Immortal Duty

by J. K. Coi

  His expression turned serious.

  “I want to go home,” Amy said firmly.

  “It’s not that simple.” He would have looked apologetic if his eyes hadn’t still burned, searing her skin with little licks of fire where his gaze touched her.

  “Look, I guess I can understand why you brought me here, but please, I have no intention of telling the police anything. Your military secrets are safe. Nobody would believe me anyway. I’m just going to forget the entire night.”

  Rhys looked back at her, that shuttered expression of his making her want to scream.

  “I’ll keep quiet, I promise.” Amy knew she was begging but it didn’t matter. She was too confused to care.

  “You know,” she continued, “I actually think I got knocked on the head or something. In fact, I must have because I can’t remember a thing. Yup, there’s a bump there. Really. So if you could show me out, I’ll just go home and get into my bed. I’ll sleep this off and wake up fresh and memory-free tomorrow morning…uh, later this morning.”

  Damn it, stop babbling.

  Amy’s mouth dropped open as Rhys turned from her without a word. He disappeared into the bathroom without even an “excuse me please”.

  Of all the rude, frustrating, ignorant… She ground her teeth as the door closed in her face.

  When she heard the water came on in the shower, Amy rushed to the door and turned the knob, but it was indeed locked. She thought of sneaking into the bathroom and snatching his jeans for the key. But after that kiss, she was simply not brave enough to walk into a room when she knew he was going to be completely naked…and wet…and lathered up with soapy bubbles—

  She moaned and clenched her eyes shut, but that only intensified the images in her head. Her pussy was pulsing with desire and her nipples were so tight they ached.

  Snap out of it!

  She crossed her arms and paced the confines of the room, pondering her options. Even if she knew how to get past the locked door, she wouldn’t get far. Since nobody had hurt her yet, and it didn’t look like they planned to in the immediate future, maybe she could wait and try to convince Rhys again that she had no interest in whatever it was these men were involved in.

  Not to mention, she wanted to see that arm again. For purely professional reasons, of course. She was a doctor after all.

  Rhys emerged from the bathroom, towel-drying his hair.

  Amy had parked herself in the leather chair. She watched him move around the room.

  He grabbed a clean shirt from a set of drawers along the wall and tugged it over his head, wondering again at his own stupidity. What the hell had he been thinking to bring her here? Moreover, why hadn’t he let her go yet?

  He couldn’t shake these protective feelings and didn’t know whether they were a result of his dreams or because he was painfully attracted to her. But he was worried about the premonitions. When she had been just a strange face in his dreams, he’d almost been able to dismiss them as fantasy, but not anymore. It rankled, but he felt responsible for her.

  He had always been able to see into the future of people he had a connection to. His special gift—or curse—was a side effect of being an Immortal. But the visions had never been reliable. They tortured him when they wanted to and weren’t something he could call up when he needed insight into the future.

  He combed a hand through his wet hair and stole another furtive glance at Amy. Jesus Christ, the curves on that woman should be outlawed. Just the sight of her lounging casually in his chair had him hard…and nervous. Nervous because he liked seeing her all curled up, occupying his space like she belonged there.

  Rhys dumped the wet towel and walked to the door. He would check on Baron, then decide what to do about Amy.

  She jumped to her feet to follow him. “You’re not leaving me here alone, are you?” She glared, but he could see the panic in her eyes. “How long do I have to stay here?”

  He didn’t answer—didn’t know himself yet.

  “How was it, again, that you knew my name?” she continued, dogged in spite of her fear. “I don’t think I caught your answer the last time I asked.”

  She stood before him with her hands on her hips, refusing to be ignored. He admired the way she didn’t let anyone, even an ugly, mean fucker like him, push her around for very long.

  Given the circumstances, her courage was impressive. Even more impressive? The fact that he was actually trying to be considerate of her feelings. Damn it, he was even being polite.

  He could have dumped her in this room and left her to rot until he decided whether to kill her or let her go, but he hadn’t done that and he still wasn’t quite sure why.

  No, but he had kissed her. That didn’t seem to fit under the category of polite, did it? Whatever. He wasn’t going to inspect the nature of his feelings about that incident just yet.

  “Still nothing, huh? Okay, fine.” She gave him a hard look. “How about letting me see your arm? Which one has the bullet hole in it again? I wish I could remember, but I’m sure you understand my confusion.” Her sarcasm was cutting and pointed.

  From the look on Amy’s face, his evasiveness was making her angry. He bet if they had known each other for more than a few hours, she would have smacked him by now. She was already too sexy for his peace of mind. His cock swelled at the thought of a feisty, fiery Amy challenging him up close and personal.

  “You don’t need to see my arm, it’s fine.” He hoped she would leave it at that but he wasn’t holding his breath.

  “I’m a doctor. I just want to see it. I could probably help.” She put her hand out and he promptly jerked back out of her reach.

  “Come on, you’re being ridiculous.” She reached for him again and touched the place where the wound had been, the place that was now fully healed but for a slight redness and a raised scar that looked as if it were already days old.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Rhys thought he sensed true concern in her voice. “It was just a scratch.” He shrugged.

