Marek’s eyes narrowed, his extrasensory senses kicking in. One of the men’s suit jacket flapped open to reveal a gun in a holster. His gaze bounced between the woman and the men, gauging his distance as he walked towards the front desk. Reading her mind was so easy but he thought against it. Reading the men’s minds…
Why the hell do they want to kill her?
“Hey, babe, glad you could make it.” His voice boomed in the empty lobby. Everyone save for the woman looked at him in surprise. Marek surprised himself. Why get involved at a more intimate level? He could have just easily stayed with her without any suggestion of being together. But there was something about her that made his gut believe that it was the right thing to do. And he always believed his gut.
She continued to stare at the men as though in a trance. Marek sauntered and stood in front of her breaking whatever spell she had fallen under. She blinked looking up and Marek’s stomach dropped. The deepest green eyes he’d seen looked up him, reminding him of deep forests after the rains. They were filled with fear and brought the desire to keep this woman safe. Marek leaned in and she jolted when he gently placed his hands on her upper arms, her fear palpable.
“Relax,” he said inhaling sharply taking in her spring and vanilla scent. “I’m not one of them.”
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Your saviour.” A smile inched its way to the edges of his mouth. He pulled away slightly. “British?”
She stepped back, confusion lurked in the midst of her anxiety. “Really? Uh… yes.”
His lips slowly pulled to a side grin.
“Now, if you tell me your name we can get on acting in front of the men you’re afraid of.” He paused, waiting for her reply. “Or…I can leave if you don’t need saving.” He almost chuckled at the annoyance that flitted across her face. Then she smiled sweetly, her green eyes slanting upwards. Marek’s brow arched in amusement when her hand crawled up his chest and around his neck. His skin heated under her fingertips feeding his growing lust. No surprise there. He still had the upper hand and before the night was over, he’d be taking her to his bed. Her fingers played with the hair that curled at the back of his head, causing his cock to take notice. Oh yes, a good fuck would help him sleep.
“Gwen,” she whispered before pulling back. Her breath softly fanned the flames of Marek’s lust. “Sorry, babe. I knew you’d be waiting at the airport but I had no way to call you. I was involved in a car chase and my cell died on me.”
Marek’s eyebrow rose. “What car chase? Are you okay?” The thought of her being chased around in the dead of night tightened that spot right below the breastbone.
“I’m fine. Really.”
Gwen was showing a brave front but Marek heard the underlying tremor in her voice. He turned towards the men. He felt his body heating. Who were these people? What did they want from Gwen? He wanted to give them a piece of his mind. Correction. His hell fire. He was always protective of women sometimes too protective as he was with his sister. Gwen was no different except that she held his interest longer than any woman he chatted up within the five minute window.
“Let’s go up. Only to escort you to your room,” he whispered when she tensed in his arms.
“Okay,” Gwen whispered after a moment’s hesitation. She trailed a finger down his chest and his skin quivered. “But if you touch me in the elevator, I’ll break your nuts.”
A blinding flash of shock followed by his cock hiding was not exactly the way Marek wanted to end the night. He blinked, her seductive smile blindsiding him.
Marek barked out a laugh. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed this hard. Gwen looked up at him in bemusement until her gaze lit up with humour and she too laughed softly. He conceded this round to her. Placing his hand on the small of her back they walked to the elevator, and as they did he turned to the men. His smile was still in place but his eyes were spitting fire. The men stepped back in surprise nearly tripping over themselves in the process. Gwen glanced at them.
“What did you do?” She laughed softly as she angled her head to look up at him.
“Stared them down.” He looked at her eyes and knew if he was not careful, he could drown in them and never want to surface.
Gwen laughed once more, her face lighting up. “What? With X-ray vision?”
He smirked as they entered the elevator. “You have no idea. Which floor?”
Gwen gave the floor number. Marek was surprised at the pleasure coursing through him when he realized that they were on the same floor.
Gwen held her purse close to her chest, her body language shutting everyone out. Her angelic features scrunched in concentration as she stared at a point somewhere at the bottom of the console. She bit down on her bottom lip and Marek had the strongest urge to pin her to the wall and do the nibbling for her.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his mind still on her mouth...
“Who were those men?” she asked not to anyone in particular.
“Care to tell me what that was all about?”
She sighed, loosening the band around her hair so that it fell around her shoulders. “I honestly don’t know.” At Marek’s raised brow, she added, “I was on my way home when they boxed me in.”
“Boxed you in.”
Gwen raised her eyes to his face looking at him like he was a dolt. Marek couldn’t blame her. As an oil tracker with a knack for successfully playing the stock market and gifted with a sharp mind, he didn’t like him either.
“There were two of them. SUV’s I mean. At first I thought nothing of it. I had a lousy last day at work and just wanted to go home.”
Marek nodded and she continued.
“But when I saw the silencer—”
“Say that again?”
“A silencer! Keep up!”
