Read Online Taken (Ava Delaney #4) by Claire Farrell - Free Book Online Page A

in the shop, so she had the
opportunity.”
    “And he seemed
pretty agitated the other day when I saw her there.” I sipped the
drink, made a face, and put it back down in a hurry. Damn Finn.
    “What about the
other consultants?” Peter said. “It’s hardly Aiden, unless he
specifically wanted to keep Esther out of this to protect her.”
    “If he did,
I’ll kill him,” she hissed. “But that leaves us with the hottie and
the ancient vampire.”
    I raised a
brow. “The hottie?”
    “Elathan. He’s
fiercely hot.” She made a face at Peter’s look of disgust. “Demons
can be attractive, too.”
    “Demon, as in
from Hell?” I asked.
    She fidgeted at
a beermat. “He was kicked out of Hell.”
    I stared at
her, wondering what on earth someone had to do to get kicked out of
Hell.
    “I doubt it’s
him anyway,” she said.
    I shrugged.
“But you don’t know for sure. This is getting too complicated. Too
many possible players, and no way of us knowing who’s in on it. No
matter where we step, it’s likely to be on somebody’s toes. Gabe
didn’t have a clue what Illeana was doing, and Eddie seems to be a
victim of theft, so we can probably rule them out. But both could
be covering their tracks, so we’re stuck at square one.”
    “We could ask
them,” Esther said, but her heart wasn’t in the suggestion.
    “And risk all
of us getting killed?” Peter asked. “Isn’t worth it.”
    “All we can do
is keep working on it,” Carl said. “And watching out, because as
soon as anyone has an inkling of what we’re doing, they might want
to shut us up.”
    We discussed
our options for a while longer. Callista wasn’t working that night,
so Esther figured it would be better for me and her to confront
Callista in her own home. Esther would dig a little deeper into the
mystery of Illeana’s potentially missing belongings, and Carl and
Peter would keep trying to come up with leads on possible
witnesses, or any kind of information that might help. Esther was
still working on the hacker in the Council headquarters, and she
seemed confident that he would come up with something.
Eventually.
    I wanted to
talk to Gabe, but he seemed busy, so I left early.
    Peter followed
me outside. “Wait.” He grabbed my hand. We walked together for a
few minutes in silence. “Thanks,” he said at last. “For showing up
here.”
    “You didn’t
give us much choice.”
    “Everyone has a
choice.” As if to illustrate his point, he pushed me against the
closest wall and gripped my chin between his finger and thumb. “You
could kill me if you wanted to. I could kill you, too. But we
don’t. Even if we should.”
    His mouth fell
on mine hungrily, but I pushed him away. “What are you doing with
me then?”
    “You ask me
like I ever know what the fuck I’m doing,” he said, leaning in to
whisper in my ear. “Maybe you’re the ultimate forbidden fruit.” His
lips grazed my jaw, and he reached for my mouth again, forcing my
bottom lip down with his thumb. “Maybe I like getting close to the
mouth of danger.”
    I jerked my
knee upward, pulling the blow just in time, but he caught his
breath all the same.
    He laughed
softly. “Maybe I like the unpredictability.”
    “Maybe, maybe,
maybe.”
    The laughter
fell from his face, and his eyes turned earnest. “Want some
truth?”
    I frowned.
“Always.”
    “Truth is, I
like to be around you because I don’t have to worry about you. No
matter what happens, you defend yourself. Nobody is going to come
in the night and take you away. And even if they did, I wouldn’t
ever let myself feel enough for that to make a huge difference to
me.”
    “Wow. You’re so
romantic.”
    He laughed, but
there was no humour there. In fact, he looked unbelievably sad.
“Everything about you is almost ordinary, but all together, it
makes up something… interesting. You’ve brought something out of me
that I lost a long time ago. But I can’t offer you anything. I have
nothing to give you.