21. Are you sure you’re not an angel in disguise? #3
I blinked. Wait. When I had first met Quinn, I had thought he was an uptight ass; beautiful, infuriatingly sexy, and unfortunately married, but a snobbish ass. Dosing him with pixie dust had been my way of getting rid of the lust-inducing nuisance.
Did pixie dust affect him like it did other incubi?
I trailed my fingers along the length of his spine before pulling my hand out of his clothes. “Hey, Quinn?”
“What?”
“Does pixie dust make you a sex fiend?”
Everyone in the room choked and spluttered. Quinn stood, turned around, leaned over me, and rewarded me with a kiss. “Is there a reason you’re asking me this, my beautiful?”
He stole my breath. He needed to stop doing that. I needed to breathe. I also needed another kiss, but he pulled away. Later, once my heart stopped racing, I’d deal with him calling me beautiful. “I may have spiked a few of your coffees with pixie dust while you were still married to Audrey.”
He froze, sucked in a breath, and widened his eyes. “Oh.”
“You were being an uptight ass, and Mary kept pinches of pixie dust on hand for spiking drinks to keep irate customers from flipping out. It’s like a quarter of the amount we use in a light dusting—just enough to take a bit of the edge off.” I bit my lip. “It’s legal.”
“I know.”
“It’s important information,” I stuttered. How much dust would I need to turn him into my personal living, breathing sex machine? “It really is.”
“The answer is yes.”
I now had proof God loved me and wanted me to be happy. Nice. “So for the past five or six years I’ve been sending you to work as a tortured, sex-deprived sex fiend.”
Quinn sighed. “You’re far too happy about this, Bailey.”
I smiled. “Of course. I’m very happy about this.”
“She won that round, little Samuel. Just accept it. I think I see what she’s trying to imply, however.
If Bailey drugged you with pixie dust, your behavior would have changed, especially if your relationship wasn’t as, ah, intimate as some might think.
Audrey may have linked Bailey to your whetted appetite, thus giving her the impression Bailey was more than she seemed. ”
“Demon between the sheets,” my mouth contributed.
Quinn turned scarlet. “Bailey!”
I was not sorry. “Oops.”
“She’s not wrong. Pardon us, Chief Hollands. My grandson has a bit of incubus in him from his mother’s side of the family.”
While I expected some sort of reaction, did Chief Hollands really need to dissolve into helpless laughter? Men. “It’s not that funny.”
Quinn walked across the room and banged his forehead into the wall. “Damn it. I managed to hide my heritage for a long time, too.”
I stared at Quinn’s back as I realized he had never been at risk of being encased in a glass coffin and buried. Gorgon dust could petrify even gorgons, but there was no evidence it did anything other than inconvenience anyone with gorgon blood. I had worried for nothing.
Well, shit.
Still, I needed to know for certain. “Hey, old man. If I dumped your grandson in a vat of gorgon dust, what would happen?”
“You’d piss him off.”
Damn it. The answer didn’t help at all; I’d be pissed off, too—I’d be alive, stink of gorgon, and want to kill whoever had dumped me in, but I’d be fine. Would Quinn? I needed to know. “After he’s been petrified?”
“You’d piss him off,” my grandfather-in-law repeated.
Grandfather Quinn needed to have his pretty snakes braided and tied off with pretty little bows. “Let me rephrase this: I’ve been terrified that if Quinn was exposed to dust, they would lock him in a glass coffin and bury him due to his magic rating. What would happen?”
Quinn sighed and banged his head into the wall a few more times.
“He wouldn’t be buried. First of all, the Quinn family wouldn’t allow it.”
With a low groan, Quinn bumped his head into the wall again. “I’m very cautious around dust and bile. Don’t worry, Bailey.”
“I torched a skyscraper for you!”
Ouch. Even to my ears, my voice turned painfully shrill.
Quinn turned to face me and sighed. “I’m sorry. I had no idea that was bothering you. There’s a reason I’m cautious around bile sites.”
If he could be reasonable, so could I. I wouldn’t yell nor would I shriek again. “Okay. Can you tell me this reason?”
With a soft clearing of his throat, Quinn’s grandfather shut the door to Chief Hollands’s office. “He is his father’s son, that’s why. While he’s technically human, he does have an exceptionally high magic rating.”
Quinn shook his head. “I’ll tell her.”
“Then do it.”
Quinn approached and sat beside me on the couch.
He took hold of my hand and rubbed his thumb against my palm and traced my fingers.
“It’s a matter of gorgon biology. In most circumstances, bile won’t petrify another gorgon.
