Find Me in Passion: Mal and Christina's Story, Part 3

by Julie Kenner

  “You know my father.”

  “I know your father,” he confirms.

  “And he told you that about me?”

  “The lawyer part. The rest I figured out all on my own.” One corner of his mouth curves up. “I have eyes, after all.” Those eyes are currently aimed at my chest, and I say a silent thank you to whoever decided that padded bras were a good thing because otherwise he would certainly see how hard and tight my nipples have become.

  “University of Texas School of Law. Good school.” He lifts his gaze from my chest to my face, and the heat I see in those ice blue eyes seems to seep under my skin, melting me a bit from the inside out. “Very good.”

  I lick my lips, realizing that my mouth has gone uncomfortably dry. I’ve been working as an assistant district attorney for the last two years. I’ve gotten used to being the one in charge of a room. And right now, I’m feeling decidedly off-kilter, part of me wanting to pull him close, and the other wanting to run as far and as fast from him as I can.

  Since neither option is reasonable at the moment, I simply take a step back, then find myself trapped by the glass jewelry case, now pressing against my ass.

  I clear my throat. “Listen, Mr. Engel, if you’re looking for my father—”

  “I am, and I apologize for snapping at you when I came in, but I was surprised to see that the shop was closed, and when I saw someone other than Oliver moving inside, I got worried.”

  “I closed early so that I could work without being interrupted.”

  A hint of a smile plays at his mouth. “In that case, I’ll also apologize for interrupting. But Oliver asked me to come by when I got back in town. I’m anxious to discuss the amulet that he’s located.”

  “Oh.” I don’t know why I’m surprised. He obviously hadn’t come into the store looking for me. And yet for some reason the fact that I’ve suddenly become irrelevant rubs me the wrong way.

  Clearly, I need to get a grip, and I paste on my best customer service smile. “I’m really sorry, but my dad’s not here.”

  “No? I told him I’d come straight over.” I can hear the irritation in his voice. “He knows how much I want this piece—how much I’m willing to pay. If he’s made arrangements to sell it to another—”

  “No.” The word is fast and firm and entirely unexpected. “It’s not like that. My dad doesn’t play games with clients.”

  “That’s true. He doesn’t.” His brow creases as he looks around the shop, taking in the open boxes, half filled with inventory, the colored sticky notes I’ve been using to informally assign items to numbered boxes, and the general disarray of the space. “Callie. What’s happened to your father?”

  It is the way he says my name that loosens my tongue. Had he simply asked the question, I probably would have told him that he could come back in the morning and we’d search the computerized inventory for the piece he’s looking for. But there is something so intimate about my name on his lips that I can’t help but answer honestly.

  “My dad had a stroke last week.” My voice hitches as I speak, and I look off toward the side of the store, too wrecked to meet his eyes directly.

  “Oh, Callie.” He steps closer and takes my hand, and I’m surprised to find that I not only don’t pull away, but that I actually have to fight the urge to pull our joint hands close to my heart.

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “I’m so sorry. How is he doing?”

  “N-not very well.” I suck in a breath and try to gather myself, but it’s just so damn hard. My mom walked out when I was four, saying that being a mother was too much responsibility, and ever since I’ve been my dad’s entire world. It’s always amazed me that he didn’t despise me. But he really doesn’t. He says that I was a gift, and I know it’s true because I have seen and felt it every day of my life.

  Whatever the cause of my disconnect with men, it doesn’t harken back to my dad, a little fact that I know fascinates my shrink, though she’s too much the professional to flat out tell me as much.

  “Does he have decent care? Do you need any referrals? Any help financially?” Raine is crouching in front of me, and I realize that I have sunk down, so that my butt is on the cold tile floor and I am hugging my knees.

