’ Of course he had. He was a boy scout, always prepared.
‘Great. Well. Help yourself.’
‘Thank you.’ As he stood, he revealed his tight, navy boxers. He folded my blanket neatly and laid it over the back of the sofa precisely as he’d found it.
He peeled off his T-shirt to reveal a torso that demanded sculptures be made of it. Most men I’d been with had slim frames and maybe a little light muscle tone; Sam had a small beer belly, thanks to his love of real ale. Those men were all normal but Krieg was not: every visible inch of him was pure muscle. He had to havesomefat, but I was damned if I knew where he was storing it.
His chest looked as if it had been carved rather than made; it was the kind of chest you could bounce coins off and turn them into small projectile weapons. He had thick shoulders, pronounced traps and huge arms. His right arm was larger than the left – all ogres had something asymmetrical about them – but it wasn’t overly different; in fact it was barely noticeable and about as suspicious as an average bloke having one more muscular arm from ‘private cardio’.
Krieg’s biceps flexed subtly as he folded the T-shirt and laid it alongside his other discarded clothes, which were neatly folded at the other end of the sofa on top of his steel-toed boots.
He straightened – and there were his abs: eight of them, defined, tight, the stuff of film screens. I’d never seen anything like that in the flesh. But it was the V muscles that truly got to me, those sculpted lines that dipped low, bracketing his hips like an arrow pointing straight down into the waistband of the dark boxers that rode low on his hips. Too low. Not low enough.
My mouth went dry and my brain issued a quiet blue screen of death.
It stuttered back to life when I realised he was standing there, patiently letting me ogle every inch of his body. I dragged my eyes up to his. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as my cheeks warmed. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. I’ve never seen a man quite like you.’
‘Do you like it?’ he asked softly. ‘A lot of women get intimidated – not everyone is a fan of the muscular look, the veins on the biceps, that kind of thing.’
‘I— Yes, I like it.’ Too much, way too much. All I had to do was unfasten my robe and we could be skin to skin in seconds. The temptation to undo that belt and to slide my eyes lower past those pretty V muscles was so strong that I closed my eyes. ‘Please go and shower before I pounce on you.’ My voice was strangled.
