Holy God, he smelled good.
Whenever I got close to him I inhaled citrus and vetiver with hints of sandalwood and amber, cedar, and leather. All of it together made me want to lick him all over.
“M?” He chuckled as I breathed him in at the same time I sucked the spot behind his ear.
“You smell so good,” I almost mewled.
“I smell like sweat,” he grumbled, but I could hear the begrudging rumble of happiness. Me wanting him turned him on big-time. “Come on. Let’s go get the car so we can first report in and then figure out where we’re staying. We need a bed.”
We did, it was true.
Half an hour later, we had the Toyota Sequoia and Ian drove us out of the parking garage, heading toward the street. The temperature on the dash read 101, but I was pretty sure that was because the asphalt was absorbing all the heat. I was interested to know how people drove in the summer and wondered if they slipped on a pair of oven mitts to be able to touch the steering wheel.
“Where are we going?” Ian asked irritably.
“Okay, so right now we’re on East Sky Harbor Boulevard, and you’re gonna want to take a right onto I-10 in like a minute.”
“Then what?”
“Do you know that in the summer they cook eggs on the sidewalk out here?”
“Shut up. What do I do once I’m on the freeway?”
“Oh, are you there already?”
“This is me driving.”
True. “Okay, so then you’re gonna take the 7th Avenue exit, which is exit 144.”
“Roger that—now what?”
“Okay, now you’re gonna take the 7th Avenue ramp south, and you’re staying on that until you take a left onto Jefferson. It says the courthouse is on Washington just east of 7th, and by the way, it’s dubbed the ‘Solar Oven.’”
“Oh fuck you,” he growled.
I cackled. “In the summer, they let people who work there, security and stuff like that, wear short-sleeve shirts.”
“They do not.”
“They do, but now it’s not as bad.”
“It’s a fuckin’ blast furnace out here,” he complained, gesturing to the temperature displayed on the dash. It read 92 degrees. “It’s October, for crissakes.”
“Yeah, but look, it already dropped nine degrees from when we got in the car.”
“You think your body can actually tell the difference between ninety degrees and a hundred degrees?”
Perhaps not. “You know, Kage told me before we left the office that when he was on a task force here once that he and the other guys said it’s like a giant greenhouse from hell.”
Nothing for a moment before he turned to me. “Are you fucking with me?”
The look on his face was priceless.
“That’s what he said?”
“He says it’s like being in the devil’s terrarium.”
Ian groaned and I died.
Died.
I laughed so hard I couldn’t even breathe.
“Can you please pull your shit together?”
It took several minutes, because having to leave home because there was a psychopath after me was scary, but Ian was with me, so it was sort of like a vacation. All in all, I was feeling a bit unbalanced.
“He said”—I wiped at my eyes, still chuckling—“that it’s all glass when you walk in, and in the summer it’s like being in a sweatbox, and it’s not much better in the winter.”
“That’s because during October here, it’s still ninety-two fuckin’ degrees!”
“I bet it doesn’t cool down at night, either,” I mentioned. “Look at all this concrete.”
At first, we didn’t find parking anywhere near the building. It was all blocked off. But Ian finally saw what looked like a gated area and drove around behind it, and sure enough, that was where the people who worked there parked.
We had to stop and show the guard our badges and IDs before we were finally allowed into the atrium. And our boss was right: gorgeous building, all steel and glass, and hotter than hell. Outside, it was like standing in the blast of a blow dryer set to crispy, but inside, for whatever reason, it was hot and humid.
“This is like Chicago in July,” Ian moaned.
“And yet back outside, it’s a dry heat.”
“I wanna go home.”
The people working the coffee kiosk and some others wore shorts and T-shirts—some even in tank tops—and I got it, I did. If they were dressed like most people you saw inside a federal courthouse, they’d melt. It was hot inside the atrium, and I wondered if, as winter rolled around, it got cold inside and held that temperature too?
At the security station, we got out our badges and IDs again, passed the guns over, and were finally admitted. Before we could head up to the second floor, though, one of the deputy US marshals we had just spoken to made clear that we were supposed to report to the security director of the court and that he was in the Central Court Building, which was not where we were now. We needed to go back outside and walk a bit.