by Unknown
Her tongue met his and all he could think about was lifting her up so that she sat on the half-wall and he could get at the zipper to her jeans. He wanted inside her. Now.
So badly that it scared him.
It felt like he was losing control of his body, the long-denied lusts that had ridden him rising to the fore until they stamped out his conscious thought and possibly her will as well.
That scared him. He tore away from her, mourning the lost taste of her lips but too afraid of where his body might be going without his mind.
She blinked up at him, shiny lips parted and breath coming fast. “Ian, um… I…”
“We should go.”
She nodded, seeming to come back to her senses. “Okay. You’re right. Of course.”
Ian spun from her and headed back to the metal door that led back into the museum. He had no idea how he was going to keep his hands off her now.
Fiona and Ian dodged pedestrians back to their rented flat. The two of them were like water that was just about to burst into a boil. There was no stopping it.
It was surreal to be this close to the book, yet be distracted by a thief who’d stolen the artifacts she’d dedicated her life to finding and protecting.
She couldn’t help it; her mind was on the man at her side.
“Ian MacKenzie, is that ye?”
Fiona turned around to look at the man they’d just passed. Tall and slender, he was wearing ratty clothes and looking at Ian with recognition gleaming in his buggy eyes. If he recognized Ian, he was a Mythean, not human. He had to be, to still be alive and look so young.
She tensed.
“Tommy MacFee.” Ian’s voice was reserved as he shifted to stand partially in front of Fiona.
She elbowed him and moved to his side. She could protect herself.
“Who’s that ye got there? Lovely bird, she is.” His accent was far thicker than hers or Ian’s.
Fiona scowled at him.
“You always were an arse, Tommy,” Ian said.
“Aye, ye’d know now, would ye no’?” Tommy reached into the pocket of his scrubby jeans and fished out a cigarette and a lighter.
“Goodbye, Tommy.” Ian nodded and took her arm.
“Oy, wait.” He blew out a puff of smoke. “We’re running a con tomorrow night. Could use a hand like yours. Interested?”
“Nay.”
“What, too fancy now, are ye? All yer money and yer women and yer standards. Too good for what ye came from? Ye were the best of us, lad. No’ a moral in sight and always brought in the biggest haul.”
“It’s been over a hundred and fifty years, Tommy. I’m gone from that life.”
“Ach, ye know I doona see time like that. Come on then, gotta pretty pay day in it fer ye if ye join us. Just an evening’s work.”
“Nay, Tommy. Goodbye.” Ian pulled on her arm until she turned and followed him. He looked back over his shoulder. “Be careful. Stay out of sight of the university.”
She glanced back to see Tommy shrug, then amble off down the street.
“Who was that?”
“Old mate. A walker I grew up with.”
A walker. She craned her neck around to see if she could catch sight of him again, but he’d disappeared. So that’s what he’d meant about not seeing time, and why he’d asked Ian to join him in a con after so many years apart. Walkers could travel back and forth through time. But if they weren’t careful—and it didn’t look like Tommy was the careful sort—it scrambled their brains until they couldn’t quite tell when things had happened. In Tommy’s mind, he might have been with Ian yesterday.
“What did you mean, stay out of sight of the university?”
Ian shrugged. “Doona want to see Tommy anymore, but doona want him to end up in prison either.”
“You were close?”
“No one was close in our crowd.”
“Then why hang out together?”
“No choice. Canna survive on your own on the streets when you’re a Mythean orphan.”
They reached the wide blue door to the building that housed their rented flat. He pushed it open and waited for her to precede him inside. They climbed the darkened stairwell in silence, but she couldn’t get her mind off the thought of Ian as a child, trying to survive on the streets of Edinburgh.
It was dim in the flat, the sun close to setting and no longer shining through the little windows. It was still midafternoon, but the sun set early this time of year. She flipped the lights on and tried to stow her curiosity about Ian. What they had between them—what little it was—couldn’t just be sexual attraction if she was worried about his childhood. She liked him. And that was bad. He had to go back to prison when this was all over. There was no other choice.
So she had to stop worrying about him.
But she couldn’t help herself from following him over to the window and looking out. Her palms positively itched to wrap around his waist from behind. Crazy thought.
She clenched them and stood next to him, peering out at the near-darkened street below. Though night fell early in December, they’d have to wait until the street quieted down to break in. It had started to rain, a pathetic sort of drizzle that made the yellow lamps glow eerily and the road gleam darkly. A few people rushed out of the rain. But what about the people that had nowhere to go?
That would have been him as a child, in a time that was far harsher than this.
“Will you tell me about it?” she asked.
“About what?”
“What it was like to be alone out there back then. With Tommy and the others.”
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s a long time past, lassie. Let’s no’ worry about it.”
But she did. She worried about him. She wanted to know if it was as bad as she was imagining it.
“I never knew my mother. And I haven’t seen my father in fifteen years,” she said.
He looked down at her, brows drawn. The dim streetlight cast a yellow glow on the side of his face. “You’re telling me this so that I’ll share, too?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I just want to share it. What you decide to say after is up to you.”
