Chapter 5
Pippa stared at her computer and tried not to think of how absolutely, unquestionably fucked she was.
Someone cleared their throat in the office and she snapped her eyes up.
For one horrible, short moment, she forgot she was on the tenth floor and beneath artificial lighting, and braced herself for a verbal attack by a berobed and furious coven member.
But no.
It was just Geoff, who appeared to have choked a little bit on his scone.
Pippa flexed her fingers on her keyboard. She tapped a sentence in an email, then deleted it, then tapped it out again. Then deleted it. Then dropped her head into her hands and groaned.
Demon’s teeth, she couldn’t focus.
When she woke up this morning, she’d entertained the thought that the day before had been a series of long, awful delusions.
The fading scar on her forearm and the dark smudges under her eyes spoke strongly against that hope however, as did the long call with a tow truck service and a ride in to work on a particularly smelly bus.
As much as she would like to believe that Maxim Sheppard had not witnessed her using magic and killing a demon in an alley, it had happened. She had violated one of the Ash Coven’s highest laws: respect and uphold the secrecy of the otherworld.
She couldn’t think about this right now. Shouldn’t. There were messages to write, queries to answer, and by focusing on the minutiae of this job, she could get through the day without crumbling.
It would have been easier if she didn’t have to work with Maxim Sheppard.
Forever the interminable pain in the ass, he didn’t seem to have been affected by her threat the previous day.
She had expected him to keep his distance, maybe scuttle around her nervously, but even though he now knew she could turn him into a charred pile of woodsy-citrusy-smelling ash, he didn’t seem to be able to stop staring at her.
While Reggie Cavatappi gave his speech at this morning’s meeting (Jules accepted the twenty-dollar bill with a pleased “Aah!”), Pippa repeatedly glanced across the table to find herself pinned by golden-green eyes.
Not an aggressive pinning, but Pippa still shifted under their intensity.
Maxim looked at her as if he expected to see informative essays stamped in fine print along her hairline or along the bridge of her nose.
After ten minutes of this, Pippa nudged some magic so it clamped on his tie and cinched it more tightly around his neck.
Not nearly enough to choke, but enough to make him start in his chair.
He caught her glare, paled, and for the rest of the meeting, was at least more surreptitious with his attention.
She must have glared at him hard enough for Jules to notice. As they’d sat at their desks post-meeting, Jules had spun around to face Pippa.
“He’s scared of you,” she said. “He legit quailed. I’ve never even seen an example of that word in real life before. How do I gain this power?”
Pippa hadn’t liked the emphasis Jules had put on ‘power.’ She purposely chose to not address it, and instead she shrugged, then mumbled something nondescript about throwing her drink at him and giving him a minor lecture after he’d stomped off to the alley like a child.
“Good for you,” Jules had said. “Maybe he won’t be so much of an ass on his next project.”
Thinking of this earlier conversation reminded Pippa that his next project was actually her current project, which reminded her of the Burton case, which reminded her of the empty email sitting unaddressed on her screen.
She really should start that.
Dear Mr. Sheppard,
Attached are the files you requested. Please make sure to update your PDF viewer, as I believe that is part of the issue with viewing them.
Pippa Beverly
P.S. Stop staring at me like I’m hiding tentacles beneath my sweater. I am fully capable of melting your eyeballs without saying a word. Or waving a tentacle.
Ah yes, because emails post-scripted with a threat were the best kind of work emails.
Pippa frowned at her screen for a solid minute, then decided she needed a break, both for the good of herself and the good of the office.
The building had a mini cafe on the ground floor; she could do with something coated in powdered sugar.
And something with caffeine. The effort of healing Maxim’s severe injuries had left her with the same sort of head fog and groggy irritability that came along with a hangover, without any fun memories.
She grabbed her wallet and shoved her phone into her sweater’s kangaroo pocket in case Jules finished her current chapter and wanted instant feedback, then made her way to the elevator lobby.
Her thoughts full of foamy, syrupy coffee beverages, Pippa skipped through the elevator doors as they began to close. Empty. Perfect.