  I shake my head, a bit dazed to realize this stranger is apparently offering to help pay my dad’s medical bills. “We’re fine. He’s got great care and great insurance. He’s just—” I break off as my voice cracks. “Shit.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. Breathe now. That’s it, just breathe.” He presses his hands to my shoulders, and his face is just inches away. His eyes are wide and safe and warm, and I want to slide into them. To just disappear into a place where there are neither worries nor responsibilities. Where someone strong will hold me and take care of me and make everything bad disappear.

  But that’s impossible, and so I draw another breath in time with his words and try once again to formulate a coherent thought. “He’s—he’s got good doctors, really. But he’s not lucid. And this is my dad. I mean, Oliver Sinclair hasn’t gone a day in his life without an opinion or a witticism.”

  I feel the tears well in my eyes and I swipe them away with a brusque brush of my thumb. “And it kills me because I can look at him and it breaks my heart to know that he must have all this stuff going on inside his head that he just can’t say, and—and—”

  But I can’t get the words out, and I feel the tears snaking down my cheeks, and dammit, dammit, dammit, I do not want to lose it in front of this man—this stranger who doesn’t feel like a stranger.

  His grip on my shoulders tightens and he leans toward me.

  And then—oh, dear god—his lips are on mine and they are as warm and soft as I’d imagined and he’s kissing me so gently and so sweetly that all my worries are just melting away and I’m limp in his arms.

  “Shhh. It’s okay.” His voice washes over me, as gentle and calming as a summer rain. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  I breathe deep, soothed by the warm sensuality of this stranger’s golden voice. Except he isn’t a stranger. I may not have met him before today, but somehow, here in his arms, I know him.

  And that, more than anything, comforts me.

  Calmer, I tilt my head back and meet his eyes. It is a soft moment and a little sweet—but it doesn’t stay that way. It changes in the space of a glance. In the instant of a heartbeat. And what started out as gentle comfort transforms into fiery heat.

  I don’t know which of us moves first. All I know is that I have to claim him and be claimed by him. That I have to taste him—consume him. Because in some essential way that I don’t fully understand, I know that only this man can quell the need burning inside me, and I lose myself in the hot intensity of his mouth upon mine. Of his tongue demanding entrance, and his lips, hard and demanding, forcing me to give everything he wants to take.

  I am limp against him, felled by the onslaught of erotic sparks that his kisses have scattered through me. I am lost in the sensation of his hands stroking my back. Of his chest pressed against my breasts.

  But it isn’t until I realize that he has pulled me into his lap and that I can feel the hard demand of his erection against my rear that I force myself to escape this sensual reality and scramble backward out of his embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, my breath coming too hard.

  “Callie—” The need I hear in his voice reflects my own, and I clench my hands into fists as I fight against the instinct to move back into his arms.

  “No.” I don’t understand what’s happening—this instant heat, like a match striking gasoline. I’ve never reacted to a man this way before. My skin feels prickly, as if I’ve been caught in a lightning storm. His scent is all over me. And the taste of him lingers on my mouth.

  And oh, dear god, I’m wet, my body literally aching with need, with a primal desire for him to just rip my clothes off and take me right there on the hard, dusty floor.

  He’s triggered a wildness in me that I don’t
understand—and my reaction scares the hell out of me.

  “You need to go,” I say, and I am astonished that my words are both measured and articulate, as if I’m simply announcing that it is closing time to a customer.

  He stays silent, but I shake my head anyway, and hold up a finger as if in emphasis.

  “No,” I say, in response to nothing. “I don’t know anything about this amulet. And now you really need to leave. Please,” I add. “Please, Raine. I need you to go.”

  For a moment he only looks at me. Then he nods, a single tilt of his head in acknowledgment. “All right,” he says very softly. “I’ll go. But I’m not ever leaving you again.”

  I stand frozen, as if his inexplicable words have locked me in place. He turns slowly and strides out of the shop without looking back. And when the door clicks into place behind him and I am once again alone, I gulp in air as tears well in my eyes again.

