Demon Night

to do something, and she’d have done just about anything for a cigarette—anything but ask Ethan for one.
    Even something as innocent as asking for her knitting seemed too much a giveaway of her hurt, so she just squeezed the wood instead.
    Ethan’s gaze lifted from her hands to her face. “Charlie—”
    “So you can fly, and you heal fast,” she interrupted, because she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about anything else. Didn’t want to hear him say again that she was needy, or to think about how easily he saw into her.
    Didn’t want to think about how simply knowing that she’d aroused him had created an ache that centered much lower—and was much warmer—than the one in her throat.
    She was good at wanting things that she shouldn’t…and equally good at denying herself them.
    Ethan watched her carefully as he stood. A blue cotton shirt appeared in his hands. “Yes. I can run quick enough a human can’t see it, lift a city bus if it needs to be lifted.”
    A thin scar bisected his navel horizontally, rippled across the left side of his abdomen. She swung her legs out so that she had something to stare at besides his stomach. Her shoes were spotless; so were her pants. Considering how much blood had spilled, and how close she’d been to him, that was impossible. “And you make stuff disappear.”
    “If I can get my head around it, I can store it. Blood doesn’t feel good, though.” He slid into his shirt, frowned at the length of the sleeves. He met her eyes again as he rolled up the cuffs. “If I have the opportunity, I choose to clean it off in the normal way.”
    She didn’t know if that was an apology or an explanation, or just an excuse—but it helped that he offered one. “Do you drink blood?”
    “No. Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t sleep.”
    “That must be nice,” she said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Not to need anything. Then it wouldn’t hurt so much when you didn’t have it.” Or when you had to give it up.
    His lips tightened. “Well, the lack of sleep is more difficult than the others. Close your eyes, Charlie—I’m about to make new britches, and I don’t always get it right the first time.”
    She did, but an image of his body appeared behind her eyes anyway. “Where’d you get that other scar?” Not as a Guardian—he’d said the one on his lip was from when he was human.
    “Which?”
    How many did he have? “Here.” She lifted the hem of her shirt a couple of inches and ran her finger in a quick line over her stomach.
    She heard him swear lightly and fabric rip before he said, “A saloon in Cheyenne. I’d tracked…hell if I remember his name, but he’d swindled a nice bundle out of some society matron in New York. A little dude, and I never expected he’d pull a—Now, Charlie, what about that is so almighty funny?”
    It took her a second to stop laughing, but she finally managed, “Dude?”
    His voice suggested that he was smiling again. “Ah, well, a ‘dude’ back in my day was a fancy man who had no business being out west. And I’m decent now.”
    Indigo denim jeans—not formfitting, but falling straight from his hips, like the old-fashioned Levi’s she’d seen miners wearing in pictures. His suspenders looped the length of his thighs, and Ethan had his head bent, working a metal button on his waistband through the end of the leather strap. His shirt was still unfastened, exposing a wide swath of skin. Dark hair roughened his chest, arrowed down the center of his stomach.
    Nothing about that visual was decent; it embodied some kinky fantasy Charlie hadn’t even known she’d had. She picked up her makeup bag, began digging through it to distract herself.
    “You tracked him—you were a cop?” Old Matthew hadn’t been wrong, after all.
    He shook his head. “I was employed by a detective agency.”
    “Like…like…” Dammit. “It starts with ‘P.’”
    “Pinkerton’s?” He glanced up from his buttons, and she nodded. “Similar to it, yes. I worked with Pinkerton’s for a spell, but they mostly wanted thugs to hassle unionizing workers. So I moved on to a smaller agency where I could be put to better use.”
    She leaned to the side and turned on the faucet in the middle of the island, rinsing her tweezers. “You’re big enough to be useful as a thug.”
    “But I’m more useful thinking like a thief and murderer.” His eyes narrowed. “What’s it with you and letters? ‘Starts with “P.” ’”
    “I remember