“Of course not.”
“Why did you send me back, then?” she demanded. “How could you do that to me?”
He took hold of her shoulders and turned her the rest of the way to face him. “I sent you back because I love you, sweetheart. I love you with all my heart and soul. You crushed me back there. Don’t you realize that? I have never loved anyone the way I love you, and I couldn’t live without you.”
She lowered her eyes and started to soften. “But…”
The words came out of him in a rush. “I remember every moment with you in 1740. I thought you were one of the women from the future, and I thought you came back there on purpose. Then I found out it was all an accident, that someone sent you there unawares. I realized after a while that it must have been me. I sent you back, first of all so I could meet you, and second, so you could find whatever it is you’re going to share with us tonight.”
A silence fell over the room until Ellen spoke up. “What are you going to share with us tonight?”
Vic dove into her handbag and pulled out the book. “I found this in the Guild House. It contains the species name for the brandywine tundra beetle.”
Ree gasped out loud. “It does?”
“It’s a June bug,” Vic blurted out. “I recognize the name.”
The others exchanged glances.
Vic faced Ree. “Do you remember when I spent that summer with my cousins in South Carolina, in seventh grade? She was a bug fanatic, and I helped her with her science project about identifying all kinds of bugs. One of them was the Green June bug, native to most of the eastern half of the United States.”
Louis frowned. “If you’re right, we’ve been testing all the wrong bugs. This could be the breakthrough we’ve been looking for.”
“I didn’t get a chance to look through the rest of the book,” Vic went on, “but I think the guy who wrote it must have documented the Latin names of most of the other ingredients. His name was Nikolai Wainwright, and he—”
Ellen whipped around fast. “Nikolai Wainwright!” she shrieked.
“Do you know him?” Vic asked. “It seems like he did a lot of time traveling. He had all sorts of stuff from the future. I didn’t get to see half of it, but he must have known a thing or two.”
Ellen looked away. “I knew him. That bastard tried to kill me.”
“He did?” Vic asked. “What did you do?”
Ellen’s mouth twisted in a vicious grin. “I killed him first. Luckily, I nabbed this book from him before I had to flee. Maybe we should compare notes.” She held up another bound leather book almost identical to Vic’s.
Vic started back. “Oh! Okay.” She crossed the room and wedged herself into the couch between Ned and Ellen.
She and Ellen laid their respective books open on their knees and started studying every detail about Nikolai Wainwright. Malcolm watched her for a moment until Louis Kirk nudged him in the ribs.
“It seems it all worked out in the end. You got her back.”
“Yeah.” Malcolm couldn’t take his eyes off Vic. She’d slotted into this scheming den of wolves like she belonged here.
Ree drifted to Malcolm’s other side. “This is incredible. I never thought she’d come around like this.”
“I did,” he replied. “If you’d seen her in Orkney, you’d know she belongs with us.”
“You realize what this means, don’t you?” Louis remarked.
“What does it mean?” Ree asked.
“It’s time,” Louis replied. “It’s time to tell the others.”
Chapter 26
Vic nestled into Malcolm’s shoulder on the way back to his apartment. She held him close, sinking into his bulk. Now that she knew all his secrets, now that they stood side by side against a common threat, she never felt safer or happier.
Nothing remained hidden or secret between them anymore. Not only Ree and Ellen, Vic’s closest friends in the world, but Louis, Noah, and Ben were all in on it. In one fell swoop, all her misgivings from the last three months came crashing to the ground.
No one could have told her anything that would satisfy all her suspicions and all her curiosities, but this did. She’d seen that world of the past for herself. She’d met the Falisa on their own ground, and she’d taken her stand.
She’d wake up tomorrow morning and go into the lab. She’d get busy on the formula, and she wouldn’t quit until she and all her friends made it.
The guys all agreed the time had come for Ree, Ellen, and Vic to take Quinn and Mila into their confidence.
Vic didn’t want to think about the formula right now. She only wanted to savor Malcolm and his beloved presence. He’d told her straight out that he loved her, and she already knew she loved him back.
She’d had dozens of boyfriends in her life but never loved any of them. She might have told them she loved them, but that was just a euphemism for sexual attraction. She’d never loved anybody the way she loved Malcolm. She could envision spending the rest of her life with him, and even the rest of eternity. Somehow, their time in Orkney never really ended. It just melded into one seamless experience where they only parted for a short time while she spun back to her original time.
Maybe he saw it differently. He’d been alone for three hundred years, waiting for her to grow up. Now they were together forever, or at least until he had to go back undercover.
He brushed his lips against her hair and tightened his arms around her. They were on their way back to his luxury apartment. She would have liked to stay there, but he’d already told her that wasn’t possible. She could spend one night of eternal passion with him, then she had to go home to the house she shared with her sister. She had to go back to her old life of quiet desperation and long work hours.
The limo dropped them off at the curb. Malcolm unlocked the door. They started kissing in the elevator. He backed her against the wall, and his iron frame hardened into her. He crushed her petite body under his solid bulk, his tongue licking flames through her being.
