And his body had been the focus of her most feverish erotic dreams in the privacy of her bed for years. He was so tall and lean and muscular. Whipcord tough, every muscle defined, but as graceful and agile as a dancer. She'd loved it when he pushed up his sleeves so she could sneak peeks at his thick, ropy forearms. His broad shoulders and long, graceful hands, those powerful legs, that excellent butt that looked so fine in his faded jeans. He was so gorgeous, it made her head spin.
She'd been tongue-tied and fluff-brained in his presence for years, but any romantic dreams she might have had about finally catching his interest when she grew a bosom, or got up the nerve to talk to him, had evaporated forever that day at Crystal Mountain. When she discovered that Dad was collaborating with a vicious criminal. That Georg, the guy who'd been coming on to her at the ski lodge, was an assassin who was hovering over her in order to control Dad.
That it had been Dad's betrayal that had gotten Jesse killed, and almost cost Connor his life.
She covered her face, trying to breathe through the burning ache in her chest. Boy, had that ever put a damper on her secret fantasy life.
Her own stupidity made her sigh. She had bigger problems than unrequited lust. Beginning with her mother's finances. Busy was better, she repeated as she dialed Mom's number. Busy was much better.
We're sorry, but the number you have dialed has been disconnected… Oh, God. It seemed like just last week that she'd had Mom's phone turned back on. She couldn't leave town without checking on Mom.
She reached for her keys before she could stop herself.
Her car had been repossessed months ago. She still hadn't broken the habit. She ran down the stairs, shoved open the door, and raised her face to the sky. The clouds were clearing. A star glowed low on the horizon.
"Hi, Erin."
That low voice sent a shock of intense awareness through her body. She stumbled back against the door.
Connor McCloud was standing right there, staring at her.
Chapter Two
He was slouched against an ancient, battered beige Cadillac, parked in a tow zone. The stub of a glowing cigarette was pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He sank into a crouch and stubbed it out. His face was hard, and grim with what looked like controlled anger. He straightened up, looming over her. She'd forgotten how tall he was. Six foot three, or something ridiculous like that.
Her hand was pressed hard against her open mouth. She forced herself to drop it. Head up, shoulders back, don't lock your knees, she told herself silently. "Why are you lurking in front of my building?"
His dark brows twitched together. "I'm not lurking," he said. "I was just having a smoke before I rang your bell."
His tawny hair was longer and wilder than it had been at Crystal Mountain. His chiseled, angular face was even leaner. His green eyes were so brilliant against the smudges of weariness beneath them. Wind ruffled his hair around his broad shoulders. It blew across his face, and he brushed it back with his hand. The one with the brutal burn scar.
He could have been a barbarian Celtic warrior heading into battle, with that hard, implacable look on his face. Stiffen his hair with lime, give him a bronze helm, a torque of twisted gold around his neck, chain mail—except that most Iron Age Celtic warriors had disdained armor to show their contempt for danger, the fussy scholar inside her reminded. They'd run naked into battle, screaming with rage and challenge.
Oh, please. Back off. Don't go there.
She didn't want that image in her head, but it was too late. She was already picturing Connor's big, hard, sinewy body. Stark naked.
Her eyes dropped, flustered. She focused on the cigarette butts that littered the ground beside his battered boots. Three of them.
She glanced up. "Three cigarettes? Looks like lurking to me."
His face tightened. "I was just working up my nerve."
"To ring my doorbell?" She couldn't keep the sarcasm out of her voice. "Oh, please. I'm not that scary."
His lips twitched. "Believe me, you are. For me, you are."
"Hmm. I'm glad I have that effect on somebody, because the rest of the world doesn't seem too impressed with me these days," she said.
His eyes were so unwavering that the urge to babble was coming over her. "Why do you need to work up the nerve to talk to me?"
"Your last words to me were less than cordial," he said wryly. "Something along the lines of 'Get away from me, you sick bastard.'"
She bit her lip. "Oh, dear. Did I really say that to you?"
