Unassailable: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #5 (The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist) Read online

  “No,” she insisted, effectively heading off my reconstruction of the two times I had caught them mid-bone in my office supply closet. “He wanted to know where you were…but I didn’t, didn’t—”

  I held the phone away from my ear as she squealed through another ecstatic shout and crossed my legs, tucking the edge of my sarong tight beneath my knees.

  “Consequently, how did you know where I was? I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.”

  “Your pad. Last page. You wrote Hilton Head. Doodled a frame around it. I didn’t have time to call around, so I—”

  She was speaking of the ubiquitous pad I kept balanced on the arm of the overstuffed leather chair where I sat to receive the collective woes of my clients. Though I was loath to admit it, said pad often collected just as much of the unconscious static crackling through my own head.

  “You hired a crop duster to come hunt me down because Crixus wanted to find me?”

  “Not. Exactly.”

  “What exactly?”

  “When I wouldn’t tell him where you were, he started calling your clients…scheduling…appointments.”

  “What?” My face felt as if a bed of needles had come to rest on it. Heated blood burned into my cheeks. “Crixus is seeing my clients?”

  “Yes!” In her present fervor, I couldn’t be sure if Julie was answering my question or merely shouting out her own ecstasy.

  Panic descended into my gut with the weight of a stone. True, some of my clients had been his clients first. Beings he had dragged into my office for therapy to avoid an impending cataclysmic collision between our two worlds.

  But others. Others were depressed, fragile, anxious, people from every walk of life. I was particularly concerned for my female clients as Crixus’s idea of healing mostly involved getting naked and sweaty.

  The thought of these people across the coffee table from a capricious demigod as likely to hand them a bottle of Jack Daniels and tell them to suck someone off as to attempt any sound therapeutic advice sent cold fear trickling down my neck.

  “Julie, how did he get my client list?” I steeled myself against a revelation that placed Crixus beneath the Julie’s desk, doing things with his tongue that would loosen hers indefinitely. True, the demigod could read thoughts on occasion—when he was in range and not distracted by other pursuits. But even if he had gleaned from the sparkly pink wonderland hiding behind Julie’s eyes where the list was, he would still have to access her computer to get it.

  Crixus was capable of many things, but thus far, taking what he wanted by force wasn’t part of his repertoire. Even in the face of ample provocation on my part.

  “He’s…he’s making me…”

  “He’s doing the spontaneous orgasm thing again, isn’t he?” I had been the recipient and benefactor of this particular talent more times than I had pencil skirts in my one-bedroom apartment back in New York. It was one of the side effects of materializing—Crixus’s preferred method of travel when his Harley was stashed somewhere—they might put on the warning label for humans hitching a supernatural ride. Right next to may cause your eyeballs to eject from their sockets and some users report feelings of having passing through a soup strainer made of razor wire.

  “Yes! Oh my God, yes, yes yes!”

  “Put him on the phone, Julie.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  “I can’t walk.” I heard a sound that may have been her gripping the desk for support.

  “That’s going to be a serious impediment when you have to look for another job.”

  “Crixus!” Julie’s scream was far too much like a bedroom battle cry for my comfort. “Dr. Schmidt…wants you!”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Just this handful of words was enough send my pulse racing south. Arrogant and cockier than a rooster convention, Crixus had a voice so resonant it could melt a diamond on a cold day. His first phone call to me—a late night affair that had me peeling my sheets from my skin—had booted my world off its axis with the ease of a soccer ball.

  I decided a tone similar to the one I employed that night was in order: clipped, professional, with just a hint of irritation to underscore my general feeling of put-outed-ness.

  “Crixus, what the hell do you think—”

  “Did you marry the hit man?” The direct, brusque interrogation stopped my words as effectively as a concrete wall.

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach, leaving a bottomless black hole I wished I could likewise disappear into.

  Somewhere in the background, Julie made a sound that suggested she might have just been slugged in the kidneys with a baseball bat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. Did you marry the hit man? Yes or no.”

