Forever fucked up.
Royally.
“He’s fine. Go back to sleep.”
Sully heard the soft smack of lips meeting lips, and Pelicia’s sleepy sigh. Then Declan said, “I told you that you should’ve come to the States with us from the get-go.”
“I didn’t call to hear you say ‘I told you so,’” Sully interrupted. “Just…” He heaved a sigh and ran his fingers through his hair. “Just tell me the offer to come stay with you and learn how to control this…” He met the gaze of the cabbie in the rearview mirror and changed what he’d been about to say. “Tell me the offer is still on the table.”
“The offer’s still on the table.”
The cab pulled up in front of his four-storied terrace house, and the cabbie told him the amount of the fare. Sully muttered, “Hold on,” into the phone. He pulled out his wallet and extracted several five-pound notes and handed them to the man. “Thanks.”
“Right. ’Ave a nice day, guv.”
Sully got out of the cab, pausing on the walkway in front of the house and watched the car pull away. A few doors down, a woman climbed out of another taxi. He couldn’t see her face, but long, dark hair streamed over her shoulders and caught the sunlight with strands of red and gold.
His fingers curled with the desire to stroke through those tresses, to feel their silken strands against his skin. He drew a breath and smelled a light, orangey perfume and, underlying that, a sexy, musky all-woman scent that made his cock jerk against his thigh. He stared at her, his gaze zeroing in on the flare of her buttocks in tight blue jeans. His gut tightened with something that went beyond lust. It was…
Primal.
More than mere want. It was need.
Deeper than he’d ever felt before.
Sully was five paces down the pavement after her before he realized he’d moved. There was something vaguely familiar about her, something that drew him like an unaware fly to the spider’s web. Just as he decided to keep following her, to find out who she was, Declan’s voice sounded in his ear.
“Hey! You still there?”
Sully stopped. He watched the woman who, without a glance in his direction, started up the short front walk of a redbrick terrace house three doors down. Her head was turned, so he still couldn’t get a look at her face.
For all he knew, she could be butt-ugly. But with an ass like that, somehow he doubted it.
He huffed a sigh. Turning back toward his own house, he shoved his right hand into his pocket. Jingling his keys as he walked, he told Declan, “I’ll make travel arrangements and be in Tucson tomorrow.” He went up the pavement to his front door and drew his keys from his pocket. “My passport’s up-to-date, so it’s just a matter of booking a flight.” He unlocked the door and went inside, closing the door behind him with one heel. “Fuck. I hate this. I really, really hate this.”
“It’s not that bad.” Declan was beginning to sound more alert. “You’ll find there are a lot of things you can do now that you couldn’t do before. You’ll have lots more stamina, for one thing. In all areas,” he added with a low chuckle.
Sully ignored the innuendo. Since he had no sex life at the moment to speak of, whether or not he had more stamina wasn’t an issue. “Yes, and I can run faster, see clearer, hear things from greater distances.” He gave a growl of frustration. “I also nearly killed a man today. If my DC hadn’t caught up to us when he did—”
“But he obviously did, otherwise you’d be sittin’ in a jail cell and not talkin’ to me on the phone.” Declan heaved a sigh. “Look, call me when you have your travel itinerary, and we’ll pick you up at the airport, okay? Until then…buck up. It’ll be all right.”
“Hmm. Maybe.” Sully said good-bye, not waiting for Declan to respond, and closed his phone, disconnecting the call. He loosened and then pulled off his tie, tossing it onto a decorative table in the narrow entry hallway. Then he went upstairs to pack and try to begin coming to terms with his new life.
Chapter 2
Olivia prowled around the back yard of the swanky town house, taking particular care to be quiet so the werewolf inside wouldn’t hear her. She tried to find a way in and cursed under her breath at being thwarted. Damn. Cops were the same world-over. This guy’s place was buttoned up tighter than the White House.
Or, since she was in London, maybe Buckingham Palace was a more appropriate analogy.
She’d already lost almost twenty-four hours of her seven-day reprieve getting from New York to London and waiting outside New Scotland Yard for a glimpse of DCI Sullivan and the chance to follow him home. He’d finally come out, looking as pissed as hell and, interestingly enough, flagged down a taxi instead of driving off in an unmarked police car as she’d thought he’d do.
She’d grabbed a taxi of her own and followed him, having the driver pull over a few houses up from where Sully got out. Thankfully Sully was so preoccupied with his current…predicament that he hadn’t noticed he’d been followed.
When she had first gotten out of the taxi she’d seen him glance her way. She’d quickly turned so he wouldn’t see her face, her heart beating fast. Her citrus-based perfume would mask her scent, so he wouldn’t be able to smell her as another werewolf.
She had to act like she belonged in the neighborhood, so she’d walked down the short sidewalk to a nearby town house as if it was hers—thankful no one poked their head out asking what she was about, loitering around their front door.
While they were both outside, her enhanced werewolf hearing had allowed her to listen in on his phone conversation, even from three doors down. As soon as she’d heard him making plans to leave the country, she knew she had to act.
If she didn’t get him now, she’d lose at least another day or two waiting to get him once he got to Arizona. She paused, peering into a downstairs window.
It looked like some sort of home office. A big mahogany desk took up one side of the room, a comfy sofa on the wall facing it, and book-lined shelves made of the same dark-hued wood. She didn’t know much about Rory Sullivan, but she recognized that he had money.
Hell, the fact that he lived in one of those old town houses made her think he had oodles of money. Probably old money, but who knew? There were a lot of nouveaux riches in the world these days, even with the uncertainties in the stock markets in the last couple years.
God, what would her life have been like had she had this kind of money? Instead of living in a modest apartment in the Bronx, she and Zoe might have been living large in the East Village or Gramercy. At the very least, she probably wouldn’t have been turned into a werewolf, so anything different would be an improvement.
Now’s not the time, Liv. She pushed away the feeling of despair at her current situation, remorse at what she was being forced to do—and, yes, jealousy at Sully’s good fortune—and focused once again on a way to get to him.
Thirty minutes later she heaved a sigh of defeat. She could break in, but he’d hear her and be prepared for a fight. Before, when he was human, she would have been twice as strong as him. If she hadn’t been interrupted by O’Connell, the job would have been finished in the Isles of Scilly. Without the element of surprise on her side, she had a slim-to-none chance of defeating him.
Now that he was a werewolf he was stronger and faster than her, so it would be better if she could avoid a fight. She couldn’t afford to be wounded—or worse. Zoe’s life depended on her mother murdering this man.
An innocent man. A good man.
Someone