"It was a bad scene," he conceded. "You were upset."
"I'm sorry," she said. "For the record, you didn't deserve it."
His eyes were so intensely bright. How could such a cool color give out such an impression of heat? It scorched her face, made something clench up low and hot and tight in her body. She wrapped her arms around herself. "There were extenuating circumstances."
"Yeah, there sure as hell were. Are you OK, Erin?"
Wind gusted around them, setting his long canvas coat flapping around his knees. She shivered and clutched her thin denim jacket tightly around her. No one had asked that question in such a long time, she'd forgotten how to answer it. "Is that what you waited three whole cigarettes outside my building to ask?" she hedged.
A quick, hard shake of his head was her answer.
"So… what, then?"
"I asked my question first," he said.
She looked down, away, around, anywhere else, but his gaze was like a magnet, pulling her eyes back and dragging the truth right out of her. Dad used to say that McCloud was a goddamn psychic. It had made Dad nervous. Rightly so, as it happened.
"Never mind," Connor said. "Shouldn't have asked. I need to talk to you, Erin. Can I come up to your place?"
The thought of his potent male presence filling her dingy little apartment sent shivers all down her spine. She backed up, and bumped into the wrought iron railing. "I'm, uh, on my way to visit Mom, and I'm in kind of a hurry, because the bus is about to come, so I—"
"I'll give you a ride to your mom's house. We can talk in the car."
Oh, great. That would be even worse. Stuck all alone in a car with a huge barbarian warrior. She couldn't bear his burning scrutiny when she felt so weepy and shaky and vulnerable. She shook her head and backed away from him, toward the bus stop. "No. Sorry. Please, Connor. Just… stay away from me." She turned, and fled.
"Erin." His arms closed around her from behind. "Listen to me."
His solid heat pressed against her body nudged her shaky nerves toward what felt like panic. "Don't touch me," she warned. "I'll scream."
His arms tightened around her ruthlessly. "Please. Don't," he said. "Listen to me, Erin. Novak's broken out of prison."
A cloud of black spots danced in front of her eyes. She sagged, and was abruptly grateful for his strong arms, holding her upright. "Novak?" Her voice was a wispy thread of sound.
"He broke out the other night. With two of his goons. Georg Luksch was one of them."
Her fingers dug into his rock-hard forearms. Her head spun, and her stomach with it. "I think I'm going to be sick," she said.
"Sit down, on the steps. Put your head down." He crouched beside her and rested his arm across her shoulder. His touch was light and careful, but the contact reverberated through her entire body.
"I hate to scare you," he said gently. "But you had to know."
"Oh yeah?" She looked up at him. "What good does it do me?"
"So you can take steps to protect yourself." He sounded as if he were stating something too obvious to put into words.
She dropped her face down against her knees. She shook with bitter laughter, like a dry coughing fit. Protect herself. Hah. What could she do? Hire an army? Buy a cannon? Move into a fortress? She'd been trying so hard to put this nightmare behind her, but she'd just swung around in a big circle and smacked into it again, face-first.
She lifted her face, and stared into blank, empty space. "I can't deal with thi
s," she said. "I don't want to know. I've had enough."
"It doesn't matter what you want. You have to—"
"I'll tell you what I have to do, Connor McCloud." She wrenched herself away from him and rose up onto unsteady feet. "I have to go to my mother's house to pay her bills and mortgage, and get her phone turned back on because she won't get out of bed. Then I have to call Cindy's school and beg them not to withdraw her scholarship. I take the bus because I lost my job and my car got repossessed. I'll worry about homicidal maniacs another time. And here comes my bus. So thank you for your concern, and have a nice evening."
Connor's face was stark with misery. "I didn't want you to get hurt, Erin. I would've done anything to stop it."
The look on his face made her chest hurt and her throat swell shut. The bus groaned to a halt, a suffocating cloud of diesel fumes rising around them. The door sighed and opened its maw for her.
