CROSSING FIRE, page 21
“You can call this one off,” I told him. “I’ll work on the roster myself; do all the paperwork. If anyone asks about it, have them report directly to me.”
His eyes went from my hand, locked with Jillian’s, to studying the woman herself. I saw swift recognition in his eyes, then deep disapproval.
I had a thought and felt disloyal for even having to ask, but I couldn’t seem to keep the question in. I had to know, to see his face when he answered. “Someone turned her in last time, it’s why she had to run. Do you know who did it?”
He looked appalled, and I was instantly assured. Cam was volatile and headstrong, but loyal to a fault, and what you saw is what you got. “Of course not. I would have told you right away. I know how you feel about her. How could you think it? I don’t like her, but my loyalty is and always has been first to you. I would never betray your trust.”
“I apologize. I know that, I’m just a bit… overcome at the moment. Listen, I’m going off the radar for a few days. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you at our next assignment.”
We took her car, an unassuming black sedan, and I left Cam the rental we’d picked up at the airport. He’d have a lot of questions later, but I’d deal with that reality later.
Her house wasn’t far away, a small attractive one story, white house with blue trim on the edge of downtown. It was just the sort of idyllic spot I’d once fantasized about sharing with her.
She unlocked and opened her door and I followed her in. I took in the place. It was nice, neat but sparse and practically nothing was out of place.
That made the large signet ring, obviously a man’s, laid out casually on a side table catch my attention right away.
I froze. My whole body zoned in on this little thing like a hound on a scent.
She caught on to something in the air and followed my eyes until we were both looking at the same thing.
“I don’t want to know the details.” My voice was cold as a grave, and it took restraint for me to be even that civil. “But you need to end it. Never see him again. He won’t survive it, whoever he is.”
“Oh, Dom, no,” said Jillian. “Stop that. It’s not anything like you’re thinking.”
She looked half-amused which calmed me a bit. She wasn’t into games.
“Not a boyfriend,” she amended, “or anything like that. Just a friend.”
“A male friend. One that gave you a very expensive, personalized ring. Care to explain?”
“I don’t care to, no, but I will to get that fatal look out of your eyes. I won a bet with a friend, and that was his wager.”
“Must have been some bet.”
“It was. That’s all I’ll say about it.”
“So there’s no one?”
I didn’t think she’d answer when it took her so long to respond. The strain of waiting had the tips of my fingers trembling, and it wasn’t only rage. Fear was in there too. The thought that she could have moved on from me, that she could prefer some other man, weakened me greatly.
“I’m not seeing anybody,” she finally said.
The dark tension slid out of me like a sickness being purged, and I moved, crowding her now, everything back in its proper place. “Except for me,” I corrected.
“What are you trying to get out of me?”
“That this is something, that you’re not just going to disappear tomorrow or even next year.”
She moved into the kitchen, maneuvering around me like it was a dance, waving her hand at a small table set into a breakfast nook. “Have a seat. I’ll make tea.”
Frustrated, I sat and watched her.
“I missed talking to you,” she said without looking at me, her hands busy measuring out tea.
“Oh yeah?” I asked dryly. “Is that all you missed?”
She didn’t respond to that. A first impression of her would have you think she was a little apart from the world, a bit above it by the way she held herself. But I knew her better, knew exactly what was underneath all of that cool armor of hers, and I knew without her ever having told me that I was the only one that ever had.
I remembered well exactly how it was with her. Her chilly exterior, her walls, her straight back, and unruffled manner as though nothing in the world could shake her composure. It was such a lie; the dichotomy of what she presented to the world. What others saw versus what I knew her to be forever fascinated me.
She brought me a cup of tea just how I took it and sat down with hers across from me. The table was small, our legs would touch if she pushed her chair in a bit more.
“How have you been?” she asked, locking her pale ocean eyes with mine.
“Fine,” I said shortly. “You?”
“Fine,” she repeated back, amused. “Are you Arch yet?”
I shook my head, one sharp motion right to left, rejecting the question. “No.”
“A lieutenant, then?”
“I don’t care for the current North American Arch, I wouldn’t work to be one of his lieutenants, and I have no plans to move to Europe, so no.”
“I’m surprised. I always knew you’d take over the world.” She said it with a certain pride of ownership in her voice and that was what caught me more than the words themselves.
“I think your ambitions for me outmatch my own,” I told her softly.
“We’ll see,” she said enigmatically.
I’d be annoyed by it if I wasn’t already feeling too many more overpowering things to name.
“I always just wanted to settle down and be a family man,” I told her softly, but it was nothing she didn’t already know.
Something about that made shadows move in her eyes, but she hid it quickly. “Perhaps I’m not your girl, then.”
“You know better than that.”
“Kids are out of the question with me, Dom.”
“I don’t care. I’ll take you as you are, whatever that means. I just want you.”
“You’re impossible,” she said affectionately.
