Meghan didn’t wonder that she could feel so much for those two men in such a short time. It was the way of her people to form the initial bond with their destined mates very quickly. That was as natural for her as the magic that lived inside her.
She cast a glance over at her garden. Nothing to do there, as the weeding had been done, the soil turned, and the ripened vegetables picked. She had a number of books loaded into her e-reader—what an amazing device!—just waiting for her to read. She could go inside and bring out her reader and that pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge.
Yes, that was what she’d do. Then, when it became dark, she’d go inside, fix a light supper, and maybe watch a few more episodes of Ryan and Jeremy’s program.
An insect buzzed close to her ear, and she nearly—very nearly—used her magic to ask it to leave. But the sense of something slightly off stopped her from doing so.
Needing to find the source of that disquiet, she used her hand to brush the insect away and cried out when the nasty little critter bit her. She looked at her hand and couldn’t figure out just what sort of bug it was. She’d never seen anything like it in her entire life.
And then the world tilted and spun, and her stomach rolled. She looked up toward the trees at the side of her property and saw them waver as if tremendous heat distorted her view.
Two men emerged into the light, men of dark hair and darker hearts, and Meghan had just enough time to send out a mental cry for help before the world went black.
Chapter 11
“So, why the change of heart...again?” Ryan kept his tone as businesslike as possible. He recalled thinking that the way Samuel Kolm seemed to avoid publicity was remarkable. Most of the people they researched, interviewed, and then contracted for the show were, at heart, social beings. They wanted the spotlight, and the money that could bring them.
Neither he nor Jeremy had ever held that against any of their subjects. If a man or woman had supernatural abilities, why not try to make the most of them? At the time it didn’t seem odd to them that the so-called “special” people would use their talents to advance themselves.
Ryan wasn’t certain he believed that anymore, not in light of having come to know Meghan. He couldn’t imagine her trying to profit financially from her gift. No, her attitude was more like the man’s in front of him.
He refocused on Kolm, who seemed to be peering into his glass of tea. Finally, the medium sighed and met his gaze.
“I was urged to respond positively when you first contacted me, urged by someone I’ve come to trust. But as the time drew near for our meeting, I got cold feet. So I canceled.” He took a sip of his tea. “But over the last week, my...friend...has been giving me grief over my cowardice. So here I am.”
He sat forward, folded his hands, and looked from Ryan to Jeremy. “My friend assures me that your interest in all things supernatural is genuine. That you truly believe there are special people in the world. People who have been...gifted, for lack of a better word, with special talents and abilities.”
“That’s an interesting word to use,” Jeremy said. “Gifted.”
The man shook his head. “I’m not even sure why I used it. This...ability can seem more like a curse than a gift. I have to remind myself that it is a gift. There are people who genuinely need just one more moment with, or message from, their loved ones. When I manage to accomplish that—when I assure a survivor that their lost one knows they were loved or when an apology is given and accepted—in those moments, I know I have done something good.”
Clearly he and Jeremy were on the same page. Ryan looked and knew Jeremy did too. There was no ember within the man. He wasn’t a descendant of the Chosen, like Miss Bea. He put his focus back on the older man. “In that case, Mr. Kolm, why agree to see us at all?”
“My friend recently encountered someone who was very interested in your work.”
Something about the way Kolm kept referring to his friend made Ryan sit up. He leaned closer and kept his voice quiet.
“Mr. Kolm, is your friend among the living?”
“That depends, Mr. Jones, on how you define life.” Kolm sat back and looked from Ryan to Jeremy. He seemed to be waiting.
You know that look because it’s one you’ve worn in the past, on the one occasion you told someone about “a friend” who’d saved their father’s life.
Kolm was waiting to see whether they’d deride him or not.
“All right. Your friend encountered another soul who was interested in our work. Was it someone we knew?”
