by Tessa Adams
Quinn stripped off his T-shirt, then settled himself on the bed next to Jazz and simply watched her sleep. Despite the seething storm of emotions he sensed right below her surface, she looked so peaceful, so calm, that he felt a little of his own tension draining away.
It wouldn’t last—how could it?—but for the moment he would take the gift she had given him and savor it. Who knew how long it would be before he felt this way again?
Reaching out, he traced a finger down her still flushed cheek. The skin was so soft, so delicate that he found himself savoring the feel of it. The feel of her. He moved closer, fitting his body against hers so that her head was pillowed on his bicep and the soft ripeness of her breasts rested against his chest.
Inside him, the dragon stretched once before settling down to rest. Their frantic lovemaking had soothed his beast as well as his body. Closing his eyes, he concentrated for a moment and the light on the side of the bed winked out. It was a small power, but one he found exceedingly handy. He hadn’t gotten up to turn off a light since his powers had first manifested themselves somewhere around his twenty-third birthday.
Tired from his long flight, worn out from his time with Jazz, he closed his eyes and settled down for his first sleep in three days. But the second he relaxed—the second he let his guard down—thoughts of Michael started to invade.
He saw his little brother smiling and laughing on the day Quinn had taught him how to fly, saw him dressing up for his first courtship with a girl more than four hundred years before. Saw him training patiently to be one of Dylan’s sentries, though everyone—including Quinn—had thought he was too immature, too soft, to ever make it on the High Council.
Michael had proven them all wrong.
Quinn shuddered at the memories, and a cold sweat broke out all over his body. He rolled away from Jazz, ignoring the small sound of protest she made in her sleep, and swung his legs out of bed.
As he did, pain radiated through his body, so intense that it felt like every nerve ending had been dipped in acid. He lowered his head, fought the pain as he fought so much in his daily life—with as much energy and dedication as he could muster.
Part and parcel of his healing gift, the pain was the physical consequence of his race to cheat death. It was the cost for being able to manipulate the earth’s energy to save—or try to save—those clan mates who were so bad off that modern medicine didn’t stand a chance of helping them. Tonight’s payment was going to be a bad one, as he’d given every ounce of power he had—wielded all the energy he could call up—to try to save his brother’s life. He’d even gone inside his brother to try to shore up the failing cells—a healing technique that was incredibly dangerous, and it exacted a huge price. Though he hadn’t been able to save his brother, he’d still have to pay the price that came with holding that much energy for that long.
The shakes started, violent shudders that wracked him from torso to toes. They were made worse by the pain that continued to invade his every pore. The vomiting would start soon—as it did with every bad attack—followed by a blackout that could last minutes or hours or even days.
He’d been a fool when he had decided that he was safe, that it wouldn’t happen this time, since it had been over twenty-four hours since Michael had died and nothing had hit him. Usually, the symptoms started soon after he used his gift.
He hadn’t given it much thought when he’d been flying—he’d been too wrapped up in his emotional pain to worry about the rest of the shit. But now that it was happening, now that agony was racing through his system like a Molotov cocktail on the brink of exploding, the scientist in him couldn’t help wondering whether his grief had somehow managed to block the physical symptoms—or at least mask them.
If that was the case, this should have started happening hours ago—back when he’d been flirting with Jazz in the bar. Instead, it had waited until now to rear its ugly head. He couldn’t help wishing that if it had waited this long, it could wait a little bit longer. Long enough, certainly, for him to see Jazz off in the morning.
He glanced around desperately, knowing he needed to get out of the damn motel room. He’d spent years keeping the side effects of his gift a secret, and though she wouldn’t understand what she was seeing, he still didn’t want to scare the hell out of her.
He tried to stand, but he’d waited too long. The shakes were too bad. His legs went out from under him, and he fell to the ground next to the bed. Unable to do anything else, he curled into a ball and waited for the tremors to stop.
It seemed to go on forever. On some level he was aware of time passing, but he was so locked into the pain—into the misery—that one minute bled into the next. More than once he tried to fight it, but it was the worst attack he’d ever had and his powers were useless against it. He couldn’t move without feeling like he was breaking wide-open.
He’d locked his dragon deep inside of himself, so deep that he could barely sense it as it snapped and snarled at the invisible enemy. Which was good—the last thing he needed was for the dragon to be front and center when Jazz woke up. God only knew what it would do to her.
Another wave of pain swamped him, so powerful that he thought he might have passed out for a minute. When he came to, he was aware of nothing. He was blind and deaf, locked into a darkness from which there was no surcease.
He wanted to scream, but didn’t have enough strength—or enough hope. He was suddenly, abruptly sure that this time he had gone too far. This time he wasn’t going to make it back. His one regret was that poor Jazz would be dragged into this. She would wake up in the morning with a dead man on her carpet.
The thought galvanized him for a moment and he tried to move, tried to make it to the door and out of the room, but he only got a couple of feet. Besides, without the use of his senses, he was so turned around he wasn’t even sure he could find the door.
