My gaze dropped.

“Oh, goddamn it!” I snarled, fists pounding the carpet.

Clay caught me up with a growling laugh. “My sentiments exactly, darling.”

His lips went to mine, our kiss even rougher now, edged with frustration. He broke away first, his lips going to my ear.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” he whispered. “Anything.”

“What I wished you could do? Or what you can do, under the circumstance?”

His face moved in front of mine, the tip of his tongue slipping out, his eyes rolling back as my hand wrapped around him.

“What you want me to do,” he said, finger sliding into me. “What you wish I could do.”

So I told him, in every way and turn of phrase I could think of, half of which would make me blush under any other circumstances. I hadn’t even exhausted my repertoire when the words caught in my throat as I threw my head back, growling, thrusting against his hand, and pretending with every bit of creative visualization I could muster that it wasn’t his fingers inside me.

Clay’s mouth went to mine, and I felt the answering snarl of release vibrate up through his chest into his throat. A moment later, he shuddered, and started to lie down atop me, remembered it wasn’t possible these days, and lowered himself to my side.

He bit back a yawn. “After the baby comes, you’ll get that.”

“Repeatedly, I hope.”

He grinned. “As ‘repeatedly’ as I can manage, which, after four months, I figure I should be able to manage pretty often.” He paused. “Well, with short breaks.”

“Which we’ll probably need…for feeding and diaper changing.”

“Hmm, hadn’t thought of that. Not going to be pulling those half-day sessions for a while, are we?”

I sputtered a laugh. “Half-day? More like half-hour.”

He growled and pulled me onto him. “You’ve gotten half-day…with short breaks.” He looked at me. “Lots of short breaks.”

“Don’t ever hear me complaining, do you? Slow is good for teasing, but for satisfaction?” I grinned down at him. “Give me fast and hard any day. Pretty soon, speed will be a good thing, or this baby’s going to be hampering our sex life for more than these few months.”

“Can’t have that.”

I curled up beside him. “Definitely not.”

“Kidding ourselves, aren’t we?”

I chuckled against his chest. “Oh, yeah.”

Homeward

BY THE TIME WE WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, JEREMY had already scoured the papers for any mention of last night’s events. He’d found nothing. On the radio, a local station reported that hydro crews were still working to recover power lost last night in a Cabbagetown neighborhood, but beforethe newscast even ended, they announced that the problem had been fixed. That was it-one blown transformer, already repaired. Not a single mention of a whiskered man in a bowler hat.

“So we’re leaving?” I said as Jeremy folded a shirt and put it into his bag. “We may have unleashed Jack the Ripper, and we’re just going home?”

He didn’t answer, so I moved to the foot of the bed where I could see his face. “You do think that’s what we did, don’t you? Unleashed Jack the Ripper?”

“Because we dropped a dead mosquito onto a letter possibly written by the man over a hundred years ago?”

I thumped onto the bed. “My hormones are acting up again, aren’t they?”

I could imagine what Clay would have said about my wild logical leap, but luckily he was still in our room, showering and shaving.

Jeremy only gave me his crooked smile as he took his pants from the chair, then said, “Considering some of the things we’ve seen, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Something did happen last night, something…unusual.”

I remembered his reaction, the odd look on his face when he’d seen the smoke, how he’d glanced up at the transformer and pushed Clay and me out of the way before it blew. I longed to ask him about it, but as with everything else in Jeremy’s life, if he didn’t volunteer, I rarely dared to ask.

“That guy didn’t come from a community theater production,” I said.

“I know.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”

He moved to the bathroom to clear his toiletries.

“You want me to shut up and go away?” I said.

“Of course not.”

“Then you just want me to stop talking about it.”

“No.”

I gave a low growl of frustration.

“Can I see the letter?”

“It’s packed.”

He said this without hesitation, inflection, facial expression or anything else to suggest he didn’t want me seeing that letter. But when you live with someone for as long as I’ve lived with Jeremy, you just know.

I moved to the bathroom door. “What’s wrong with the letter?”

“Nothing. I just need to repair the damage before we hand it over. And I’m not eager to hand it over until I’ve done what I should have done before-researched it.”

“We did research it. I pulled up everything I could find on the history of-” I looked at him. “You mean supernatural history, don’t you? Whether the letter has any kind of supernatural background. It was owned by a sorcerer. Maybe there’s an invisible spell written on it. Or the paper could be magical. Maybe it’s-”