Julie Leto - Stripped

He heard her close the door. Her stiletto heels clicked across the terrazzo floor but stopped their ominous tattoo when she reached the edge of his desk. A desk he liked in an office he liked—all courtesy of a job he liked. A job he’d devoted his life to since trading his college degree in criminology and four years’ service in the military police for a badge emblazoned with the City of Chicago’s official seal.

A job he might have been kissing goodbye right now if the chief of police didn’t owe him for saving his life once.

“So got any ass left for me?” Lilith asked.

Mac shifted uncomfortably in his seat and opened one eye halfway. “Let’s just say it’s a miracle I’m sitting.”

“Chief chewed off all that prime meat?”

“And spit it out right in my face.”

She leaned forward on her hands, her green eyes twinkling with carnal knowledge. “Then I’m glad I had a chance to check your butt out earlier, before there was nothing left to see.”

“I thought you hated my guts.”

She snickered. “Takes too much energy to hate. It’s much more fun to hang around the people you’re pissed at and make their lives miserable.”

The tease in her voice should have annoyed him, but Lilith’s laugh never failed to remind him that life wasn’t over just because some perp got off or the new mayor was using Mac to show the rest of the force what a tough guy he was. Or that a woman he once thought he loved believed him to be an asshole.

Not that he blamed her. He’d acted like a first-class bastard when he’d realized she possessed a power he couldn’t wrap his just-the-facts mind around. Even now, resentment burbled in his belly because she’d used her natural advantages to coil him tightly around her finger. He’d been blindsided by her true abilities, even though she’d assured him from the start that her powers were real.

But when the truth had finally sunk in, he’d said things no man should ever say to a woman. His guilt was lessened only by the fact that she’d shot back with venom of her own—venom that stung. Venom he’d deserved.

Mac crossed his arms over his chest and balanced his heels on the stack of reports he should complete within the hour.

“Well, you’ve succeeded. I’m officially miserable. Is that why you didn’t warn me Boothe Thompson was about to blow my interrogation?” he asked, ignoring how delectable she looked in skintight, painted-on jeans and one of those flimsy blouses that made no secret of the curves underneath.

She stood her ground. “Didn’t know it was my day to keep defense attorneys from doing their jobs.”

“Pogo Goins never asked for his attorney.”

“Then why was Thompson at the precinct?”

Mac shrugged. “Followed an ambulance in? I forgot to ask.”

“Yeah, you were too busy assaulting him,” she replied, and not surprisingly, he heard no chastisement in her voice. Except for criminal types, anyone with a brain knew in less than ten minutes that Boothe Thompson was a creep.

“Well, it’s one way to relieve stress,” he said.

She pushed Mac’s feet aside and settled onto the corner of his desk, her feet dangling in impossibly sexy high-heeled boots. “Not to mention end a career. What exactly happened in the chief’s office? Beyond the rending of gluteus flesh.”

Mac kicked off his desk, rolling backward in his chair before her increasingly alluring scent stole his ability to think. The exotic spices counteracted the effects of the aspirin he’d choked down in anticipation of writing the report of the incident that had left Boothe Thompson with a bruise on his chin and Mac with his ass in a sling.

“Same old warnings and ultimatums,” he replied. The lie tasted natural on his tongue, which worried him even more.

“You suspended?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you expect to be?”

This time her voice had sharpened with the sound of outrage. Great. Just what he needed. A loudmouthed ex-lover who would relish a chance to march into the chief of police’s office and give him a piece of her mind on Mac’s behalf. Or maybe she’d make sure his possible suspension turned into a permanent firing. With Lilith, he never could tell.

“Look, it’s been a kick seeing you again, and if not for the interruption, your help might have scored us the information we needed, but I have to get this newly flattened backside to work while I still have a job. I’m sure you have…I don’t know…palms to read somewhere.”

“That’s the best thank you I’m going to get, isn’t it?” she asked. “And for the last time, I’m out of business.”

“Then maybe we’ll soon finally have something in common,” he replied. He grabbed the corner of the report and tugged, but the paper didn’t budge, securely held down by her curvaceous backside—a backside she gave him a delicious view of when she shifted to release his paperwork.

Her mouth, so sensually shaped and enhanced by her dark burgundy lip gloss, dropped open. “Something in common beyond an insatiable need for hot, sweaty sex?”

Despite the instantaneous spike in his temperature, Mac snorted. “We don’t even have that anymore.”

“That was your decision,” she responded, taking the opportunity at their proximity to slide her dark-red-tipped finger across the path from the monogrammed police logo on his polo shirt to the base of his throat.

“You gave me no choice,” he said, gazing straight into her eyes, daring her to contradict him.

As if she needed a dare.

“You always have a choice.”

He leaned closer and instinctively breathed in the scents he’d forever associate with the red sheer curtains, silk sheets and gold satin pillows of her bedroom. “Did you have a choice to be a psychic?”

She pressed her lips tightly together. “At first, no.”

His mouth dried. “And now?”

Her lip quirked up, bringing the tiny scar on her cheek into sharp relief against her ivory skin. “I’m working on it.”

When a jolt of hope shot through him, Mac stepped back. This relationship could not be renewed. Not when he and Lilith were so diametrically opposed in every aspect of their lives they might as well have hailed from different planets. “What does that mean?”

In a quick move, she stood and charged toward the door. “Never mind. Look, don’t call me again, okay? I’m not the w-woman I used to be. I can’t help you anymore.”

Mac narrowed his gaze. He might not have psychic powers, but he’d managed enough interrogations to know when someone he’d once been close to was both uncomfortable with the subject matter and…lying? Lilith? She broke rules, defied conventions and generally caused consternation among any group that demanded adherence to a certain code of behavior, but she never lied.

At least not to him. With him she’d always told him the truth. Unfortunately what he’d chosen to believe of that truth had ultimately caused the destruction of their affair.

“Lilith, what aren’t you telling me?”

She stopped at the door, startled. “I’m not telling you a whole hell of a lot. You see, when you call a girl a freak and then bolt out of her bed as if the sheets are on fire, you pretty much lose your right to be a confidant.”

Ouch.

“I deserve that,” he admitted.

“Damn straight you do!”

“I’m sorry.”

Lilith opened her mouth, stopped, then popped her lips closed.

Mac shoved his hands into his pockets. Those words, hard as they were to say, were woefully overdue.

For a split second her gaze softened. But before she could respond, his office door banged open, nearly knocking her against the wall.

“What the fu—”

The mayor, the newly elected Perkins Dafoe, gave her a quick and startled glance, then dismissed her. Okay. So she didn’t exactly look like a typical voter. Not with that bloodred lipstick and pentagram charm dangling between her generous breasts. But Lilith didn’t cotton to blatant disrespect.