He half-walked, half-carried her to the sofa. When he set her down on the plush cushions, she slumped back, boneless.
But her eyes were wide open and fixed on something he couldn’t see.
He slid into the shadows long enough to know that whatever she was looking at, it was in her own mind, not in the shadow world.
“I was wrong,” Francine breathed when he re-emerged. He sat on the chair opposite her, spine straight, brain warring with his body’s unfathomable longing to sit beside her and let her fall against him instead of the sofa cushions.
“Wrong about what?” His voice was clipped. Professional. Gave nothing away.
Except it must have given something away, because her eyes found his. Her nostrils flared as she drew in a slow breath.
But she didn’t say anything.
Julian’s eyebrows drew together. *What were you wrong about?*
She frowned back at him, one fist clenching. Her eyelid twitched. A sense of pressure formed in the air around her—then nothing.
Francine swore under her breath and suddenly Julian understood. Whatever she’d been wrong about, it was dangerous enough that she didn’t want to risk being overheard.
And she was too drunk to prevent her telepathic speech spilling out to be overheard, too.
A chill went down his spine. Before he could decide whether to say anything, though, her face snapped into a resigned, determined expression and she got up from the sofa.
She scrambled for a remote on the coffee table. Music flooded the room, throbbing and sensuous.
Three steps, and she was draping herself over him.
*There’s nobody else here,* he sent her, trying to ignore his body’s reaction to her weight pressed so close and warm against it.
“Not in the shadows or hidden in the light shades?” Her lips were so close to his ear it would only take the slightest change of position to brush against them. If he turned his head—
He looked upwards instead. The nearest light was wall-mounted, with an art déco-style fitting. A small shifter could have hidden in it. An electronic bug, though? One of the tiny computers Harper loved to use to spy on and control his underlings?
His senses rolled through the room, seeking through the shadows and the light. “Nobody’s here,” he repeated. But he couldn’t lift his voice above a whisper. Not with Francine still pressed against him.
She wrapped one arm around his shoulder. Pulled him closer as he pulled them both into the shadows.
“Gerald Harper is dead,” she whispered, her voice little more than a breath despite his reassurances, “and that means I was wrong about who our lovely friends here really are. They aren’t part of Harper’s scheme. They had him killed. We all drank to his death. Totying up another loose end.”
Another loose end? Had he been the first?
Francine grimaced. “And as much as I want to celebrate the bastard’s death—there’s something here I haven’t seen. I thought they were here to get a head start on the auction. But if they don’t need Harper alive, if they don’t need his directions to your family—I’m missing something. A key piece of the puzzle. And the last time that happened—”
She swallowed, and he saw it in her eyes: the calculation, thedesperation, of knowing whether she could trust him.
Her voice shook. “The last time this happened, I had every piece of the puzzle except the fact that those pieces had been fed to me by someone who saw me as a pawn, not an ally. And I lost everything.”
16
Francine
Francine woke with a headache and fuzzy memories of the night before. Her mouth tasted like stale booze, her head ached, and something nagged at her mind. Something wrong.
Eyes cracked open, she took account of herself piece by piece. She was alive. Unhurt, except the obvious hangover.
She was lying on the bed. Dressed. Julian was sprawled on the sofa, also dressed. They couldn’t have slept together, then. She wouldn’t have been nimble enough to do up all the tiny buttons on her dress and put it back on afterwards. Or undo them in the first place. He would have had to tear it off her.
The thought sent a surge of lust through her, so overwhelming that for a moment she forgot she was hungover. Then—