For a second—just a second—tears welled in his eyes for the first time in over three centuries, but he refused to give in to them. Crying wouldn’t bring Michael back any more than it would help Dylan save the clan. It wouldn’t find a cure for the disease, and it sure as hell wouldn’t make him feel any better.
In other words, it was a total waste of time.
In the end, he stopped fighting and simply yielded to the inevitable. He put his head down on the carpet and simply waited to see what would happen next.
More time passed, though he wasn’t sure how much.
He did know it was long enough to count to ten thousand in his head.
Long enough to go over every joke and punch line Michael had ever told him.
More than long enough to figure out that maybe he really didn’t want to die after all. At least not blind and deaf and alone on the floor of a cheap motel hundreds of miles from home.
And then suddenly, someone turned the lights back on.
CHAPTER SEVEN
One of Jazz’s arms snaked around his waist, and the second she touched him, every one of Quinn’s senses came flooding back with a jolt.
It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, and for a moment he was too stunned to do anything but lay there and absorb the sound of her breath against his ear. Then she was sliding her other arm beneath him, trying to pull him into a sitting position, and with the way she was tugging, it didn’t feel like she was going to take no for an answer.
Afraid she would hurt herself trying to move him, he rolled to a sitting position, all the while bracing himself for another white-hot stream of pain. Since this thing had started, every move he’d made had been met with renewed agony.
Yet, this time nothing happened—no pain, no vomiting. Even the shudders that had all but knocked his bones together had just disappeared.
He didn’t know what to make of it.
“Quinn, are you all right?” Jazz’s voice was low and serious, harsher than he had heard it all night. But then again, waking up to find her lover curled on the floor in the fetal position could probably do that
to a woman.
“I’m fine,” he croaked, his mouth and throat so dry that he could barely form the words. And yet he took a couple seconds to take inventory of his body and realized, with a shock, that it was true. He was fine.
He’d been to hell and back in the past two hours, but now he was feeling better than he had any right to expect. He was still weak, but he always was after a typical one of these episodes—and what he’d just experienced had been anything but typical.
“Well, you don’t look fine,” she said. “To be honest, you look like hell.” As he had been assessing the damage, she joined him on the floor, scooting until her legs rested on either side of his hips while her breasts pressed against his back. That’s when he realized two things simultaneously. The first was that sometime during the night, she had discarded her tank top and there was nothing between them now but skin.
The second realization was that she was still holding him. Her arms were wrapped around his waist, her hands holding on to his wrists. A low-grade warmth started in his belly, and began to chase away the chills. He knew it had nothing to do with his strange and sudden recovery and everything to do with her.
Shifting a little, he tried to hold her hand but she pulled away—a low, warning sound coming from her throat.
That’s when a third realization hit him—she wasn’t holding his hand to give comfort, as he’d thought. She was taking his pulse. Which probably wasn’t a good thing, seeing as on a normal day his heart rate was almost twice what a human’s was. And at the moment he was anything but normal. She probably figured he was a walking candidate for a heart attack.
Not wanting to deal with questions—and not wanting to lie to her—he jerked his wrist out of her grasp and hoped that she hadn’t gotten enough of a count to realize just how different he was from her.
He waited for her to say something, to protest his pulling away or to demand to know what the hell was wrong with him. But Jazz did neither—instead she simply sat there, the front of her body pressed against his back, and held him while he struggled to gain control of his riotous thoughts and emotions.
More than once he considered turning to look at her, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Firstly, because after waking up and finding him nearly comatose she could have run for the door but hadn’t. That frightened him even as it made his dragon preen. And secondly, because he couldn’t stand the thought of seeing how her opinion of him had changed—not now, when he was still so raw, his wounds so close to the surface.
Not now when he was still confused and trying to figure out what the hell had happened. He’d never had an attack that bad before, nor one that had ended so abruptly. Even while the man was grateful it was over, the scientist in him wanted to know the whys and wherefores.
Minutes passed and he braced himself for a confrontation, figuring Jasmine would start pushing him for answers. Not that he blamed her—if he’d woken up and found her in a similar situation, he would have demanded to know what the hell was wrong with her.
But she didn’t do that, didn’t say a word. He didn’t know if it was because she’d sensed how vulnerable he felt or because she simply didn’t care. But the way she was holding him—so tightly and tenderly—didn’t feel like lack of caring.
As if sensing the ever-changing thoughts that were mixed up in his brain, Jazz smoothed her palms over his shoulders, down his arms and up his spine, kneading softly everywhere she touched.
It was exactly what he needed, though he hadn’t had a clue, and the dragon reveled in her warmth and attention. He reveled in it, realizing with a shock that he was cold for the first time in recent memory. And not just any cold, but a bone-deep frigidity that went so deep he wondered if he’d somehow lost the ability to control his own body temperature. Dragons were the only animal of reptilian descent that could regulate their temperatures, due largely to the fire that burned deep inside any healthy dragon.
