“But I don’t know you and you’re . . .” She trailed off again.
“I’m wha’, Juliette?” he asked softly.
He knows my name, she thought. For some reason, she wasn’t surprised. He seemed unreal, sitting there only inches from her, more solid than a sable-draped statue of bronze. He seemed impossible, like a superhero. Like a dream. You’re scaring me.
Thunder boomed closer to the train, the storm obviously having moved in, as it was easier to hear over the metal slide of the rails. Something strange flashed in the light gray depths of Gabriel’s eyes. He gently released her hair and leaned in a bit, closing the space between them. “You’ll want to control that, luv.” He smiled a decidedly dark smile. “Let it rage an’ it’ll drain your strength.” He leaned in even farther so that Juliette’s head bumped the wall behind her. “An’ then how will you fight me off, lass?”
Juliette could barely breathe now. Her mind fought to process what he had just said, even as her body fought with itself over the effect he was having on her. Enough of his words got through that her blood pressure shot through the roof, and adrenaline poured into her bloodstream. “Control what?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“The storm, Juliette,” he replied. “It’s one of your powers as an archess, is it no’? An’ from the way it’s growin’ stronger by the moment, I’d wager it’s a fairly new one to you.”
Terror thrummed its way through Juliette’s body, instantly chilling most of the heat Black’s nearness had awakened. Her stomach turned to lead in her middle, and her heart hammered bruisingly against the inside of her rib cage. “What are you talking about?”
Gabriel’s smile never wavered. The pupils of his eyes were expanding, like those of a predator singling out its prey. “You know verra well, luv. An’ I do, too. I know because I’ve been searchin’ for you for so long, I’ve lost track o’ the time.”
The world blurred around them and melted into slow motion as Gabriel slowly raised his hand and cupped her cheek. At the contact, Juliette felt trapped and possessed and wanted and cherished and more beautiful than she had ever felt in her life. Even through the fear, her body was responding to his as if it wanted him more than it wanted life itself. His hand held her as if she were a delicate treasure; she felt a tremble in his fingers, despite the apparent calm of his tone, and it echoed the chaotic beat of her heart—and the growing storm outside the train windows.
She wanted to close her eyes as he leaned a little closer, so close now, his next words whispered across her lips, a breath of mint and Parma Violets. . . . She loved Parma Violets. “You were made for me, Juliette,” he said. His thumb brushed possessively, enticingly, across her full lower lip. His gaze flicked to her mouth and back again; the silver in his eyes had become mercury: liquid lightning that reflected the gale building beyond the window. “How else would I know wha’ I know aboot you?”
Juliette kept her gaze locked on his as she shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted stubbornly. He couldn’t know. This was insane. She barely knew about her powers herself. “Please back off,” she added, almost desperate now for him to either kiss her or disappear. One or the other—or she would pass out.
“Och, no, I canno’ do that, luv,” he told her with a single shake of his head. His thumb brushed across her lower lip again, and she shivered. “There are men after you, if you’ll recall. The one who attacked you last night was no’ the first of his kind to come after an archess. An’ he won’ be the last. You’re no’ safe alone, an’ there’s no’ anythin’ I won’ do to keep you safe.”
Juliette’s gaze narrowed. “How do I know you didn’t set up that entire scene last night?” she asked him. “Scumbags sometimes work in teams, one to play the bad guy—the other to ‘save’ the victim.” She gritted her teeth, trying to believe her own words enough to deliver them with some conviction. “I’m not stupid.”
“No, lass, that you’re no’.” He shook his head, clearly agreeing with her. His eyes still twinkled with some secret merriment and it made him so handsome, she had never felt so close to losing control. She’d never thought herself the kind of woman who could lose her composure around a man simply because he was beautiful. Gorgeous. Godlike. But she may have been wrong. Because at that moment she wanted to kiss him—and do other things with him—so badly, her body was aching in the most embarrassing places.