I just stared at her, equal parts frustrated and desperate. “What will it take to get you to take me seriously?”
“I’ve always taken you seriously.” She paused. “It’s me I can’t take seriously.” She paused again. “And it’s very much mutual. I just want you, too.” Another pause and we ate each other with our eyes. “You don’t have to go easy on me, you know,” she said in her raspy, silken voice, “I can take it. Do your worst.”
My mind did filthy things with that. “Excuse me?” I was gripping the table, braced and trying not to pant as I battled for an ounce of control.
“Yell at me. Curse me out. Say whatever else you need to say.”
“Raging at you is not the first thing that comes to mind at the moment.”
She smiled, a tender smile that belonged only to me, and the knowledge of that was powerful enough to break me. She set her tea down and sat back in her chair, spreading her arms wide, “What I said still stands then. Do your worst.”
I was afraid what I had to give her might be just that for a few rounds at least. “Don’t say that unless you mean it.”
“You think I don’t mean it?” It was a challenge, issued in her sublimely velvet voice.
I stood so violently that it sent my chair back crashing into the wall.
She stood more slowly, nonplussed, never breaking our locked gazes. “I’ll show you my bedroom,” she said and smoothly made her way to the back of the house.
I followed, breathing down her neck like the big bad wolf.
“Where do you live now?” she asked me without turning or stopping. “Not in Denver, I assume.”
“I’m between places. On the road, mostly, staying at druid crash pads between jobs.”
“Is that by choice? Are you able to live in one place or does your job not permit it?”
“It was a choice.”
I followed her into her bedroom and instantly went to the bed, sitting on the edge of it and staring at her, studying her some more in large, hungry bites.
She was dressed much differently than the last time I’d seen her, in slacks and a blazer. Almost like a man except that her curves and graceful, lithe figure made it all hyper-feminine, the masculine attire accentuating the fact that she was anything but.
“I like your hair long,” I told her.
She moved closer to me, reaching behind me and freeing my hair from its tie. She ran her hands through it with long, slow strokes, and I closed my eyes with pleasure. It hung just past my jaw now. “Yours is long, too. I love it. Remember how short it was when we were together?”
I didn’t answer. She knew I remembered everything from when we were together.
She was close to me, her standing, me sitting. I opened my legs and she fit herself between them, hugging my head to her soft, heavy breasts. I inhaled her, palms flat on the bed. I knew the second I touched her it was lights out, and I was hanging on by a thread.
She bent down, her chest moving unfortunately away from my face, her lips coming to my ear. “Are you feeling particularly beastly right now, lover? I meant what I said. Do your worst. I won’t break.”
I snapped and thoroughly lost it for a while. She meant what she said. She could take it. She could take everything I had to dish out, which was fortunate.
I had her flat on her back on the bed, our clothes gone, when I came even a little back into my own control. I was kissing her like she held the air I needed to breathe as I pounded into her with deep, devout focus.
She took it all with shuddering, encompassing submission. She went against her very nature to yield to what I needed, which was to lower her guard and give me her total, abject surrender.
I had the enormous urge to do absolutely everything to her, but for the first few times it would just be this, my body consuming hers, hers giving way, embracing mine, unfolding to my brutal attention until I finished with deep pulses of choking pleasure that crescendoed into sweet, overwhelming oblivion.
I came wholly back into reason in stages, but I never stopped, never subsided for the duration of it. I was a passenger to my savage devouring of her for hours, spending my body in hers until there was nothing left to give, her body receiving mine until it was topped up and overflowing.
She was smiling at me when I finally went still, and it was a relief. It had been many rounds of me being less than gentle, being mindless enough to do damage without realizing.
I was still on her and in her as she fingered the ends of my long hair. “I love your hair,” she told me, “I can’t get enough of it. If you love me, you’ll never cut it again.”
“I won’t cut it again.” It was a promise. “You don’t get to cut yours either,” I told her. “And I love you more than life, but you know that.”
“I won’t cut mine either,” she agreed. “And you know I love you, too. I’m sorry I left you like that.”
“Never again,” I told her softly and fervently. “You’re mine now, and I’m keeping you this time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JUST A BLINK
I was yanked out of the past unceremoniously. On my hands and knees, I looked up at the creature.
It had changed.
It was less humanoid now, the shape of it harder to make sense of. From the bottom of its chin to the top of its head, to the spot where its ears should have been, it had wicked little mouths all over.
I wondered exactly how much damage I was doing. How much power was it gaining from this?
Still the first thing I said was, “I want to go back.”
It made a terrible noise out of every hideous mouth that I thought was supposed be a laugh and struck again.
Some part of me remained while I was in his head, in his past now, and the more I did it, the stronger it was. I could form thoughts as a watcher now, cohesive ones.
And as I came into his body for this memory, I thought, Oh no, not this one. My heart can’t take this memory. It’s too much.
I was looking at a very somber Sloan. She had a manila envelope in her hand, but she was shaking her head, over and over.
