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

I didn’t miss his oblique reference to a moment of madness wherein seeing Adonis’s face for the first time, I had endeavored to relieve him of his pants.

  With my teeth.

  “That’s exactly my point.” I looked at him over a dying mound of iridescent bubbles. At this rate, I wouldn’t be covered for long. “Half the time when you show up, it’s with a new case in tow. Helping you is exactly what has created the interruptions you’re referring to. Was it or was it not the three bears coming home that busted up our last encounter?”

  “You choose a time when I’ve been assigned twenty-four hour watch and am evading three werebears sent by Hera to give it up? That doesn’t strike you as at all odd, Doctor?”

  “Are you saying I chose a time I knew we would be interrupted?”

  He shrugged, a gesture that sent his broad shoulders towards ears unusually small and shapely for a man of his size. “I’m saying that when stretch of unoccupied time presents itself, you go colder than the feathers on a penguin’s ass.” The tap squeaked as he turned it off.

  “That’s an overgeneralization, and you know it. If I remember correctly, I was the one who came looking for you last time.”

  Something dark passed through his expression. “After you accused me of screwing Goldie Locks eight ways from Sunday.”

  “You were alone in the woods with a porn star. Forgive me for being so wildly presumptuous.”

  “The point is, I didn’t.” His jaw flexed, chewing over more words I suspected he wanted to, but wouldn’t say.

  “I apologized, okay? What do you want from me?”

  “An answer.”

  “To what?”

  “I was trying to give you space. Trying to give you time. But you came looking for me. We have one real conversation, things get hot and heavy and you take off without so much as a word at the first opportunity.” He let this accusation ride for the space of a couple breaths before continuing. “I want to know what you’re afraid of.”

  “Who says I’m afraid of anything?”

  “Body language, Doctor. You’re the expert. What does yours say right now?”

  I looked down at the arms wrapped tightly around the knees sandwiched to my breasts. “It says I was enjoying some solitude when I was interrupted by someone who wasn’t scheduled to show up for another half an hour.”

  Crixus stood, turning to me his naked need. I kept my eyes trained on a single spot—the distorted bubble of my own reflection in the tub’s overflow drain.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Nothing.” The reflection’s small mouth moved, a shift so tiny it barely seemed real. “Everything. You. This.”

  “I’m just a man, Matilda. A man who’s lived long enough to know what he wants. A man who’s bled enough to know its value.”

  I covered the overflow drain with a sudsy smudge, erasing that strange self. “Value is relative.”

  “Look at me.”

  My eyes leapt to his under the cover of a blink.

  “All of me.”

  I followed the line of his jaw until it disappeared into his neck, sloping out where it met his trapezius muscle. His collarbone was the slip of a shadow above pectoral muscles carved in high relief, boasting the same dark valleys cut in his abdominals. My favorite lines, the ones I hadn’t had the chance to trace with my tongue, beckoned from his hips, tracking a deep V downward.

  His arousal surged upward within that frame, flat against his belly, pulsing in time with a heart that beat a lifetime before ash covered Pompeii.

  “Do you want me?” His question hung between us, thick in the air like steam.

  Wresting my attention from the primal witness of his desire proved too difficult, an answer in advance of the one I thought next.

  You already know.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Yes.”

  *****

  A spray of warm droplets flew as I was hauled from the tub by hands clasped around my ribcage, their pressure almost painful on my slick skin. The sound of protest died in my mouth, or in Crixus’s. They were now one and the same.

  His tongue was hot velvet, prying my lips open to steal his next breath from my lungs. The cold porcelain pedestal sink slid beneath me, the faucet jamming into my lower back as I collided with the mirror. My toothbrush and toiletries, so carefully set out upon my arrival, clattered to the floor along with the hand towel and the small seascape hanging on the wall behind us.

  The sound of shattering glass was the punctuation to this statement—a declaration of inevitability and intent. His hands were on my thighs then, pulling me back toward him until only the barest fraction of my flesh balanced on the sink. He slid my knees over his hips and moaned into my mouth when I hooked my ankles behind his back, trapping him against me.