As if her own need were a signal of surrender for the predator in him, Black’s pupils ate up the silver in his eyes and the sight of it made Juliette weak from the neck down. Before she could react, he was moving in for the kill, his lips slanting over hers even as his hands framed her face, claiming her for his.
God, yes . . . She was lost now; there was no coming back from this. Nothing else in life would ever feel so good. Juliette was instantly on fire, her heart hammering, her body melting, her core throbbing as wetness wantonly gathered between her legs and her breath left her lungs. Her hands came up of their own accord and clutched at the thick black leather of his jacket, her fingers curling into the material as if holding on for dear life.
He was an expert kisser; he did everything right. He knew how to surround her, how to open her up and delve deep. He possessed her with that kiss, taking and tasting and destroying her defenses as if they were tissue paper. And then, suddenly, he went still above her. His body tensed, his hands slid to her hair and tightened their grip, and very, very slowly, he pulled away.
The moment his lips left hers, Juliette experienced such cold and emptiness, she actually shivered. It was like tasting despair, this abrupt separation. It hurt. But she retained enough control over herself to release his jacket and open her eyes.
When she did, she almost gasped at the change she saw in Black’s expression. The lust and need were still there in that handsome face, but there was anger there now as well, stark and dangerous. His own gaze had narrowed, and lightning reflected in the molten silver of his eyes. His stubbled chin was set with hard determination. “Do no’ move from here, lass. Stay in this seat until I return,” he told her firmly.
Juliette was too stunned to react in any way. He must have taken it for acquiescence, because with that, he pulled back, and in one fluid, graceful movement, he stood in the aisle on the opposite end of the table. Juliette sat up a little straighter in the seat as reality slowly flooded her world like a cold shower. She watched his tall, dark form take a step back, and in that brief moment of space and clarity, she entertained a hundred different thoughts. He’s crazy. This is nuts. He’s dangerous. He knows. I have to get out of here. Wait until he’s gone—
As if he knew what was going through her head, Gabriel came forward again to brace his hands on the surface of the table and lean in toward her once more. “Know this, lass. There is nowhere you can go where I will no’ find you. Leave here an’ I promise you’ll no’ get far.” His eyes speared her like silver daggers.
She swallowed hard. He waited a moment more, trapping her in his metal gaze, and then he straightened and turned to stride down the aisle of the otherwise deserted coach. The automatic door opened before him. He stopped, turned to look at her over his broad shoulder, and captured her gaze with his. There was a world of meaning in the look he gave her. It was a brand of a look, hot and searing.
Then he turned back around and stepped through the plastic sliding doors and out of her line of sight. Juliette sat there in the seat, just as he had told her to, for several long moments. She couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was obeying his order; she simply couldn’t move.
The first time he had kissed her had been heaven. He’d torn down her walls and breached her world with seemingly no effort at all. The second time he’d kissed her, he’d marched right into her castle and claimed it as king. She was ruined now. No man in the world would ever kiss her like that again.
Slowly, Juliette raised her fingers to her lips. She touched the swollen, sensitive flesh and closed her eyes. No mat
ter how perfect the man was, he claimed to know about her ability to control the storm—which was throwing as big a fit as ever outside the windows now. He had called her something strange—an archess. And now that she’d said it out loud, the possibility that he had collaborated with the blond in her room to set up that kidnapping attempt just so that he could rescue her seemed much more likely.
She didn’t trust Gabriel Black. She didn’t trust anything about him—not his tall, hard body or his piercing silver eyes or his incredibly handsome face or his accent, which melted her bones in her body. She didn’t trust the graceful way he moved or the sexy way he smelled or the subjugating perfection of his damnable kiss.
Definitely, she didn’t trust the kiss.
Juliette’s fingers trembled on her lower lip. “I have to get out of here,” she whispered to no one.
As if the train had heard her and decided to become her partner in this venture, it slowed as the next station drew closer. Juliette lowered her hand and scooted to the end of the seat to peer down the length of the aisle. The doors on both ends were shut tight, and though she detected movement beyond them, it was blurred and indistinct: passengers disembarking in the neighboring coaches.