  Amy made a noise under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “liar”, but it was cloaked in a faint coughing sound. His smile caught him by surprise. After all she’d been through this evening, that she could be calm, collected and even teasingly flippant with him was amazing. She was a completely alien but refreshing light in his world of death and darkness.

  He was more certain than ever that his dreams portended some mortal danger to her. Which meant he was going to have to dedicate time he didn’t have in order to keep watch over her.

  Her fingers brushed feather-light caresses over his arm as she gently examined the scar. Tingling slivers of awareness shot through him like little bolts of lightning. He covered her hand with his to make her stop before he did something stupid again, like kiss her.

  Her cheeks flushed and she tugged her hand from his, clutching it to her chest as she took a few steps back. “How can you be healed already? What were you guys actually fighting back in that alley?”

  Rhys sighed. If he tried, he could probably convince her that he’d never been shot to begin with. Lies like that came easily enough to him. All he really had to do was let people’s own assumptions tell the story they wanted to believe anyway.

  But for some reason Rhys felt the perverse compulsion to tell Amy the whole truth. To tell her all about himself and what he did.

  How much would she believe?

  He didn’t know where these feelings were coming from. He couldn’t tell her the truth, but he still didn’t give her the bullshit answer. “I can’t talk about it. It’s…classified. But if you promise to keep your mouth shut about what you saw, I’ll take you home right after you clean up.”

  Amy watched him for a long moment before shrugging her shoulders. “Okay, I won’t press you. I know when to mind my own business, even if I don’t have to like it,” she replied. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  While she was in the bathroom, he went to tell Baron that he was going to drive the woman hom
e.

  “Can we zap her with some kind of ray gun to take away her memories?” Baron asked.

  “There’s no ray gun, you idiot.” Rhys shook his head. “She’s promised to keep what she saw to herself, and I believe she will.”

  “Shit, man. I never pictured you for a sap.”

  “Back off, Baron. I’m going to keep an eye on her for a little while, but I don’t think we have to worry about her.”

  “How can you be so sure? If she talks it’s going to cause us a lot of hassle we can’t afford.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what we can or can’t afford.” Rhys sighed, “Look, I’ve seen her in my visions. I’m not sure exactly why she’s important, but tonight was no accident.”

  When Amy came back into the room, she’d washed her face and hands, and brushed out the knots and tangles from her hair. Rhys thought the silky curls poking out of her ponytail earlier had been sexy, but the reality of all that hair unbound was a different story entirely. His mouth went bone dry as he stared at her.

  She shouldn’t be able to affect him so much and so easily by doing so little. He wasn’t some randy kid mooning over his high school crush. With a disgusted sigh, he led her out of the room, back to the garage.

  He waited until she pulled the passenger side door closed. “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “What, you don’t know already? Somehow you knew my name, and I didn’t have to tell you that.” She glared at him as she pulled the safety belt across her hips and snapped it tight. Every minute he hadn’t killed her she showed less and less fear, and more and more attitude.

  He liked it.

  “Are you going to tell me, or do you want to come back inside? I’d be happy to have you stay the night.”

  He liked the tempestuous flash of her eyes.

  He liked the bite in her voice as she huffed and gave him her address.

  He liked too much about her.

  They drove in silence until Rhys stopped in front of her apartment.

  He walked her up the steps of her building and looked for her name on the mailbox. Apartment 2D, Amy Bennett.

  Amy looked at Rhys in the soft lamplight of her building’s entrance. His dark hair was still damp and fell just past the nape of his neck. He wore a plain black leather jacket and jeans, but she had a feeling there was a gun tucked under his arm. His eyes seemed to shimmer strangely like silver in the light, making them look like brittle crystal. Hard. Uncompromising.

  And yet she wasn’t afraid. This evening could have ended a lot differently than with the two of them standing at her front door like this. “Thanks for bringing me home,” she said.

  “No problem.” Rhys seemed to want to say something more, but didn’t.

  Amy stared at his mouth, wondering if he would kiss her again.

  She really wanted him to kiss her again.

  Deciding this was her night to flirt with danger, she didn’t wait for it and instead went up on her toes and smoothed her lips over his.

  Jeez, he was tall.

  She pressed her mouth against him lightly, cautiously, then he groaned and wrapped his arms around her, deepening her soft kiss into something more, something carnal and hot, and she tumbled into it, lost in her mounting desire.

  Her arms clutching him, Amy found herself forced back against the wall. She reveled in the feel of the sharp stone scraping her spine and his hard strength pressing into her. One muscled thigh moved between her legs and she gasped, her insides melting.

  His lips traveled along her jawline, down the smooth column of her neck. He licked the sensitive spot in the hollow of her collarbone and his hand cupped her breast, kneading and shaping it to fit his palm. She groaned and his other hand tangled in her hair.

  What had started as a daring impulse had quickly turned to a raging inferno, and she didn’t care, had no intention of putting out the flames.