  “No.” The answer shot from my lips in reflex.

  “So you’re not married to him?” His voice betrayed something like relief.

  “Technically—”

  “You married a man who kills people for a living? What the fuck were you thinking? And when were you going to mention this?”

  Never. I had kind of hoped it would be annulled before it became a relevant point. “It’s not what you think.” If I had a rock handy, I might have tenderized my own skull with it at that moment. Such a lame, predictable rejoinder left me feeling like someone coated the soles of my sandals with axle grease and set me on an incline.

  “Doctor, I’ve been alive two thousand one hundred and nineteen years. When I say I’ve heard it all, I mean twice.”

  “Liam filed the paperwork, okay? It’s something he does when a… job requires that he gather information not accessible to the general public. ” I myself had only learned of my marital status according to Liam’s home territory of Davis County, Nevada, a week earlier and hadn’t yet confirmed the requested annulment had been seen to.

  “A job. How could I forget? That’s how you entered his orbit in the first place. He was going to sell you to a mob gangster.”

  “But he didn’t go through with it.” I slid a good twenty feet down the incline. Echoes of domestic counseling courses I had taken rolled through my head.

  He also moved my mother beyond the reach of a blackmailer, I reminded myself. One who, as far as I knew, would even now be searching for a new and increasingly painful way to get at me.

  “He didn’t go through with it,” Crixus mimicked. “How fucking romantic. No wonder you gave it up to him in a scabby motel shower less than twenty-four hours after he kidnapped you.”

  My cheeks stung like they’d been slapped from the inside. “Do I need to remind you who was diddling my assistant in the supply closet while I was abducted at gunpoint and shot full of animal tranquilizers? The same assistant you are now employing sexual torture to extract information from.”

  The memory ate an acid channel down my nerves.

  “Where are you?”

  “Changing the subject. How original. Does the truth bother you that much, or have you just run out of material after shoving people around like chess pieces for a couple millennia?”

  The second the words left my lips, I longed to spool them back. We were racing toward an ugly collision, fueled by months of unspoken resentments and unanswered questions. The metaphysical fallout threatened to tip what was left of my normal life like a toy boat in a tsunami.

  “Where are you?” he repeated.

  Even for one whose livelihood depended on being attuned to the difference between fear and anger, depression and despair, Crixus was notoriously difficult to read.

  Not now.

  Now, the desperation in his voice sent a jolt of electricity searing through my middle. But what was driving it? Arousal? Anger? Jealousy?

  “On vacation.”

  “You don’t want to play cute with me, Doctor. I’m not sure how many more Julie can stand.”

  Julie howled an auditory example from the background.

  “For God’s sake, Crixus—”

  “Tell me w
here you are.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “Tell me where you are, and I’ll stop.”

  “Why the hell do you need to know?”

  “Do you have some leverage I’m unaware of? Because otherwise, I think the only questions being answered in this conversation are mine.”

  This ruthless streak made Crixus’s past as a gladiator all too believable. I had encountered it before when he had insisted on trading a night in my bed for his help locating gold I had been accused of stealing from an Irish gang.

  He had showed up to collect, but barely slid the straps of my nightgown from my shoulders when Zeus summoned him away from my bedside. The state of this unpaid debt had been a matter of contention for him ever since.

  “What’s it going to be, Doctor?”

  I floundered between concern for Julie and the selfish desire to hang on to just a few more moments of solitude. Anger roiled in my empty stomach. I resented him for forcing me to make this choice. “I just need some space, okay? Can’t you just give me a few days to collect myself and regroup?”

  “Who’s next on the schedule, Julie?” Crixus asked, speaking away from the phone’s receiver.

  “It’s ah ah a-Allan Grier!”

  The name punctured my cultivated calm like a flaming arrow. “Not Allan Grier! He has a messiah complex! Last time he tried to walk on water, he nearly drowned. They had to fish him out of Lake Champlain.”