“Wait!”
Pippa snapped her head up to see Maxim jogging across the lobby’s shining tiles.
Shit.
“Oh no!” she said as she rapidly jabbed the “close” button. “The doors are closing too fast! Maybe you should take the stairs!”
Maxim shoved his arm inside and the doors bounced harmlessly off his fine gray sleeve.
He charged into the elevator once the doors opened wide enough to admit him, then faced Pippa.
Although he was breathing hard as if he’d sprinted from his office, his lips were pressed together in their traditional thin line.
“I’m getting coffee,” Pippa said curtly. “I wasn’t aware you wanted some that badly.”
“We need to talk.”
She aimed a glower at him and was very displeased when he failed to quail again.
“No we don’t,” she said, directing her glower at the closing doors instead. “I said all I needed to. Unless you want to be threatened a second time.”
“What is happening here, Pippa?”
The utter desperation in his voice, as well as the use of her name, tugged at her.
Whenever he’d needed to get her attention in the past, he’d usually just send her an email addressed to either “Ms. Beverly” or “Philippa.” There were times when she’d assumed he looked it up in a roster every time he needed something.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“You— You know exactly what I—” Maxim made a low growl of frustration, and before Pippa could properly register what he was doing, he lunged in front of her and slapped the emergency stop button.
The elevator coasted to a stop. According to the illuminated numbers above the doors, they’d made it a single floor.
Pippa let loose her own frustrated growl. “You’re unbelievable.”
“You’re a witch,” he hissed, as if someone outside the doors could even hear, and as if her being a witch was a perfectly valid reason for disrupting a large chunk of the building’s elevator traffic. “I need to understand what happened last night.”
“No, you don’t. You have no right to be involved with any of it.”
“You involved me! When you decided to kill a demon—”
“‘Decided’? What a great way to describe that whole situation.”
“When— All right, fine, whatever, when you killed a demon, because that’s kind of the main issue here, you did it right in front of me. Did you just forget I was there?”
Guilt tugged at Pippa’s stomach. “I’m insulted you’d even think that.”
“You opened up a . . . a completely different world to me. And like hell will you convince me to lie down and forget about it.”
There was an intensity to him she’d never seen before.
This was not the same Maxim who had calmly and rationally paved the way for a winning case in a courtroom.
It was not the same Maxim who had frowned at an incorrect coffee order, or talked about the differences in tie knots with a haughtiness that must have been inherited.
His eyes were fiery, his skin flushed. Even his nostrils were flared.
If he’d appeared more human the previous night in the alley when she confronted him, now he was alive.
Seeing him like this was both exciting and disturbing, though she couldn’t quite unpack the reasons for either.
It was a little thrilling, even; what else would make a flush stain his cheeks?
Not at all the type of thought that was appropriate in a closed elevator with an agitated man she had to work with every day.
Despite the thrill, her gut soured and her stomach twisted as if it were a caught creature.
Wait.
That couldn’t be right.
No matter how the man irritated her, he’d never instigated nausea. Something was wrong.
“What else can I say to you? Is there any way . . .”
She tuned out Maxim’s continued argument.
The taste of bile burned hot and acrid in her throat.
She focused on the air around her, on that twinge of wrong, how she suddenly felt as if the back of her neck was being tickled with a knife.
It was coming from . . . She couldn’t tell. Maxim was still talking.
“You’re— And now you’re pretending I’m not here.” He rubbed his forehead. “Wow. All right.”
“Shut up,” she said.
“I— What?”
Before he could begin an offended rant, Pippa clapped a hand over his mouth and shoved him against the elevator wall. There was empty air below them, walls to the sides, and above—
“I need you to be quiet,” she whispered.
After only a brief but muffled outraged curse, Maxim seemed to realize there was a change in her demeanor and didn’t try to move away.
She was so much shorter than he was, and pressed up against him like this, she could feel the hard, strong lines of his body through his suit. It wasn’t a good time to notice that, or the length of his eyelashes, or the thick arch of his eyebrows, or how soft his lips were under her palm.
Pull yourself together, Pippa.