  This man. This god. At once too perfect for fantasy and too solid to be a dream, was here with me over any other place in my world and his. I pushed myself up against him, basking as I would on sun-warmed stone, drinking in the delicious desire rolling off him in heady waves.

  Each silky stroke was a question, a demand, and intention communicated without words. In our frenzy, not even thoughts passed between us. Our only exchanges the simple messages the urgency of one body against another could send.

  Pleasant pain stung my scalp, my hair tangled in Crixus’s fist. One smooth tug downward and my throat lay exposed to his teeth. A stubble-roughened chin scraped my sensitive skin as he bit, sucked, devoured like a man starving.

  My hips moved with a rhythm as relentless as the sea’s breaking on the shore, driven by a force as elemental as the earth’s turning. Fingernails sunk into his shoulder, I clawed at the smooth skin of his back for purchase, dragging my body up his until I was poised above the part of him that pulsed hotter than a brand.

  He growled a curse in what might have been his native Gallic tongue. Some small measure of satisfaction bloomed in my chest. Power, or pride at having reduced him to it.

  His eyes were blue flame when they opened.

  “You want this?” He took my hand from his shoulder and guided it over his chest, down abdominals made slippery by the tub and my body’s desire, wrapping my fingers around the smooth column of his arousal.

  He held my gaze steady as he guided my grip down, down to the root. My eyes widened in surprise—an unguarded moment of renewed wonder at his size and fear of my own inexperience. I watched the knowledge sink into his dark pupils, then bloom outward, working through his expression.

  Mixed hungers warred on his face. The savagery he was born to. The control he’d tried to cultivate. His insatiable nature and my retreat in its presence.

  He’d found it. The seat of my angst and my apprehension.

  All the women he’d had, the beauty he had seen, the pleasure he had tasted.

  What was I to him? What could I ever be?

  “Everything,” he whispered between my lips. His mouth brushed down my throat. His tongue dipped into the hollow at the bottom of my neck to collect droplets of sweat pooling there. He planted kisses down my sternum, then paused to look me in the eye as he traced a damp circle around one nipple, then the other.

  My grip on him tightened, milking a gasp from him that caused words to explode in my head.

  I could learn you for a million years.

  Tighter.

  I could fuck you every day forever.

  “Starting today?” I ran my fingers around him the way I had admired the oak bannister curving up the bed and breakfast’s staircase.

  “Starting now.” He split my knees, his palms pushing my thighs wide, sliding upward to cup my hips, opening me to him.

  Breath rattled in and out of my lungs as I worked not to tense against the blunt heat nudging against a spot that threatened to fold me in half. My eyes fell closed. My attention shrank through concentric circles until the only sensation in all the world was where our two bodies met.

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hold
still or I’ll split ye in two!”

  Shock shot my eyelids open as the clang of metal on metal reverberated through the room.

  “The fuck—” Crixus spun. I slid down from the sink and huddled behind the expanse of his broad back.

  “Suck me cackleberries ye hornswaggling thief!” A pair of boots shuffled into view of the bathroom doorway, followed by skinny calves clad in hose protruding from purple knee breeches.

  “Awk! Suck his berries!” a disembodied voice chimed in.

  “Ye’d like that, wouldn’t ye Gaybeard? You arse-chasing bilge rat!”

  “So it be name calling, eh, Ricardo Sin Pantalones?” Another clang. The figure leapt backward, narrowly dodging the point of a sword jabbing into view. If a Captain Hook had become desperate after years at sea and sexually wronged an overripe eggplant, the pirate sword fighting at the foot of my bed would have been the result.

  It wasn’t just his breeches that were purple, but his gold-embroidered knee-length jacket, his tri-corn hat—sporting an appropriately coordinated aubergine feather, his fingerless gloves, and the patch covering the eye facing us. A scraggly powdered wig flew out behind him as he spun away from the cleaver-wielding giant who lumbered after him.

  “Call me that again, I dares ye!” With his shaved head, gold hoop earrings, and brawny arms stained by faded blue-green tattoos, Gaybeard’s opponent looked exactly like the rendering of any stereotypical buccaneer—save for one tiny detail.