She sank underneath him, wanting never to be anywhere else. She wanted all of this, especially if she had to go without it for a long time. Tonight began a new chapter in her life. Love and purpose and a vision of the future filled every moment with heartfelt significance. She would never again grind through the days just for the sake of getting through them. She had a goal to shoot for, and he was the prize waiting on the other end. Once she and her friends completed the formula, he’d be all hers. No more hiding. No more running and fighting. No more fear. Just the two of them and their friends against the world.
The elevator door hissed open, but they didn’t separate. They stumbled down the hall. Malcolm kept kissing her while he got his code card out of his pocket. They staggered into the apartment and pitched laughing onto the couch. They rolled one on top of the other, kissing and touching and rubbing their bodies together until Malcolm climbed off her and got to his feet. He suppressed a smile while he held out his hand to her.
He mesmerized her with his gaze, so she had to obey. She straightened up, and he conducted her to his bedroom. He bent down and flipped back the bedspread. She watched wide-eyed while he kicked off his shoes and got into bed with all his clothes on.
He stretched out on the pillow and patted the mattress next to him. “Come on in.”
She snorted with laughter and slid under the quilt. He tucked it around her shoulders, and they snuggled into bed. They might have been married for forty years. Centuries of inevitable history came true when he shifted over to kiss her. Her arms found their natural place around his shoulders, and her hand against his neck. He sank on top of her, and her destiny fulfilled itself in answer to her prayers.
These new clothes he bought her turned out to be a lot more comfortable than she’d expected. They didn’t feel strange or alien at all. They continued the transformation she underwent in Scotland, only now she was in America.
He caressed down her shirt to her jeans. The tight denim against her crotch excit
ed her until she couldn’t keep still. She writhed against his hand tickling her burning flesh through the stiff cloth. She wanted his bare skin, but her clothes in the way sparked a deeper passion than she could have experienced if she had been naked.
His hard shaft nudged her thigh, and she responded by arching against it. His suit pants did nothing to hide it, and he contracted to shove it toward her again. He rolled up on top of her, and she wrapped her legs around him to pull him in.
She swirled in his burning kiss. His eyes bored into her soul. The city lights shone off his irises until she couldn’t look away. He was here in her arms. He was still the same man she’d fallen in love with in Scotland, but somehow different. The mystique of his accent and his kilt and his smoldering tension fell away to the modern version of the Highlander she loved.
Still, the same boiling danger, the impenetrable sturdy power, would always fuel his massive energy and drive to conquer. She loved that most about him, and it would never change. Buried deeper still in the vast empty reaches of his soul, he would always be the boy who survived the plague with only his wits and his resources to guide him. Besides Ned and a few Angui, she was the only person alive who knew the ultimate truth of who he was. She held the secret in her heart, along with the rest of him. That past didn’t make him weak. It didn’t cheapen him for making him vulnerable. If anything, it made him stronger, more cunning, more determined than ever to win this war. He of all people knew what the Falisa were capable of, but he didn’t shrink from engaging with them. He used all his might and intelligence to beat them at their own game.
That was the Malcolm she beheld when she looked into his eyes, that dark night in his apartment. That was the Malcolm she would always love.
What did he see when he looked into her eyes? What secrets did he divine in those depths? She didn’t have any secrets to share. She was just plain-Jane normal. How could a man as complicated and powerful as he was be interested in that?
As long as he was interested, she belonged to him. She collapsed under his weight and inhaled him into her, luxuriating in his warmth and his mass.
His undulating contractions increased. She couldn’t hold back the torrent of desire throbbing in her veins and seized his ass cheeks, pulling him tight against her center. She whined into his mouth between panting kisses.
Faster than she dared anticipate, he tore her clothes off to get at her. He slid her jeans down, and she kicked them away. He ripped her shirt open and pawed her breasts. She wanted more, so much more, faster and harder. Nothing he did could ever be enough to satisfy her.
She snatched at his belt, and in an instant, his blazing wand touched her sizzling fissure. Her soul screamed, Oh, yes! but he suddenly froze at the very entrance to her welcoming channel.
She stared up into his fevered eyes, but he didn’t see her. He saw something cosmic, something life-changing. Vic hesitated, but her own life-affirming need wouldn’t take no for an answer. She heaved off the bed and glided over his stiff length.
He roared out loud and reared off the bed in all his mighty fury, but when she sank back down, he came with her. He drooped on top of her, and his pulsating shaft penetrated to her very center.
“Oh, God, yes, that felt so good!” She kicked her hips up against him. In a flash, she caught him in her rhythm, stroking her inner itch on his wooden lance, and electric sparks cascaded through her. They exploded in her eyes and out of her fingertips.
She coated him all over with her juices as she kissed his forehead and his cheeks in desperate hunger for every scrap of his skin.
He caressed back her hair, letting her go wild under his incessant drumbeats, but didn’t go crazy himself. He towered over her, observing her from high above. He soared in the heavens while she tossed and pitched in the tempest of undying passion.
