The Klaxon in her head blared out a warning at the glint in those dark eyes, but somehow she knew it came just a split second too late. Apparently, that was one insult too far for the Guardian.
She tried to backpedal so fast, she could almost hear the chains falling off her mental gears. She opened her mouth to take it all back, but she never got the chance. He pounced like a big cat, and she—God help her—squeaked like a little furry church mouse.
It was humiliating.
It was mind-blowing.
Baen’s mouth seized hers as if it were a medieval village, and not the fortified kind either, with walls and moats and actual working defenses. No, she was the laughably vulnerable kind, where there were no men under ninety left to fight off attackers and no one had eaten a decent meal for six months, so they barely had the strength to run and hide.
Oh, who was she kidding? She practically threw him a welcome-home party and crowned him king of her libido. It was downright embarrassing.
Or it would have been, if she hadn’t been way too busy enjoying herself to think that hard.
He tasted like fire, or at least like she imagined it tasting, like the burn of alcohol without the sharp sting. Just light and heat and destructive power. He sure as hell destroyed every protest in her head before it could finish forming, leaving her weak-kneed and weak-willed and eager for more of his intoxicating taste.
Her head spun, and she reached out for something to hold on to, clenching her fingers in the smooth fabric of his shirt and leaning into him. It was either that, or fall flat on her ass, and if she fell, she wouldn’t be able to reach his lips anymore. Totally unacceptable.
Baen didn’t appear to like that idea, either. He finally let go of her shoulders only to wrap those brawny arms around her and pull her snug against his hard body. With the differences in height, he made good use of his altered grip to lift her feet clean off the ground and leave her dangling in midair while he continued to devour her mouth. She felt one arm clamp around her waist to pin her in place while the other moved lower to brace against the curve of her bottom to support her.
And, you know, cop a feel.
That was what finally jump-started her brain cells back into working order, the sensation of that big hand squeezing as it drifted across her ass. Not that she found the sensation unpleasant, but because it took her by surprise. It had been a long time since her last date, let alone the last time she’d gotten this caught up in a simple embrace, and she’d almost forgotten how it felt to have a man’s hands on her. Not that any of them had ever made her feel this way. Especially not before the first date.
Ignoring the inner voice in her head whining not to do it, Ivy tore her lips from Baen’s and flattened her palms against his chest. She opened her mouth to utter some witty quip, but nothing came out. She was too rattled. He had scrambled her brain like a couple of eggs, and not even a good shake of her head managed to rattle things back into place.
Sheesh, what was wrong with her?
Hormones, her brain said.
Overthinking, her hormones countered.
Ride him like a rented pony! her libido shouted.
Ivy ignored the last suggestion and clenched her thighs together to stifle further comment from that quarter. Last time she had checked, her genitalia had not registered to vote.
She cleared her throat to make sure it still worked in theory, then tried again to speak. “Um, maybe you should put me down?”
Instead of the protest she had half expected, Baen merely loosened his grip enough to let her slide to her feet. Slowly. With a lot of interesting friction that told her more than she had really needed to know about how much the kiss had affected him. Don’t get her wrong, she was flattered, but really?
Well, flattered and a tiny bit intimidated. Yowzah.
Ivy pressed against his chest again, and this time he let her put a few inches between them. Wait, that sounded wrong. A few inches of space between them. “I’m not sure that was such a good idea.”
“I thought it worked out very well,” he rumbled, the deep, vibrating sound going right to the part of her that was least likely to behave itself when she ordered it to. “You taste delicious.”
“Thanks. Wait! Um, I mean—” She caught herself and felt her entire body spontaneously combust.
Well, okay, not really, but she did blush from the soles of her feet to the part in her hair.
She blew out a breath and stepped resolutely backward, a small part of her brain registering stunned surprise when she didn’t trip over anything and ratchet up the level of humiliation another notch. “What I meant was that you shouldn’t say things like that. It’s not appropriate. We need to stay focused on the mission at hand, not let ourselves get distracted by … um … things. If you really think that I’m somehow your Warden, then that means we’re working together, and I have a strict rule that I never get involved with coworkers. Period.”
Baen just watched her with his eyes gone black and burning and the corners of his mouth tilted up in that wholly male expression of self-satisfaction known far and wide as a smirk. He smirked at her, and the bastard had the nerve to look sexy while he did it.
Jerk.
When he remained silent and crossed those thickly muscled arms across his ripped chest, Ivy tore her gaze from all those tempting grooves and bulges and turned her back on him. Maybe if she couldn’t see him, this ridiculous awareness of him would finally fade.
The traitorous flesh between her thighs told her not to get her hopes up.
“Good. I’m glad you agree,” she said, not waiting to hear whether he did or not. “It will keep things simpler, and I’m sure we’ll all be a lot happier in the long run. I’ll go online and see if I can get us a last-minute flight this evening, and then I’m going to study that book on magic that Drum left me. He said there are a couple of simple defensive spells in there that I should be able to pick up in a couple of hours of practice. After this afternoon, I have a feeling I might need them.”