  He was naked from the waist down.

  Spotting his pale white buttocks jiggling below a stained red sash, I clapped my hand over my eyes and tried not to think about the way his battered leather boots stood out against the hairy ankles above them.

  “Sin Pantalones!” taunted Gaybeard, leaping over the steamer trunk to put the four-poster bed between them.

  “Awk! No-pants, no-pants!” The sound of feathery flapping preceded a little green parrot landing on the bedpost closest to the door.

  The cleaver sailed overhead, turning end over end and connecting with a thock that sent the bedpost’s ornately carved wooden knob bouncing onto the floor. The parrot squawked his displeasure before fluttering down to roost on Gaybeard’s gold-tasseled shoulder.

  Sin Pantalones reached up and jerked his cleaver out of the bedpost where it had stuck. “Come here, ye scurvy winged rat! I’ll have your wings for me appetizer!”

  “You almost hit Sir Queenie!”

  “Awk! Can’t aim for shit!” The parrot disappeared into the tangled nest of Gaybeard’s wig as Sin Pantalones dove across my bed.

  Perhaps it was the bouncing springs that brought Crixus to himself. Or maybe it was my scream of horror as Sin Pantalones’ naked pirate privates made contact with my laptop. Either way, the silent pocket where we had observed the fight unfold exploded with a roar of rage.

  “You!” was the only word he managed. He strode forward, still naked, hands clenched at his sides.

  Gaybeard’s eyes went round as silver coins. “Keelhaul me sideways and hang me from the yard arm! Would you look at the size of his cutlass!”

  “Awk! Hoist the sails! Half mast! Half mast!”

  “He could take the cat o’nine tails to my arse—”

  Thump.

  This was the sound of the cleaver burying itself dead center in Gaybeard’s chest.

  My scream split the air at the same moment as Sin Pantalones’ hoot of triumph.

  “He…he hit me.” Gaybeard looked down in wonder at the crimson flowering across his chest, blinked, and slumped into the bedpost.

  “9-1-1!” I shrieked. “We need to call 9-1-1!” I grabbed my robe and shuffled out into the room, dumping my laptop bag upside down on the bed. No cell phone to be found among the debris.

  “And a good hit it was too!” Sin Pantalones crowed. “Serves ye right, ye traitorous dog!”

  “How could you do that! You’ve killed him!” I snatched my phone off the nightstand and punched in the numbers, waiting for a voice to connect.

  “Matilda,” Crixus warned. “Don’t—”

  “Aaaargh!” Gaybeard’s moth-eaten lace cuff fell across his face like a veil as he threw his forearm to the crown of his head, staggered backward, and collapsed into Crixus’s arms.

  As Crixus looked over at me with abject horror, Gaybeard’s hand flew to his face to straighten one side of a heavily-waxed mustache that looked like clock hands at the noon and nine positions.

  Fingers laden with jeweled rings crawled up Crixus’s pectoral muscles. “Holds me while I die, kind sir…” Here, Gaybeard indulged in a rattling cough. “Let me expire in your strong arms. Nuzzle me into the light with your granite jaw.”

  “Awk! Out with a bang!” The parrot had abandoned his place on the purple pirate’s shoulder in favor of perching on in the sandy nest of Crixus’s hair.

  “Tell your fucking bird to get off my head.”

  “I’ll get the bastard off ye!” Sin Pantalones picked up one of the paperbacks from my bed and lobbed it at Crixus, who turned just in time for Bart the Bastard’s Revenge to catch him in the temple.

  “Fuck!” Crixus lost his grip on Gaybeard, who slid down to his crotch before the demigod could catch him.

  “Heaven!” Gaybeard cried in elation. “I be in heaven! I hear the angels a’playin their harps o’gold!”

  “Sorry about that, mate.” Sin Pantalones ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. The roll on the back of his neck was as thick as a Polish sausage. “Me aim is usually better.”

  “Hilton Head police department, state your emergency.” The strange cadence of the words suggested the person who spoke them might have been chewing.