  I rub my hands over my face, forgiving myself for this emotional miasma because of all the shit that’s happened with my dad. Of course I’m a wreck; what daughter wouldn’t be?

  Determined to get a grip, I follow his path to the door, then hold onto the knob. I’d come over intending to lock it. But now I have to fight the urge to yank it open and beg him to return.

  It’s an urge I fight. It’s just my grief talking. My fear that I’m about to lose my father, the one person in all the world who is close to me, and so I have clung to a stranger in a desperate effort to hold fast to something.

  That, at least, is what my shrink would say. You’re fabricating a connection in order to fill a void. It’s what you do, Callie. It’s what you’ve always done when lonely and afraid.

  I nod, telling myself I agree with Kelly’s voice in my head.

  And I do.

  Because I am lonely.

  And I am afraid of losing my dad.

  But that’s not the whole of it. Because there’s something else that I’m afraid of, too, though I cannot put my finger on it. A strange sense of something coming. Something dark. Something bad.

  And what scares me most is the ridiculous, unreasonable fear that I have just pushed away the one person I need to survive whatever is waiting for me out there in the dark.

  Want to read more? Visit the Dark Pleasures page on Julie’s website.

  Tainted Excerpt

  Please enjoy the first chapter of Tainted (Blood Lily Chronicles, Book 1).

  PROLOGUE

  . . . And by her hand that which would be open may be closed . . .

  —The Prophecy of the Orb

  Can I just say that dying sucks? All that bullshit about seeing the light and having this final moment of inner peace, blah, blah, blah. It’s crap.

  Dying is messy and terrifying and it hurts like hell.

  I ought to know. After all, I was the one on that basement floor in a puddle of my own blood and bile. And there was no peace, no light, no anything. Nothing except the ice-cold knowledge that the sins I’d racked up in the last twelve or so hours were more than sufficient to push me through the gates of hell.

  Forget everything else I’d done in my twenty-six years on this earth, good and bad. You go out planning to kill a man—even a man as vile as Lucas Johnson—and your fate is pretty much sealed.

  From a practical standpoint, the moment of death is a little bit late to start getting all profound and reflective. As they say, what’s done is done. But that doesn’t matter, because even if you’re the least introspective person on the planet, you still go through the whole Psych 101 rigmarole. You tell yourself that maybe you should have said your bedtime prayers once in a while. You wonder if all those torture-porn horror movies you watched while your boyfriend copped a feel weren’t actually a sneak peek into what hell had to offer.

  In other words, you get scared.

  When you’re living, you might tell God to take a flying leap for putting your mother six feet under when you were only fourteen. For leaving you with a stepfather who decided to cuddle up with Jack Daniel’s because he no longer had a loving wife in his bed. For leaving you in charge of a pigtailed little half sister who thought you hung the moon.

  And for making you arrogant enough to swear that you’d protect that precious kid no matter what, even though that wasn’t a promise you could keep. Not when there are monsters like Lucas Johnson trolling the earth. Monsters who suck the life from little girls.

  For all those reasons, you might turn your back on God, and think you’re oh-so-righteous for doing it. But you’d be wrong.

  Trust me. I know.

  I know, because even as my life faded, the fires of hell nipped at my toes.

  In the end, I got lucky. But then again, luck is all a matter of perspective, isn’t it?

  CHAPTER ONE

  I woke up in total darkness, so out of sorts that I was convinced I’d pulled on the wrong skin along with my blue jeans. Couple that with the fact that anvils were about to split my head wide open, and I think it’s fair to say that I wasn’t having a good time. I tried to roll over and get my bearings, but even the tiniest movement kicked the hammers in my head to triple-time, and I abandoned the effort before I even got started.

  “Fucking A,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I’m no American Idol contestant, but my voice doesn’t usually inflict extreme pain. Today, it did.

  Today? Like I even knew what day it was. Or where I was. Or, for that matter, why I was.

  I’d died, after all.

  Hadn’t I?

