by Cherry Adair
“This is what always happens when you try too hard to think about it and make sense of what happened.” His thumbs moved with firm, gentle pressure up the sides of her neck.
Sara wanted to hum with pleasure as his strong fingers kneaded the tight tendons. The delicious sensation shivered all the way to her bare toes. “It’s frustrating not to have all the … pieces.” God, that felt good. She allowed herself to sink into the sensation of Jack’s hands on her for just a few more moments.
She smelled him. The starch in his shirt, and a subtle male smell that was all Jack. Her toes curled against the fluffy texture of the flokati. She found the smell of Jack’s perspiration an aphrodisiac. His pheromones didn’t just call softly to her pheromones; they stood on a mountaintop and yelled her name.
And even now, when she least wanted to be attracted to him, she was turned on by the familiar scent of his skin and the arousing slide of his hands on her bare nape. “Yeah,” he murmured, his fingers moving to her shoulders, manipulating the trapezius muscles, searching for and destroying knots of tension, gently but firmly. He knew her body so well, Sara thought, taking a deep, shaky breath. “It must be frustrating,” he told her, his breath warm on her neck. She imagined his lips following his fingers, warm and tender, trailing soft kisses across her throat. He’d turn her face up to his—
“But fighting to remember something you’ve obviously blocked out is counterproductive. Baltzer was there, right? Maybe there’s something he knows that he might feel you’re ready to hear now. It’s been twenty years.” He shifted her head to one side and drew long, deep strokes along the length of her neck.
“He says not,” Sara murmured, eyes closed. In a moment she’d get up and walk away. Both mentally and physically. What had happened last night was an aberration. She knew it, he knew it. As long as they didn’t both think of the same highly charged sexual moment in their shared past, they wouldn’t find themselves unwilling participants in duplicating the experience now.
They were no longer lovers. They weren’t even friends.
She felt the pull of his touch deep inside her womb. Her nipples ached for his touch. It would be so easy to turn in his arms. To push him onto his back. To imagine them naked, and to position herself over him …
“I asked him about it a couple of weeks ago,” she said too quickly. Think about the wallpaper for the lobby of the Cali property. Think rainbow snakes. Think Jack’s skin rubbing against hers …
Think of my dead parents. That was an effective bucket of ice water on her lusty thoughts. “He just repeated what I already know.” She lifted her head and looked toward the window, trying to focus on the blurs of greens and crimson through the sheers and not on the tactile torture and bliss of his hands. “My parents had a dinner party. Grant and his girlfriend were just back from Paris and spent the night. The fire started in the living room. The gas jet beside the fireplace malfunctioned and exploded. Grant managed to get his friend and me out. His girlfriend had third-degree burns. My parents died. My dog died. The house was a total loss. Everything I loved was gone in the blink of an eye. End of story.”
She didn’t want to think about it anymore. Fire was her power to call. Fire had taken away everything she cared about. The guilt she felt was staggering to this day. Not only did thinking about it always give her a hellish headache, but thinking and not remembering was frustrating. And scary.
“Grant thinks my powers go crazy because I didn’t go to wizard school and didn’t learn how to control them.” Jack’s fingers traveled down either side of her spine with exactly the right pressure. “Instead, he sent me to boarding school in London.”
“He doesn’t like that you have powers.”
“He knows I’m not properly trained and that sometimes when I use my powers, things don’t go exactly as planned. And, yes, I know he feels uncomfortable when I use them. Big difference.”
His breath was soft on the back of her neck. Goose bumps rose on her skin. She jumped to her feet. “That felt great,” she told him brightly, striding to the open closet. “Thanks.” She unhooked a baby-pink toweling robe from behind the door and bundled it in her arms to conceal that her nipples were hard and erect. Her knees felt like overcooked spaghetti. “I’m going in to take my shower. When I come out, you’d better be gone.”
He leaned back again and quirked a dark eyebrow. “Why don’t we talk about what just happened instead?”