  “Yes! Hello, this Dr. Matilda Schmidt and I’m staying at the Inn on the Hill. There’s been a murder in my room.”

  “Where are you now, ma’am?”

  “Oh, I be cold, kind sir!” Gaybeard looked up at Crixus from the floor, hands clutching at the demigod’s calf. “Can you warm me next to your bronzy muscles? Let me smell your man-scent before the life leaves me?”

  A smudge of powder marked Crixus’s shin where Gaybeard’s nose dragged across it.

  “Do that again and I’ll kick that blade clear through to your spine,” Crixus threatened.

  “Promise?” Gaybeard’s voice took on a pouty sensuality.

  “Ma’am?”

  I remembered the phone in my hand. “Okay, so he’s not technically dead yet, but he’s a pirate and he has a cleaver in his chest and they were sword fighting—”

  “Ma’am, are you aware that placing a false call to 9-1-1 is a prosecutable offense?”

  “Listen to me. This is not a prank call. This is a real emergency and I need help. There’s a man dying!”

  “We have our hands full with the festival right now—”

  “Please,” I begged. “You have to believe me.”

  The line went dead in my ear.

  “It’s coming from here!” Voices mumbled beyond the door to my room seconds before the brass lock tumbled open.

  “Don’t come in!” I called. “I’m not decent!”

  However I presented the scenario to myself, one pirate with a cleaver in his chest and another naked from the waist down did little to recommend me.

  When the door handle began to turn, I launched myself across the space in time to span the gap as it opened.

  I was greeted by a face full of mechanical beeping and flashing lights, held in the extended arm of Auburn Nerdglasses.

  “You can’t just come barging in here.” I blocked the doorway with my body and held fast to the frame. “This is my private room.”

  “Kim, can you hold this key? I have to adjust the sensitivity on the EMF.”

  “Where did you get that?” I snatched the key before he could hand it back to Pageboy, who hid behind the cyclopean eye of a video camera.

  “Dean, you would not believe what I’m seeing on the infrared,” she said. “I’ve never seen it act this way around anyone.”

  “You’re re
cording, right?” Dean passed the blinking box over me and stopped at breast level. “Hot damn. Something’s been here all right.” He reached out a finger and poked my nipple.

  I slapped the device out of his hands and felt a stab of savage triumph as it hit the floor.

  “Hey!” Dean dropped to his knees to gather small pieces that had scattered on impact. “What did you—holy shit!”

  I winced, knowing exactly what he must have seen in the space behind me. “Look,” I said. “I’ve already called the authorities. It’s best if you just leave now and…”

  “You’ve read Bart the Bastard’s Revenge? That’s a great historical. They did their research.”

  If Dean had spontaneously burst into flames and started juggling his own eyeballs, I might have been less surprised.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bart the Bastard,” Dean repeated. “Blackened chicken. It’s right there on your nightstand.”

  I spun around to see what he was referring to and had to stifle a gasp.

  The room was exactly as it had been when I left for the beach this morning, down the bed knob secured to the post nearest the door.

  Like any evidence of all that had happened in the moments previous, Crixus and the pirates had vanished.

  *****

  Dean pushed past me with no more effort than brushing aside a curtain. Any protests against the invasion of privacy that might have occurred to me were hijacked by wordless shock. A sense of unreality permeated the room. I felt lighter than summer’s first dying leaves and equally insubstantial.

  Now it was I, blind to their presence, walking up and down my room, peeking behind the doors, staring at walls, considering the floor.

  They had been here. Hadn’t they?

  Not since the early days when Crixus first dragged Cupid into my office had I questioned my sanity. But at least in that instance, there had been some physical evidence to support the encounter. Namely, my broken diploma frames and denuded bookcases from Cupid’s lame-winged attempt to fly at my head.

  “Are you on vacation?” This was Kim, peering through the camera in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Something like that.” I idly picked up my cell phone and thumbed through the call records. Nothing. No missed calls from Julie, no messages. The phone had simply blanked out. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my ribs beneath the bathrobe.