Nolan peeled back the body bag to expose Jane Doe’s bare white shoulders. All three of us leaned over the corpse, and I half-expected her to open her eyes and stare back at us. But nothing happened. And there were no scars on her shoulder or anywhere else on her body.
“What the hell?” I said, unable to understand why there was no evidence of the wound. I wasn’t willing to accept I was wrong about it being the same girl. The resemblance was too uncanny.
When we pulled back, the dead girl’s eyelid had opened, and she leered at us with her one constricted pupil, her face contorted in a sinister, frozen wink that was more creepy than comical. Brigit, Nolan and I all stepped back in unison. I knew bodies did messed-up things postmortem, but it was hard not to imagine that she was staring at us. I was suddenly all too aware that we were in the middle of a room full of corpses, and the heebie-jeebies set in full force.
I did the on
ly thing I could think to do. I zipped the bag back up, pushed the tray back in and closed the cabinet with a final, satisfying click. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I swore the rank of decay was hanging heavy in the air, and I feared it had sunk into my clothes, hair and pores. I would spend hours in the shower washing the smell of death off me.
When we left, Brigit gave the smiling desk clerk his card back.
None of us said a word.
Chapter Twenty
My original plan had been to go straight from the Medical Examiner’s office to Columbia to talk to Mayhew again. But with the smell of rotten corpse clinging to me, I needed a hot shower and a change of clothes before I went anywhere.
There were any number of places I could have stopped between the financial district and the Columbia campus, but I still felt like I reeked of death and had corpse stink oozing out of my sweat. The only shower that would do was my own.
When I unlocked my door, I almost tripped over Desmond’s work shoes. Kicking them out of the way, I shucked my boots off next to his. The water was running in the bathroom, so Desmond had probably gone to the gym after work and just gotten home. If he’d been in a hurry to go from the office to a workout, it would explain his haphazard shoe disposal. Of the two of us, he was almost always the neater one.
Who was I kidding? He was always the neater one.
I contemplated waiting for him to finish in the shower, but the stench wafting off me was too much to bear. Stripping in the middle of the hallway, I stalked into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming shower stall. Desmond’s brown hair and olive skin looked especially dark against my garish pink tub and rose-print wallpaper.
He also seemed surprised to see me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his voice slipping into the husky growl he reserved for bedroom conversation.
I would have loved to act out some slippery, soapy, shower-sex fantasy with him right then, but it wasn’t meant to be. He was a werewolf, and his sense of smell was second to none, even when he was in his human form. The moment he stooped to kiss me he recoiled, his nose wrinkled with disgust.
“What? You don’t like my new perfume?”
“Eau de Putrification? God, Secret, what is that?”
“Death.” I should have known he’d be able to smell it on me. It was bad enough that the wolves could smell vampires on me, but real human death had its own distinctive, lingering quality. I’d been right to shower.
Desmond put his hands on my waist, but it wasn’t a come-on. He pushed me past him so the full brunt of the showerhead was angled in my face. The water was so hot I thought it might burn off the top layer of my skin. I turned it hotter. To Desmond’s credit he didn’t bail out to get away from the smell. Instead he opted to empty half a bottle of green-apple-scented shampoo onto my head and made a desperate effort to scrub the stink out of my hair by sheer force of will.
In spite of the unpleasant reason for my being there, it felt fantastic to have him wash my hair. He applied just the right amount of pressure on my scalp and wrapped my hair into a thick tail to rinse the shampoo free. Then he handed me a loofah and ducked out of the shower.
I was impressed he’d lasted that long.
A good fifteen minutes later my skin was scrubbed pink, I’d washed my hair again, and we were out of pomegranate body gel. I still detected the lingering touch of old death when I took a deep breath, but I always smelled a little dead.
Desmond was dressed and waiting for me in the kitchen with a pre-warmed glass of AB negative.
“Well…” He handed me the glass. “Now you smell like a rotting fruit salad. I guess it’s an improvement.”
“Did they teach you how to woo a lady at charm school? You’re excellent at it.”
“You mean we don’t club women over the head and drag them back to our caves? Hmm.” He swallowed a mouthful of water. “We wolfmen must have missed that lesson.”
“Lucas sure did,” I added with an indignant huff.
Desmond wrapped his hand around the back of my neck and kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it. His lips were warm and velvety soft in spite of the harsh dry air. I made a mental note to send the folks at ChapStick a thank-you letter. He didn’t push for more than a kiss, just let the gesture stand as its own entity. And what a kiss it was. My knees turned to gelatin, and I sagged into him, still clumsily holding my glass of blood in one hand while caressing his smooth cheek with the other.
He pulled back, playfully licking my swollen lower lip and sending tingles from my forehead to my toes.