He saw too much. “Why don’t we—not.”
Her cell rang.
“Ignore it.”
She skewered him with a look, then picked up her phone from the dressing table. The mirrored surface showed that her hand was shaking. “I have regular business hours, Jack.”
“They’ll leave a message.”
Sara ignored his high-handed order. “Hi, Carmelita, how are y—”
Jack rose from the rumpled bed and stalked toward her, barefoot. Beneath his khaki pants, his erection was unmistakable. “Tell her you’ll call her back,” he instructed thickly.
Sara backed into the table and braced a hand on the shiny surface for balance. She looked away from the heat in Jack’s eyes so she could concentrate on Carmelita’s hysterical words. “When? … Teleport. … Yes, right now! Get out of the house. I’ll be right there. I’ll find you. Go!”
Jack’s voice changed as he halted a few feet away. “What is it?”
“There’s an earthquake in the village. My God, I don’t feel a thing—do you?”
“Localized.” He grabbed her hand. “Stay here. I’ll find her.”
“She and Inez won’t teleport and leave their friends behind.”
“Shoes.”
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THE SECOND SARA SHIMMERED hiking boots onto her feet, Jack teleported them directly to the center of the village. A great rumbling, like a subway train shooting past beneath their feet, shook the ground just before they were flung against each other as the earth buckled and heaved. Towering jungle trees swayed, monkeys screamed and chattered, and, with a cacophony of shrill cries, birds shot into the air like buckshot. Then, just as suddenly, there was a moment of eerie silence, as if every animal had at the same moment been wiped out of existence.
Jack grabbed Sara’s arms to steady her as he tried to assess the situation in a sweeping glance. Blocking out the shrieks of animals and people, the grind of falling rocks, the creak of trees ripped from their moorings, he concentrated on the visual of the disaster.
Without a Mercalli intensity scale, he guesstimated the intensity of this second shock as close to six on the Richter scale. “Brace yourself,” he told Sara, releasing her arm. “Earthquakes come in clusters. The main shock was probably a six-point-five or a seven, so the aftershocks are going to be strong. And the animals just went quiet, so an aftershock is coming. Stay the hell away from the buildings.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when another roll of the ground sent them to their knees. A wall of the mud brick house closest to them began to waver, then buckled, sending down a shower of mud bricks. He moved to cover Sara, casting a shield over them both. The bricks bounced off with dull thuds, but he sensed every one of them as they tried to punch through the shield.
The earth roared and bucked like a living animal fighting to get something off its back as it shot upward, sending Jack flying backward and knocking the breath from him. Sara piled into him, landing an elbow square in his gut.
Screams pierced the air, drowned out by the deafening grind of rock against rock and falling debris. But loudest by far was Sara’s scream of terror in his ear, making his heart nearly stop.
He held on to her as though his entire existence depended on it. “Stay with me! Just stay with me. It’s almost over,” he yelled over the noise.
Sara burrowed closer to him. Jack strengthened the shield. Goddamn. Why couldn’t she be thinking about Switzerland right now? Or Tahoe? Even Greece? Anywhere but the epicenter of an earthquake.
And just as suddenly as it had begun, the af
tershock stopped. Rolling Sara on top of him to protect her back from the hard ground, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her head down to his chest.
“Stay put.” He waited, counting off five minutes, then six, seven. Just to be sure.
Macaws began to squawk, monkeys whooped, and he heard the groans and hysterical chatter of dozens of people. At last Jack released her, and they got to their feet slowly. He glanced around. The houses—fortunately all one-story—on the left side of the dirt road were now fifteen feet down a crevasse where the ground had opened, a giant split seam in the earth, and swallowed them whole.
“Carmelitaaaaa!” Sara amplified her voice to be heard over the cracking of branches and the thuds of falling bricks. “Ineeez?”
“Sara! Gracias a Dios! Estás bien?” The two women came charging out of the jungle, flinging themselves at Sara in a flurry of arms and voices as they talked over one another.