  “I’m sure we can track down a life vest. It might be good for him to learn his own limits. What do you think, Julie? Should I go ahead and see him?”

  “Yes!” Her scream had the sharp, ragged edge of a saw. “Please,” she begged. “No more.”

  “Hilton Head!” I blurted out. Julie’s exhausted sigh of relief drew out in the silence following my admission. In my mind’s eye, I could see the blond curls stuck to her face with sweat. “I’m in Hilton Head at the Inn on the Hill bed and breakfast. But Crixus—” The words tumbled out of me in a desperate rush. I looked down at my half naked body, knowing Crixus would have it all the way naked less than thirty seconds after materializing into my presence. My heart tripped at the thought. “Can you give me an hour? Just an hour. That’s all I ask.”

  “An hour? That’s all?”

  “That, and under no circumstances will you talk to Allan Grier,” I amended.

  “How am I supposed to pass the hour then?”

  I took a deep breath and lowered my voice in volume and in register. “Use your imagination.”

  *****

  Captain Cruelcock dove into the steaming bathwater, the book launching from my hands at the eardrum-slamming pop announcing Crixus’s arrival in my bathroom.

  One minute I had been alone, submerged in the warmth of a claw-footed tub, soaking in a lavender-scented bubble bath, and the next, all the molecules shifted to make room for the six-foot-and-then-some demigod standing between the towel rack and me.

  “I said an hour!” Shocked, sputtering, smearing yet more bubbles on my glasses as I tried to wipe spots off the lenses with an already-wet hand, I searched in vain for anything I could use to cover myself.

  “Allow me.” Crixus plucked the glasses from my face and used the edge of his black T-shirt to wipe them free of bubbles. From my vantage point, I could see up the gap to the shadowed lines of his abdominal muscles. What my blurred vision couldn’t make out, the palms of my hands still remembered.

  “Who wears glasses in the bathtub?” he asked through lips tugging up at one corner as if snagged by a fisherman’s hook.

  I sank down in the tub until the bubbles rested under my chin and my knees poked up in twin islands. “Someone who can’t read without them.”

  Eyes bluer than the sea I had just abandoned skimmed the surface of the water like they could already see all that was submerged beneath. His hair was the color of sand dunes shaded by storm clouds, his smooth skin a bronze that suggested the sun worshipped him, rather than the other way around.

  “And what would Matilda Schmidt, Ph.D., Psy. D., be reading on her vacation? Surely not any of the fascinating tomes lining the bookshelves of your office.” He pronounced the word fascinatingwith the same excitement most people attached to the word vivisection.

  “I’ll have you know Kraeplin’s Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia is the seminal volume—”

  Crixus held up one palm and settled onto the edge of the tub. “We’re on vacation, Doctor. Can we leave the clinical terms in your luggage?” He replaced the glasses on my face, his hands radiating warmth into my temples.

  He came into focus all at once, his perfection almost too much to bear when assembled so close and so suddenly.

  I was certain he saw my throat work over a swallow. “We’re on vacation?”

  The same hand he’d held up to silence me dipped below the bathwater. My stomach shuddered as his knuckles slid between my knees. Instead of continuing higher, he seized something and drew it to the water’s surface.

  My book.

  Crixus squeezed the dripping pages closed and consulted the cover. Cunning Captain Cruelcock, soggy now as one of the pirates who had been shipwrecked on the Squatting Watchman, seemed robbed of some of his former glory.

  “Captain Cruelcock?” I didn’t miss the teasing, sardonic smile playing over the demigod’s face as he set the book aside and walked around behind me.

  “His family were chicken farmers,” I explained, trying to peek over my shoulder. “He only became a pirate to buy medicine for his mother, who was dying of consumption. After their farm in Jamaica was burned down by his nemesis, Bart the Bastard, who unwittingly popularized blackened chicken.”