Their dust, on the other hand, can petrify many gorgons—most, in fact.
Gorgon kings and their scions are only petrified by the dust created from a stronger gorgon. ”
“So it’d be difficult to petrify a gorgon king—and princes, like you.”
“Right.”
I clacked my teeth together to bite back my growing irritation. “Did the pixie dust bring out your incubus tendencies?”
“Yes.”
I pointed at the whiteboards. “On the timeline, put when you remember coming to Mary’s shop for coffee and I served you. Does it line up?”
“Before we continue,” Chief Hollands lifted his hand and waited for silence. When he had it, he continued, “I’m not sure I understand why this is relevant, Mrs. Quinn.”
Oh, right. I was interrogating and filleting my own husband. Crap. “He’s a demon between the sheets without pixie dust. On it, he must be like a god. If they were only together when I was dosing him…”
The chief snapped his fingers. “Sex addict.”
Quinn groaned. “You’re really going to make me detail this, aren’t you?”
“It’s important information.” At the very least, I’d make sure I wasn’t messing up and driving him away.
Of course, I had already pushed my luck with him as it was.
“That, plus if I ever see the bitch again, I can tell her I don’t need any damned pixie dust to rile you up.
Then I’ll shove her own snakes down her throat and punch her in the mouth until she swallows her teeth. ”
With a soft laugh, he shook his head. “There you go running your mouth again. Should I fetch you a shovel so it’s easier to dig the hole you’re trying to bury yourself in?”
“Quinn!”
“All right, all right. I’ll detail my lackluster sexual exploits with my ex-wife. For the record, I think this is ridiculous.” Hopping to his feet, Quinn went to work, and to my surprise, he pulled out his phone to reference it.
“You note when you have sex?”
Crap. I clapped my hands over my blabbering mouth.
“No, I noted when I saw you, actually.”
Stunned, I lowered my hands. “What? Why would you do that?”
“I record where I go and interesting people I meet. You disliked me from the start. It’s odd for women to dislike me.
I cheated and checked the facial recognition database to find out who you were and saw you were a promising CDC student.
That made you interesting. Honestly, though, you made good coffee, and that was more important. ”
“I should have known you bothered me because I made you coffee.”
“You made the bed, sweetheart. You know what they say about that.” After flashing his sexiest smirk at me, Quinn filled in the dates and times of his encounters with me that led up to Audrey’s first infidelity. “That should be all of them.”
Chief Hollands pointed at a two-month gap prior to Audrey cheating on him. “Were you together during this period of time?”
“Not often.”
“Why not?”
“I had a lot of work. Audrey knew my job was time consuming when we got married. She liked my wealth and looks, but she didn’t bring a whole lot to the marriage for me.
She did help me dodge the bachelorettes, which is what I needed from her at the time.
I did not anticipate my general lack of interest in her as a woman. ”
“You are incredibly young to be a police chief.” Chief Hollands snatched up a folder and flipped it open. “Thirty. That must be a record.”
Quinn flinched. “Manhattan has ten police chiefs spread across the island, and all of us have the same magic rating.
I enrolled at the police academy at eighteen, three years before the legal enrollment age because of an exception due to my rating.
My predecessor was murdered. I was the only one in the force with the required rating, so I got the job.
I had six months of field experience. Since the reporters liked me, I got recruited to do the majority of the talking and ended up with blanket jurisdiction over the entirety of Manhattan Island.
“With no experience.”
“I said the same thing, trust me. I even tried quitting once. The commissioner laughed at me.”
While I had wondered why Quinn had looked so young for a police chief, I had assumed he had been promoted due to some stunning act of heroism or something equally impressive.
I tried to imagine him as a cadet, and instead I got the memory of the dipshit I’d gone into 120 Wall Street with.
Yuck. “If you don’t come home at acceptable intervals, I will come to the station, steal your car, and start breaking laws so you’re forced to chase me down and put me in cuffs. ”
Oh, shit. Stupid mouth. I groaned and leaned forward, bowing my head and running my hands through my hair.
“Bailey probably doesn’t mean it. She just forgets to think before she speaks when she’s embarrassed over something.” Quinn chuckled. “She’s also the jealous type.”
“Quinn,” I groaned.
Chief Hollands clapped his hands. “All right, back on subject. Sam, is there any chance Audrey McGee might have associated your heightened interest with Bailey?”
Quinn froze and his eyes widened. “Excuse me for a moment.”
In four long strides, he left the room, closing the door behind him with a soft click. Through the room’s window, I watched him straighten. He spewed curses so loudly I could hear him through the wall. The cops in the main room jumped.