Bound by Moonlight by Nancy Gideon Read Free Book Online Page B

Max.”
    “What time?” Max asked.
    Babineau met his gaze with thinly veiled distaste. “Noon. It’s going to be outside, real informal.” No need to get up close and friendly.
    “Am I supposed to bring something?” Cee Cee asked in horror. “Like some kind of Jell-O salad thing?”
    Babineau laughed. “No, don’t make us suffer that. Tina’s got it all under control.”
    Tina, the perfect woman, wife, and mother. “At least we can talk about the case,” Cee Cee said.
    “Ah, no. She made me promise no shop talk.”
    “What the hell are we going to talk about, then?” Her dismay echoed his.
    “Polite things that civilized people discuss,” Max asserted. “I’m sure we can think of something.”
    She eyed Max doubtfully, picturing a long, horrid silence in which they gobbled up the food and snuck out as fast as possible.
    She turned the topic to something more agreeable. “What did you find out on the street?”
    Babineau’s gaze touched on Max. “We can talk about it on the way in.”
    “I want to know now. Come on up with me. You can fill me in while I change.”
    She was off his lap and the two of them had gone inside before objection hit Max between the eyes like the slug of a SIG Sauer. She was taking Babineau upstairs to his bedroom—
their
bedroom. And she was going to get dressed just as comfortably as you please in front of a man who wasn’t sharing that bed with her.
    Alain Babineau and I were lovers.
    Images of them together filled his mind, and for a moment he was plunged back into the hot madness that plagued him the weeks before he and Charlotte had bonded. That same dark, furious need to claim and guard her as his own snarled through him with teeth-bared possessiveness, startling him with its intensity and his inability to just shake it off.
    He’d been taught only one way to deal with a threat that came into his yard. And for a moment, he consideredkilling Alain Babineau as if it were a rational solution.
    “S O, WHAT’S THE story?”
    Babineau hesitated just inside the room, trying not to look at the big unmade bed. Savoie’s bed, where he’d been sleeping skin to skin with Charlotte.
    “Like I figured,” he began, awkward at first, then falling into the familiar pattern, “no one is eager to give anything up to the cops. I tapped a couple of my usuals, asked them to sniff around. We’ll see where it goes.”
    Cee Cee snagged a pair of black jeans out of a dresser and carried them into the bathroom, leaving the door open so they could continue their conversation.
    Babineau watched her reflection as she stepped out of the shorts and wiggled into the stretch denim. She had the most amazing legs he’d ever seen. That hadn’t changed.
    “Dovion should have a report for us this morning,” she continued, rummaging through her makeup bag. “We need to stop there first. Hopefully they’ve ID’d the vic by now and we’ll have some photos to circulate.”
    “There’s something we need to talk about first.”
    “Yeah? What’s that?” When he hesitated, she called out, “Don’t be shy. Spill it.”
    “Ceece, the guys were wondering . . .”
    “What?”
    “What to do about Savoie.”
    Her head poked out of the bathroom, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “What do you mean, ‘do’ about him?”
    “It’s been bothering us. All of us. We didn’t want to say anything until you were back to one hundred percent.” His hand raked through his sandy blond hair, his bewildered relief over her amazingly quick recovery evident. Then his expression tightened. “It’s not like we can forget what we saw him do. What we saw him . . . turn into.”
    “Your point?” she snapped out, anger covering her sudden leap of alarm.
    “Ceece, I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know what the hell he is. What do you want me to say?”
    Charlotte felt blindsided, though she should have seen it coming. She’d been aware of Max’s world long enough to accept it without the doubt and