Dark and Dangerous: Six-in-One Hot Paranormal Romances

by Jennifer Ashley

  Seen any naked pictures of me today?

  “Go on,” Adam said, his voice thin with strain.

  Philip tilted his head. “As we spoke, this elder, he made a mistake. He did not say ‘a life for a life.’ He said, ‘a life for a death.’”

  Adam frowned. “Why can’t you just say what you mean? If you have an answer, let me have it. Don’t play games with me.”

  “I’m not playing games. This is far beyond games. I meant exactly what I said. A life for a death. Would you give up your life to teach Jacob how to die?”

  “Is that possible, or are you philosophizing a bunch of bullshit?”

  “I don’t know. I hope it is possible. I have found a druid rite dedicated to death. A blood rite to the Others to end a scourge. It requires a voluntary human sacrifice. What if the rite is literal? What if a life is required to end ongoing death? It makes sense to me. It is a solution that has symmetry. The account comes into balance when you pay for a death with a life.”

  “I die, Jacob dies?”

  “That is oversimplifying, but yes.”

  Adam sat back in his chair. “But there are more wraiths out there. Thousands. What about all of them?”

  The old man’s hands shook as he raised his mug. “I guess it would require...”

  “People are not going to line up to die for wraiths. Hell, I don’t want to die for a wraith, not even my brother.”

  “Of course not.”

  Adam stood abruptly; his stool tottered. “And more are being created every day. Someone or something out there is changing people, and I have to find out what. I can’t let that continue.”

  “You asked me to find a way to end Jacob. I think I have. Something similar must have happened in the past, and a way was found to end it. It’s horrible, yes. But the alternative is horrible, too.”

  If Adam heard him, he did not acknowledge it.

  “I have to stop the source first, even if it is fueled by revenge. Then I will see to my brother.” Adam paced the length of the island. Tension rolled off him in such great waves that Talia stood as well, reaching for shadows.

  Philip put a hand up in reconciliation. “It does not have to be now. Live your life, and when you are ready to pass, then end it for you both at the same time.”

  “What if something happens to me in the meantime? A car accident? Illness?”

  Philip shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. Well, I don’t know either. Six years and I don’t know anything. How much more is that monster going to cost me?”

  “Adam...”

  “Screw it. Jacob has been trying to kill me for a while now, and it seems like he is going to get his way.” Adam stalked from the kitchen, the darkness of the connecting rooms breaking around him.

  Talia glanced at Philip, who had lifted his sandwich again.

  He looked over at her. “Are you going to go after him or not?”

  Talia startled. Why me? He was the one who’d dropped this bombshell on Adam. Shouldn’t he be the one to make sure Adam was okay?

  “Pretty girl like you ought to know what to do. Go on now.” Philip took a bite of his sandwich.

  Horrible old man, insinuating...

  Talia glanced into the darkened rooms beyond the kitchen. She could see Adam perfectly. He strode through the adjoining rooms toward the double doors to the terrace. His broad shoulders were visibly tense, his gait long and fast. If she were he, she’d want to get out of here, too.

  “Go on,” Philip said. “I’ll clean up.”

  Talia looked over at him. “You didn’t have to...”

  “Tell him the truth? Don’t be silly. He needs the truth. Go on, now.”

  Talia didn’t want to spend another second with the old man. She started across the dark, empty space. She was going to go back to her room and think things through. Things were getting too complicated. Out of control. Better to pull back.

  She hit the button on the elevator and waited in the marble atrium, but the double doors of the terrace beckoned. A man stood on the other side, grappling with an unknown, but certainly horrible, destiny. If anyone could possibly relate, it was she.

  At least that’s the excuse she gave herself as she coded out onto the terrace.

  The night air was bursting with scent. Sharp grasses and pine dominated, but the broader fragrance of undergrowth underscored each breath. Stars glittered piteously above. Segue’s paltry lights offered feeble competition. The contrast suggested another hard truth, comforting in its own way: No matter what havoc wraiths or humankind wreaked on earth, those stars would keep on shining. Everything good or evil would eventually be scorched from the earth by the inexorable domination of the universe.