His hand tightened on the windowsill.
“You know that he lost his mind because he’s a Failte. He’s a shell now. Just a body. I doona visit him anymore because I canna take it.” Her throat burned. That would be her one day. Soon, if she didn’t recover the book. She said no more. It felt like the words were boulders stuck in her throat.
“Thank you for telling me.” His hand still gripped the windowsill, knuckles white. She wanted to touch him, so badly. Instead, she reached out to trace her finger over the grain of the windowsill.
Minutes passed.
His hand shifted and landed over hers, squeezing lightly.
He turned around and leaned against the wall, staring into the small living room. He didn’t look like he was seeing anything, though.
“There’s no’ much to tell, really. I grew up in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. Among the mortals.”
“How?” she asked. “How’d you end up there? You’re a Mythean.”
“I was brought up by an old mortal woman until I was five. I knew she wasn’t my mother, but I’ve no idea how I ended up with her. We were hungry and cold almost all the time, but she was kind. For the most part. When she died, her son sold me to the workhouse. A glassworks. It was like a fucking nightmare I’d never wake up from, but I had it no worse than any other child had it in the workhouses. Half of Britain ran on the backs of children in those days.”
He sighed and turned around, looked down at the street, his gaze lost in the past. “When I was about thirteen, I figured out that I wasn’t human. At will, I could become invisible. It was my Sylph side coming out. I escaped the glassworks using that ability.”
Of course. He was a half-breed. They didn’t come into their powers until puberty, unlike full breeds, who developed them more gradually from the time the
y were infants.
“Then what?” she asked.
“I met Tommy. Fell in with his crowd of thieves, and have been doing it ever since. I left Tommy and his like behind years ago and struck out on my own. More profitable.”
“You could do legitimate work,” she said.
“What kind? I’m a former Mythean criminal. At least, I hope to be, if I can get out of prison.” He fingered the collar at his neck and she wanted to yank the thing off him. There was no way he’d be getting out and it made her sick.
“Anyway,” he said. “I enjoy the hunt. The chase. It’s who I am.”
Fiona’s phone shrilled and jerked her attention away.
She looked down at the number. Fear clogged her throat, and it felt like the floor dropped away from her.
Her boss. Again.
The phone continued to shriek into the now-silent flat. Fiona knew her face was white, her eyes probably wide as hell.
Ian turned and walked to the couch, no doubt trying to give her a bit of privacy in the tiny flat. But she couldn’t seem to pick up the phone. Her hand clenched around the little piece of plastic until the ringing finally stopped
A voicemail popped up and her stomach pitched. A second call from the boss who never called her. She was just a researcher and receptionist now. A desk jockey. There was only one reason he’d call her.
She took a shuddering breath and pressed the voicemail button, then lifted the phone to her ear.
‘“Fiona, this is Darrence. Lea has informed me that you’re searching for the book. You’ll cease this ridiculous hunt immediately and return to the university at once. Retrieving the book is beyond your capabilities, as you’ve proven. The university will be sending in the best of the best tomorrow. Don’t screw this up for them by charging in there and fucking this up. You’ll be a disgrace to your family, as your father was. I want to see you in my office tomorrow morning, or we’re sending guardians after you.”
She dropped the phone into her lap. She’d known this would happen, she just hadn’t thought it would be so soon.
Ian turned to her, concern darkening his expression. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Gotta go.” She raced to the bathroom. She swung the door shut behind her and leaned over the sink, her hands biting into the rim until her knuckles were as white as the porcelain.
She dragged frantic breaths into her lungs, struggling to calm her breathing and her pounding heart. My job. Everything she’d worked for. It had been a mess these last ten years, ever since she’d failed to find the book, but it was all she had. All she worked for. All she really wanted.
It was her life, as it had been her father’s before her. Becoming a Failte had ruined it for her, but still, she needed this job. It was what she’d been fighting for, just as much as she’d been fighting to find the book to save herself from her father’s fate.
Now they would try to take it from her?
Knocking sounded at the door.
“Just a minute.” Fiona was horrified to hear the tears in her voice. She glanced up at the mirror and saw them streaking down her face.
Oh shite. She scrubbed at her face, but it only made her look redder and wilder.
Ian knocked on the bathroom door again. The muffled sounds of her tears echoed through the door.
“Fiona, let me in,” he said.
“Just a minute.”
Damn it, no. Just no. He couldn’t stand on this side while she was distraught on that side. For the last hundred years, he’d been kept from what he wanted by prison walls. Now he wanted to comfort her, and he was separated by a damned bathroom door.
“I’m coming in.” He twisted the doorknob. When the lock didn’t catch and she didn’t slam a hand against the door to stop it, he pushed it open and squeezed into the tiny bathroom behind her.
Fiona was leaning over the sink, her long hair pulled out of its knot and falling around her face. She stiffened when she sensed him behind her, then shook her head and turned to face him.
Her face was set, her eyes hard, and her lips firm. Suddenly he doubted whether or not she even needed him here to comfort her.
Then her lower lip trembled.