“That isn’t something I’m at liberty to say at the moment. They...” He stopped speaking, a look of surprise on his face. He tilted his head, almost as if he was listening to someone beside him. Then he turned to Ryan, his expression confused, his robust complexion now somewhat ashen.
“You have to leave, now, both of you. Someone is in danger. And I’m to tell you...this doesn’t make any sense, but you’re to go immediately to Meghan without using your car.”
“What...” Ryan froze in mid question as a sense of panic washed through him. But it wasn’t his panic. It was Meghan’s.
He looked at Jeremy, whose own eyes were wide with shock, telling him he’d felt Meghan’s panic, too.
All afternoon, he’d sensed her there, in the background, aware of him and Jeremy, letting them be aware of her, too.
I can’t feel her now. She’d sent them that one panicked, pain-laced cry for help, and then nothing.
He didn’t waste a moment. He just nodded to Kolm and surged to his feet. There was a door just behind their table that opened to a corridor that led to the hotel lobby. They’d noticed it before they’d taken their table earlier.
He and Jeremy headed for that door. The moment they were in the corridor and alone, they grasped each other’s hand, and, in the next heartbeat, were standing on Meghan’s front lawn, a location that was slightly more than an hour away from downtown Raleigh.
Meghan lay in crumpled heap mere feet from the gazebo, with two men he didn’t recognize bent over her.
“Get away from her!” Ryan’s growl snapped both men’s gazes to him.
They raised their hands, each of them looking madder than hell. That, and the darkness that seemed to come from within them, were the only things Ryan noticed, the only things he needed to know.
“He said get away from her.” Jeremy didn’t move his hands. He simply punched out with his magic, and both men stumbled back from the force of it.
Ryan had never considered using his power in this way, but he didn’t hesitate. He mentally formed a fist and swung for the face of the man closest to him.
That man’s head jerked to the side as if Ryan really had physically slugged him. A split lip that drizzled blood stood as proof that the magic was real—and that Ryan knew how to use it.
The other man sent a shaft of power his way. In the shape of a lightning bolt, it was aimed straight for his heart.
Ryan imagined a large shield like the one held by one of the superheroes in a movie he’d seen recently. The bolt hit that shield and shattered.
Tiny pieces nicked his left shoulder and arm, and one struck his cheek. They hurt like hell but weren’t serious.
“Fuck this.” Jeremy opened his hand, and a fireball appeared. He sent it aloft, where it spun high, growing from the size of a tennis ball to the size of a basketball. And then he hurled it toward the strangers. The fireball split in two, singeing them both and making them scream.
Ryan followed Jeremy’s attack with a couple of lightning bolts of magic, one aimed at each villain. Both men seemed taken aback by the quick one-two punch of power. The two looked at each other, and he felt a familiar hum. They were clearly talking to each other in their own version of mind space.
“This isn’t finished. We’ll be back.” The man closest to Ryan spat his threat. And then they were just gone.
Jeremy tilted his head, one hand held up. Then he turned to look at Ryan. “They only took themselves off t
o about a quarter of a mile down the road, where their car was waiting.”
Ryan nodded. With Jeremy, he ran to Meghan. Her soft moan both alarmed and comforted him at the same time.
Ryan picked her up in his arms and used his magic to take her to the bedroom. Jeremy was with him as he laid her down.
“Sweetheart?”
He searched, with his eyes and his hands and his power, trying to discover how she’d been hurt. He looked up at Jeremy, hoping his brother could see what he could not.
“Let’s look inside.” Jeremy tapped his head.
Ryan had already done something similar with Miss Bea. This time he didn’t hesitate, nor did he feel guilty. Jeremy was there with him as Meghan’s memories played for them both. It seemed almost as if they were watching the dailies from his television show, and he was watching them on a monitor. He saw her come out of her workshop after her sisters left and felt her pleasure in the day.