  “For someone with such an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation, it was damn foolish of you to come out here after me. Go to bed, Talia.” Adam angled his face toward her, his expression unguarded. He probably thought the darkness would obscure the pain in his eyes, but Talia could see just fine. Too well in fact. The man was confused and exhausted with his ongoing burden. His already busted-up soul had taken yet another beating today.

  “You wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, stepping up beside him. She sounded more certain than she felt.

  “Honestly, I don’t know if that’s true,” he sighed. “Right now I feel just as monstrous as what is locked up beneath us.”

  “I’ll risk it.” She looked across the roll of the fields toward the mountains, willing her rapid heartbeat to peace. But standing beside him, the organ only doubled its rhythm. She babbled, “Besides, I can see better in the dark than you can. The world fairly throbs with details, color, and sensation. It’s too intense for me really, so much to take in, but I’m pretty sure I have the advantage over you out here.”

  A corner of his mouth tugged upward, though his eyes remained dull and heavy, trained through the dark on her. “You see so much, but you can’t see what I see. Only an artist could capture you.”

  Relief flooded her as a deep ache coiled gorgeously in her abdomen. He didn’t think her a joke. After everything she’d revealed, he still desired her. The knowledge rooted her to her spot, in the path of certain danger.

  Besides, she needed something, anything, to escape her own discovery today. Death was her father. No one would want her if that bitter truth became known.

  She saw him move in her peripheral vision, was expecting it. A small rush of air brushed by her body just before his arms came around her waist, one shifting upward to the space between her shoulders.

  He’d warned her. She’d had every opportunity to run back inside.

  Instead, she tilted her head up to meet his.

  His mouth came down hard. Pressed more deeply than she imagined. Raw heat coursed through her, demanding without thought or reason. Just need, his knotting with hers. Her mind fragmented. A strange, tight pressure set her blood thudding in her head.

  The kiss burned, his tongue parting her lips to taste her. He smelled good: masculine, sharp, and dark. The combination was potent, his touch, a catalyst to change her. Like a drug once tested, she knew she’d crave it for the rest of her life.

  His body shifted, taking more of her weight. She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulder so that she wouldn’t fall. He was tall, all firm planes and unyielding strength, wonderfully painful in his embrace.

  She gripped his shirt and arched her back so her breasts pressed more firmly against him. Felt the drum of his heart against hers, the flex of his muscle, and needed more.

  He groaned low against her lips, and when she broke the kiss to gasp for air, he settled his blistering mouth into the bend of her neck.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed. Never in the many sleepless nights she’d spent fantasizing about a man like Adam had she imagined this.

  “There is no God,” he answered, voice ragged. His teeth worried her shirt at her collar to find her skin. Where his hot mouth branded, her nerves sang, her body begging please, yes, more.


  He dragged up her shirt and thrust a hand up her bare back to twist the band of her bra around his grasp. He scorched his other palm around her hip, to the juncture of her legs, where he pinned her hard against him.

  Talia squeezed her eyes shut against the pulse of shadow across the valley, against the gathering darkness that her blood and bone summoned. She reached out to him from her core.

  A great wave of want swamped her inner senses in answer. A soul-deep hunger borne of long deprivation.

  But...not for her. Not really.

  She felt a twisted self-pity ruling his actions. Loneliness, pain, and hatred combined with his considerable will to bind her to him, to use her to mute the myriad hurts in his spirit. There was nothing of her there at all, only Adam and his personal demons.

  The knowledge tore at her, made her hate her gift and regret the impulse to indulge in the moment.

  She twisted in his arms, pushing him away with her hands. She sought the protection of darkness. Brought a knee up to break his hold.

  He grunted, but grasped her closer still, fighting the onslaught of shadow.