All at once, she climaxed once, twice, again and again. She hurled her pelvis at him in frenzied ecstasy but couldn’t stop the waves crashing over her head. They pounded her to dust, and still she kept spiking into Heaven, never to come down.
He surged off her, bracing his arms on either side of her head, while his root kept digging into her down below. He plowed her apart with driving strokes that opened her to the universal truth all around her.
Her body followed where her soul led in the endless dance between his spirit and hers.
Chapter 27
Malcolm stopped kissing her and let his head sink down next to hers. He lay there, just breathing into her as he vibrated in the exquisite sweetness of her underneath him.
Vic kissed his ear. “You okay?”
How could he explain what he felt when he barely understood it himself? This whole thing between him and Vic took him so far out of what he understood, no words existed to make sense of it all. “I don’t want you to leave,” he whispered. “I wish you could stay here from now on.”
“You said that’s not a good idea.”
“It isn’t.” He slid his weight off her and propped himself on one elbow. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “I’m just saying I want you to, even though I know you can’t.”
“We’ll be together sooner or later. As soon as we make the formula, we can be together without having to worry about the Falisa.”
“We’ll always have to worry about the Falisa.” He flopped over on his back. “Once we make the formula, they’ll be twice as dangerous and twice as determined to wipe us out, to stop us breeding. We’ll have to worry about the Falisa for a long, long time.”
He stared at the ceiling so he wouldn’t see her observing him. He didn’t want to disappoint her hopes, but he better learn to be honest with her, if not the rest of the world. He’d spent his life living a deception. He couldn’t let that infect his dealings with her. He held her sacred. He had to trust his heart and soul to her, no matter what else happened.
When she spoke, he heard the struggle to keep her voice steady. “When will we be together, then?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I wish I could tell you something different, but I don’t want to lie to you. As long as the Falisa exists, they’ll keep coming after us.”
“Why do you have to work inside the Falisa?” she asked. “Why do you have to be the Angui’s man undercover? Why can’t you just quit and live a normal life like Ned and Ben and Louis?”
He twisted onto his side and draped one arm over her. “Come on, sweetheart. You know we can’t stand up to them without a man on the inside. We never would have survived this long if I hadn’t been on the inside.”
“That was before,” she countered. “You did all that when you were single and alone. You had no reason not to. You spent so much time around the Falisa, you understood how to blend in. You’re not single and alone anymore, and once we make the formula, you don’t have any more reason to stay undercover. Why can’t you just walk away from it? The Falisa will know you’re Angui. They’ll treat you as an enemy, and you’ll have to deal with that, but at least we’ll be together. Isn’t it worth it?”
He gave her a sad little smile. What an idealistic world she painted for him! If only he could walk away, he would do it in a heartbeat. “I have to keep working for Allied. I’m in charge of the whole company. I can’t walk away from that.”
“Why not?” Her voice started to rise beyond her control. “Don’t tell me Allied and the Falisa mean more to you than I do.”
He wilted against her skin shining with sweat. “Of course not. You know that’s not what I mean.”
She burrowed into his chest, his sternum muffling her voice. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just wish like anything we could be together. I can’t stand the idea of leaving here and not seeing you. Ree has Ned and Ellen has Louis. It’s not fair.”
“I know, sweetheart.” He kissed her hair and held her close.
She lay silent for a long time. “I liked it better when you called me ‘lass.’”
Malcolm listened long after this statement ceased echoing in his head. A tw
isting tendril of scorching excitement licked through his gut when she said it. It kept twining around his insides every time the words repeated in his heart.
He kissed her again. “Would you like me to use a Scottish accent now too?”
Her shoulders started to tremble. At first, he thought she might be crying until she threw back her head. Her mop of curls shook away, and he saw her laughing.
“No. Just stay exactly the way you are, and don’t start calling me ‘lass’ again, either. I love you exactly the way you are now. You’re perfect.”
They kissed for hours. At last, Vic got up to go to the bathroom. On her way back, she stopped at a table in the corner of his bedroom, poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher, and studied the city lights outside. “This is a nice apartment.”
“It’s nicer with you in it,” he remarked. “I haven’t spent much time here since I bought the place. It’s too lonely. I spend most of my time at the office. It’s a pathetic life for a man.”
She held out the glass to him. “Do you want some?”
He drank it down, and she sat on the edge of the bed.
Placing her palm over his heart, she asked, “Now what’s this you were telling me about not seeing Boyd again after I left Scotland? What does that mean?”
“Just what I said. I never saw him again. I sent you back. I left the room. I went to his office to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“About sending you back,” he replied. “I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting around for him to drop the hammer on me. I figured if he was going to kill me for being Angui, I might as well get it over with. I was going to…you know, I was going to turn myself in, but he wasn’t in his office. I waited around for the rest of the day, but he didn’t come. He never came back.”
Vic frowned. “That’s weird, isn’t it? Did he just up and vanish?”
“I have no idea. He never came back. And everyone there acted like I’d always been in charge, not seeming to miss the man, so I didn’t ask questions. It was like he was erased from history—I have no other way to describe it.”
Spies of the Angui - Cipher's Kiss Book 3 Page 18