She laid her hand against his broad chest, and yanked it right back, shocked by her own boldness. His body was so hard and warm.
"I know it wasn't your fault," she said. "What happened to Dad. He did it to himself. I knew he was in trouble, but he wouldn't let anyone help him. And none of us knew how bad it was."
"Miss!" the driver bellowed. "You on or off?"
"It wasn't your fault," she repeated. She scrambled into the bus, and clutched the pole as it pulled away, watching Connor's tall form recede into the dusk. Wind whipped his shaggy hair around his stern, sculpted face. The canvas coat flapped. His penetrating eyes held hers, tugging at her, until the bus turned the corner and he was lost to sight.
She collapsed into a seat. Her eyes darted from passenger to passenger, as if Georg would suddenly pop out of nowhere and flash her that seductive smile that had so perplexed her at Crystal Mountain six months ago. She'd been surprised and gratified to be pursued by a guy like that. Almost tempted to give him a whirl just to break the spell of her self-imposed celibacy—but something had held her back.
Her friends had been so impatient with her. What the hell do you want in a guy, Erin? He's smart, he's built, he's charming, he's got a sexy accent, he looks like a GQ cover model, and he's warm for your form! Stop acting like a friggin 'nun! Go get you some, girlfriend!
She'd tried to explain that the easy warmth that Georg exuded didn't warm her. It was sort of like the way her taste buds could not be fooled by saccharine or Nutrasweet. The sweetness didn't follow through, it didn't satisfy. Her girlfriends had shrugged that off as unconvincing. They told her she was too fussy. Or just plain chicken.
The fact that she hadn't gone to bed with that awful man had been her one small, private satisfaction and comfort afterwards, when her world lay around her in ruins.
Nobody in the bus was the right size or build to be Georg. Every time the bus lumbered to a stop, she held her breath until she saw who boarded. A teenage Goth girl with black lips and a pierced face. A portly Latina lady. A young urban professional woman in a suit, coming home from working Saturday at some high-powered job, like she herself so often had, back in the dear old days of steady employment. No Georg. Not that she would necessarily recognize his face, after what Connor had done to it. The memory of that bloody duel made her queasy again.
She was being stupid, really. If Novak really was bothering to think of her, it wouldn't be Georg that he would send.
It could be anybody.
Novak read the e-mail on the screen of the laptop and typed a response. His hands were deft on the keyboard even with the use of only his right hand plus the thumb and middle finger of his left. He stared at the text as he rubbed the stumps of his maimed hand.
A constant, throbbing reminder of the debt he was owed. The wind on the terrace made his eyes tear up. They burned and stung, unused to the colored lenses, and he pulled the case out of his pocket and removed them. The glues and the custom-made prosthetics that changed the shape of his features were uncomfortable, but temporary. Just until he could organize a final bout of cosmetic surgery.
He gazed out over the city. Such a pleasure, after months of staring at the walls of a prison cell, to cast his gaze out toward ranges of ragged mountains that hemmed in the jewel-toned greens and blues and silver grays of Seattle. He hit send, and took a sip of cabernet out of a splendid reproduction of a second-century B.C.E. Celtic drinking cup. It was fashioned from a real human skull, decorated with hammered gold. A fanciful indulgence, but after his prison experience, he was entitled.
He had Erin to thank for this expensive new caprice. Odd, that he had not developed a taste for blood-drenched Celtic artifacts until now. Their penchant for ritual murder resonated in his own soul.
The sacrifice that he had planned was blessed by the gods. He knew this was so because Celia had come to him in a vision. He was always moved when one of his angels visited him. They had come to him in the hospital where he lay near death, and they had comforted him in prison. Souls he had liberated, forever young and beautiful. Their shades had fluttered around him, distressed to see him suffering. Belinda had come, and Paola, and Brigitte, and all the rest, but when Celia came, it was special. Celia had been the first.