Every emotion played on his heart. He caught her sense that something was off and her carelessly waving away an irritating insect as she began to focus, to try and discover what was wrong. He felt the insect bite. But looking down at her hand, he realized it hadn’t been an insect at all.
Ryan felt Meghan’s power surge and meld with another’s, wrapping her in a cocoon of protection as she fell unconscious. Then those two assailants—the Fortunas—appeared at the edge of the trees and approached her. They bent over her and one of them—the one who’d gone all Terminator on them—grabbed the other’s shirt, clearly furious.
You told me you knew what you were doing, Pietro. I can’t read anything, can’t get inside her head. You were only supposed to give her enough anesthetic to incapacitate her. Did you fucking kill her?
I didn’t mean to, but so what if I did, Mario? That should make the old man happy as hell. Prophecy fulfillment and power meltdown averted.
Then he and Jeremy appeared, and that other power, the one that had reinforced Meghan’s cocoon, evaporated.
“Come on, little tiger. Come back to us.” Jeremy held her hand, rubbing it, and Meghan made another small sound.
“You’re safe, love. The men who attacked you are gone.”
She moaned again, and then her eyes fluttered open. Jeremy lifted her so that she was sitting up and he was her personal lounge chair. Ryan conjured a glass of water, and they both helped her drink.
“What happened to me? I didn’t even have a chance to protect myself!”
“They used a tiny dart to drug you,” Jeremy said. “Some kind of anesthetic that was just supposed to make you woozy.”
Ryan watched her as she processed that. Her frown remained, and he could almost feel her looking back, as he had done. Then she turned her gaze to his, and he saw the worry in her eyes.
“Something was off. I remember thinking that.”
“Because those two assholes were lurking nearby,” Jeremy said.
“Partly. But also because I felt....” She seemed to flounder for words.
“You felt someone else inside your head.” Ryan didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. “And whoever it was, baby, helped to protect you from your attackers. Whoever that was helped you.”
“It wasn’t anyone I know,” she said slowly. “I know what the magic of everyone I know who’s Gifted feels like. I know what their magic looks like.”
“I know,” Ryan agreed. “Your power looks like an opal to me. This one, whoever it was, that power was like pewter—neither light nor dark.” Then he thought of what she’d told him about Cheri’s encounter with two Fortuna brothers on the cruise ship, and he asked the question that was screaming in his mind.
“A power that was neither light nor dark,” Ryan repeated. “Sound familiar?”
* * * *
“I’m really all right now.” Meghan wondered if there was something the matter with their hearing. She’d been insisting that she was all right for the last half-hour, but neither Ryan nor Jeremy seemed to get the message.
“You might be fine…” Ryan said. He leaned over and placed a sweet kiss on her lips. “But we’re not. So humor us, please.”
“Let us pamper you, little tiger.” Jeremy leaned over from the other side and kissed her, too.
At the moment, humoring them and allowing herself to be pampered meant relaxing between them in the enormous Jacuzzi they’d conjured. They’d set it behind the house and curtained it from view by magic.
Meghan had to admit it was hard to really mind being coddled. The hot, bubbling water did feel good, but even better was being held so closely, so securely, between these two men.
“You don’t think they went far, do you?” Meghan knew she couldn’t avoid talking about the situation, at least a little. Maybe if they did, they could put it behind them faster.
She was forming sexy thoughts of what else they could be doing with their time other than fretting about what had happened, what they couldn’t change.
“I don’t think they could go far, at least not using their powers.” Jeremy laced his fingers with hers. “I saw their magic, and it was darker—brown or deep gray—but it didn’t seem to be as much.” He looked at her. “When I see your magic, it’s not only light and colorful, it has depth. Theirs? I didn’t sense much depth to it at all.
“You said that the descendants of the chosen lost their magic through generations of not being mated in the traditional way,” Ryan said. “That it eventually eroded until there wasn’t much left except a few embers.”
