Priceless (A Rylee Adamson Novel, Book 1)

CHAPTER TWENTY

20

The processing took about three minutes tops. O’Shea was cuffed and flung into the back of a police cruiser, and I was hauled out to the back of the Jeep for questioning, my hand never leaving Alex’s collar. If it came off, everyone would see him for what he was, which would create a shit storm of problems we did not need.

From what picked up in the scattered radio squawks I could hear, there was an anonymous tip that O’Shea was with me and we were headed to Giselle’s. My gut was telling me that it was the black Coven getting inventive with ways to slow me down. I couldn’t prove my theory, but it was the only thing that made sense.

Alex pressed hard against my leg, his teeth chattering, but he had enough understanding of the situation not to say anything. I tried my best to focus on what the officer in front of me said.

“So, you’re telling me that Agent Liam O’Shea tracked you down and forced you to drive him . . . here?” The disbelief in the officer’s voice told me everything I needed to know. I was about to go down with O’Shea. Two birds, one big nasty, lying stone. There was no way I would be walking away from this.

I let Alex’s collar slip through my fingers. “Find Milly.” He lifted his big dark eyes to mine and nodded, then took off like a shot into the overgrown and junk-filled alley that ran alongside Giselle’s home, much to the dismay of the officers around us. Even though we were at odds, she would look out for Alex, would maybe even come to pull my ass out of this fire. Maybe.

“Oops,” I said. “Fingers slipped.” The officer glared at me, his face darkening to a shade that, in the light of the sirens, looked a distressing shade of purple.

Unable to help myself, I asked, “Do you have high blood pressure? You look like a plum that’s about to explode.”

Without further ado, I was spun, frisked and handcuffed with my hands behind my back, then shoved inside the same police cruiser as O’Shea. Or Liam, I suppose.

My hip bumped against his; he glanced over at me, but said nothing. All that spark and humor I’d seen earlier was gone, wiped out. Back were the cold, distant dark eyes I’d grown used to seeing glare at me out of his sharp angled face. There were no handles inside, nothing to even rattle in an attempt to get out. But I wasn’t panicking, at least not yet.

Leaning back into the pleather seats I stared up at the battered ceiling of the cruiser. It looked as though more than one set of feet had been smashed into it. “You never told me your name was Liam.”

He said nothing, so I kept talking. “It suits you.” I shifted down a little further and put my feet on the ceiling, setting them inside the prints of the previous passenger. “He had big feet. At least a size fourteen or fifteen. Maybe he was a Big Foot.” That got his attention.

“They aren’t real.” No one was in the cruiser with us yet, so I leaned toward him and put my lips to his ear.

“You sure about that?”

He shivered and a flash from a camera went off behind us. A picture of me snuggling up to the agent who’d shot his partner while hunting me. Oh, that was not going to help us any.

An officer got in the car, flipped the lights off, and stared at us through the metal bars that kept us from climbing out. “Was she worth it?”

O’Shea glanced over at me, and I smiled up at him and gave him a wink. “Go ahead, tell him the truth.” Something in me wanted O’Shea—Liam—to smile again.

There it was; a flicker of devilry in those dark eyes. “I don’t know. Yet.”

Heat, intense, searing heat flared between us. I couldn’t look away—the promise of that one, single, simple word was all it took to spin my mind back to a very tight cramped bathroom and the feel of his chest under my fingertips. The taste of his lips and tongue against mine. I swallowed hard, my heart pounding, blood rushing to places I’d ignored for a long time.