Playing Their Parts

“She’s right, Cassandra.” Her partner, Stone, looked up and Cassie saw with a little shock that his face looked pale. Stone was a Blood Kindred—all cool logic and reason to go with his dark blond hair and piercing, Husky-blue eyes. Nothing ever ruffled his feathers, so what was it about this case that had him looking like he’d seen a ghost?

“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning across her desk and reaching for the dispatch. “What’s different?”

“This time the murder victim isn’t male—it’s a female.” Stone’s deep voice was low and shocked. “And the perpetrator appears to have been…Kindred.”

Two

“That can’t be right.” Cassie snatched the dispatch out of her partner’s big hands and scanned it rapidly. Sure enough, the victim was a female. “But…Kindred don’t kill women,” she said blankly. “This has to be a mistake—right?”

“Don’t know until we check it out. Vic was Caucasian, mid-twenties. Found dead in a South Tampa residence on Bayshore,” Captain Perkins said, reciting the facts even as Cassie read them. “The body isn’t even cold yet—just called in by the owner of the house twenty minutes ago.”

“Bayshore?” Cassie looked at the address again and let out a long, low whistle. “This is going to be a mansion.”

If Tampa was a Monopoly game, Bayshore Avenue would have been Boardwalk. It boasted the longest unbroken length of sidewalk in the US, which edged Tampa Bay on one side and rows of stately mansions on the other side. The mansions themselves went for millions—even the more modest ones.

“She must not have been hurting for cash if she was living on Bayshore,” Cassie remarked. “Guess the motive probably isn’t money.”

“Actually, she wasn’t living there—she was working there,” Captain Perkins corrected her.

“Working?” Cassie frowned. “Was she a maid? A housekeeper? Cook?”

“Try porn star,” the Captain said flatly. “According to the owner of the house—who found the body—she and her, uh, Beast Kindred co-star were renting the mansion by days to make some high-class interspecies pornography.”

“What?” Cassie shook her head. “Now I’ve heard everything.” She looked at her partner. “What do you think, Stone?”

Stone shook his head. He still looked shocked to Cassie.

“I will not know until I see it,” he said shortly. “I think we’d better get over there, Cassandra. Come on.”

Cassie sighed. It looked like Lady A would have to wait for another day. And yet, she was intrigued. Finally, after two whole years, it seemed like they had an interesting case. Not that she wanted anyone dead, but maybe there was an actual mystery involved here.

And she was determined that she and her partner were going to be the ones to solve it.

Three

“You drive. I need to think,” Stone said shortly as he folded his big body into the passenger side of the Kindred shuttle that doubled as his squad car. He’d brought the vehicle with him when he came from the Mother Ship to join the Tampa PD and had taught Cassie to drive it when she’d asked him to, even though it was against regulations.

Cassie had been secretly pleased that her seemingly silent and uptight partner was willing to bend the rules a little for her. It had been, she thought, the true start of their friendship.

Teaching her to drive the shuttle had been the start, but their friendship didn’t really take off until about six months into their partnership when her marriage had dissolved.

Not that the end of Cassie’s marriage was Stone’s fault. Part of it was about the long hours she was working and part of it, she suspected, was the fact that her ex-husband had been ridiculously jealous and controlling.

Keith hadn’t liked the idea of her riding around all day with a big, muscular, handsome Kindred, even though Cassie had explained over and over again that he was just a partner. Even if she had wanted to put the moves on Stone—which she told herself she most certainly didn’t—the big Kindred was way out of her league.

Not that she was bad looking. She had a pretty face—really pretty, some said—with big brown eyes and jet-black hair she wore in a tight French braid most of the time. She had good skin too—a smooth olive complexion she could attribute to her Italian grandmother. But that was where her prettiness ended—at least as far as Cassie was concerned. She had big hips and a wide behind and thighs that her ex, Keith had referred to as “tree trunks” when he was being especially cruel.

There was no getting around the fact that she was a curvy girl, which definitely disqualified her from the beauty queen circuit, while Stone looked like a Greek god descended from Olympus to grace the world with his presence. From his piercing eyes—a pale blue, ringed with black usually only seen in a Husky—to his classically handsome features, he was a catch. Which made it surprising that he was still single.