Without giving it further thought, Juliette jumped up off the seat, grabbed her carry-on bag from its place above her, and raced to the door on the opposite side from the direction Black had gone. It opened as she reached it, and she shot through it and off the train onto the landing.
It took her a disoriented moment to figure out where she was. There weren’t many big cities or even towns in Scotland, and this certainly wasn’t one of them. A sign inside of the station house marked it as the Muir of Ord Railway Station. So she must be in Muir of Ord. Wherever that was.
At least she knew it was somewhere between Ullapool and Inverness. She was in the Highlands. This was where her mother’s side of the family was from, the MacDonalds.
Now what? Her mind ran somersaults inside her skull; she needed transportation, she needed a map, and she needed to get away from the train and its windows as soon as possible. Her feet moved of their own accord, eating up the ground at a desperate pace as she made her way off the landing, down the ramp that took her from the station, and around the brick building. She would ask the station manager or director, or whatever he was called, for help. But first she would hide.
The women’s bathroom was as good a place as any. She would wait there until the train took off again. It was a shitty plan, but it was better than no plan at all.
* * *
Gabriel’s blood was on fire in his veins; he’d never felt like this before. Juliette was ripping him apart inside. He’d felt her give in to him, he’d won her surrender with his kiss, and he knew that if he’d wanted to, he could have taken her right there on the seat on the train. Not that he would have. Well, maybe.
But then he’d felt something else. It was a vibration in the air, a thickness to the atmosphere, charged and negative and wrong. And he would recognize it anywhere. The Adarian was on the train. Not only was he on the train, but he had been in that coach with Juliette, invisible and lying in wait like an unseen serpent. He might even have been sitting across from her—watching her all along.
Gabriel wasn’t sure why he hadn’t sensed it at first. It might have been that he was so focused on Juliette, nothing else registered. It might have been that the Adarian was so good at hiding, Gabe hadn’t felt the change in the air until the man moved right by him.
That he had felt. It was a shift in the air, like sandpaper molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide, scraping along his flesh and soul as the Adarian moved past him and down the aisle.
He had no idea what the man was waiting for. He could only guess that the Adarian hadn’t attacked Juliette outright because there would be no easy way to get an unconscious body off the train without being seen. And then Gabriel had shown up and most likely thrown a wrench into the Adarian’s plans. He’d left the coach while Gabe and Juliette were kissing. And now he was somewhere—somewhere on this train. And Juliette was alone in her car and Gabriel wasn’t an idiot. He knew she would try to escape. He knew that once he gave her enough space to think, she would come to her senses and a good, hard, healthy fear would set in. She had no reason to believe that his intentions were pure. She was right about the way some men set women up with the good-guy, bad-guy routine. Michael had come across many a rape scenario in his line of duty as a cop in New York, and he’d shared enough of those stories over the years.
Men could be monsters. And Juliette had a good head on her shoulders. She would run. He’d seen the thoughts in her eyes as he’d left her. He could threaten and try to scare her all he wanted, but it wouldn’t work. In the end, she would flee.
At least there was nowhere she could go on a moving train. She was too smart to try to jump off it, and the doors wouldn’t open in that fashion while the train was moving anyway. For the moment, she was stuck, giving him the time he needed to track down the Adarian.
What was confusing Gabe, however, was the apparent absence of any of the other Adarians. Where was the General? Why hadn’t Abraxos made his infernal appearance yet? What the bloody hell was going on?
Gabriel strode through the aisles of the train, honing his senses for that familiar spark of negativity that would tell him the Adarian was near. He cursed his luck that just as he was finding the woman he had searched two thousand years for, his enemy had found her as well. At least he didn’t have to deal with Samael the way Uriel had when he’d found his archess months ago. Small blessings.
Nonetheless, witnessing the Adarian’s intrusion was like watching the Roman army lay siege to Gabriel’s homeland. She was his—and only his. It was time to deal with the intruder once and for all.
