Edge of Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel)
Page 24
“Just tell him…tell him I said whatever goes on four legs will always be a friend”—her voice cracked over “friend”—“and we just should leave it at that.”
“Okaaay,” drawled Asher. “And what do I tell him when he asks for a translation?”
“He’ll know what it means. Just tell him that.”
Christian shouted her name through the door again, so loudly and for so long the cords in his neck stood out and lights blinked on in apartments all over the building.
Asher muttered, “Yeah, I have this funny feeling he’s not going to give up so easily, Em.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not like he’s going to accidentally stumble across my new address. Nobody ever comes to this end of El Raval but junkies.”
Asher’s answer was full of disapproval. “Don’t forget the rats; they love the docks almost as much as the junkies. But he could just go to your work…”
Christian turned and flew down the stairs, not bothering to listen to the rest of the conversation.
He had all he needed to go on. Now he just had to trust his nose.
“Well, smack my ass and call me a cab. He did give up that easily. He’s gone, honey.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Ember had been pacing the floor of her apartment as she spoke with Asher, chewing her thumbnail and hyperventilating, but now she froze in place.
“I’m telling you, I just went to the door to tell him to piss off and he wasn’t there. I guess he wasn’t really as determined as he seemed.”
But she knew with sudden, chilling certainty that wasn’t what had happened. She replayed the last few moments of her conversation with Asher in her head, then slumped against the kitchen counter and muttered, “Shit.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
And so was she. But not for the reason Asher thought she should be. “I have to go.”
“Okay, but I’ll see you Wednesday, right? Three o’clock?”
He was picking her up for her next appointment with Dr. Flores; there was no way he was letting her get out of missing a single session, so he’d insisted on driving her to and from the therapist’s office like a den mother on carpool duty. Ember murmured her assent and disconnected the call.
Then she went to the window and yanked down the shade.
She turned off all the lights in the apartment, made sure the deadbolts Asher had installed were securely locked on the front door, then slowly retreated to the darkest corner of the living room.
To wait.
Twenty-three minutes later, as she was both dreading and hoping it would, the knock came. Two short raps, then Christian’s voice through the wood, infinitely dark, supple as silk.
“September. I know you’re in there, little firecracker. I can smell you. Open the door.”
Knowing he could hear her as easily as if she shouted, she whispered, “Go away.”
“We can do this the hard way or the easy way. It’s up to you. Open. The door.”
Beyond the howling chaos inside her head, she wondered briefly what the “hard way” would look like. Trying to ignore the shaking in her hands and knees she said, “There’s nothing to talk about, Christian. Please go away.”
She actually felt the intensity of his focus on her voice. There was a short pause in which the booming of her heart was a near deafening racket in her ears, then an ominous sound came through the door: a slow, light scratching, like fingernails dragged down the wood.
“Do you think I can’t get through it? Do you think you can hide from me?”
“Christian. Please. Listen to me. Go. Away.”
His answer to that was a low, menacing chuckle.
A three-quarters moon shone brightly overhead, spilling ghostly pale light through the gaps in the window shade, so it wasn’t particularly difficult to see the first, sinuous curl of mist billow beneath the door.
The gap between the floor and bottom of the door was hair-thin, but it was enough.
He came in a sleek, unfurling coil of gray Vapor and rose swiftly from the floor to gather in a glittering plume, hovering silently just inside the doorway. The Vapor shimmered, a thousand sparkling pinpricks of light, then coalesced into the form of a man. Feet first, then legs, then torso and arms and chest, strong and muscled, then Christian’s face and eyes, those vivid green eyes, lucent as emeralds in the shadows.
He was naked.
“You changed your phone number. You moved,” he said, sounding outraged in spite of the softness of his tone. His gaze swept over her, and he blinked, startled. His expression darkened and he growled, “And you’ve lost weight. Christ, Ember—haven’t you been eating?”
Keeping her gaze carefully above his waist-level, she snapped, “Oh, hi, it’s nice to see you, too, Christian! How’ve you been for the last two weeks? Good? Me, too! Everything’s just peachy keen as a matter of fact! So glad you broke in—glided…whatever—so we could catch up, but now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to living my life. Which doesn’t include you!”
Ember wasn’t sure exactly why she was being such a bitch, but it probably had to do with the fact that if she wasn’t yelling at him she would dissolve into tears at how much it hurt to have him standing there naked in her living room looking so beautiful and so impossibly out of reach. Because he was a gentleman at his core, if she were crying it might lead to him trying to comfort her, which might lead to her doing something pathetic and desperate like trying kiss him. Which would obviously just lead to further tragedy and heartbreak.
So going the bitch route was actually perfectly logical. Satisfied with that, she crossed her arms over her chest and glared daggers at him.
“Funny,” he drawled, “you don’t seem very happy to see me.”
“Ah, irony,” she replied in exactly the same lightly sarcastic tone. “I’ve recently become very familiar with the concept. For instance, the tragic irony of falling in love with the one person in the world guaranteed to be unable to love me back.”
