Page 96 of Playing with Fire

“My coffee maker.”

“Ah. Why is your coffee maker going to die at the hands of your wife?”

“My wife is a coffee snob.”

“Your wife thinks you have a stick up your ass again and you need a dose of pixie dust to be tolerable company.”

I blinked. Wait. When I had first met Quinn, I had thought he was an uptight ass; beautiful, infuriatingly sexy, and unfortunately married, but a snobbish ass. Dosing him with pixie dust had been my way of getting rid of the lust-inducing nuisance.

Did pixie dust affect him like it did other incubi?

I trailed my fingers along the length of his spine before pulling my hand out of his clothes. “Hey, Quinn?”

“What?”

“Does pixie dust make you a sex fiend?”

Everyone in the room choked and spluttered. Quinn stood, turned around, leaned over me, and rewarded me with a kiss. “Is there a reason you’re asking me this, my beautiful?”

He stole my breath. He needed to stop doing that. I needed to breathe. I also needed another kiss, but he pulled away. Later, once my heart stopped racing, I’d deal with him calling me beautiful. “I may have spiked a few of your coffees with pixie dust while you were still married to Audrey.”

He froze, sucked in a breath, and widened his eyes. “Oh.”

“You were being an uptight ass, and Mary kept pinches of pixie dust on hand for spiking drinks to keep irate customers from flipping out. It’s like a quarter of the amount we use in a light dusting—just enough to take a bit of the edge off.” I bit my lip. “It’s legal.”

“I know.”

“It’s important information,” I stuttered. How much dust would I need to turn him into my personal living, breathing sex machine? “It really is.”

“The answer is yes.”

I now had proof God loved me and wanted me to be happy. Nice. “So for the past five or six years I’ve been sending you to work as a tortured, sex-deprived sex fiend.”

Quinn sighed. “You’re far too happy about this, Bailey.”

I smiled. “Of course. I’m very happy about this.”

“She won that round, little Samuel. Just accept it. I think I see what she’s trying to imply, however. If Bailey drugged you with pixie dust, your behavior would have changed, especially if your relationship wasn’t as, ah, intimate as some might think. Audrey may have linked Bailey to your whetted appetite, thus giving her the impression Bailey was more than she seemed.”

“Demon between the sheets,” my mouth contributed.

Quinn turned scarlet. “Bailey!”

I was not sorry. “Oops.”

“She’s not wrong. Pardon us, Chief Hollands. My grandson has a bit of incubus in him from his mother’s side of the family.”

While I expected some sort of reaction, did Chief Hollands really need to dissolve into helpless laughter? Men. “It’s not that funny.”

Quinn walked across the room and banged his forehead into the wall. “Damn it. I managed to hide my heritage for a long time, too.”

I stared at Quinn’s back as I realized he had never been at risk of being encased in a glass coffin and buried. Gorgon dust could petrify even gorgons, but there was no evidence it did anything other than inconvenience anyone with gorgon blood. I had worried for nothing.

Well, shit.

Still, I needed to know for certain. “Hey, old man. If I dumped your grandson in a vat of gorgon dust, what would happen?”

“You’d piss him off.”