Gabriel ignored the stares he got as he passed through the compartments. He was too focused to pay them any heed. But the farther down the train’s length he got, the more agitated he became. The air was clean of the feel of the Adarian. There was no static, no thickness, no wrongness—not like there had been in Juliette’s cabin. Where had the intruder gone?
And then something niggled at the back of Gabriel’s brain—and the train began to slow. No.
Gabriel stopped in the aisle and turned to face the direction from which he’d come. The LCD screen at the end of the car read “Muir of Ord,” and a few people were grabbing for their luggage. Gabriel broke into a near run, brushing rudely by the people who had claimed space in the aisle. The doors opened for him as he neared them and he shot on through.
But by the time he reached Juliette’s car, the train had been stopped completely for several seconds and his fears were confirmed.
She was gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Mitchell, tell me what you hear,” Ely instructed as his dark eyes scanned the faces of the passengers disembarking from the train.
Beside him, the tall Greek Adarian nodded his assent and began scanning the faces as well. The dark of his eyes sparked with what looked like stars in a night sky as he concentrated. Ely glanced at him, noting the change. He’d always been fascinated by his fellow Adarian’s ability.
But Mitchell fell silent as he worked, and Ely began to feel anxious. He was tired; the flight had been long, and he’d never dealt well with idleness in the first place. He, Luke, and Mitchell had traveled to Scotland as soon as Luke and Mitchell had managed to combine their powers in order to perform a makeshift scry on Daniel.
The fact that it had worked was shocking enough. The fact that no one had thought of trying such a thing until now was even more stunning. The possibilities it opened up were potentially endless. All it required was the consumption of blood.
Blood. In the end, it always seemed to boil down to blood.
“I don’t hear him,” Mitchell spoke beside him. Ely and Luke turned to face him. “But I do hear something interesting.” He nodded toward a car at the front of the train, and Ely looked to see a stunningly beautiful petite woman disembark.
She stood around five feet and two or three inches and was as slender as a dancer. Her skin was flawless and tanned a light gold, her features delicate, her green-brown eyes large and bright in her lovely face. She was in a hurry, her long thick waves fanning out behind her as she moved quickly and purposefully through the crowd.
Ely wasn’t a fool. There were attractive people in the world, and every now and then a true natural beauty came along. But this woman was different. She had an aura around her that Ely instantly recognized. It was too pure, too magnetic. She didn’t even notice the men stop to stare as she passed them by.
“Let me guess,” he said, his low voice rumbling as he watched the woman turn a corner and disappear from sight. He turned to face Mitchell again, and the dark-haired man flashed him a smile. “Daniel’s been holding out on us.”
Luke chuckled darkly beside them. “An archess. And a lovely little lass at that.”
“We’re in Scotland, so if I had to place a bet, I’d say she’s Gabriel’s,” Mitchell said as he dug into the inside pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He always did this after scanning people’s minds. Either he would smoke, or he would drink. Ely had asked him about it once, and Mitchell shook his head and said, “Believe me, you would, too.”
“Nice try, Mitchell,” Ely said. “I would be impressed if it weren’t for the fact that you just read her mind. She’s got the archangel on her brain, hasn’t she?”
Mitchell smiled again, put his cigarette between his lips, and then ignited his lighter. “She has a beautiful mind,” he said. “Open and honest.”
“And I bet that just turns you on like mad, doesn’t it?” Ely asked. He knew how Mitchell felt about honesty. It was as refreshing to the Adarian mind reader as water in a desert. He could tell already that Mitchell was going to claim this archess as his own.
Mitchell didn’t bother replying to the insinuation, but he didn’t have to. His secret smile was response enough. “She’s afraid of him,” Mitchell continued. He spoke around the butt as he lit the cigarette and repocketed his lighter. “She plans to hide in the women’s restroom until the train takes off, and then hitch a ride into Inverness.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth, blew a cloud of smoke, and then replaced it. His dark eyes were shining.
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