She kept her back to him and marched toward the door to her bedroom and the laptop she had left there. She did not run away. No, sir. At best, some haters might want to call it a strategic retreat, but there was no running involved. Not even a jog.
Okay, maybe a race-walk, but that was it.
Honest.
Behind her, Baen chuckled, the sound rusty from long disuse but full of self-satisfaction. Full of smirk. She closed the door behind her with a sharp click, then leaned back against the cool panel and closed her eyes. Her nipples remained drawn into hard peaks of arousal, just to taunt her.
Men sucked.
Apparently, even the mythological ones.
* * *
Baen remained in the sitting room of the comfortable flat after Ivy fled, satisfaction filling him. She might have run from him this time, but that kiss had told him some very important things. First, that he affected his little human in much the same way that she affected him. He had felt the heat in her response as she returned his kiss, had felt her nipples draw into tight beads of arousal as they pressed up against his chest. He had felt her shudder when his tongue stroked across hers and plumbed the depths of her sweet mouth. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her. That was good.
Secondly, and most importantly, it had told him that there was a chance he had found not just a new Warden to help him fight back the threat posed by the Darkness; he might have found his own destined mate.
The possibility made his heart and mind race.
While there had been little time to spend with Ash and her Warden, the pair had shared a few significant pieces of news regarding the others of his kind. All five of the Guardians to wake in this time had found themselves paired with a Warden of the opposite sex, an individual who seemed to fulfill all the traits told about in the legend of the Guardians and the Maidens.
All except for Drum, of course, but if he proved to be the exception, that only made sense, because Ash formed the biggest exception Baen could ever
imagine. Never before in the long history of their kind had a female Guardian been summoned, which was why it had so shocked Baen to hear her claim him as her brother. He felt ashamed now that he had reacted so badly to the news and had treated her with such disrespect, but surprise had rendered him temporarily unable to think. It had never occurred to him that her existence might be possible, but clearly it was, which made Drum’s place at her side more than possible as well; it made it necessary.
That old story the Guardians held so dear and passed on among themselves from summoning to summoning meant much more than most who heard it first assumed. Listeners often tried to dismiss it as romantic fantasy, a syrupy little love story with scant consequence in the harsh world of endless conflict that made up the existence of the Guardians, but it was much more than that.
It was true that the story gave hope to Baen’s brethren that they might one day escape the endless cycle of sleeping and fighting that defined their existence by finding a mate, but it did something even more important. Baen believed that it showed them the true path to defeating the Seven in battle. After all, according to the legend, the maidens who woke that first generation of Guardians after they ignored the summons from the Guild had given the warriors purpose and added strength. They had joined them in the battle, stood by their sides and aided in the defeat of the Darkness, a defeat that might not have happened without them.
Baen knew his ideas were radical ones. The Guild had long maintained that the taking of mates weakened the side of the Light because it took experienced and battle-tested Guardians out of the fight, forcing the summoning of new, untried replacements. That argument failed to hold water in Baen’s mind. He had once been newly summoned, and he knew very well that each Guardian came into existence in the human world with all the skills and memories of those who served before him. There was no learning curve for a new Guardian. He appeared fully armed, fully trained, and ready to fight, as deadly as the brother he had replaced.
It made him wonder what the Guild hoped to achieve by maintaining their stance of disapproval and discouragement.
Power, his inner voice whispered. It’s always about power.
Baen could find no way to argue with that. To a Guardian, the human quest for power would always remain a mystery. Easily recognized as the species’ begetting sin, the humans’ thirst for power seemed behind all the great conflicts in their history. Certainly, it was behind the plans of the Order of Eternal Darkness and those who followed their masters, for the Darkness itself was always greedy for power. Perhaps that came from the knowledge that the most important power in the universe was the one thing the Darkness would never have—the Power of Creation. Only the Light could bring forth new life; the Darkness could only corrupt, seize, and destroy.
Now he was getting philosophical, Baen admitted to himself with some amusement. It seemed that his little female inspired deep thoughts as well as deep feelings. Part of him urged him to go after her, to corner her in the small room where she had shut herself away and seduce her into admitting her feelings for him.
He stifled the urge with difficulty. If his instincts were right, and Ivy could be his mate, the one destined to change the course of his existence, then he would gain nothing from pushing her. Nothing but an angry, spitting cat of a female. His human had an independent streak.
And, he recalled, a fairly impressive skill with her little consecrated knife. He would do well to step back and give her a little time to see her own feelings more clearly. So that was what he would do. For the moment.
After all, in a few short hours, he would get the chance to distract her for the three hours or so that it took him to fly her from London to Paris. Clasped in his arms high up in the night sky, she wouldn’t have the chance to run from him.
Baen could hardly wait.
Chapter Eleven
Baen could hardly believe she had forced him into that metal tube and made him contort himself to fit into the tiny, cramped seat for a miserable trip he could have accomplished faster and much more comfortably all on his own. After all, he had wings, didn’t he? If the Light had meant him to ride in unstable bits of human machinery, he would have been summoned without them.
