Deadly Descendant by Jenna Black

either going to misplace his conscience and sleep with Steph, or he was going to break her heart. Neither alternative was acceptable to me, but no matter how logically I argued with Steph, she refused to stop seeing him. Maybe she thought the sexual limitations were convenient. After what she’d been through at Alexis’s hands, maybe a relationship with no sex was all she could handle.
    I made it up to my suite without encountering anyone and breathed a sigh of relief as I opened my door and stepped into my sitting room. Living in a house with eight other people didn’t leave me with as much alone time as I was used to.
    My first clue that something was up should have been that the lights were already on. I always turned them off when I left the room. But I was a little slow on the uptake, lost in thought, and I took a couple of steps in before I realized I wasn’t going to get that blessed alone time after all.
    Steph was curled up on my couch, drinking a cupof coffee, and apparently waiting for me. I almost jumped out of my skin when I caught sight of her, but I managed to keep things down to a soft gasp and an adrenaline spike.
    “Have fun on your date with Jamaal?” she asked with a little smile.
    “If you call walking around a stinky underpass in Anacostia a date,” I said, sitting down beside Steph and wondering what was up.
    She laughed and took a sip of her coffee. “I’ve seen Jamaal, remember?”
    My cheeks heated just a little, because yeah, I had to admit, Jamaal was a thing of beauty, and I would have had to be dead not to have noticed. But he’s beautiful in the way that a leopard is beautiful—nice to look at, but you’re a hell of a lot better off if there are some sturdy steel bars between you.
    “Just because he’s a hottie doesn’t mean investigating crime scenes with him is romantic or anything. In case you haven’t noticed, the guy’s a psycho.”
    Steph had never seen Jamaal in action, but she knew about his previous vendetta against me, and she knew just how violent that vendetta had been. It should have been enough to quell even the slightest hint of attraction in me, but I had a long history of being attracted to the wrong men.
    “Nikki …” Steph said in a warning tone, and I realized I might be protesting just a little too much.
    “There’s nothing going on between me and Jamaal,” I said in what I hoped was a calm voice. “I’m not a moron.”
    Steph laughed. “You are where men are concerned.”
    “Says the woman who’s dating a descendant of Eros.”
    That killed her amusement in a heartbeat. “Don’t start.”
    I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to start anything. Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re lying in wait for me? I know it’s not because you want to talk about relationships.”
    Steph scrutinized me. She’s two years older than me, which means she thinks she’s older and wiser. Sometimes she can’t resist dispensing advice, and I was afraid this was going to be one of those times.
    I was more relieved than I liked to admit when she sighed and shook her head. “Actually,” she said, reaching for a briefcase on the floor, “in a way, this is a bit about relationships. Just not the romantic kind.”
    “Huh?”
    Steph popped open the briefcase, withdrew a manila folder, and handed it to me.
    “What’s this?” I asked, taking it cautiously from her hand, as if expecting it to bite.
    “Your adoption papers,” she said, and I quickly dropped the folder onto the coffee table.
    Despite being a private investigator, I’d never had any interest in trying to locate my birth mother. The woman had abandoned me in a church when I was four, and I wanted nothing to do with her or with the baby brother she’d been carrying in her arms the last time I saw her. I knew my adoptive parents, theGlasses, had a whole bunch of paperwork they’d kept for me, in case I ever changed my mind, but I’d never even given a passing