“You don’t need to see this, Dom,” she told me, a weak thread to her voice I’d never heard before.
I held out my hand. I had to see. I already knew it would be bad. My lover had left me, breaking all ties, leaving chaos in her wake, and the harder I looked for her, the more damage I found.
That was Jillian for you. She never did anything in half-measures.
She should have known me better. I’d never stop looking for her, no matter what she’d done. She needed me as much as I needed her.
She’d broken our blood bond, parts of me breaking with it. What could be worse than that? What could a manila envelope hold that was more profoundly detrimental to me than the loss of her, the only woman I had ever loved?
Sloan handed me the evidence, and I asked her for a moment alone.
“Please, Dom. Don’t look.”
I shook my head, and she left. She knew me better. I was resolute.
I sat for a long time before I opened the envelope, time bracing myself, staring at the thing like it held horrors I could not bear to stomach.
It did, of course. I’d known it as soon as I heard there were pictures, had it reinforced when I saw the defeated look on Sloan’s face.
My hands shook as I pulled out the stack of photos and began to flip through them.
I was three pictures in when I began to shake so badly that I fell to my knees.
Six pictures in when began to wretch.
Ten pictures in when I began to weep.
Not only had she left me, broken oaths, severed bonds.
She’d been unfaithful, done the thing she knew would break me the most, and with a man I despised. She’d shared her body, all of that beautiful flesh that belonged to me, with my enemy.
I was blind in my agony, lost in my pain, but even crippled and broken, I knew there was calculation behind this thing she’d done.
Why? How could she? It was so uncharacteristic. So wrong.
It didn’t matter what she’d done. And it didn’t matter why she’d done it. I’d still never stop looking for her. What I’d do with her when I found her, well, that didn’t bear thinking about just then.
But him. Declan. To him I’d show no mercy. Not an ounce of it. I had a target now, a focus for the unadulterated rage that had gripped me from the moment she’d broken our bond.
When I came out of the spell, I stumbled to his room, to his bed, on trembling legs.
My own pain had been bad enough, but to shoulder his as well, to feel it unfiltered and fresh like that.
I couldn’t stand it.
He wasn’t there, of course. It was the middle of the day.
I made my unsteady way out to the hall, then a bank of elevators that I knew were guarded.
The druid there gave me a startled look.
I knew I was a sight. Blood on my neck, likely on my clothes, wild hair, wilder eyes, breath ragged. Tears running down my face.
“Are you hurt?” the guard asked. “What’s happened?”
I shook my head, feeling disoriented but determined. “Get Dom. Tell him I need him.”
I didn’t wait to see what he’d do, just went back to Dom’s room.
I meant to strip off my bloody clothes before I climbed into the bed, but couldn’t find the energy.
It was less than five minutes later, and I was laying on my back, knees draped off the side of the bed, tears running in unhindered rivulets down my cheeks, when Dom burst into the room.
He was at my side, hand at my neck, eyes scanning me for injury.
“What happened? Where are you hurt?”
Everywhere, I wanted to say. Every part of me hurt.
“Dom,” I gasped, reaching for him.
He resisted at first when I tried to pull him to me, still concerned that I was injured. I kept pulling.
“I’ve done something terrible, and I’m sorry. But I’ve been punished for it, and I can’t take the pain. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“So much. But mostly for leaving you like that, for the way I made you suffer, for making you think I’d betrayed you. It hurts. It hurts so much.”
He was kissing my tears away and soothing me. “We’ve been over that again and again. I forgive you. We’re past it. You want another bit of comfort to help you work through it? Even all the years we’ve lost are just a blink in the expanse of our eternity together.”
It was a comfort. And I felt all the more guilty for it.
“You don’t understand,” I told him. “I felt it. I felt your pain as you did, and it was more than I could bear.”
He froze, raised his head as horror filled his eyes. “Jillian, tell me what you’ve done.”
“It’s The Grove…”
“What about it?” he asked and anger was mixing with the horror now.
“It’s been taking my blood.”
“How?”
“I let it.”
“Why? Why on earth would you put yourself at that thing’s mercy?”
“For memories.”
“Memories? What memory could possibly be worth that kind of price?”
“There were several, actually. Your memories.”
“I don’t understand. What use did you have for my memories?”
I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so embarrassed by my answer. Because it was the naked truth. The truth and I had never been close. “They were memories from before . . . Before I hurt you, and I could feel how you loved me. It was so pure, absolute, and uncomplicated. Unassailable. I felt the raw emotions that you did, and I kept going back for more. I know how idiotic it was, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I wanted to live in that world for a bit, that world where I had your love like that again, with no reservations at all.”
In spite of the horror and anger he was experiencing at me specifically, his eyes softened. “That’s the world you still live in. Just open your eyes and here we are. Now tell me how many times you indulged in this.”
I told him and his expression did not comfort me then.