“Would you stop pouting already?” Ivy smirked at him as she led the way through the crowds at the small Beauvais airport north of Paris. They had arrived on the very last flight of the evening, so the terminal was emptying out quickly. “We got here safely, didn’t we?”
Baen muttered something that she didn’t quite catch. Luckily. “I could have taken us straight to the city,” he added in a louder voice.
“Not while I have a breath in my body, pal.” She hitched her small satchel higher onto her shoulder and picked up her pace. “Hurry up. I want to make sure we get a cab before they all disappear for the night.”
He trailed her toward the airport exit, feeling a little too much like a faithful pet for his liking. He honestly had not believed Ivy would manage to find them a flight on the same day they needed to leave. For some reason he had understood this to be difficult to accomplish in the human world, so he had been anticipating the pleasure of holding her as he transported them between the two cities.
Instead, she had managed the impossible, or nearly so. While unable to book them directly into one of the major Paris airports, she had gotten them close. Beauvais was only about fifty miles from the capital.
“Where will we take this cab?” he asked grudgingly as he followed her out into the chilly evening. “It seems a long trip to ask of a hired driver.”
“Well, we are not taking it into Paris.” She snorted. “I’d need to mortgage Uncle George’s house to pay that fare. We’ll go into the nearest town and find a hotel or something, then we can take a train into the city in the morning. We’ll still get to our meeting in plenty of time.”
He grunted. She didn’t seem to require a further response. After all, the human clearly had everything under control. It made him itchy.
Baen was unaccustomed to the quandary in which he found himself. In all of his existence, he had woken to the heat of battle. Never before had he experienced a situation that forced him to face such long periods of inactivity. It left him feeling superfluous and almost useless. Give him an enemy to slay, and he would do it; ask him to entertain himself during a day of waiting and mechanical travel and he grew frustrated enough to scream.
Outside the airport terminal, a short line of taxis had queued up to the curb, waiting to ferry arriving travelers to their destinations. Ivy made a beeline for an empty vehicle and the driver opened his door and climbed out.
“Bonsoir,” he said politely, though the boredom in his voice was obvious. “Avez-vous besoin d’aide avec vos bagages?”
Ivy flashed the driver a smile, and quickly the man drew himself up straight and puffed out his chest. His gaze traveled over her petite form with obvious appreciation and he started to hurry around his car as if he wanted very badly to help her with something else.
Baen flashed him a smile full of teeth and empty of goodwill. “Non.” To make himself plain, he reached out to rest his palm against the small of Ivy’s back and guide her close to his side. “Ce n’est pas nécessaire.”
For a second it looked as if the driver would push his luck, but then he tore his gaze off Ivy’s sweet curves and caught a glimpse of Baen’s expression. Quickly he raised his hands and took a step backward. “D’accord, d’accord. Euh, où allez-vous ce soir?”
Ivy looked between them, her brow furrowed. She hadn’t mentioned whether she spoke French, or how well, but at least she didn’t interrupt to demand a translation. Baen would prefer to handle this driver on his own.
“À la ville,” he said. “Nous cherchons un hôtel ou une auberge pour passer la nuit.” Into town. We’re looking for a hotel for the night.
“Bon. Je vais vous y emmener.”
Having agreed to the fare, the driver made as if to open the rear door of his cab for Ivy, but a low sound from Baen had him thin
king better of it. He scurried back around instead and climbed back behind the wheel while Ivy got in and scooted across the seat to allow Baen to follow.
“What was that all about?” Ivy asked softly, leaning close under the pretense of settling her satchel onto the floor at her feet.
“Do you speak French?” Baen asked just as quietly.
“Like a learning-disabled three-year-old.”
He took that to mean she wasn’t fluent. “It was nothing. I merely asked him to take us to a place where we could find accommodations for the night.”
Ivy didn’t look entirely satisfied by the answer, but something must have convinced her to let it go, because she lapsed into silence beside him and turned her attention to the window. The sun had set just as they landed, so there wasn’t much to see beyond the twinkling cluster of lights in the distance that he assumed indicated the location of the nearby town. Still, it was enough to keep Ivy’s attention, allowing Baen to turn his back to the driver.
A young man, probably in his mid-twenties, he had cocoa-colored skin and an accent that indicated he’d been born not in France itself but likely one of its former colonies in the northern part of Africa. His smooth, even features probably made him attractive to most human females, Baen conceded reluctantly, but if he wanted to keep those dark eyes of his in his head, he needed to stop using his mirror to steal covetous glances at Ivy as he drove.
Not that Baen couldn’t understand the impulse to stare at her. He spent enough time fighting against it, but that didn’t mean he liked it when another man followed suit.
Even in another of her disguises, his Warden looked good enough to eat. He hated her wig, of course, even though this one suited her better than the blond thing she had sported when he had first set eyes on her. This one looked as sleek and dark as mink, falling straight to her nape in back but angling down as it moved forward so that the hair in front curved under the smooth angle of her jaw at the sides and fell in a heavy fringe to her eyebrows at the center. The color made her skin look impossibly pale and milky so that the freckles dusting her skin appeared like nothing so much as a sweet sprinkling of cinnamon sugar atop a bowl of rich cream.
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