The instant the words were out, she regretted them. She mashed her lips together in horror and slapped a hand over her mouth.
He tensed. His eyes flashed. Then very, very quietly, he said, “Did you just tell me you’re in love with me?”
Ember understood in that moment the true definition of the word “mortified.” Her face flamed red, and even though the room was full of shadows, she knew he saw it. She gave a little sideways jerk of her head—no—because she was too humiliated to speak, and her lips were still mashed together.
He nodded slowly, his gaze scorching the air between them. “Yes you did.”
“I want you to leave now.” Her voice was no longer steady.
“I don’t think you do. And anyway, I’m not going anywhere.”
He took a step forward. She took a step back.
Still in that deadly soft tone he asked, “Let me ask you a question, Ember. Why do you think I made the offer to buy your failing bookstore?”
Ha! I knew it! Ember said, “Because you’re a control freak who likes to butt into other people’s business?”
He shook his head. “Wrong. Guess again.”
“Because you have more money than sense?”
A corner of his mouth lifted, a dark, lopsided smile with an edge of danger that made her heart hammer against her breastbone. “Wrong again. Next question: why do you think I paid your rent?”
“So you admit that, too!”
He lifted a shoulder, unapologetic. “I knew you’d figure it out eventually. And even though it was written into the contract, Dante doesn’t exactly strike me as the type who can keep secrets.”
“Well, see my previous two answers.”
“Yet again, wrong. It’s the same reason I’m here now. Because I want to take care of you—”
“Stop. Just stop. I can’t listen to this.”
Why the hell was he even here? He’d made his feelings perfectly clear, they both knew it was a disaster, he hadn’t tried to contact her at all—
She breathed in and out in shallow, rapid breaths, trying to regain her equilibrium. His words had kindled a fire in her that was spreading liquid heat throughout her limbs, but she could think about them later, she could savor this moment later—right now she had to get him out of her apartment before she did something very, very stupid.
“No. You were right to walk away. We both know it was a mistake.”
He advanced another slow, calculated step, his eyes burning, his jaw hard. “Do we?”
“Corbin told me, Christian. I know about your parents, about what happened to them. So yes, we know. People like us—we’re oil and water. We don’t mix.”
He came another step closer but Ember held her ground. He wasn’t going to push her around, not in her own apartment, not anywhere. Still, it felt like there was a rabid hummingbird trying to escape from inside her chest.
With fierce intensity, he asked, “Is that how you felt that night, before I was such an ass? Is that how you felt when I had you in my arms? When I was inside you? Like we didn’t mix?”
When I was inside you. A tremor of longing ran through her, but she pushed it aside, concentrating on the important thing: getting him to leave before her willpower crumbled, along with her pride.
“You think there’s going to be a happy ending to this, Christian? You think this can go any direction but south? Because I think you’re lying to yourself if you do.”
“Like you’re lying to yourself about wanting me to leave?”
I’m not lying to myself, I’m lying to you, she silently corrected him. She knew she wanted him to stay, which is precisely why he shouldn’t. She dropped her head into her hands and pressed her knuckles into her eye sockets, blocking out the sight of him. Softly, she begged, “Please, please, Christian don’t make this any harder for me—”
But she never got the rest of the sentence out of her mouth because suddenly he was right in front of her. Before she could jerk away, his arms had encircled her, one of his hands had fisted into her hair. He pinned her against him. His heat and strength burned her, straight through her clothes.
He pulled her head back and said roughly into her ear, “You think this is easy for me? None of this is easy, but that doesn’t make it wrong. You and I have something that I’ve never had with anyone else before, and even though it’s messed up and we can’t change the past, I’m not letting you go. We are going to work this shit out, right here, right now.”
“And I don’t get a say in any of this?” she cried, trying to push him away. It was like trying to move a mountain, and equally effective. “You just get to decide what’s going to happen and what I want doesn’t matter?”
“If you think for one second I’m going to believe that you don’t want me, you can forget it. You can fight me all you want but your body doesn’t lie.” He inhaled deeply against her neck. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped an octave. “And like it or not, you already admitted how you feel. You’re in love with me, little firecracker. Selfish bastard that I am, I’m not giving that up. That’s mine. You’re mine. So stop fighting it.”
Suddenly furious, wanting to hit something, Ember gasped. “You arrogant, cocky, vain, overbearing—”
“Dick?” he supplied, lifting his head to gaze at her. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a hint of laughter in his eyes that made her even angrier.
“Yes! Dick! Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.”
She hissed, “I don’t want to be with you, understand? My body might want to, but I don’t want to, and I don’t want your money or your charity or your help—”
He stiffened. The laughter in his eyes died. “Charity? What the hell—”
“Yes, charity, that’s what it’s called when you donate money to the helpless and the needy! I might not be the best businesswoman in the world, but that store is mine and it’s the only thing left I have of my father and I’m not ever going to sell it, you understand?”
