"So this is your infamous partner." Once more, Anna Mei's jade eyes caught him in some invincible net. Crook felt the sound all over his skin, like gently travelling fingernails. "I was beginning to think you made him up."
Crook knew he was supposed to say something. He tried not to look at her prominent cleavage and the obvious swells of her breasts, failed, then managed to gather himself enough to extend his hand and say, "Crook Kingsman. Nice... uh... to meet you."
Anna's dark eyebrows lifted and she took his hand confidently into hers. When her fingertips brushed against his signet ring, she didn't jerk away, but she sure as hell let go in a hurry. As the gold band warmed and vibrated against his finger, her open, curious expression turned shrewd then guarded, and those relentless green eyes seemed to drill into his every essence. Crook leaned back before he caught himself, straightened up, and returned her stare.
She knows, he told himself, and the thought made his chest tight.
Since his grandmother died when he was a teenager, the only living soul who knew about Crook's true nature was the man who shared it-his twin brother Dominic- and he hadn't seen Dominic in five years.
But she knows.
The beast inside him - the other- stirred in response to the threat, but Crook forced it down with a ferocious inner snarl. Anna flinched as if she heard the sound. For a long second, her eyes blazed. Her hands twitched as if they wanted to grab for weapons.
Crook actually found himself glancing at the ample curves of the woman's hips for purely self-protective reasons. No holster. No unsightly bulges. His gaze travelled to her boots. Could be daggers in there, he supposed, but he could move faster than daggers.
Andy(Andrea's nickname) seemed cheerfully unaware of the tense undercurrent. When Anna mei stepped aside to let them in, Andy bustled past her without hesitation. Crook clenched his fists, feeling the warm, sharp pressure of his signet ring. The weird vibrating had stopped. Still, he didn't want to walk past Anna Mei and enter her sanctuary. Everything inside him, especially the other, screamed for him to back away, to leave this woman as he found her.
Her crystalline green gaze intensified, and her mouth opened slightly again, daring him to come inside and daring him to flee at the same time. She knew what he was, potentially dangerous- and she didn't care. Not even a little bit.
Who is she, really? What is she?
There it was again. That same dare in her expression. Come in, Crook Kingsman. Find out for yourself.
He felt his lips curl at the challenge.
A split second later, he drew even with her and paused to drink in her heady aroma of fresh rain and lavender. Then he moved past her into possibly the strangest room he had ever seen. The only normal things in the room, in fact, were the doors at the back and sides, and the broad staircase on the right, leading into dark reaches if the brownstone. Competing aromas blended, sage, he knew that one. And jasmine and vanilla and something like cherries or apples, all light, all swirling to form an unusually pleasant departure from the typical antiquated must of most old dwellings.
Andy had already flopped down on a comfortable looking overstuffed sofa, camel-colored and covered with mahogany pillows. Foour matching chairs formed a circle in front of the couch. A massive oak table sat dead center in the circle, laden with papers,pens,plates and cups, a couple of incense burners,two socks, one blouse, a nylon footie and a high heeled shoe. A red one. Crook could just make out that the knee-high table's edge was actually a carved lip with a trench in it, lined with what looked like silver or lead.
Damn. That table's big enough to hold a dance contest. But it weighs like a bastard too.
There was no other furniture save for a few musical instruments leaning against the back walls. The walls themselves were covered with various antique mirrors hung at seemingly random heights, interspersed with spare sculptures that looked like Slavic runes. Wind chimes dangled from the ceiling. A lot of wind chimes of different sizes and lengths, but all the metal-pipe kind, some silver, some coppery-looking, and one, up near the door, a bright polished bronze. The bronze chime danced in the light breeze flowing through the front door, sounding again like distant church bells.
Crook studied the wind chimes and the instruments, and thought he recognised the prominent body, intricate markings, and distinctive drone string and handle of a real koliosnaya lira, also called a Russian hurdy-gurdy. The thing functioned a little like mandolin combined with a bass guitar, as far as he could remember from the few times he had heard one played. Olympic god's might have played it, and if he wasn't mistaken, the third instrument was a good-sized Celtic harp. His eyes almost watered as he imagined the unusual noise all three would make in combination with the wind chimes.
As Anna closed the front door, the bronze chime rang again and the door at the back of the room sprang open. In came two more women. The first had hair as red as Andy's and legs almost as long as Anna's. She seemed taller because of the spiked heels she wore, along with tight fitting leather pants and a loose white tunic shirt. She came into the room, she pulled back her hair, fastened it into a ponytail with a leather tie, and slowed to stare at Crook. The second woman was a little shorter but no less fit, with cropped blond hair and bare feet showing beneath the frayed cuffs on her jeans. She held a bag of potato chips and a bunch of soft drink cans crashed against her black sweater. She,too, stopped to stare at Crook.
He had the uncomfortable sense of being probbed and dissected. Both women narrowed their eyes. Their gazes moved from his face downward to the signet ring, which once more decided to quiver.
Christ. What is this, psychic central?
Was he sweating yet? Damn them. Damn Andy! What had she gotten him into.
"Anna's cousins," Andy announced. "I told you before, remember? The redhead's Samantha and the blond is Riego. Sam and Riego, this is my partner, Crook Kingsman."
The women nodded at him in eerie unison, as if they were accustomed to acting and moving in concert.
He returned the gesture, wishing he'd stayed in bed, wishing he'd never come to work, wishing he'd tied Andy up and stuffed her up in a locker instead of letting her drag him to this bizzare brownstone full of -of whatever these women were.
""Sit down,Crook," came Anna's low, sexy voice from too close behind him. "We don't bite."
He turned slowly to the beautiful woman with the bright jade eyes and let his expression say it all.
Yea. Right. Not yet.
She didn't smile at him, but he thought he saw the barest shadow of mirth cross her hard-to-read features. His body responded so fasthe almost couldn't stop a menacing growl. As it was, his senses flared, showing him the brilliant colours of Anna's natural energy. Lavender like her scent, and powerful. God. He had never seen such a halo around a human before. He wanted to touch it, thought it might feel solid. Hell, he wanted to touch her. Wanted to see if her skin felt as soft as it looked, if her lips were that full and moist. Blood thrummed in his ears. His cock got hard in record time, and he had to close his eyes and think of his grandmother's smile before things got totally out of hand.
By the time he positioned himself beside Andy on the couch, hoping in the distant reaches of his mind that she would shoot her friends to protect her partner if necessary. Sam and Riego had joined them around the table. Riego dropped the chips in the middle of the table mess, then distributed soft drinks to everyone but Crook. She gave him a guarded but apologetic look, gestured to the cans, and started to ask if she should get him one, but he shook his head.
Meanwhile, Sam shoved the show and socks and footie onto the floor beside her chair, along with the bunch of the maps and diagrams. Crook caught a glimpse of what looked like sketches of hallways and doorways arranged in a vaguely familiar pattern before Sam pushed the farther away to make room for some dirty dishes. He was tempted to let the other come out forward a little bit, to risk a few seconds of reduced control in order to get more information off that scrap of paper, but one look at the array of women staring at him killed that idea in a hurry. He settled for committing the ideas to memory, along with the rune sculptures between the ancient-looking mirrors, and some of the odd designs carved into the mirror frames themselves.
Anna kept up her determined surveillance. Crook fiddled with his ring but refused to shift under the woman's fierce gaze as Andy moved aside some candles and notebooks to spread out the photos from her folders.