He stood in the doorway facing Carling. His broad shoulders filled the space. Niniane could just see the outline of his profile. The planes and angles of his face were serrated. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. The tiny hairs at the back of her neck rose as he pointed the tip of the sword at Carling in naked threat. Every one of Carling’s people took a step toward him.
“If you do anything that puts her in danger again, I will burn down your world,” he said. The lightning was in his voice.
Carling’s eyes lit up. She smiled at him and said softly, “You might try.”
Tiago’s savage aggression. Carling’s sinuous deadliness. It was just too scary.
Niniane shouted at both of them, “Oh, for crying out loud!”
She left them to their standoff and stomped down the stairs.
Death prowled behind her. She couldn’t hear him but she knew he was there. She wouldn’t turn around again. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing him how freaked out she really was.
She reached the next floor down. That stairwell door was guarded by two uniformed police who stood aside as she approached. She smacked the door open with the flat of her hands and stormed down the hall. Last night she had been too sick to notice the number of the suite they had occupied, but it was easy enough to find. It was the only door with another pair of guards, a male and a sandy-haired lanky woman, standing at attention. Their bright smiles at her appearance vanished, and they paled as they looked at what followed in her wake.
She paused in front of the suite door and glared at it because she didn’t have a keycard. The sandy-haired woman opened the door for her. Not trusting herself to speak, Niniane gave the woman a curt nod before she stomped inside.
Then she reached the suite’s living room and came to a stop. Someone had come in to clean while she had been kidnapped. The breakfast dishes had been removed. The table gleamed with polish and a fresh bouquet of flowers. The coffee table was bare of gun parts, Tiago’s canvass duffle set against one wall. She could see the corner of her bed in the other room. It had been neatly made. The second bedroom door was closed. The heavy living room curtains had been drawn to reveal a bright, sunny Chicago day outside. A cerulean sky was dotted with fluffy white clouds.
She pressed her fists against her temples as she struggled with a sense of disorientation. It looked so normal out there in the sunshine, outside of this hotel filled with crazy people. She turned as Tiago entered the room and finally sheathed his sword. He unstrapped the scabbard and laid it on the table. Then he removed one of the shoulder holsters and put that on the table too.
The cataclysm that had consumed his expression had vanished as if it had never existed. His face had become a smooth blank.
Had he calmed down already? How did he do that? She hadn’t calmed down, not in the slightest.
Then he looked at her.
No. He wasn’t calm at all. The cataclysm still raged inside him.
Her breathing grew ragged and her mouth shook. Something breakable uncurled inside her, causing her to open up her arms to him. For the space of a single heartbeat she pleaded with him in silence. Please don’t reject this. Don’t turn away from me.
Tiago took the short distance toward her in a lunge. He snatched her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung tight as he held her in a grip that threatened to cut off her air supply. His dark head lowered, and he buried his face in the crook of her neck.
She cupped his head with a hand, stroked his short hair and murmured to him. She hardly paid attention to what she said. The words didn’t matter. “I know. I’m sorry. I was scared too. I was so scared. Thank you for coming after me. Thank you so much for finding me.”
He sank to the floor and sat on his heels, bringing her down with him until she straddled his lap. He rocked her, savoring with desperate focus all the sensual evidence of her, the weight of her body and shape of her graceful, delicate bones, her arms holding on to him as tightly as he held on to her, the touch of those small, gentle fingers.
When Niniane had disappeared, he had gone to a place he had never been to before.
He had panicked.
He reassembled his guns in seconds. He informed Cameron so she could mobilize police and call in a forensic witch to analyze the Power in the bedroom before it could fully dissipate. He called New York. Then he strapped on his guns and his sword and came to a complete standstill, because he did not have a clue how to track Niniane through the maelstrom of energy that had taken her.
She had vanished into thin air. She was just gone. The horror of it, the wrongness, had opened up a black hole inside of him that sucked away everything else—any sense of decency or perspective or moral compass—it all vanished until what had been left behind was a howling beast that would savage anyone or anything that got in its way.
Desperation drove him up to Carling’s floor, which had turned out to be a stroke of sheer dumb fucking luck. He hadn’t been capable or clever. He went to ask Carling to help him track Niniane down. He had been prepared to do something he had never done before. He had been ready to beg. Then he caught a whiff of Niniane’s delicate fragrance in a place where it should not have been, and the beast consumed him.
If Niniane became endangered again, he might do more than just burn down Carling’s world. He was a destroyer by nature. As the Wyr warlord, he could channel that violence in controlled, targeted ways that achieved a great deal of good.
The beast inside him was an entirely different matter. Unleashed, it might engage in wholesale slaughter.
And the beast wouldn’t care.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. Even he didn’t know who he was trying to reassure, himself or her. His lips moved against her fragile skin. “It’s okay now.”
She nodded, her cheek pressed against his. His heartbeat pounded against her breastbone. He was more than twice her size. He was as big as a moose, and as he was wrapped around her, he felt exactly like the right size. He felt like home.
I’m in so much trouble.
She froze. Wait. Did I just say that out loud?
“What do you mean?” Tiago said. He ran his big hands up and down her back. “What kind of trouble are you in? What happened?”