  Rhys was on fire, burning up with need. He wanted Amy with a desperation that was overriding all his good intentions. He wanted to take her as hard and as deep as he possibly could. His body had never ruled him this way before. Right now he wanted—needed—to imprint himself on her, mark her, dominate her. He wanted to possess her and protect her at the same time, to push inside her wet heat and hold himself there for an eternity.

  It didn’t help his self-control to know that she was just as hot for him. Her raspy little moans beckoned like a siren’s summons and the scent of her excitement was an aphrodisiac. It would take nothing to convince her to invite him inside and into her bed, and once there he wouldn’t let her out of it again for days.

  In fact, what better way to keep an eye on her? If he kept her constantly at his side, preferably naked in between bouts of sweaty, acrobatic sex, he might gain some insight into the source of his dreams.

  Whoa. For women proximity meant closeness and sharing and no way did he want that kind of complication. He had a job to do that Amy could never understand, and a life that she could never be part of…a dangerous, fucked-up life at that.

  It would be better for them both if he simply let her retreat into her apartment alone. She would never see him again, and he would move into the future as a whisper of nothingness, a ghost, as he had always been to humans.

  But first he intended to commit the taste of her to memory.

  Amy broke the kiss.

  She sensed the shift, the moment when Rhys distanced himself. Amy could tell when a guy was getting wiggy—she had experienced that very wigginess herself enough times. If this had been a real date—one where she got dressed up in her one and only black dress, a date that actually involved a meal instead of almost becoming a meal—then they would have reached the part of the evening where she politely told Rhys she’d had a great time and they should do it again sometime soon. She’d promise to call, and might even do it—as long as she knew that she could stay in control.

  Amy had always followed the path marked “comfortable and safe”. There was less opportunity for emotional damage. Case in point, her relationship with Neil.

  Amy had had enough emotional damage to last a lifetime.

  But this time it wasn’t her putting up barriers. She knew Rhys was going to say goodbye and walk away from her. She might as well save them both the hassle of wading through the uncomfortable moment.

  “Well, goodnight.” She could still taste him on her lips. Her heart pounded and she knew she wasn’t pulling off easy and casual as well as she’d hoped.

  “Damn!”Amy swore as she remembered that her purse had been a casualty of the evening. “My keys are in my purse.”

  “Which is…?”

  “In a slimy puddle in an alley about four blocks from here,” she snapped.

  He stepped forward and reached inside his jacket. Before she knew what he was doing, he had the front door unlocked and held it open for her. He walked with her up the short flight of stairs to her apartment door, and had that lock picked in less than fifteen seconds.

  “I have to learn to do that. I wouldn’t have to bother the super every time I forget my keys.” She said it with a smile, but the fact that he had just picked the locks of her building like a pro brought home just how different they were. Different lifestyles. Different values. Different worlds.

  Just as she was about to step inside, Rhys took her hand, slipping a small piece of paper into her palm, the size of a business card. There was no name on it, no address, just a phone number.

  “Keep this,” he said. “And call me if you ever need anything. If you run into any kind of trouble.” He paused, then shook his head and grinned. “Hell, call me if you’re just horny.”

  She knew he was full of shit, that he had no intention of seeing her again, but she laughed and gave him a crooked smile. “Don’t get me wrong but you don’t quite seem the dinner-and-a-movie type.”

  “You’re right, I’m not that type. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be your type.”

  “You’re such a liar,” she whispered just as he pressed anoth
er hard kiss to her mouth.

  When he raised his head, his eyes lingered for a long moment, causing her to pull her bottom lip between her teeth. For a moment she thought he might reconsider, but the steely resolve reasserted itself.

  She was never going to see him again.

  Chapter Four

  Rhys cranked the stereo on the way back. He needed the hard, thumping rock music to ease the tension strumming his nerve endings, needed to drown out the blood roaring in his temples, needed to dilute the sharp, erotic images of Amy and all the things he wanted to do to her luscious body.

  Because nothing was going to happen there. With her.

  Maybe if he had been a different person in another world.

  Maybe if she hadn’t been headlining in his dreams, covered in blood and tears.

  Maybe if the writing on the wall didn’t already spell epic disaster for them both.

  No. There was no point indulging in fantasy. He had never done so before and wasn’t about to start now. Instead he forced himself to focus on the tasks that lay ahead.

  Baron’s training was progressing as well as could be expected. It had been difficult at first to get it through the kid’s thick head that, yes, Immortal meant he would never get sick, age, and—in theory—die, but it wasn’t an automatic invincibility card. There were still consequences for stupid decisions, consequences that could result in death.

  Now that he had Baron on track, thinking instead of just reacting to the situations he was being thrown into, Rhys was ready to contact the other Immortals, two of whom, Kane and Roland, should be easy enough to find since they actually kept full time day jobs.

  But for tonight, he would hunt.

  An hour later he found what he’d been looking for.

  A pair of watchers was stalking a leggy prostitute, probably done for the night and on her way home. Rhys pulled over and stepped out of the car. He reached behind him briefly to confirm the presence of steel at his back beneath the heavy layer of leather. The air was cool but the clouds hung low, heavy. There was always rain coming at this time of year. He breathed deeply of the misty night. Ready.