Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set Read online

  “She’ll go. I remember what it was like to find out I wasn’t as weird as I’d thought I was,” Stephanie told him.

  Kent tugged her by the wrist until she was pressed against him. “Are you about to reveal to me that you had a lifetime of crime before I met you?”

  She laughed and kissed him. “No. I was a huge nerd. A real Goody Two-Shoes. I never even kissed a guy until I was in my early twenties.”

  “You got really good at it,” he said against her mouth.

  The kiss lingered, getting deeper. Breathless after a minute, she pulled away to look up at him and felt the creep of heat in her cheeks. “Kent...”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s real.”

  “I didn’t even ask...”

  He kissed her again. Then once more. His hands on her hips anchored her against him. His mouth moved from her lips to her throat to press against the pulse beating there.

  “Yes,” he said again. “It’s real.”

  * * * * *

  DARK FANTASY

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  CHAPTER 1

  Jason Davis did not want to look inside the closet. Something disgusting was inside it—he could tell that already by the smell. The odor, a toxic mix of garbage and unwashed human body, was strong enough outside the closed door to make his eyes water.

  “Think he’s alive?” his partner asked. Reg Bamford had drawn his gun, ready at Jase’s back.

  “Hope so, or else this case just escalated.” In the past month they’d been covering a spate of freakish attacks and injuries that seemed to be related, but none yet had resulted in a death. Jase pulled his knife, ready for whatever happened.

  Reg shot him a grin. “On three?”

  “I don’t think we need to kick it down, Reg. Maybe just open it slowly.” Jase gave his partner a raised eyebrow, knowing how much Reg wanted to go in full force.

  “Fine.” Reg didn’t holster his gun. He gave Jase a nod. “Go.”

  “Hey, buddy?” Jase eased open the closet door, bracing himself for the stink. Shit, it was bad. Worse even than he’d anticipated. He put up a hand to cover his mouth and nose. “Hey, guy. You in here?”

  Nothing.

  Reg moved a step closer. “Careful, Jase. He could—”

  Something launched itself out of the closet. Hulking, reeking, arms flailing. Fortunately, it wasn’t very strong, and a double one-two attack from Jase and Reg got it on the ground with Reg’s gun pressed to the back of its head.

  “Please,” the thing said. “Please, don’t hurt me any more.”

  CHAPTER 2

  He’d stalked her for days. Weeks. Watching her through the windows. Following her to the bus and then to the train, where he sat several seats behind her and counted the number of pages she read in the book she carried with her everywhere. He wanted to touch her hair.

  He wanted to cut off her hair and keep it in his pocket, where he could touch it whenever he wanted.

  But when he came up behind her and tried to touch her, the woman turned. Fists clenched. Teeth bared. She fought him, hard, in a way none of the others ever had, and he found himself on the ground with a mouthful of blood before he knew what had happened.

  * * *

  Chelle Monroe paused, her fingers lightly resting on the computer keyboard. This book wanted to be dark and fierce, edging toward the gory side. The problem was, she hadn’t started out to write a serial-killer novel. She wanted to write a romance.

  Shit.

  There was a satisfaction in writing this, though. The guy at the bus stop had been a creep. She didn’t think he wanted to keep her hair in his pocket, but you never knew.

  It figured the only male attention she’d had in the past few months had been from some wild-eyed dude who’d thought flirting meant standing too close and breathing on her neck while she waited to catch a ride to the bookstore. Or in the form of the random dick pics she got every so often in her inbox, though she hadn’t updated her profile on the LuvFinder site in forever. Dating had started to seem like so much freaking...work.

  Yet here she was, trying to write a romance novel, and why, when her heart seemed more inclined to come up with stories about serial killers or creepy clowns or natural disasters? She had bunches of those stored away in her files, unfinished, as all the other pieces were at this point. It had been a long time since she’d gone on a date but longer since she’d actually finished writing something she felt was good enough to submit to a publisher. Grant would’ve pushed her, probably until she got annoyed, to stop screwing around and just finish something already. But Grant had left her behind a long time ago.

  “C’mon, Chelle, get to it,” she said aloud, working her fingers open and closed before settling them back on the keyboard. “Write the damned book.”

  With a sigh, she opened a fresh GOLEM file. The usual prompts came up—character, plot, research. There were places for her to add photos for inspiration. A word-count calculator. The program had been designed to make plotting and brainstorming a story as easy as possible. The only thing it couldn’t do was actually write the damned book for her.

  She tried again, typing a few words, but they came out sounding like a really awful late-1980s soft-core porn movie. She erased them. Tried again. Nothing.

  The problem could be that she’d been suffering a distinct lack of romance in her own life for the past couple years and, in fact, had probably stopped believing in it. At least the hearts-and-flowers kind of romance you were supposed to read about in novels. Nope, for Chelle, love had come with a lot of baggage. She knew she wasn’t alone in that, obviously. The world didn’t go around without a whole lot of heartbreak along the way. It made writing about falling in love difficult, though.

