Stone shook his head. He still looked shocked to Cassie.
“I will not know until I see it,” he said shortly. “I think we’d better get over there, Cassandra. Come on.”
Cassie sighed. It looked like Lady A would have to wait for another day. And yet, she was intrigued. Finally, after two whole years, it seemed like they had an interesting case. Not that she wanted anyone dead, but maybe there was an actual mystery involved here.
And she was determined that she and her partner were going to be the ones to solve it.
Three
“You drive. I need to think,” Stone said shortly as he folded his big body into the passenger side of the Kindred shuttle that doubled as his squad car. He’d brought the vehicle with him when he came from the Mother Ship to join the Tampa PD and had taught Cassie to drive it when she’d asked him to, even though it was against regulations.
Cassie had been secretly pleased that her seemingly silent and uptight partner was willing to bend the rules a little for her. It had been, she thought, the true start of their friendship.
Teaching her to drive the shuttle had been the start, but their friendship didn’t really take off until about six months into their partnership when her marriage had dissolved.
Not that the end of Cassie’s marriage was Stone’s fault. Part of it was about the long hours she was working and part of it, she suspected, was the fact that her ex-husband had been ridiculously jealous and controlling.
Keith hadn’t liked the idea of her riding around all day with a big, muscular, handsome Kindred, even though Cassie had explained over and over again that he was just a partner. Even if she had wanted to put the moves on Stone—which she told herself she most certainly didn’t—the big Kindred was way out of her league.
Not that she was bad looking. She had a pretty face—really pretty, some said—with big brown eyes and jet-black hair she wore in a tight French braid most of the time. She had good skin too—a smooth olive complexion she could attribute to her Italian grandmother. But that was where her prettiness ended—at least as far as Cassie was concerned. She had big hips and a wide behind and thighs that her ex, Keith had referred to as “tree trunks” when he was being especially cruel.
There was no getting around the fact that she was a curvy girl, which definitely disqualified her from the beauty queen circuit, while Stone looked like a Greek god descended from Olympus to grace the world with his presence. From his piercing eyes—a pale blue, ringed with black usually only seen in a Husky—to his classically handsome features, he was a catch. Which made it surprising that he was still single.
Cassie supposed it might be his distant, detached manner that kept her partner from “calling a bride,” which was what the Kindred called courtship and marriage. Stone could seem as cold and hard as…well, as a stone, if you didn’t know him. She’d seen girls who were initially attracted to his movie-star looks quickly repelled by the cold reception they received when they threw themselves at him. The big Kindred exuded an air of chilly austerity that froze everyone out.
Well, everyone but Cassie. Despite their differences, she had been determined to get to know her partner. She had been curvy all her life and she was comfortable in her skin and she also wasn’t shy about getting to know people. So she’d decided not to let her partner’s good looks and Spock-like inscrutability intimidate her. And little by little, her efforts had paid off.
Though Stone had been cool and distant when they were first assigned to each other, he had slowly warmed to her. After Keith was out of the picture, he seemed to loosen up—at least around her. It was as though he finally gave himself permission to like her as a person and not just a partner.
In fact, at one point right after her divorce, she’d almost thought he was attracted to her. That had been foolishness, of course—just wishful thinking on her part. She’d been emotionally vulnerable at the time and she knew it, so she’d drawn back a bit, cautioning herself not to ruin their relationship by reading more into it than was actually there.
There was no doubt her partner was devastatingly attractive and she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t had at least a little crush on him at one time—which was completely over now, Cassie hastened to assure herself. But when you added sex to a friendship, it almost always ruined the friendship, as she knew from past experience. So it was much better to just stay friends and partners that to try and bring romance into the mix.
Stone seemed to feel the same because shortly after Cassie’s divorce, they had finally reached a happy medium and settled into a friendly routine. Cassie was glad her new partner had allowed his icy veneer to melt for her. After all, she didn’t want to marry him or even date him, she told herself, she just wanted to know she could trust him to get her back in a tight spot. And she wanted Stone to feel the same way about her.
Now, after two years together on the ‘HKR Crew’ as the rest of the PD called their unit, they were more than partners—they were best friends. They spent most of their free time together—going to concerts or movies or just relaxing at home. They would order a pizza or one of them would cook a favorite dish for the other from their home world.
Stone called this their “cultural cuisine exchange program” which cracked Cassie up. It had surprised her to find out he knew how to cook but Stone had assured her it was an important skill for a Kindred warrior.
“When I Claim the female the Goddess has chosen for me, I’ll need to be able to cook for her and serve her what she likes to eat,” he had told her. “My mother taught me to cook as soon as I was old enough to stand in the food-prep area beside her, banging a tonsa fork on a volcanic cooking rock.”
Whoever he cooked for would be one lucky girl, Cassie thought, though the idea of Stone going off and marrying some strange woman always gave her a hollow feeling in her chest. She selfishly hoped he wouldn’t find the one the “Goddess had chosen for him” anytime soon. After all, how could her partner and best friend come over for movie night or go out with her to concerts if he had a wife?
Answer: he couldn’t. But so far it wasn’t a problem because of all the women that threw themselves at him—and there were plenty—he had never shown the slightest interest in a single one. So they were safe for now.
But because she knew Stone so well, Cassie could tell when something was bothering him. And right now the silence coming from the other side of the shuttle-car spoke volumes to her.
“Hey, partner?” Reaching over, she put a comforting hand on his knee. “You all right? You’re awfully quiet over there.”
“I am just thinking.” Stone’s deep voice was a troubled-sounding rumble. He looked up at her from the dispatch he was still studying. “The perpetrator cannot be a Kindred. It is simply not in the realm of possibility.”
“Why, Mr. Spock—would that be illogical?” Though Stone looked nothing like the famous Vulcan—well, maybe a little around the eyebrows—Cassie liked to tease him that, when he got serious, Stone talked like him.
But the big Kindred didn’t even crack a smile. If anything, his expression became even more troubled.
“You know it would be. No Kindred would ever hurt a female—let alone kill one. It would be sacrilege.”