Free Touch Me by Tamara Hogan

 
    CHAPTER ONE
     
     
     
    Bailey Brown looked to the corners of the conference room for hidden cameras. I’m being punked. “Could you… repeat that?” She swallowed noisily. “Just the part about the…”
    “ Crashed spaceship?” Lukas Sebastiani said, watching her closely.
    “ Um, yeah.”
    And then he repeated it. The same damn thing. Her boss was an incubus, an incubus whose ancestors’ spaceship—yes, spaceship—had crashed on Earth. And the incubi hadn’t been alone. Oh, no. Vampires, werewolves, Valkyrie, faeries, sirens, God knew what else had been along for the cosmic road trip.
    And humanity had shared the planet with them for thousands of years.
    She sat back in the large conference room chair, hearing air shushing in and out of her lungs. Intellectually, she knew she was going into shock, but thankfully her brain kept working, the hard drive kept spinning. Because… ho-ly shit. Her employer, her co-workers, most of her new friends were…
    Holy shit.
    “Sorry I’m late.” Sasha Sebastiani breezed into the windowless conference room and dropped into the huge leather chair next to Bailey. “Problem with the delivery from the blood bank. You know how crabby the vamps get when they can’t drink an authentic Bloody Mar—” Her nostrils flared. “Jeez.” Sasha grabbed her hands and rubbed them. “Time out, guys. She’s freezing. Give her a minute.”
    For some reason, Sasha’s touch, and her blithe reference to Underbelly’s vampire clientele’s drinking preferences, injected a note of normalcy into the conversation. Just a delivery problem at the bar, because vampires, who drank blood, got really annoyed when they couldn’t get their favorite drink. Bailey laughed, a laugh even she could hear veer toward hysteria.
    The friction felt good. Why wasn’t she pulling away from Sasha, instead of clutching at her hand like a lifeline? She was being touched by a succubus whose ancestors had come from another planet, who’d been cruising through the neighborhood when—oops!—a cosmic fender-bender had altered Earth’s history forever.
    This succubus was her friend, and the incubus jamming his hands into his streaky, shoulder-length hair across the table was her boss.
    She should have known that something was just a little… off. Both Lukas and Sasha were preternaturally attractive—physical ideals, really—even if Lukas dressed more like hired muscle than the owner of the company. And Sasha was gorgeous, with fine bone structure and a delicately muscled body. Wiry and tough, she was built like the dancer she’d been before a blown ACL had halted a promising professional career in its tracks.
    She stole a glance across the table at Jack. Her longtime friend watched her closely. Appearance-wise, Jack fit right in, though he’d assured her just a few minutes ago that he was as human as the next guy.
    As long as the next guy wasn’t an incubus. Or a vamp. Or a werewolf.
    Earth still spun on its axis, molecules combined, and gravity still pulled objects to the ground, but Bailey’s reality had taken a quick hairpin turn. Just about everything she remembered reading about incubi and succubi had negative religious overtones, with the God-fearing women of the Middle Ages swearing to the heavens—and to their judgmental neighbors and clergy—that while their husbands had been away at war, demons had come to them in the night, impregnating them. Considering the beauty and charisma of both Sebastianis—hell, the whole damn family—Bailey could see how night visitors this gorgeous just might make you do something you wished you could take back the next morning.
    She now had a better understanding of why Jack rarely met Sasha Sebastiani’s eyes if he could possibly avoid it.
    She took a deep breath and sat up straight in the slouchy leather conference room chair. Jack, Lukas, and Sasha were waiting for her to suck it up and deal. “Okay, I’m fine,” she told the three of them. “Curious,