“What happened isn’t my fault,” she sniffled. “I’m just sayin’.”
He raised his head and frowned at her. The raw, bruised look had not quite left his eyes. She had never seen him look like that before. She put her forefinger to the deep line between his brows and tried to smooth it away. He pressed his lips to her palm. The exchange did nothing to sway his attention from other things. He said, “How did you disappear, and why do you feel and smell like Carling’s Power?”
“Actually,” she muttered, “it’s not so much what she did to me, as it is what she did to you. She has a Djinn who is indebted to her. He owes her three favors, or he did—he’s now down to two. She had him transport me from the bedroom up to her suite. She said it was to teach you a lesson.”
He growled, a deep rumble that vibrated through her frame. “What did that crazy bitch do to you?”
“Shh, remember everything’s all right now,” she murmured. She cupped his face in both hands and searched his eyes. They were obsidian without any telltale flickering of white. She stroked his lean cheeks. He was such a proud man, and he was so handsome when he wasn’t looking like he might tear down skyscrapers or dismantle nations with his bare hands. “She healed me, and we talked for a bit. That’s all.”
His eyes narrowed. “Healed you,” he said.
She opened her eyes wide. “Completely, Tiago. It’s the most amazing thing. See for yourself.” She pulled back so that she could lift the top of her lounge suit and show him the silvery scar. “It hurt like a son of a bitch too. I could feel it knitting together inside.”
Tiago touched the small scar. The brush of his blunt calloused fingers was featherlight. “It doesn’t hurt anymore?”
“Not a bit. I feel like I did before the attack.
” She fingered the tiny stitches. They looked like baby spiders against her pale skin. Ew, actually.
He frowned. “Those need to come out.”
She was opening her mouth to tell him she could take them out later when he picked her up and deposited her in an armchair as effortlessly as one might move a house cat. He opened his duffle bag, took out a toiletry kit and pulled out a small set of clippers. Then he knelt in front of her. She squirmed.
He smiled at her, a real smile and not his usual sardonic grimace, the kind that crinkled the edges of his eyes and revealed the handsome set of his features. “You sit still, faerie,” he ordered as he pushed up her top. She kept her knees pressed together and angled to the right as she tried to do as he said.
He bent close to make sure of the snip. His gigantic hands that were so gifted in killing were remarkably gentle as they brushed over her skin. She stared at his broad shoulders and dark bent head, and dug her fingers into the arms of the chair, her stomach clenched against a stir of arousal.
His smile deepened. He could sense it, she knew. He could scent the changes in her pheromones. Blood heated her cheeks. She felt exposed and trapped in the armchair with his large powerful body pressed against her legs, but she didn’t want to push him away. He snipped the stitch and told her, “Here comes the tug.”
She nodded and he pulled the stitch out. He soothed the area, quite unnecessarily she thought, by massaging it with the ball of his thumb. Then he bent close again to remove the second stitch.
She waited for him to move, to straighten away from her, but he did nothing. Instead he tilted his head and stared at her scar. Something unfamiliar moved over his normally aggressive expression. It was a quiet reflectiveness that opened a window to that landscape hidden inside him and revealed—pain.
Her forehead crinkled. He was angry, irritable, rude, protective and sarcastic, comforting in danger and calm under fire and unrepentantly, aggressively antisocial. He was simply an unconquerable spirit. It hurt her to think of him in pain or distressed. She put her hand over his as it spanned her rib cage.
What he did then shocked her to her toes, as he bent close and pressed his lips to the scar. A quaking started deep inside. It spread out and collapsed her like a house of cards as he straightened and sat back on his heels. She threw her arms around his neck and fell against him, shaking and clinging to him as if he were the only stable thing in the world.
And she was afraid. She was very much afraid that it might be true.
“What is it?” he asked. That rough rich voice of his was throttled down to a quiet murmur. He hugged her tight and rocked her. “I thought things were better now.”
She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “You listen to me,” she said. She pulled back, grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him. It was like trying to shake a Mack truck: quite patently impossible. “Please don’t argue with me, threaten, posture or deflect. Just listen to me, Tiago.”
He frowned. “I’m listening.”
“Carling hates you. I don’t understand it or know why. She didn’t say. Maybe you know?” She paused, and he shrugged, his expression blank. “Okay, we’ll put the why aside for now. But she does. She hates you. I could see it when I talked to her. I think she would love to find an excuse to kill you.”
His eyebrows rose. “She might try,” he said.
She wanted to smack him, but the problem was she didn’t think Tiago saw his attitude as posturing. “Yes,” she said with emphasis. “She might if she thought she could get away with it, but I’m sure she doesn’t want to make an enemy of Dragos.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m quite sure of that.”
She stuck her stiffened finger under his nose. “Don’t laugh,” she ordered. “This is not a laughing matter.”
His face straightened, but the smile remained a lazy ghost in his eyes. “Yes, your bossiness,” he said. He grabbed her finger before she could jerk it back and kissed the tip of it. “No arguing, threatening, posturing, deflecting or laughing.”
“You’re not taking me seriously.” Her eyes burned and a leaden rock settled in her chest. She looked down.