He stared at her for a moment with a quizzical look on his face while she huffed and glared back at him. Her hands were pressed flat against his bare chest and she felt his heartbeat, fast and hard, beneath her palms.
“Ember, I wasn’t going to take the store from you. I wanted you to have the money for it, yes, but I was going to turn the ownership back over to you as soon as the purchase agreement was signed. I don’t want a bookstore, I just wanted you not to have to worry about money anymore. That store is always going to be yours, no matter what.”
Oh. Wow. The sharp edges of her fury fizzled. “Well…you still paid my rent—forever. I’m not a child, Christian. And I’m not in the market for a sugar daddy.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Is that why you moved?”
She looked away and bit her lip.
He sighed and the fist in her hair loosened. He cupped her face in his hand and turned it toward his. With his thumb, he gently pried her lower lip from between her teeth. “I’m going to take care of you because I want to and I need to and I can, not because I think you’re a charity case or a child, or a woman who can be bought—”
“I don’t need to be taken care of—”
“I wasn’t finished!” he said, hard, and her mouth snapped shut. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, then began again in a measured tone that belied how hard he was trying to maintain his patience. “This thing between us is real. Messy, yes, but real. I’m going to make mistakes and you’re definitely going to make mistakes”—her mouth opened to protest, but he forged on—“and it might get ugly sometimes, but it’s going to be worth it. Every messy, ugly, amazing minute is going to be worth it because things like this don’t happen every day. People live their whole lives hoping to feel something like this”—he gave her a swift, hard squeeze on that last word—“and most of them never do, Ember.
“I made a mistake in walking away from you like I did. What happened in your past and what happened in mine are two separate things. You’re only responsible for your end of it, not mine. And I know how you’ve punished yourself; I’ve seen it. But no one should be defined by the lowest point in their lives.”
His voice dropped and he murmured, “Please give me a second chance. Please let me show you how much I need you. Please, Ember. Please be mine.”
God how she wanted to cry. But she’d done enough crying and it didn’t help anything anyway, so she just swallowed hard and tried her best to keep her breathing under control. Lashes lowered, she whispered, “I knew the money would go to the cystic fibrosis foundation. That’s the real reason I moved.”
He made a masculine sound low in his throat, grasped both her wrists and brought them up around his shoulders. He took her face in his hands. Looking deep into her eyes he said, “Tell me again, what you said before.”
Her brows drew together in confusion.
He lowered his head and brushed his lips across hers, raising the hair on her arms. He whispered, “That you’re in love with me.”
“I-I didn’t…really…say…that.” She was having a hard time concentrating on anything she might have said over the last five minutes.
His tongue skimmed the corner of her mouth. His teeth grazed her lower lip. “Tell me.”
Crumbling, crumbling, the footing beneath her feet, as if she stood on the edge of a very high cliff and piece by piece, inch by inch, the ground was giving way beneath her.
She breathed his name. Her hands around the back of his neck trembled, and she felt his smile against her mouth, a gentle curve of his lips she wanted to trace with her fingers. With her tongue.
“All right. I’
ll let you off the hook for the moment. But you have to go and pack a bag now. Just bring the essentials, I’ll get you anything else you need—clothes and whatever else—tomorrow.”
Blinking out of her daze, Ember asked, “What?”
Christian raised his head and gave her a wide, dazzling smile. “Oh, didn’t I mention? You’re moving in with me.”
When her mouth dropped open in shock, he added firmly, “Tonight.”
Caesar decided that aside from the sounds of a whip cracking, a woman screaming and a stronger man than he whispering a deferential, “Yes, sire,” the most beautiful noise in the world was the wet crunch a finger made when smashed beneath the heavy steel head of a hammer.
Well, the howl of pain that accompanied it was pretty good, too.
“Oh, don’t be such a whiner, Nico, you know it’ll heal in a few days!” he said cheerfully to the man writhing in agony in a chair opposite him. He was being held with his arm stretched across a wood table by four others, trusted males who’d proven their appetites for pain nearly matched his own. A fifth was vigorously applying the hammer to Nico’s fingers, one by one.
They were still on his left hand. Caesar wanted to prolong this little show as long as possible.
He held up a knife, ran a finger along its serrated blade, and watched all the blood drain from Nico’s face. “The wounds from this blade, however, might take a bit longer to heal.”
There would be scars, however. Lovely, lovely scars.
Nico begged, “Sire, the girl was already gone. There was nothing I could do. She moved—”
“Nothing you could do?” repeated Caesar with lifted brows. “Well if there’s nothing you can do, why on Earth am I keeping you around?” He smiled at Nico and watched with gleeful satisfaction as he cringed in terror. There was snickering from the other four. The male holding the hammer was silent, watching Caesar with avid, unblinking eyes for a sign to continue.
Caesar gave a tiny nod, and he lifted the hammer.
“Her landlord!” Nico screamed, seeing the sinister motion. “I can find out where she went from her landlord!”