He swiped my lower lip with his thumb before kissing me. "I don't know how I'm going to concentrate today. You're driving me crazy."
"Then I guess I better cross my afternoon plans to text you dirty pictures off my list," I teased.
The mischievous glint in his hazel eyes made me smile. "I suppose that means my plans to sext you are off the table too."
I giggled and kissed him. "Sadly, yes."
With his hand tangled in my hair, he said, "When you're done running your errands, take Jake to your apartment and get your things. You can have that side of the closet."
My eyes widened with surprise. I convinced myself he was thinking only of the short-term and didn't dare let myself think that he meant anything else. "Thank you. That will be much more convenient." I glanced at the wide open space he'd offered. "I'll only need a few things to tide me over until my dad is free and I'm off house arrest."
His piercing gaze seared me. "You may as well bring it all. If I have my way, you're never getting off house arrest."
Uncertain how to respond to such a bold statement, I reached for the tie that had been forgotten in our passionate tryst. Looping it around his neck, I whispered, "We'll see."
His mouth curved in a sinfully sexy grin. "Yes, we will."
Chapter Twelve
"Have you read this one?" Erin flashed a high-octane thriller at me.
I shook my head and took the book from her. "Not yet, but it looks good."
"I'm just not into the thrillers and science fiction like Ivan." She added the book to her towering pile. "I like my urban fantasy and paranormal romances. Space travel and all that science bore me to death. Serial killers and terrorists and bomb plots?" She shivered. "Not my thing."
"I like the fast-paced reads." I made a mental note to pick up a digital copy of that thriller later. "They're exciting."
"I prefer a different kind of exciting." She sidled closer and bumped me with her hip. "Speaking of…how did it go last night?"
"You mean before my cousin broke in, tried to steal Yuri's painting and got mauled by a dog the size of a grizzly bear?"
Erin winced. "Yeah. That's pretty awful but I think I probably have you beat when it comes to home invasions. Ivan fought off two armed thugs with his bare hands while I hid in a closet. I'd take a huge dog and two bodyguards any day."
She had a point. "I guess Benny really wins, though. Dimitri fought off, like, five guys and got stabbed and shot in the process. They even burned down her bakery."
"She's pretty kickass though. She had a baseball bat and took out, like, three of those guys. Me? I curled into a ball and pretended I was invisible."
I shook my head. "Man, we have had some terrible luck this year. Maybe we should get smudged or something. We need to get rid of this bad juju that's following us around."
"Right?" Erin laughed and plucked another book off the shelf. She added it to the growing pile in her arms and nearly dropped all the books when the weight shifted.
"Why don't you just get him an ereader for his birthday?" I took half of her armload.
"He doesn't like them. His library collection is so incredibly valuable to him. When he was a child, reading was the way he escaped from the hell of his everyday life." She touched the tower of books in her arms. "These are comforting to him."
I trailed her to the long line snaking around the front of the book store. Even though Yuri had suggested a book for Ivan, I decided to choose something else. Erin had bought half the store anyway so he'd be set for books for a while. I thought about the trip Yuri was planning to gift them. A nifty idea started to sprout.
"So how was Benny this morning?"
"Puking," I said with a grimace. "It seems she's getting hit a little harder with morning sickness. Remind me never to get pregnant," I added with a shudder.
"Poor thing." Erin made a sad face. "We should put together a small gift basket for her. We'll tuck in some ginger ale and crackers plus some nice feel-good stuff so Dimitri can pamper her."
"That's a sweet idea. I'll see if Vivian wants to go in on it with us."
"Did I tell you that Ivan sat for her last week?"
"No. How did it go?"
"He was nervous about showing his tattoos to someone other than me. I think it was even harder for him because Vivian can read all of them and she knows so much of the symbolic history behind them. She made him very comfortable and it didn't take long. She only snapped a handful of photographs, all from the neck down, and then she was done with him."
"Yuri is supposed to drop by her studio this afternoon. His sitting won't take long." I touched my chest. "He only has one tattoo."
"Really? Just one?"
I nodded. "He seems downright conservative compared to Ivan and Nikolai."
"Vivian still hasn't told Nikolai about the series she's doing. She specifically asked Ivan not to mention it. I could tell it made him uneasy but he agreed." She eyed me carefully. "Do you know why she's being so secretive about it with Nikolai? I don't think she's ever kept anything from him."
"She tried talking to him about his tattoos when she first became interested in them but he shut her down like hardcore. It rattled her badly and she's never brought the subject up with him again." I let loose a sigh. "She knows that he's going to flip his lid when he finds out what she's been doing."
Erin looked worried. "Do you think he'll get angry with her?"
I shrugged. "Will he grouch at her? Probably. But Nikolai get angry with Vivian?" I laughed. "Please!"
"True. He's almost as bad as Ivan when it comes to me." Her gaze jumped to the entrance of the bookstore. Stepping toward me, she hurriedly whispered, "Detective Santos is headed this way."
"What?" I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see the dark-haired detective step through the crowd of teenage girls lusting over a mountain of werewolf romance paperbacks. "Shit."
Detective Eric Santos, a member of Houston's gang unit and Vivian's cousin, sauntered toward me. He smiled pleasantly. "Hello."
"Hi," we replied in unison.
"Lena, when you're done here, would you mind if we had a quick chat?"
"Not at all," I said with a smile.
"Great. I'll grab a coffee and wait for you."
I kept that smile plastered in place until he'd turned his back. Looking toward Erin, I let it slip. "Now what?"
"Just talk to him. He's a good guy."
"Yuri was really specific about not letting anyone know about my dad. I got the feeling the negotiations Nikolai had undertaken on his behalf were contingent on keeping the police out of it."
"We're just having coffee at a bookstore with our friend's cousin. It's no big deal."
I scanned the bookstore and found Jake hovering nearby. In the span of a few hours, I'd become shockingly accustomed to Yuri's bodyguard shadowing me. Our gazes met across the store. He glanced at Eric Santos and then back at me. I gave a little shrug to let him know I didn't have a choice.