He savored his wine, his pulse leaping at the memory of the night that had marked his life. He had taken Celia's lovely body, and as he spent himself inside her, the impulse rose up like a genie from a bottle, huge and powerful. The urge to place his thumbs against the throbbing pulse in her throat, and press.
She had thrashed beneath him, her face turning color, protruding eyes full of growing awareness. Celia could not speak, she could only gasp, but he had sensed her passionate assent. They had been linked, a single mind. She was an angel, offering herself to him.
The fanged gods had claimed him as their own that night. And he had understood what tribute the gods demanded to confer power and divinity. They had marked him, and he would prove himself worthy.
Celia had been a virgin, too. He had found that out afterwards, when he washed himself. How poignant. It was a curse to be so sensitive. Doomed to grasp for the spontaneous perfection of Celia's sacrifice, over and over. Never quite reaching it.
The door to the terrace opened. He felt the red, throbbing glow of Georg's energy without turning. "Have a glass of wine, Georg. Enjoy the pleasures of freedom. You refuse to relax. This puts us at risk."
"I don't want wine."
Novak looked at him. The thick, shiny pink scar that marred Georg's cheek was flushed scarlet over his prison pallor. His beautiful yellow hair had been shorn to stubble on his scalp, and his eyes were like glowing coals. "Are you sulking, Georg? I hate sulking."
"Why won't you let me just kill them?" Georg hissed. "I will be a fugitive for the rest of my life anyway. I don't care if—"
"I want better than that for you, my friend. You cannot risk being taken again."
"I have already made arrangements," Georg said. "I will die before I go back to prison."
"Of course you have. I thank you for your dedication," Novak replied. "But you will see, when you are calmer, that my plan is better."
Georg's face was a mask of agony. "I cannot bear it. I am dying." The words burst out in the obscure Hungarian dialect they shared.
Novak rose from his chaise and put down his wine. He placed the scarred stumps of his maimed hand against Georg's ruined face. His cosmetic surgeons would improve matters, but the young man's youthful perfection was gone forever. Another score to settle.
"Do you know why the butterfly must struggle to escape its chrysalis?" he asked, sliding into dialect himself.
Georg jerked his face away. "I am not in the mood for your fables."
"Silence." The nails of his left thumb and middle finger dug into Georg's face. "It is the act of struggling that forces out the fluid from the butterfly's body and completes the development of its wings. If the butterfly is released prematurely, it will lurch around, swollen and clumsy, and soon die. Never having flown."
Georg's lips drew back from his gaping, missing teeth with a soun
dless hiss of pain. "And what is this supposed to mean to me?"
"I think you know." He let go. Blood welled out of the red marks that his nails had left. "Struggle is necessary. Punishment exalts."
"Easy for you to talk of punishment. You did not suffer as I did, with your father's money to protect you."
Novak went very still. Georg cringed away, sensing that he had gone too far.
Georg was wrong. His father had taught him about punishment. That lesson was frozen in his mind, dead center. A tableau in a globe of imperishable crystal. He turned away from the memory and held up his left hand. "Does this look as if I know nothing of punishment?"
Georg's eyes dropped in shame, as well they ought.
A gull shrieked in the darkening sky. Novak looked up, and exulted in the wild creature's freedom. Soon he would be reborn, with no father, no mother. He would be spotless, surrounded by gods and angels. He would be free at last, and he would never look back.
He jolted himself back to the present. "Be grateful that you have been chosen as my instrument to make this sacrifice, Georg. My gods are not for cowards, or weaklings."
Georg hesitated. "I am not weak," he said sourly.
"No, you are not." He patted Georg's shoulder. The younger man flinched at the contact. "You know my tastes just as I know yours. I would rip their throats out with my teeth and drink their blood, if I had that luxury. But I cannot compromise this new identity before I have even established it. You know exactly what it will cost me to step aside and let you play… while I watch."
Georg nodded reluctantly.
"I have chosen you to tear them to pieces for me, Georg," Novak said gently. "And still, you cannot wait. You whine. You complain."
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