Lewis deliberately didn’t look my way. There was a bitter sadness in those dark-chocolate eyes. “Oh, I realized,” he said. “What do you want me to say? That I loved her back? What difference does it make now?”
Shit. Djinn or not, that hit me in undefended places. If he’d said that even two weeks ago, things would be different now. Far different…
I felt David react, even across the room, and shifted my attention away from Lewis and Paul back toward the entrance, where David was standing. Still in human disguise, still gorgeous, but with the flaring powerful aura of a Djinn spreading around him like wings of fire. At first I thought it was a response to what Lewis had said, but no… There was somebody walking in front of him, drawing the full fury of his stare.
Not a Djinn, a woman. I didn’t know her. She was tall, leggy, wearing a dress that met only the most lax funeral style conventions—it was at least black— but I was pretty sure that not even I would have worn a low-cut, high-slit lace dress to somebody’s memorial service. I seriously envied the stiletto heels, though. They looked lethal.
Apart from that, she had cinnamon hair worn long and in loose waves, the kind of satiny sheen to it that you only get in commercials and very expensive salons. A face that blew past pretty on the expressway to beautiful. Wide-set eyes and a full-lipped, pouty mouth outlined in pearl pink shine. Her only jewelry was a diamond pendant that flashed to the power of at least a carat.
David looked ready to kill. In fact, I thought for a second he wasn’t going to drift out of her way as she walked forward—that would have been quite a shock for her, running into something that wasn’t there—but he moved at the last second and pivoted to follow her with eyes so bright and focused they should have set her hair on fire.
I didn’t need to make any pantomime to Lewis; he’d already seen the newcomer, and his face had gone… still. Expressionless. Paul turned to look, too.
“Gentlemen,” she said, and she had a soft Southern accent, made the word into a complicated, caressing drawl. “I was hoping to catch up to you, Paul.”
“Having a private moment here,” Paul said. His voice was flat, cold, not at all the warm purr he usually reserved for beautiful women. “Wait outside, will you?”
She was tough, I had to give her that. The warm, inviting smile didn’t waver. The big doe eyes—up close, they were a particularly interesting shade of moss green—took on a brighter shine. “All I want is a minute, Paul.”
“Can’t have it right now. Out.”
Lewis said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“And you’re not going to be,” Paul said flatly. “Yvette. Out.”
She held out a delicate, perfectly manicured hand to Lewis and notched the smile up another few degrees on the seduction scale. “Yvette Prentiss,” she said. “I work with Paul.”
“No, she works for Paul, and she’s not going to be working for Paul much longer if she doesn’t turn her ass around and march out of here.” Paul’s tone had gone dangerously dark, with a hard New York edge. “Get the point?”
“Sure.” She let her eyebrows form, a comment, lowered her hand and held the smile—and eye contact with Lewis—ten seconds too long for my comfort. “I’ll be outside, then.”
The two men watched her walk away, hips swaying, graceful and sleek and sexy. Paul’s expression was murderous. Lewis’s was still blank, like he’d been hit by a very large truck.
She passed within two inches of David, and I could see the effort it took him not to reach out and do something fatal to her.
Lewis asked, “Who the hell was that?”
Paul sighed. “Trust me. You really don’t want to know. And you really need to get the fuck out of here before somebody who knows your face takes a look in here. You’re just lucky she hasn’t got a frickin‘ clue who you are. Believe me, there are black widow spiders, and then there’s Yvette. She might be totally fuckable, but you probably wouldn’t survive the night.”
Guy talk. Jeez. What I’d missed when I’d been corporeal.
Lewis nodded, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and walked toward me. I stayed in his way, willing him to say something, anything. He adjusted course to miss me by an inch or so.
As he passed, he whispered, “Find me. We need to talk.”
I could tell you about the memorial service, but really, you know how it went. People got up, in varying degrees of discomfort, and said nice things about me. Some of them were actually heartfelt, like Paul’s; some were political correctness gone wild. I mean, to hear some of these people talk, I made Mother Teresa look self-centered. Truth was, I’d never been what you could call a saint—mouthy, attitude-challenged, headstrong, and with a love of the bad-girl side of life. Give me a choice between serving at the soup kitchen and a night slamming down tequila shots with hard-bodied guys, and I’d be reaching for the salt and lime every time.