  “Bart the Bastard?” His T-shirt hit the floor beneath the plush bathrobe I had hung on the hooks provided near the tub.

  The cadence of my words quickened in time with my pulse. “He’s actually Captain Cruelcock’s brother, but he doesn’t know that yet. Their father was a pirate too, only he was known as Captain Quickcock.”

  Motorcycle boots were kicked off onto the bathroom rug.

  “Captain Quickcock?” The metallic sound of a zipper.

  “He had the fastest ship on the seven seas. Also, he caught Rufus the Red and Terrible when no one else could.”

  “A pirate?” Well-worn jeans pooling on the floor.

  “A rooster. He was terrorizing the whole island. Pecking people’s shins, harassing the goats. If fact, he was the sole reason that Jamaicans came up with the recipe for jerk chicken. It was—”

  “Terrible?” Crixus finished for me.

  “Yes.” I had forgotten how to breathe. Efforts to syncopate the inhales and exhales left me panting. My pulse pounded in my ears.

  Crixus, naked behind me, leaned over the tub until his hands were planted on either side of the curved edge. His lips grazed the nape of my neck. Goosebumps rose on my scalp beneath the hair piled loosely atop my head.

  “What I would like to know, Doctor, is why you spend your time reading about fucking when I’m right here, ready to ruin you for all other men. Fictional and otherwise.”

  This otherwise doubtless included Liam, whom Crixus took great pleasure in slandering at every opportunity. Not that he lacked for ammunition given one of the chief requirements of Liam’s job involved the disposal of bodies.

  “Books are less…complicated,” I said, seizing ahold of a word that felt appropriately vague and innocuous.

  “Wanting something less complicated doesn’t explain why you’ve screwed the hit man twice now.”

  “You’re keeping track? A little hypocritical for a guy whose own number rivals the population of Taiwan. A guy who uses sexual torture and emotional manipulation to get his way. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I never claimed not to be a hypocrite. I’m a jealous bastard too. Are you keeping a list? I could give you a few others.” He dragged a finger down the back of my neck.

  I leaned forward to hug my knees, severing the touch, and with it, the humming electricity passing between us. �
��That list is yours to keep.”

  “I have a theory,” he announced. “I think it’s going to solve the problem we keep having.” One hand relinquished its place on the side of the tub and scooped a handful of water over my shoulder. “You could use a little more heat.”

  I wondered exactly how he intended to provide it.

  Crixus walked around to the faucet, allowing me an unfettered view of the broad planes of his back and an ass that could have Greek statues crumbling from their marble plinths in jealousy.

  “If theory is what you’ve named your…equipment, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

  “Nothing about my equipment is disappointing. Which you would know, if you weren’t terrified of fucking me.”

  “Terrified?” My high-pitched denial was as good as an admission. “Is this really the reason you’ve crashed my vacation? To pester me with half-baked theoriesabout my sexuality?”

  “Examine the evidence, Doctor. Every time I get you alone, something conveniently interrupts. And in the time it took me to pronounce that sentence, you thought through five separate exit strategies.”

  I pried my gaze from the door handle I had been in the process of calculating the distance to.

  “Three feet, five and a quarter inches. And no. There’s no way in hell you could reach it before I would be on you. Might be fun to try, though.”

  There could be no doubt about it: this thought-reading business really took the fun out of a good, old-fashioned argument. Still, having his back turned to me infused me with a boldness I had trouble summoning under his direct scrutiny.

  “Regarding the aforementioned interruptions,” I began, “I seem to remember you being called away during several crucial moments. Something important happens and poof! No Crixus. In fact, wasn’t it you who took off on the night I had agreed to spend with you?”

  “First of all,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I don’t poof. Second, I was called to help settle an impending war between Aphrodite and Persephone. Would you have preferred that I ignore an official summons let the world’s populations dwindle into nonexistence? I would think you of all people could appreciate the chaos jealousy over Adonis can cause.”