Page 31 of Cut Deeper

Her laughter tinkled out. A delighted, soft sound that didn’t make sense to me.

Symptoms.

A dull headache, increased heart rate, irritated nasal cavity, and—a raging hard-on. My shoulders sagged and I glared at her.

“It’s not pleasant being drugged, is it?” she said, lifting her spoon and cutting into the cheesecake.

This was a rare opportunity. She could have given me sleeping pills or worse, psychedelics.

“All those nasty side effects,” she continued while I catalogued her skimpy outfit.

She’d instigated the entire scenario like the chaos gremlin she was.

“Yes, side effects,” I murmured, and sat back down.“My apologies.”

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to figure out if I was being disingenuous.

“But in my defence, it was self-preservation.”

“We’re even now,” she stated.

Not quite yet.

“We are,” I said, scooping up a spoonful of cheesecake.

The tart raspberry was perfectly balanced with the sweetness from the bottom layer of cheese.

“Although,” I said, waiting for her eyes to meet mine.“Now that you’ve got me hard, I’ll need a place to bury it.”

“I don’t see that being a problem, Dr Hammond.”

I put the last piece of cheesecake in my mouth and licked the spoon clean. Watching her ride Gareth in that graveyard still burned—she used sex like a scalpel, precise and merciless. Even the bath she’d taken the moment I freed her from the basement had been for her benefit, not mine.

“Remember those words,” I said, and set the spoon on the plate.

I stood, and the unholy light in her eyes deepened to something darker than blue.

Anticipation.

I began clearing the table.

“You cooked. I’ll wash,” I said.

I didn’t look at her again until I was almost out of the dining room. It was the first time I’d left Anne speechless, and I chuckled the whole way to the kitchen.

?? ?? ??

I waited until she stomped upstairs like a spoiled princess before slipping into her garage and working through her toolbox until I found what I needed. She wouldn’t like what I had planned for her tonight, but that was the price of admission to this particular joint venture.

Anne had niggled at the back of my mind all day, and then she’d opened her front door in that outfit and undone me before I’d even made it inside. I checked the locks anyway on my way upstairs—old habits, even in someone else’s house.

When I stepped into her bedroom, she was shamelessly rifling through my bag.

“Why would you need this?” she asked, holding up my tactical karambit.

“I rarely leave the house without a weapon.”

She pulled the sheath off the claw-shaped blade.