  Disoriented, I lurched up, only to be halted before I’d barely moved.

  I tried again, and realized my wrists and ankles were firmly tied down. What the—?

  My heart pounded against my rib cage, but I told myself I wasn’t afraid. A big hairy lie, but it was worth a try. I mean, I lied to myself all the time, right? Sometimes I even believed my own shit.

  Not this time. I might have dropped out of high school, but I know when to be scared, and tied up in the dark is definitely one of those times. There was no nice, cozy explanation for my current sitch. Instead, my mind filled with high-def NC-17 images of a long, thin blade and a twisted expression of cruel delight painted on a face I knew only too well. Lucas Johnson.

  Because this had to be about revenge. Payback for what I’d tried to do. And now I was going to die at the hand of the man I’d gone out to kill.

  No, no, no.

  No way was I dying. Not now. Not when I’d survived this far.

  I didn’t have a clue why I was still alive—I remembered the knife; I remembered the blood. But here I was, living and breathing and, yeah, I was a little immobile at the moment, but I was alive. And I intended to stay that way.

  No way was I leaving my little sister to the mercy of the son of a bitch who’d raped and brutalized her. Who’d sent her black roses and mailed erotic postcards. All anonymous. All scary as hell. She would see him in stores, lurking around corners, and by the time she screamed for help, he was gone.

  The cops had nailed his sorry ass, but when the system had tossed him on a technicality, I watched Rose come close to losing it every single day. I couldn’t stand the thought that the system had kicked the monster free when he should have been in a cage, locked away so he couldn’t hurt any more little girls. So he couldn’t hurt Rose.

  So I’d stolen the gun. I’d tracked him down. And God help me, I’d fired.

  At the time, I thought I’d hit him square in the chest. But I must have missed, because I could remember Johnson rushing me. After that, things were blurrier. I remembered the terror of knowing that I was dying, and I recalled a warm flood of hope. But I had no clue what had happened between warm, fuzzy hope and the cold, hard slab that made up my current reality.

  I peered into the darkness again, and this time the velvet curtain seemed to be lifting. The room, I realized, wasn’t completely black. Instead, there was a single candle against the far wall, its small flame gathering strength against the blackness.

  I stared, pu
zzled. I was certain there’d been no flame earlier.

  Slowly, the area around me shifted into a reddish gray with dark and light spots contrasting to reveal a line of angular symbols painted above the candlestick.

  My eyes locked on the symbols, and the trembling started up again. Something was off, and I was overwhelmed by the frantic, urgent fear that the monster I knew was nowhere nearby, and that when I saw what I was really up against, I’d desperately wish it were Johnson’s sorry ass that was after me.

  A cold chill raced up my spine. I wanted the hell out of there.

  I was about to start thrashing again—in the desperate hope that the ties would miraculously loosen—when I heard the metallic screech of a creaking hinge. I froze, my breathing shallow, my muscles tense.

  The creak intensified and a shaft of anorexic light swept wide across the room as the door arced open. A huge shadow filled the gap. A dark, monstrous form was silhouetted in the doorway, emitting a scent that made me almost vomit.

  A monster. And not of the Lucas Johnson variety.

  No, Lucas Johnson was a Boy Scout compared to the putrid creature that lumbered forward, bending so that it could fit through the door frame. It lurched toward me, muscles rolling under an elephant-like hide. The creature wore no clothing, and even in the dark, I could see the parasites living in slime inside the folds of skin. Could hear them scurry for safety when the beast moved toward me.

  The fetid smell that preceded it made me gag, and I struggled to sink into the stone slab as the beast peered down at me, a string of snot hanging precariously from the orifice that served as a nose.

  The creature’s mouth twisted, dry skin cracking as the muscles underneath moved, thin lines of blood and pus oozing out from the newly formed fissures. It swaggered to the candle, then leaned over and breathed on the flame. As if its breath were gas, fire leaped into the air, painting the wall with flame and making the symbols glow.