“Ah, Fiona.” He opened his arms wide and pulled her into an embrace.
“I’m fine.” Her words were muffled against his shoulder.
“Aye, ’course you are.”
“I am.” Her voice hitched.
“Come on, to the living room.” He removed his arms and pushed her gently out of the bathroom. They sat on the couch. Unable to help himself, he wrapped an arm around her. She stiffened, then turned so that her back was pressed to his side and her face turned away from him.
She didn’t remove his arm from where it wrapped around her shoulders and the top of her chest, though. She drew her knees up and her breath shuddered.
She scrubbed a hand over her cheeks and said, “Gods, I’m never like this.”
“That, I believe,” he said. From what he’d seen of her in the last twenty-four hours, he had a feeling this was the first time a tear had escaped her in decades.
“I haven’t cried since my father was sent away to prison. There’s no point in it,” she said.
“Course there is. You feel better now, do you no’?”
“No’ really.”
“Well, it was bound to happen. This is a hell of a lot of stress for any one person. This is no’ about just getting your old job back. You’re trying to rewrite your fate and save yourself.”
She turned to face him. “Aye. Exactly.”
“You’re more than just your fate, Fiona. Everything I admire about you has nothing to do with your fate. You’re strong and determined and hard working. You have a noble purpose and goal. You work to save the past for others. I’ve never had that kind of goal. Just working to survive, to stay out of the poorhouse and now out of prison. Most people are like that. But no’ you. You’re so driven and skilled that you’ll find the book, no matter what your fate says.”
A great sigh shuddered out of her. “I’m such a weakling to be weeping about it, but I canna help it.”
“What’s so bad that it canna be fixed?” he asked.
“My department knows what I’m doing. They want me to come back or they’ll send guardians after me. If I go back, I’ll lose any chance at the book and I’ll be a Failte forever. And they’ll fire me, so I’ll go mad all the sooner without work to distract me. But if they send guardians after me before we find the book, it’ll be that much harder.”
“When will they send them?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Then we’ll get the book tonight.”
“We have to. Because it’s more than just me. If I fail and the university fails to retrieve the book, we’re looking at divine war before the end of the month.”
“You’ll get it back. I canna imagine another Mythean being more capable of the job. If you quit now, the university’s best chance of getting the book back goes with you. Then we’re all fucked.”
She straightened and breathed deeply, her confidence and determination strapped back around her like a suit of armor. “You’re right, damn it.”
He grinned. He liked her toughness and determination.
We’ll get this book,” he said. But as he said it, dread settled in his stomach. The book was his ticket out. He had to have it to barter, or he had nothing and he’d be back in hell. But if he threatened to destroy it to force her to remove his collar, the university would fire her.
With the shaking nerves of her freak-out behind her, it suddenly hit Fiona that she was sitting pressed against the hard length of Ian’s side.
The attraction she’d been suppressing welled, heat and warmth and grinding need rushing through her in a torrent. The stress of everything that lay in front of them broke down her resistance so that the river of want surged through her.
“Fiona?” Ian’s voice scratched so sweetly over her nerves and made her sex throb. His voice was so rough and hard that she c
ouldn’t help but think he’d sensed the change in her.
“Aye?” Her voice was scratchy, too, she realized.
“Maybe you ought to get up.”
She turned her head to look at him, but couldn’t quite get the range of motion required. Instead, she caught sight of the bulge between his thighs, thick and long and so prominent that it was obscene.
She wanted it. She shouldn’t. It was a terrible idea, a distraction from her work. But gods, she wanted it. Wanted him. Wanted something to make her forget everything that was at stake, if only for a moment. They had hours before they could break into the museum.
“It must have been a really long time since you’ve been with a woman.”
Why had she said that? To egg him on? To explain to herself why he was hard for a boring Acquirer like herself?
“It’s fine.” His voice had turned to gravel and his breath feathered against her ear, making her shudder.
“Really?”
“I’m no’ a fucking animal, even if I feel like one right now. But I’m at the edge here, Fiona, with the things I want to do with you. So I’m going to need you to get up or to tell me what you want.” The arm that wrapped around her shoulders trembled, his self-control an iron thing bent to breaking. “Do you want this, Fiona?”
This was so crazy. It was happening so fast. But it’d been so long since she’d been with a man. And she wanted this man. He was handsome and charming and dangerous and a thief. Forbidden.
“Fiona?”
“Aye.” It was so quiet she was almost afraid he didn’t hear her.
But his big hands gripped her shoulders and spun her quickly, pressing her back into the seat, so that he could rise up hot and hard over her, caging her in.
His head dipped low and close, his eyes hot on hers. He smelled of clean soap and aroused male and it made her want to taste him. To run her tongue over the smooth skin that stretched across the hard muscles she knew covered all of him.
“You’re sure?” Ian asked, his voice gravel.
The need and power in him almost overwhelmed her, but not so much that she couldn’t nod.
Fierce pleasure streaked across his face and he pulled her to her feet. He cupped her head and pressed his mouth to hers, stealing her breath and making her head spin.