  She bucked harder. Grabbed his hair to pull his head back. “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  Adam stilled, his chest heaving with effort. One, two breaths...she felt him collect himself. Felt his control steel around his contemptible actions and bring himself to heel, his need condensed into a tight ball of frightening, devastating potency. He released her abruptly, catching hold of her arms so that she wouldn’t fall to the flagstones of the terrace.

  Talia wrenched herself free, stumbled back, and fell anyway.

  He held out a hand to help her up.

  “Stay away from me,” she said. Her gaze flicked up to his face. She wished it hadn’t. If the man had been burdened before, now he looked utterly tortured and ashamed.

  Talia scrambled to stand, vision blurring the way his jaw clenched, the way his eyes narrowed to sharpen his own sight in the dark. To see her.

  She ran to the doors, fumbled with the code, and yanked them open to get inside and away from him.

  Damn him for touching her. Damn Philip for finding that rite. Damn Jacob for his horrible choice in the first place.

  “I’m sorry,” Adam said.

  And damn her shadow-bred senses for being able to hear his whisper across the stretch of dark.

  CHAPTER 9

  Adam gripped the marble barrier overlooking the gardens. If Jacob had brought him to the brink of insanity, Talia was going to push him over the edge. She was supposed to be bookish—to take to her offices and use her amazing mind to develop a well-reasoned theory backed up by hundreds of pages of blindingly dense text.

  Instead, she exposed Jacob’s damned choice, the one that ripped Adam’s family away from him again. Then, not two hours later, she revealed a strange connection some people have to Shadowman. Her father, of all people. Their art revealed that he was trapped somewhere, bound and unable to deal with the rising wraith threat.

  And she gave him images. What images! Hadn’t he been dutifully and honorably blocking visions of her naked body from his mind from the moment he cut her dripping clothes off her in Arizona? Okay, mostly blocking them.

  What was the daily Segue grind when Talia looked back at him with longing, glowing in vibrant color from an artist’s canvas? Naturally, he had an offer in on the piece already.

  Talia. Sleeping Beauty. Aurora. She was a lightning bolt. Sudden, unpredictable, dazzling. She brilliantly illuminated in the dark, yet was capable of setting things on fire.

  And then he had to be a dumb prick and maul her—hell, he’d wanted to use her sweet body to shut Jacob and the wraith nightmare out of his mind. Now he had screwed everything up royally.

  The thought broke over him in a wave of panic that muted his lust. He should go after her. Make it right.

  Adam crossed the terrace and stopped abruptly to pick up her fallen hair elastic. He stretched the tight, thin band round two fingers. Brought it to his nose to inhale. Caught a fresh, wet scent. He rolled the elastic along his fingers toward his palm. In a strange way—and everything about Talia was strange—the elastic became a link, connecting him to her. The tug of it felt good.

  He followed her inside. The elevator took a moment to come—probably dropping her off on her floor.

  When it arrived, he entered, reached out to hit her floor button, but paused at the sight of the black elastic on his hand, pushed up to the base of his fingers.

  It was such a little thing, so restrained. Made him want her more. Why now, as the wraith madness was just peaking, should he find the answers to his riddles and an incomparable, desirable woman at the same time? And in the same package?

  Ah, hell. He shifted his hand down. Hit Subfloor 2, instead.

  One stop at his office, then a hard, killing run until he could trust himself again.

  The elevator opened at his stop. He exited and found Custo approaching from the other end of the white corridor. Probably turning in for the day.

  “Custo, with me,” Adam said, brushing by him on his way to Patty’s lab. So what if Custo’s face was haggard with exhaustion. They could both be miserable together.

  Adam coded himself into Patty’s lab, Custo silent at his heels. Patty had said she’d be working late tonight, and she was. She straightened up from a microscope as he approached the table.

  Her eyes flicked to Custo, then back to Adam. “What’s going on?”

  Custo shrugged in Adam’s peripheral vision. “Damned if I know.”

  “I need a word with both of you,” Adam said. “What I say can’t leave this room.”