“That was how it was explained to us, yes. But, I suppose, if the Fortunas—assuming that was them—if they knew they had that magic, and knew each generation was growing weaker, well, they might have been able to counter some of that.”
“Like if they had children with women who were descended from the Chosen?” Jeremy looked at her. “I’m assuming they could recognize the embers of their power just as you could.”
“If they came through generations nurturing their magic, handing down the stories of their forbearers and working with their children to develop their powers, then, yes, they might very well have been able to recognize them. And I think you’re right. If both parents have embers of power, then their children should also have them and maybe even a little bit more.”
“But not full, not like yours?” Ryan asked.
“No, and on that question, I speak with more authority. It was discovered that, over time, the children of single couples had slightly less magic than those who were born to true mated triads. All born within the homeland have magic. Some have it stronger in certain areas than others. But the children born of destined, mated triads have much stronger magic.”
She didn’t know if speaking of destined triads was a good idea or not. Despite their care of her, she was very much aware that they’d kept their feelings for her—and thoughts about the prophecy—close to the vest.
She didn’t want to think about any of that right now. She didn’t want to think that, maybe, they didn’t love her and, in the end, would walk away. What she wanted, needed, was to feel.
Some good, honest emotion would go a long way in soothing all of them.
“I need you. I was scared tonight. I’ve never been scared before, not like that.”
Ryan and Jeremy traded a look. Then Ryan reached over and plucked her off the bench. “Then let’s go inside, sweet Meghan. Because we need you, too.”
Chapter 12
Ryan and Jeremy set candles out around the room, and soft, sensuous music filled the air. They’d taken their time drying her with warm, fluffy towels, and then they’d laid her in the center of the bed.
Ranged on either side of her, they looked down, taking in her body, yes, but also meeting her gaze.
“I couldn’t sense you.” Ryan’s quiet words hurt her heart. The fear he’d experienced was there for her to see, and to feel. “I felt your call for help and, then, nothing. It was as if...” He swallowed hard. Clearly unable to finish that thought, he looked over at Jeremy.
&n
bsp; “It was as if you were gone. And then we were here, and we saw you crumpled on the ground. God, little tiger, I was so damn scared. We both were.”
The depth of their true emotions, of their love, was unmistakable, even for one as inexperienced with men as she. They may not have ever said the words to her, but they’d shown her in countless ways that they cared for and about her. She mattered to them, and maybe, in the end, that was all that really was important.
“I’m here. I’m safe because you came when I needed you the most. You heard me, and you came, and you took care of me.”
She opened her arms, and they moved down to her. She kissed Ryan, his taste now a part of her, and drank in his essence, even as she gave of herself to him. Then she turned her head and mated her mouth to Jeremy’s. She reveled in his flavor, in the spice of him and the heat of him.
Best of all, she had the flavor of both men on her tongue at the same time, and it was ambrosia.
Ryan drew her into his arms, tucking her in close. On their sides, facing each other, she rejoiced in the brush of his chest hair against her nipples and the sensation of his hot, hard cock pressed against her stomach.
Need overwhelmed her, and when she moved, he eased his hold on her. In the last few moments, the depth of their fear had seeped into her. She never wanted to be the cause of such tumultuous feelings in either of them, not ever again. So she pushed Ryan onto his back, determined to chase that terror away.
When he co-operated and lay flat, Meghan began to kiss her way down his body. She licked and nibbled along the line of his chin, enjoying the sensation of his beard stubble on her tongue. She continued to sample his taste as she made her way down his chest. Curious, she lapped at his nipples, her smile going wide when she realized his were sensitive and hardened just as hers did.
The lower down his body she roamed, the more tension she could feel in him. His hands cupped her head, and when she nuzzled his cock, his fingers clenched.
Looking up, she met his gaze. “I want to taste you.” Then she flicked her gaze to Jeremy. His bright eyes and erect cock told her he was turned on just by watching. There was something else she had in mind for him.
The Gifted 2: Passions Aflame (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 11