His big hands settled on her shoulders. “Hey,” he said. The laughter had vanished from his quiet voice. “Look at me.”
She refused. He bent his head to try to catch her gaze. She ducked her head further.
He sighed and rested his cheek on top of her head since it was the only thing she would let him reach. “Faerie, I’m sorry. I am taking you seriously, I swear it.”
She pulled back and met his gaze, which had sobered. The skin across her cheekbones felt too tight. She said through stiff lips, “Carling really scared me, Tiago. Not for my sake, but for yours. She’s Powerful, and she’s dangerous, and for whatever reason, she would kill you if she could. I think there were only two things that held her back from trying earlier. One of them was Dragos. The other is she wants to build an alliance with me. Those feel like pretty flimsy protections to me.”
He stroked her cheek with the ball of his thumb. He thought of the stark fear in her face and the suicidal leap she had made toward him that had almost made his heart stop. The impulse to rage at her for taking such an insane risk stormed through him, but she still looked so pale and had been through so much. He throttled back the storm.
“I understand,” he said. “Forewarned is forearmed. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
Those huge gray eyes of hers searched his face. “Don’t take unnecessary chances,” she said. “Don’t threaten her.”
He could drown in those gorgeous eyes. Maybe he already had. Maybe this was what death was like, this beautiful torturous emotion. He tilted her back until he had her draped over his arm. He caressed the lovely, fragile white flower-stalk of her neck.
“I will do whatever I have to do to keep you safe,” he said. He bent to press his lips to the pulse that fluttered at the base of her neck. He would lie, cheat, steal, murder. Break vows, drop friendships, abandon responsibilities. Start wars or end them. “Whatever I have to.”
She knotted her small fists in his shirt. He loved it when she did that. He wondered if she realized how possessive the gesture was. Somehow he thought not. “Damn it, Tiago,” she whispered. “You will not take unnecessary risks.”
“You forget, my love,” he said in a gentle voice. He had been a god of war, quick to wrath and violence. Gentleness was an exoticism that bloomed only in her presence. “I don’t take orders either.”
My love. He couldn’t really mean that. Could he? It was just a term of endearment . . .
Then Tiago caressed her neck with his mouth, and Niniane lost herself in shocked voluptuousness.
She instinctively flexed as she searched for some stable point of reference. Her feet were on the floor, but he had her bent backward so far, he supported her full weight on one arm that he propped on the seat of the armchair behind her. He nuzzled at her neck then took a small piece of the tender skin between his teeth and sucked at it. The resulting pleasure was so piercing it pulsed down the length of her torso and centered in the soft vulnerable flesh between her legs. He was a master of the lightning that whipped down her body, that jumped along her nerves like a live wire, that awakened sensual urges she had not felt in far too long and stirred emotions she had never felt before.
She clutched at his wide shoulders and stared sightlessly at the ceiling as he suckled with such tender care at that one spot. This couldn’t be happening. They didn’t have time, and that was her fault. She had set the agenda for what happened next when she called for a meeting with Carling and the Dark Fae delegation in two hours’ time.
Which had happened a while ago. Which meant the meeting was two hours from now minus something. And she should never try to do calculations or time estimates when the sexiest man she had ever known was licking up the line of her jaw to nibble at her ear, because she had never been that strong in calculus and he destroyed her utterly. Utterly.
Somehow her hand
s found their way to the back of his head, her fingers stroking through his hair, following blindly the whorls that were shaven in the short, silken black length. She gasped and arched against him as his teeth nipped with such care at her sensitive earlobe.
He had come for her. He had promised everything was going to be okay, and he had come for her, and he had looked so crazy-sexy. No, monstrous. No, sexy. Oh damn.
“Big trouble,” she whimpered. I’m in big, big trouble now.
“Shh,” he whispered. “Everything is all right. You’re safe, we’re not doing anything. You’re not in any trouble.”
“Tiago,” she whispered. Her lips and her thighs shook. She tried to gasp for air.
He rose over her, an immense dark man that eclipsed the daylight. “God, you’re so gorgeous,” he breathed against her trembling mouth. “I could eat you up. I want to eat you all over. I want to eat you all day. But I know we’ve got to make that meeting.”
What meeting?
Her mouth clung to him and her legs wanted to. They wanted to wrap around his waist and bring him into alignment with the aching empty cradle between her hips. She dug her fingernails into the back of his strong corded neck, and he arched against her with a shaken laugh that sent his moist, hot breath blasting along her lips.
He jerked his mouth away and gasped, “Reschedule it.”
She blinked and looked at him with a dazed, unfocused gaze. “What?”
“Reschedule the damn meeting for tomorrow,” he growled. He glanced down her little curvaceous body. He was rock hard and agonized with wanting her. “For next week,” he amended.
Memory struck. The meeting! It was supposed to be in two hours minus a significant something now, and she still hadn’t showered or put on street clothes, and she sure as hell hadn’t calmed down. A sound broke out of her, a cross between a groan and a sob.
He put his hand between her legs and pressed the heel of his palm against the part of her that throbbed with an empty aching pain. “I can make it better,” he whispered.
Storm's Heart er-2 Page 13
