She scrambled to her feet, but when she tried to walk to the door to let Gmork back in, Søren tugged the sheet off of her. She turned around, naked, and glared at him.

“Was that necessary, Sir?”

“You can either let him in,” Søren said, “Or we can go back into your dungeon, play, and make love before lunch.”

Søren sat cooly in her big red armchair in his jeans and white tee, his beard with a touch of gray in it, his hair slicked back with water, a look of casual superiority on his face.

He wore casual superiority so well.

His steel-gray eyes gleamed with sinister intent as a self-satisfied smile played across his lips.

Gmork? Or Søren?

“He’s a dog,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”

Chapter Thirty

Cyrus had the pleasure of waking up in bed next to Paulina, a pleasure he thought he’d have to wait for until November. Even better, there was no morning-after awkwardness between them. That was a relief.

Still, she kicked him right out of her house.

“I gotta go?” he asked, still sleepy. It was just after six. They’d only spent a few minutes awake, enjoying the closeness.

“Right this second,” she said. “I have to get ready for work and if you say one more thing to me, I’ll call in and never forgive myself.”

“Bu—”

That was as much backtalk as she allowed him. She pointed at her bedroom door, and he knew she meant business.

Cyrus dragged himself away from her warm soft bed and her warm soft body and yanked his jeans on. He found his shirt in the hallway and under it, her pink panties. He brought them back to her and when she tried to snatch them from his hand, he pulled them back and tucked them in his pocket.

“Cyrus!”

“Catch me if you can,” he said, running out the door, waving her stolen underwear like a flag.

He’d been up for four hours by the time Nora called him. Good thing her Viking had been there or Cyrus might have let it slip that he’d had a very good night after leaving her. Paulina might not appreciate him spilling their business all over town.

But a man had a right to smile. Cyrus found himself grinning like a fool even as he drove back to his apartment, grinning like a fool as he walked up the stairs, grinning like a fool in the shower. He was still grinning like a fool when Nora’s Viking got on the phone and asked him to go running the next morning.

Cyrus ran about three miles a morning five times a week. And he was thirty-five. Nora’s Viking was fifty-one. Tall, though, with a longer stride than Cyrus…but fifty-one. He heard Nora’s voice in the background, yelling, “It’s a trap!”

Cyrus could handle himself with a fifty-one-year-old runner. He might be a Viking, but Usain Bolt he was not.

It sounded like Nora was off the case for today, however, bare minimum. And that was fine. Cyrus was happy to spend a day alone working on the case between having flashbacks from last night with Paulina. He’d taken care of a very insistent erection in the shower, but every time he thought about the way she looked and the way she smelled and the way she tasted and that sound she made when she came against his tongue, well, this was gonna be a two-shower day for sure.