  Then again, she didn’t believe in monsters or aliens, and she’d written horror and science-fiction stories that had gotten critical acclaim, if not a lot of money. Romance shouldn’t be so hard, right? At least at the end you could be guaranteed a happy-ever-after, and that was something to aim for. Bringing a little joy into the world, even if it lasted only as long as it took to read four hundred pages or so.

  It took staring at the blank computer screen for five solid minutes without typing a word before she gave up and opened the Works in Progress folder where she’d been keeping all her false starts. She’d tried a murder mystery, a comedy of errors, an experimental novel written entirely in iambic pentameter—that one she was proud of, actually. She’d made it to five whole pages before giving up on it. Not because the idea sucked, but because honestly, who the hell would sit through an entire novel written in iambic pentameter?

  Chelle sighed, then clicked out of the folder and toodled around a bit online, but it was a lost cause and after a few minutes of being sucked into reading click-bait articles, she thought maybe the future lay in writing deliberately misleading headlines attached to lists that tried hard and usually failed to be clever. Oh, and stock photos, she thought. You had to have a sort-of-appropriate stock picture to go along with the list.

  “C’mon,” she said aloud again. “You got this. You can do it. You’ve done it before—you can do it again.”

  Except what if she couldn’t?

  With a frown, Chelle put her computer to sleep and pushed away from her desk. She wanted chocolate but would settle for a seltzer water and some grapes. She’d been spending more time in her chair than runni
ng, and it was going to show up on her ass if she wasn’t careful.

  Come to think of it, a good run might clear her head, inspire her and tire her out enough to get a good night’s sleep. She changed into her running gear, grabbed her tiny iPod that strapped to her arm and tucked a twenty in her pocket. She’d head for the coffee shop, and if the universe meant for her to have a cinnamon bun, there’d be one left just before they closed. Usually Derek gave her a discount if she was the last customer of the night, but it had been a few weeks since she’d made one of these late-night trips. The weather had been too bad for running.

  Outside now, though, Chelle breathed in the faint scent of spring. Snow and ice still collected in piles from the hard winter, but the steady sound of dripping off every roof proved the weather was warming. She couldn’t wait, frankly. Winter in Delaware, with its early darkness and chill temperatures, always took something out of her soul. She and Grant had often talked about moving permanently to where it was warmer, but he’d gone off to Arizona alone.

  Veering to the left as she exited her quiet neighborhood, all the houses mostly dark even though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock because this was the off-season, she ran for a half mile along the highway. In the summer, traffic on this road would make it impossible to run along here, so she usually ran along the beach instead. But then there wouldn’t be coffee and a cinnamon bun as a reward, only the chilly ocean spray and sand in her socks.

  She hadn’t always liked running. It had been Grant’s thing first. He spent so much time in front of the computer that he’d made it a point to take up a hobby that would keep him fit. He’d never pressured her to join him—that wasn’t his style. She’d merely found herself picking up the habit because it meant spending more time with him. When their relationship had unraveled, she’d kept up running, not because it was any sort of tie to him, but because she’d ended up craving the mindless rush of pushing herself to the point where all she could think about was one foot in front of the other.

  Her sneakers slapped the pavement. She dodged a puddle. She ducked into one of the side streets to take a turn around another neighborhood, this one almost completely dark, as well. She pushed herself a little harder to make the turn through the cul-de-sac. She still wanted to get to the coffee shop before it closed.

  The bike came up out of nowhere, no lights, not even a glimmer from a reflector. Chelle screamed, breathless, and dodged, but the bike clipped her on the hip and sent her tumbling forward. She landed on her hands and knees, her running tights torn and her palms a stinging mess of scrapes.

  The guy on the bike ended up in a tangle of limbs and spinning wheels. He let out a string of curses, all directed at her, including an incredibly offensive insult about her gender. And her weight. And her ancestry.

  Chelle got to her feet, feeling for anything broken. She was going to ache later, for sure, but nothing seemed out of place. “Are you all right?”

  “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”

  “You were riding on the wrong side of the street,” she said and weathered the next barrage of insults before saying, “and I’m wearing a reflective vest!”

  “Fucking moron,” the guy said as he got up and lifted his bike. “You’d better hope nothing’s wrong with my bike. I should get your name and number, make you pay for it.”

  “Sure, let’s do that. Let’s trade information,” Chelle shot back. “I’ll send you the doctor bill.”

  That shut him up anyway. Still muttering curses, he got back on his bike and rode it toward one of the condos at the end of the block, where he went inside. Chelle had paused to catch her breath and make sure she was really okay before she started running again, this time at a much slower pace. She was closer to the coffee shop than to home by this point, or she’d have turned around.

  By the time she got to Waves, she was really hurting. Both knees, both palms, something in the small of her back. She limped into the coffee shop five minutes before closing, already apologizing.

  “What the hell happened to you?” It was a surprise to see Bess there, since as the owner, she didn’t often take the closing shifts. The older woman, brow furrowed, came around the counter to pull out a chair for Chelle. “Sit. Wow. Are you okay?”

