Must Love Hellhounds

tell the demon we were coming.”
    No, he wasn’t cold. He was close, and he was pissed, and she could feel the heat coming off him as well as she could the sun. Sweat trickled down her back, between her breasts.
    Maggie glanced at Sir Pup. “Follow him. Detain him gently . But don’t let the demon see you.”
    White still edged Geoff’s mouth, but color was returning to the rest of his face. A breeze pushed at his dark hair and cooled the back of her neck. “What was that, Maggie?”
    “He’s bound to help the demon. I won’t force him to break his bargain and damn him to Hell.” She had a feeling James was doing a good job of getting there on his own. “But if he’s heading back to tell the demon—to help the demon—and Sir Pup prevents him from getting there . . .”
    “He doesn’t break it.”
    “Exactly.”
    She turned toward the parking lot. Geoff caught her arm. “And the rest?”
    Langan, Stafford. Kill orders that Langan must have known would never be completed. And the certainty that she had narrowly escaped the trap James was ensnarled in now.
    “I . . . can’t,” she said. “I can’t think of it now. It’s too much, it’s too big. Maybe after we get Katherine.” She closed her eyes. “And for just one moment I need to . . . this.”
    She leaned in, buried her face in his throat. Tension held Geoff stiff for a second before his arms slid around her.
    “I’m tired,” she admitted, and let herself rest against him. Not physical exhaustion. Emotional. As if she’d been slowly wrung out since receiving that e-mail. “I haven’t been this tired since I left the agency.”
    His voice was a soothing rumble against her cheek. “We’ll be finished soon.”
    “Yes.” She stepped back. Her hand drifted down his arm until her fingers linked with his. Then she let her hand drop back to her side. “We need to go.”

Chapter Eight

    Maggie drove just above the speed limit, her gaze constantly returning to the device tracking Sir Pup’s location. He and James weren’t too far ahead—but not, Maggie had said, so close that James would spot their vehicle.
    Geoff nodded, casting ahead in an attempt to find Sir Pup, and was surprised when she admitted, “It’s almost a relief. To know I was wrong about him.”
    She’d said that she couldn’t talk about it yet, that it was too much. But maybe, Geoff thought, too much not to. At least a bit. “Wrong, how? The kill order was a setup.”
    “Yes. That’s not what I—Not exactly.” She checked Sir Pup’s position, still on a steady course north. “I was afraid I’d have to choose.”
    “Choose what?”
    “I didn’t know.” He heard the long, shaky breath she drew. Saw her hand make an open gesture, grasping at air. “Choose something . Something that would turn out to be karma coming back to bite me on the ass. Something that meant I wouldn’t be going back home.”
    Home. She glanced over at him, and he wondered if she saw his face. If she knew what she was looking at when she did.
    “But now,” she continued, “I feel I’ve done what I could for him. And the rest isn’t my choice, or my responsibility.”
    Geoff didn’t point out that it never had been. Saying it wouldn’t mean she hadn’t felt it hanging over her head.
    “Anyway.” She took another of those long breaths, but this was deep, steady. “I don’t feel so tired now. Thank you.”
    Surprise shot through him again. “What for?”
    “For caring.” She searched his features, and this time he was certain she saw. “Don’t get careless, though. Or do anything stupid. And I won’t, either.”
    She was in an emotionally weak moment. It was probably unfair to press her now. “After we retrieve Katherine, I want a week with you. Or two. Time set aside every evening. Even if we’ll do nothing more than sit in your garden.”
    “I killed all of my flowers trying to discover if I had a green thumb.”
    “I’ll not look at them if you don’t.”
    The mirror caught the corner of her smile. “All right.”
    He should have asked for a month. Geoff pushed ahead, found a driver, went farther—slipping into more than thirty people before the world exploded around him in sharp, brilliant detail. Each flap of a bumblebee’s iridescent wings as it flew past Sir Pup. Minute particles swirling from mufflers, the pits in the pavement rushing beneath his feet.
    His head began to throb, but he didn’t want to lose the connection. Narrowing his own focus on the