Free Luminous by Corrina Lawson Page A

had felt against his fingertips when he’d caressed her chin. He wondered if body paint would work. Painting her would be fun.
    Focus, he told himself.
    “We are partners,” he said.
    “So you just up and leave without me? You leave me with a doctor who’s watching over me as of I were a child?”
    “You were shot, remember? Besides, I couldn’t take you with me to the precinct.” He sat down on the couch and put his feet up on the table.
    “No one has to know I’m with you. Invisible, remember?”
    “That part is hard to forget.”
    She loomed above him. Hmm…she was about five-six, five-seven. He’d had to guess last night and pegged her as taller. It must have been the cape. And the hat.
    “You have a white bandage on your leg. Which is not invisible.”
    “I could’ve taken it off.”
    “Then people would see the blood, like I did last night. Chill, Noir.” He took his feet off the table. “You wouldn’t have been ready to help me hunt down leads tonight if you didn’t rest.”
    “Leads?”
    He couldn’t see, but he could hear the surprise in her voice. He liked surprising her. That meant she was the one off-balance, not him.
    “Yes, leads. Enough to locate the hostage, maybe.” He pointed to the chair, which was rapidly becoming her chair. “Sit down. I’ll tell you about it.”
    “Fine.”
    She flopped into the chair. Interesting. Since he couldn’t see her, he was starting to fill in the little details around her that allowed him to “see” her better. The skintight leather, along with carrying her last night, had given him the shape of her body. But the way the shirt hung on her also helped.
    He had to get some body paint. No, he had to focus and think of the job and not Noir covered in body paint.
    “I’ve got some leads on the truck and Jill’s possible lab,” he said.
    “I’m listening.”
    “Good. Because when we go on stakeout, you need to keep listening.”
    “If you know where the place is, why not rush over there?”
    He looked up at the ceiling, pleading for patience. “One, we can’t be sure this is the place unless we watch it. Two, if it is the place, given how you described your ordeal at their hands, they could have more than one innocent in there.”
    He heard her grumble.
    “Three, I don’t like people getting shot, and I sure as hell don’t like getting shot myself, which is what will happen if we rush the place.”
    “What about something like a SWAT team?”
    “Not yet. They’re trigger happy.” And if Jill had enough money, they could be on the take. He couldn’t discount it. There were few he could trust in the department, and the SWAT team leader wasn’t one of them.
    “No one will see me if I go into the building,” she said.
    “You won’t even know where you’re going.”
    She stood. “I’ve survived this long by myself. Tell me where it is.”
    “Hell, no. And if you keep being a pain in the ass, I won’t even let you come on stakeout.”
    “Fuck you.”
    He shrugged. “You want to come or not?”
    He wondered if she was glaring daggers at him. Good thing he couldn’t see it.
    “What if Jack attacks someone in the meantime?”
    Now, that was a valid objection. “I’ve got to weigh the danger to possible hostages and to cops involved in an operation against the possibility he might strike again. We wait until full dark because it offers cover, then we stake out the place. If we can confirm what we need to confirm and it’s too big for us to handle, I call in help, the place is surrounded, and we do it right.”
    Better make sure that the SWAT guys brought in the big guns too. He didn’t want any more people with their limbs pulled off.
    “We have to wait until dark?”
    “Given the neighborhood, yeah. We’ll be spotted too easily otherwise. I look too much like a cop.”
    She paced around in a circle. The sweatpants, too big for her, slipped low on her waist, showing him the outline of her ass. Nice.
    “I’m coming with you