  “Some jerk hit me with his bike.” Chelle winced as she sat. “Then tried to say it was my fault!”

  Bess shook her head. “Wow. Thank God it wasn’t a car.”

  “I think he was drunk,” Chelle said. “He smelled like it anyway.”

  “Let me grab you a coffee. You want something else? I have some scones left. A piece of coffee cake.” Bess frowned again, looking her over. “How about some ice packs?”

  “Yeah. That would be great.” Chelle pulled apart the torn edges of her running tights to look at the damage. No blood, but she’d bruise plenty.

  Bess brought her a hot mocha latte and a plate of coffee cake, as well as two ice packs from the back. She sat at the table across from Chelle with her own mug of coffee. She asked for a few more details about the crash, though Chelle didn’t have many.

  “I couldn’t tell if he was a local or a renter,” Chelle said. “It’s early in the season, but I don’t want to think someone local would be such an asshole.”

  Bess nodded. “Yeah. That sucks. I’m sorry. Hey, can we give you a ride home? Eddie’s going to be here soon to take me. You shouldn’t try to run back.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That would be great, thanks.” Chelle had met Bess’s husband a few times. He owned Sugarland, the Bethany Beach fudge shop downtown. She tested out her legs, one at a time. Both hurt.

  Bess excused herself to finish closing up while Chelle finished her drink and the coffee cake. Eddie came through the door with a greeting for his wife, stopping to double-take at the sight of Chelle. Bess explained the situation.

  “Are you going to file a report or anything?” he asked, concerned.

  Chelle shook her head and got to her feet. Everything still worked, but she was definitely grateful for the ride home. “Nah. I’m all right. Anyway, he’ll get what’s coming to him, I’m sure.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Eddie said.

  CHAPTER 3

  “He said it was King Kong.” Reg craned his neck for a moment to look into the next room at the victim. “Big fucking gorilla.”

  Three days ago, Stan George had allegedly been attacked in his own living room. That he’d suffered some kind of attack wasn’t in question, although the manner of it was suspicious. Not that everything they ever dealt with wasn’t in some way weird. That was their job, after all.

  Jase looked at the notes in front of him. Reg had done the interviewing while Jase checked out the rest of the house for signs of forced entry. None. Signs of paranormal activity. None of the usual. It was the same as the other four cases they’d been investigating, some dating back about six months without a clue as to what had caused them.

  “Guy was online, surfing for...appliances?” Jase looked up. “So, porn.”

  Reg laughed low, dark eyes sparkling. “That’s what the browser history shows, yeah. But then, whose wouldn’t.”

  “So he’s online, surfing for wank material. King Kong comes in, tosses the laptop, wrecks the room, beats the guy up.” Jase shook his head. “How’d Vadim find out about this guy?”

  Vadim, Jase and Reg’s boss in the Crew, had a network of people around the world dedicated to reporting in on the strange and fantastic. Sightings of strange creatures, hauntings, that sort of thing. Jase didn’t usually ask how Vadim found out about the cases; he went where the boss told him to go and did what the boss told him to do. In the last case, they hadn’t even known there’d be a guy in the closet until they got to the house. They’d been called in to investigate what someone had claimed were flying monkeys. So far, they hadn’t found any evidence of winged apes, but now here was this guy talking about
a giant gorilla.

  “I’m seeing a simian similarity,” Jase said.

  Reg laughed. From the other room came the sound of angry shouting at the television. “Dude’s got anger problems,” Reg said in a low voice.

  Jase leaned back in his chair to take a peek into the living room, then looked back to his partner. “He filed a police report? Or did it come from the hospital?”

  “We’ve got one of the EMTs with us,” Reg explained. “He’s the one who called it in. Said the guy’s injuries weren’t that severe but that he kept ranting about King Kong.”

  “Think the cases are related?”

  Weird things often were.

  “Let me go talk to this guy. You look around, see if you can find anything we can use.” Jase went into the living room, where the guy had propped his casted ankle on a footstool. He was nursing a glass of what appeared to be a very fine whiskey, though he hadn’t offered Jase or Reg so much as a shitty light beer.

  Jase helped himself from the decanter.

  “Hey...”

  “So, did the big monkey do that to you?” Jase gestured with the glass toward the guy’s ankle.

  His name was Stan, Jase recalled. Stan scowled.

  “Nah, that happened because some dumb bitch ran into me while I was on my bike.”

  Jase sipped. Not as fine a whiskey as he’d thought, actually. The guy had money, that was obvious, but his taste left a lot to be desired. He put the glass back on the table.

  “So tell me again when King Kong decided to show up.”

  “I know you think I’m making this up,” Stan said. “So fuck off and leave me alone.”

  “You sure the booze didn’t have anything to do with this?”

  For a moment, Stan looked guilty. Then angry again. “A giant fucking ape came into my fucking house and fucked me up—you think I just imagined it?”