But now, it was like his fire had gone out. He reached for it but it wasn’t there, and a low-grade panic started humming through his veins. Jazz must have realized how cold he was, too, because suddenly her arms were around his waist. She held him tightly to her while her hands chafed against the skin of his arms and her mouth skimmed over his bare back as she tried to share her body heat with him.
It was the nicest thing a woman had ever done for him. That she was doing it now, when he’d been so close to giving up hope, meant more than he would ever be able to tell her.
He wanted to explain things to her, but his normal eloquence had deserted him, and he settled instead for simply leaning into her body, concentrating on the soft, warm feel of her.
On the crazy, blackberry scent of her.
On the sweet caramel taste of her that still lingered in his mouth. It felt amazing to have his senses back, especially after spending so many minutes locked in complete and total sensory deprivation.
He focused on them—focused on her—as an excuse not to think any more about what had happened to him. It wasn’t the best coping mechanism in the world, but here—in the dead of night—it was enough.
“Can I get you anything?” she finally asked tentatively.
How about a nice dose of sanity? he wanted to ask. Forgiveness. Oblivion. But since asking for any of those things would only make her think he was even crazier than she already did, he simply said, “I could use a drink.”
“Of course.” She scrambled to her feet, crossed to the bathroom and filled one of the plastic glasses with tap water.
A few seconds later she was back, the cup extended toward him. He reached to take it and suddenly there was a searing pain on his arm—it circled his bicep and shot up to his shoulder and down into his fingers. For a second Quinn was afraid that his reprieve was over, that the agony was coming back, but within seconds he realized this pain felt different. It felt hot and sharp and comforting in a way he didn’t recognize and couldn’t explain.
Then it was gone and he was cold again. Lonely. Desperate to connect in a way he never had been before.
“My brother died yesterday.”
As soon as he said the words, he wanted to call them back. What kind of idiot blurted something like that out—especially to a woman he’d just met? It was a lot more than she’d signed on for. After all, this whole night was supposed to be about fun and games, not his complete physical and emotional collapse. But it was so much easier to show his pain to a stranger, to her, than it was to acknowledge it to his clan members.
Jazz didn’t say anything at first, and he waited, expecting to hear all the meaningless platitudes that strangers voice at times like these—followed by a run for the door. But she didn’t move, didn’t speak. Instead, she slipped behind him again, tightened her arms around his waist and just held him for long moments, the feel of her heart beating steadily against his more soothing than anything he’d felt in a very long time.
When she finally did speak, she said the one thing he never expected to hear. “Was it your fault?”
Anger surged through him, even as he told himself he was grateful she hadn’t pulled her punches. “It was completely my fault.”
“Somehow I doubt that. Death is rarely anyone’s fault—at least not completely,” she answered. “Things happen.”
“How can you say that?” He shrugged her off, got up and paced across the room on unsteady legs. “For all you know, I could have pointed a gun at him and shot him.”
He whirled to face her, and if he expected her to be scared, he was disappointed. Instead, she regarded him steadily from her spot on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest like they were having the most regular conversation in the world.
“Did you?”
“Shoot him? Of course not.”
“Well there goes that argument.”
“You’re being pretty flippant considering I just told you my brother is dead.”
She didn’t look as embarrassed by his observation as he’d expected her to be, only a little sad. “It
seems to me that you’re torturing yourself enough for both of us. Someone needs to keep a level head here.”
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if there was anything he could say, as a small part of him wondered if she was right. Turning away, he faced out the window toward the parking lot where the last of the traffic from the bar was slowly working its way onto the main street. It was easier than looking at her, easier than seeing that odd understanding in her eyes.
He struggled for control, continuing to watch the mass exodus until the last car had turned out, leaving a lonely red Mustang as the lot’s only occupant. “Is that your car?” he asked, at a loss for anything more meaningful to say.
She crossed the room to peer over his shoulder. “Yep.”
“You want me to change the tire now?”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, skimmed her lips over the ornate lines of the dragon tattoo that covered most of his back. Her easy affection was balm to his tattered soul, even before she answered, “It’ll still be there in the morning.” He felt her smile against his shoulder blade and allowed himself to sink into her words. He didn’t know why, but she helped keep his demons at bay, and right now he was too worn out to do anything but let her.
“Besides,” she said, “I can think of a better way to spend the rest of the night.”
“Oh, yeah? And what way is that?”
She leaned away from him a little and he almost protested, except her voice was light and teasing and still close when she whispered, “Guess.”
He turned just in time to catch the wicked grin that flashed across her face. It aroused him all over again, and he gave himself over to the feeling. If sex was the only thing he could bring himself to share with her, then he’d settle for that. The oblivion that came with losing himself in her body sounded really good right about now. Moving toward her, he murmured, “I should probably let you know I’m a pretty good guesser.”