  Custo leaned forward on the lab counter. Patty pushed her wheeled stool away from the scope. “Of course.”

  Adam scrubbed a hand over his face. Where to start?

  “I have new information. Too much information, actually.” He couldn’t tell either of them about the rite that Philip had found. He didn’t trust them not to try something stupid, to give their own lives for Adam, before he had an opportunity to give his for Jacob.

  “Why do I have the feeling I’m not going to like it?” Patty twisted her mouth into a wry pucker.

  “Because it complicates the hell out of our lives,” Adam answered.

  “Go on,” Custo said.

  Adam drew a deep breath. “Talia is at the heart of this mess with the wraiths. She, and her father, Shadowman.”

  “Shadowman is her father?” Patty’s brows drew together.

  Adam could guess her train of thought. She’d want to take a closer look at that abnormal DNA. He’d be looking over her shoulder.

  “Talia thinks so, and the connection accounts for her physiological differences. When she was fifteen, she got into a car accident with her aunt, Margaret O’Brien. Her aunt died and Talia had the near-death experience that inspired her work. She claims to have had a brief moment where she ‘crossed,’ saw Shadowman, and knew him instinctively for her father.”

  “Does she know anything else about Shadowman? Where he is?” That was Custo, straight to the point.

  “What he is?” Patty clarified.

  “No. At least, she hasn’t said so, and she was opening up for once so I didn’t press the point. But she thinks he may be trying to get in touch with her.”

  Custo pushed up to his feet. “How so?”

  “Talia has been doing her own search for Shadowman. She discovered him in art. The same figure appears in several artistic renderings—paintings, sculpture, and the like, all named for him. In each image, he is bound by some kind of force against his will. I can show you what she found.”

  “Maybe the images have clues where to locate him,” Custo said.

  Adam had poured over the images—they were all surreal, indefinite, lacking concrete details—even the face of Shadowman was indistinct.

  “There’s more. Talia also found artistic renderings of herself.”

  “Oh, dear,” Patty said. “The poor girl.”

 
“Some images”—the painting of her in the nude, for example—“merely name her. Others show her variously fighting, fleeing, or fearing anthropomorphic monsters.”

  “Wraiths,” Custo concluded.

  “Yes. And we have to assume that The Collective is aware of this as well, since they tracked her for months.”

  “So she’s supposed to save the world from wraiths?” Custo’s tone did nothing to hide his skepticism.

  “We have to help her,” Adam said. “We have to protect her at all costs. We have to foster her, train her, and make certain that she knows Segue has got her back. Put all our resources at her disposal.”

  He glanced at the band on his fingers. He’d have to keep their relationship professional. He couldn’t very well protect her if he were on top of her. Or beneath her. Inside her. His mouth went dry. He slipped the elastic off his hand and pocketed it.

  “One more thing,” Adam began. “If anything should happen to me...”

  Patty frowned and waved her hands abruptly. “I don’t like that kind of talk.”

  “Too bad”—too bad for all of us. “The reality is that this fight is going to become a matter of life and death. If anything should happen to me, you both must continue to support her unconditionally. I want your agreement.”

  Custo’s eyes narrowed, but he gave a short, curt nod.

  Adam looked across the table. “Patty?”

  “I support her, already. Has nothing to do with whether you’re alive or not.”

  Patty used her sass to cope, but Adam couldn’t smile. Didn’t have it in him.

  “Okay.” Adam nodded. “That’s all.” Now on to that run. Fast and far so that he didn’t do anything stupid. Like wander up to the fourth floor.

  “Adam?” Custo raised a brow.

  “What?”

  “You’re not telling us everything.”

  “And I’m not going to.” Adam turned away from them and made for the door.

  Talia went to the roof, the last place she thought Adam would look for her since she had never been there before herself. She thought the place would be peaceful, but it was loud, a generator whirring and rumbling to disturb the night. She thought the air would be sweet so close to the sky, but it was slightly mechanical, oily, and tinged with cigarette smoke.