“I’m going to do a void space search,” Jack told her when the women broke apart. “Look around and see what you can do to help.”
Sara spoke rapidly in Spanish to the two women, then turned back to him. “They think just about everyone ran for the jungle when the earth started moving.”
Jack had understood the conversation just fine. “Yeah, but there are some people down in that pit. I heard screams when the fault cracked open. Look, let’s teleport everyone we can off the fault line, then look for any injured. How far is the next village?” he asked Inez.
“Seven or eight miles. They will welcome us there.”
“All right.” Jack’s voice was grim. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of juice.” He took Sara’s hand. “Ready?”
Her hand felt small in his. He’d always thought of Sara as an Amazon, never vulnerable or weak. Never afraid of anything. For Christ’s sake, she manhandled a giant boa like it was an evening wrap. Her hand was clammy and cold in his. He squeezed her fingers.
Her eyes were huge and dark as she glanced up at him. “People, livestock, houses?”
“In that order.” His fingers tightened around hers. He imagined the villagers materializing in the larger village. He visualized everyone safe and whole. Then he poured all his power into combining his magic with hers. It was different this time from when they had spontaneously teleported Alberto. Maybe it was the conscious effort, but the fusion felt stronger, and he got a fleeting sense of untapped reserves of power in Sara. Then it was over.
“It worked.”
The sudden quiet made the remaining buildings seem like a jungle ghost town, except for the snort and squeal of a few pigs and the clucking of chickens.
“Great,” she said briskly, trying to tug free of his hold. Jack tightened his fingers around hers, making her frown at him. “Let’s get their livestock and homes to them, then go and check on everyone.”
“Whoa. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
She disengaged her fingers from his and stepped out of reach. Her agitation set off warning sirens in his head. “Nothing. I want to check on—”
“You think this happened because we had the hots for each other back at the hacienda?” Hots was like saying a plinian volcanic eruption was a freaking campfire.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Not maybe at all. This was purely scientific. The release of stored energy deep inside the earth radiates in seismic waves,” he explained calmly. He tilted her head up and waited until she looked at him, his gaze holding steady with hers. “The lithosphere—that’s the outer layer above the earth’s asthenosphere—is a patchwork of slow, constantly moving plates that push and rub against each other. That stress causes movement in the weaker, overlying crust. It’s as simple as that.”
“TMI, Jack. I don’t care what caused it right now. I just want to see that my friends are all right. Let me go.”
He wasn’t going to change her mind, at least not now. He released her. Watching her stride off and pick her way around the debris, he shook his head. Where the hell had she gotten this idea that her powers were (a) malfunctioning and, (b) responsible for a fire and an earthquake, plus whatever other natural disasters she ran up against?
Sara’s powers appeared to be fully operational. And she seemed to have control. He was somewhat surprised to realize that, once again, their magic worked better when they were physically connected than when they were apart. Granted, they were still on the leyline he’d discovered running through the hacienda and the village, but he felt it was more than that, something deeper.
Edge might be right about them being Lifemates. Might be. Jack wasn’t sold on the idea. They’d tried being together. It hadn’t worked. Hell, it had been a fucking disaster.
Jack wondered what happened to Lifemates who chose not to be together. And realized he hadn’t heard one single story about that. Not one. Then he wondered why not.
Chapter Eleven
Carrying a lost, sleepy toddler on her hip, Sara watched Jack help an elderly couple draw water from the well in the town square, then carry it away down the street. The meager light cast three long, eerie shadows on the cobbled road. Dark came quickly in the rain forest, and while the sky above the tree canopy was a deep navy, beneath the thick leaves it was fully dark.
A few lamps along the rough stone street burned little circles of pale yellow, but almost everyone was safely inside. The villagers, many of whom had friends or relatives among the people rocked by the quake, had opened their homes to the evacuees.
