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The name Elliot Harding pounds through my brain until it fuses into my neural pathways.

“Seven, switch to silent computronic mode,” I murmur. A green light blinks from the device on my dresser to signal compliance. “Commence full search. Subject: Elliot Harding. Professor. UCLA, California. Full history—financial, medical, academic. Current location. Cross reference with Leo Brummer, same parameters including next of kin. Also search for dwellings with extensive underground development in Hollywood Hills, California. Specific dates of interest, first half of 2009. First report by zero six hundred.”

The green light blinks three times to signal message received.

I exhale and tangle my legs with Keely’s. She murmurs softly in her sleep, and I’m about to pull her even closer, bask in her warmth, when another device lights up, this one right next to me on the bedside table.

Cassie’s name is backlit in blue neon on my phone and the tiny sense of peace I felt a moment ago vanishes. I let it buzz, not trusting myself to be civil to a woman whose only sin against me is the blue blood that runs through her veins.

I was indifferent to Cassandra McCarthy long before I married her for the sake of consolidating our families’ financial power. Unfortunately, it took three years of mind-fucking cruelty for me to recognize that I was punishing her for being a carbon copy of my mother.

But more than detesting her for taking what I doled out like a meek, pearls-draped, upper-class lamb, I detest her for giving me the son I grew to love more than I ever believed I was capable of loving another human being. She tore open a heart I didn’t want to believe I possessed and filled it with hopes and dreams, magic and endless possibility, for a senselessly brief time.

The day I lost Toby was the day I came within an inch of killing my ex-wife.

I divorced her the day after I buried my son, for her own sake as well as mine.

That compulsion hasn’t abated.

She knows better than to contact me. So I know she has a good reason for contacting me now.

I wait for the beep that tells me she’s left a message. It never arrives. I place the phone back on the bedside table. Three calls in one day. Three calls with no messages.

My ex-wife has either grown brass balls.

Or something is very wrong.

26

KEELY

I’m not sure what wakes me. All I know is that I’m lighter than a cirrus cloud and soaring just as high, even though I’m weighted down by a heavy limb.

Mason’s scent hits my nostrils and memory rushes back.

I told him. Another human knows what happened to me six years ago.

I wait for my stomach to turn, for the hot poker of shame to stab me in the heart, because let’s face it, the Sodom-sized hell visited upon me wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t following the dictates of my pussy. The bundle of nerves between my legs has altered my reality for all time, and for as long as I live, I’ll have to bear the consequences of that, so yeah… shame.

I wait for it to drown me.

Nothing happens. I’m still floating. A little heavier than I was a moment ago, but I’m a happy, shame-free cloud.

A happy, shame-free,hornycloud.

Slowly, I open my eyes. The room is dawn-dark, so I know we haven’t been asleep longer than three hours. I turn my head and watch a softly snoring Mason. He’s lying on his side, as if he fell asleep watching me. The thought tightens my chest, and I dance away from the warning light flickering on inside me.

He was a handy confessor. More than that, he received my burden with no outward judgment.

For that, he deserves a reward. And I know just the thing.

I lean closer and touch his eyebrow. He shifts, but his eyes remain closed, so I kiss the corner of his mouth, linger on his sensual upper lip before I trail kisses along his jaw to his ear. He stirs beneath me, and I know he’s awake.

“‘You are the one I am lit for. Come with your rod that twists and is a serpent,’”I whisper the line from “To a Dark Moses” in his ear.

His jaw moves and I can tell without looking that he’s smiling.

“You wake me with talk of rods and serpents. Either you’re a celestial being come to deliver the end of days, or you’re a little horny. Which is it, kitten?”