He grinned, dipped his head, and pressed his hot mouth against my pulse. Molten lava swirled in my abdomen, causing sensual quakes to shudder through me. I fought for the strength to stop him. Seriously, this was ridiculous. My utter lack of control where Reyes was concerned bordered on deplorable. So what if he was the son of Satan, reportedly the most beautiful being ever to have walked the paths of heaven? So what if he was formed from the heat of a thousand stars? So what if he made my insides gooey?

I had to get a grip. And it needed to be on something other than Reyes’s manly parts.

“Wait,” I said when his tongue sent a shiver straight to my core. “I have to give you fair warning.”

“Oh?” He leaned back and leveled a lazy, sensual gaze on me.

“I’m not going to allow you to let your corporeal body die.”

“And you’re going to stop me?” he asked, his voice skeptical.

I pushed him away, picked up my bag, and headed out the door. Just before I closed it, I looked back at him and said, “I’m going to find you.”

Chapter Four

IF IT HAS TIRES OR TESTICLES, IT’S GONNA GIVE YOU TROUBLE.

—BUMPER STICKER

I locked the door behind me, essentially leaving the son of Satan in my apartment. Alone. Annoyed. And quite possibly sexually frustrated. A niggling in the back of my mind had me hoping I didn’t make him angry. I would hate for him to catch my bachelorette pad on hellfire.

But really, he was being ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. The whole thing reminded me of my elementary school days when my best friend said, “Boys are yucky and we should throw rocks at them.”

I stomped across the parking lot, allowing the cool breeze to calm my shaking desire, and cut through my dad’s bar to get to the interior set of stairs. My dad was an Albuquerque cop who, like my uncle Bob, skyrocketed through promotion after promotion until they both made detective. With my help, naturally. I’d been solving crimes for them since I was five, though solving might be a strong word. I’d been relaying information from the departed to help them solve crimes since I was five. Better. While my uncle was still on the APD payroll, my dad retired a few years ago and bought the bar I now worked out of. My office was on the second floor. I also lived about two feet from the back door. It was all very convenient.

Dad was in early. A light from his office filtered into the dark lounge, so I wound around bistro tables, cornered the bar, and ducked my head inside.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, startling him. He jerked at the sound of my voice and turned toward me. He had been studying a picture on the far wall, his long thin frame resembling a Popsicle stick clothed in wrinkled Ken-wear. Cleary he’d been working all night. A bottle of Crown Royal sat open on his desk, and he held a near-empty goblet in his hand.

The emotion radiating off him took me by surprise. It was wrong somehow, like when a server once brought me iced tea after I’d ordered a diet soda. The normally mundane task of taking that first sip sent a shock to my system, the flavor unexpected. While Dad had his occasional off days, his flavor was different. Unexpected. A deep sorrow mixed with the overwhelming weight of hopelessness barreled toward me to steal the breath from my lungs.

I straightened in alarm. “Dad, what’s wrong?”

He forced a weathered smile across his face. “Nothing, hon, just getting some paperwork done,” he lied, the deception like a sour note in my ear. But I’d play along. If he didn’t want to talk about what was bothering him, I’d let it slide. For now.

“Have you been home?” I asked.

He put down the glass and lifted a tan jacket off the back of his chair. “Headed that way right now. Did you need anything?”

God, he was a bad liar. Maybe that’s where I got it from. “Nope, I’m good. Tell Denise hey for me.”

“Charley,” he said, a warning tone leveling his voice.

“What? I can’t say hey to my favorite stepmother?”

With a weary sigh, he shrugged into his jacket. “I need a shower before the lunch crowd descends. Sammy should be here soon if you want some breakfast.”

Sammy, Dad’s cook, made huevos rancheros to die for. “I may get something later.”

He was in a hurry to get out of there. Or, possibly, to get away from me. He slid past without making eye contact, despair rolling off him like a thick, muddy vapor. “Be back in a few,” he said, as cheerful as a mental patient on suicide watch.

“’Kay,” I said back, just as cheerfully. He smelled like honey-lemon cough drops, the scent lingering in his office. When he was gone, I strolled inside it and glanced at the picture he’d been looking at. It was a photo of me around the age of six. My bangs were crooked and both of my front teeth were missing. I was eating watermelon nonetheless. Juice dripped from my fingers and off my chin, but what caught my attention, what had caught my dad’s attention, was the dark shadow hovering just over my shoulder. A smudged fingerprint on the glass gave proof that Dad had been examining that same spot.

I glanced down to the top of a bookshelf housed underneath his montage of humorous family moments. He’d set out several photographs of me, each one featuring a dark shadow somewhere in the background, each one smudged with a fingerprint in that exact same spot. And I couldn’t help but wonder what Dad was doing. Well, that and what the dark shadow meant, ’cause even I didn’t know that one. Was it a by-product of grim reaperism? Or maybe, just maybe, it was Reyes, his dark robe almost visible, almost capturable. The thought intrigued me. Growing up, I’d seen him only a handful of times. Had he been there more often? Watching over me? Protecting me?