Sara, Jack, Carmelita, Inez, and several of their friends had worked tirelessly, helping families reunite in the chaotic aftermath. The hours had passed in a blur of activity—finding lost goats, helping get food and water, and doing basic first aid for minor injuries.
Sara couldn’t remember having eaten anything. Carmelita had brought her coffee what felt like years ago. She’d taken a sip, then left the cup somewhere when she’d responded to a call for help.
Now, other than the little one who was wilted against her body, her damp little head buried against Sara’s throat, everyone seemed to be okay.
It felt good to be needed.
The shower Sara had desperately wanted hours ago was now a necessity. She was sweaty and filthy, and her clothes were ready to walk themselves into a laundry hamper.
Sara scanned the road for Jack. He’d first caught up with her as she’d helped set up a triage area for the people who’d been hurt. Fortunately, the doctor who’d been treating Alberto was in the village visiting his grandmother. Dr. de Canizales had indicated with a flip of his chin who required basic first aid and who needed the hospital. He and Jack had quietly teleported those people to San Cristóbal without fanfare.
She and Jack had worked for hours, sometimes together, sometimes apart, always aware of each other. Between them they’d helped everyone make a connection, get a meal, and find a place for the night. But they hadn’t spoken in hours.
She’d been grateful when he’d ambushed her to spray her with insect repellent, his small grin acknowledging that she had totally forgotten her own needs while taking care of everyone else. She couldn’t stop an answering smile. He’d winked and gone on to hose down the next person.
How did Jack manage to remain so damn charming in the midst of a crisis? She tended to retreat behind a wall of feigned indifference that Jack had once described as cold. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but that she was frightened of what might happen if she cared too much.
Where was he?
The little girl, probably two or three years old, wrapped her arms tighter around Sara’s neck.
“We’re going to find your family, honey.” Someone in a village this size would surely know whom the child belonged to. Sara’s heart melted as she thought of the child she’d never gotten to hold. “I promise.”
The little wizard in Sara’s arms didn’t seem to be afraid, but she didn’t know where she lived. Sara presumed she’d wandered away with the influx of new people into the village. As soo
n as the girl was returned to her family, Sara planned on going home. She was exhausted and starving, and that cool, refreshing shower was starting to feel like the Holy Grail.
Insects swarmed around the lights, blocking what little illumination they emitted. The savory fragrance of roasting meat and fried arepas made her stomach grumble and almost blocked the fetid smell of the jungle. Keeping the vegetation from encroaching on the small settlements nestled in the rain forest was a constant battle, but these people had been doing it for hundreds of years.
“Dónde está tu mamá, niña?” Sara asked the little girl softly. The child hiccuped and gripped Sara’s neck so hard it almost cut off her air. Poor baby. Sara dropped a kiss on her dark, matted hair and ran a soothing hand up and down the child’s back.
“Hay mi mamá!” The child suddenly jerked upright with an excited shriek. “Mamá!”
“Dónde, niña?” Sara looked around. “Where, baby?”
The little girl wriggled to get down, but Sara wasn’t putting the barefoot child anywhere but in her mother’s arms. “Shh. Shh. Show me where, okay?” The child pointed across the street where the jungle had overtaken what might once have been a house. Sara doubted anyone lived there now. The stone walls sagged and most of the roof tiles were missing, although that could be a trick of the iffy light.
Still clutching the suddenly energized child, she crossed the street and eyed the small, dark house dubiously. It didn’t look in any better repair up close. “How about if we go and talk to Tia Inez first?”
With a shriek, the little girl tried to launch herself over Sara’s bracing arm. “Mamá! Mamá! Mamá!”
Sara kept her grip with difficulty, afraid the wriggling child would catapult onto the hard ground. “We’ll go and look, okay?” I am absolutely not going inside this death trap. Six feet from the doorless opening, Sara stopped. A pile of firewood had been dumped against the crumbling wall; the spiderwebs covering the rough logs caught the light and appeared to have been there for ages. Three out of four support beams for the porch overhang were missing.