“Whoa, there.” Marek held his hand up, heat crawling up his neck. A frown was starting to decorate his forehead. “It isn’t every day I get to talk to a lady threatened with a gun. Are you sure?”
Gwen stormed off the moment the elevator pinged open. Laughter rumbled in Marek’s chest. He knew he shouldn’t be laughing at her but he couldn’t help it. The cool and collected yet fearless woman in the lobby was so different from the flustered and irritated one walking away from him. But it did give him a good view of how her skirt flared over her hips and followed the shape of her pert ass. He felt the stirrings of lust once more. He closed his eyes sighing heavily.
“Gwen.”
She continued striding and looking at the door numbers.
“Gwen.”
“Thank you for helping me downstairs but I can take care of myself now.” She turned the corner. Marek strode quickly seeing her just as she inserted her key card into the slot.
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, so am I.” She threw a glance at him over her shoulder. “At least you were a gentleman about that.”
The reproach stung made stronger by the sound of the door closing after her. Marek had his share of women who stormed off but he’d chalk it up right there with the notches on the wall of his apartment like the scratches of a wild fuck night. Why the hell did he feel something when it came to a woman he just met in the lobby? Lia told him he was an asshole. The accusation always slid off him like water over oil but it grated.
Then this woman enters his life like much needed rain over parched earth in the form of a sudden storm that her opinion of him smarted and he wanted to correct her. But she was already inside her room and he probably wouldn’t see her again.
Marek shook his head as he headed to his own suite just a few doors down. Chuck it up to being used to instant gratification, he just needed to take the edge off of seeing a woman and not taking her to his bed.
So much for capping his night.
Gwen leaned against the door. Her body screamed for rest but her mind refused to stay still. Toeing her shoes off, she groaned in relief at the cool carpet on her tired feet. She half-heartedly threw her purse
and key card on top of the desk in the small anteroom before dragging herself and falling back on the bed. Her body sank deeper the more the tension eased from her. She stared at the cream coloured ceiling her mind still in a whirl before she crawled higher on the bed burrowing under the blankets with her clothes on. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a change of clothes or that she’d look like crumpled paper when she left the hotel. Her adrenalin was close to empty. She hadn’t eaten either but the thought of food when she could barely keep her eyes open didn’t seem like a good idea. And just like that the fear that hovered at the back of her consciousness slammed into her.
“Oh God, what have I got myself into?” she whispered, turning to the window where she blankly stared at part of the Austin skyline and the blackness below she knew to be Lady Bird Lake. She felt exposed, ill at ease that she was not within the confines of her apartment where she could relax completely. To be in surroundings she familiarized herself for a year. She ran through the events that led to her detour. Who wanted to harm her? Digna? Gwen gave an unladylike snort. Despite what Digna had done, Gwen didn’t think she was capable of hiring men to kill her. What would she gain? Gwen hadn’t finished writing her report and her research notes were in the lab. Her mouth pursed in disgust. If they were after the research, they should have harassed Digna not her! Surely it’s a case of mistaken identity? Yet the men followed her inside the hotel. Gwen’s stomach twisted. If it wasn’t Digna, the other possible suspect was Sebastian Highmore. He hadn’t liked the way she had defied him but that was not reason enough to hurt her.
Or was it?
Gwen shook her head, her hair making soft noises against the crisp pillowcase, the smell of clean fresh sheets dulling the edge of her paranoia. She was no longer certain whether resigning had been the best thing she did or the most stupid. Highmore couldn’t keep her, could he? Granted, she had a contract but she stuck to it. It just had become untenable to stay. She could bend the rules to about almost anything, but what she couldn’t do was to break her principles. Something she realized Sebastian Highmore had no hesitation of doing. All she had was a coincidence that her resignation and the threat on her life were connected because of the proximity of the events.
Her thoughts turned to something less traumatic. The stranger who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to rescue her. Shit, she didn’t even know his name but she’d given hers. For a split second in the lobby she wanted to give a different name but her rational mind had decided to bloody hide and she blurted her real name. She huffed putting her arm over her eyes.
So much for keeping safe.
Gwen rolled away covering her face with the pillow. She had been downright rude to him then when she heard him chuckle the volatile mixture of panic and irritation took over. Her head gently shook from side to side. Gentleman prick. Was there even such a phrase? Because it really suite him. The sexy hunk who came to her rescue when she thought she had no way out.
The memory of his hands on her and the heat rolling off him made her body spark with an awareness even in the midst of the tense atmosphere she found herself in. She wasn’t aware of experiencing that kind of awareness even in her last relationship. When he entered her personal space, breaking her view of the men who were after her, he oozed confidence. She had looked up. In her three inch heels, the stranger was still a good seven inches taller.
But what mesmerized her were his eyes. They were the deepest blue green eyes she had ever seen on a person. It reminded her of one of the underground lagoon in Falmouth, Jamaica where the waters looked as though it had its own effervescent light. And the way the stranger looked at her…a sigh parted from her lips. Gwen didn’t expect the ache that bloomed inside her at his nearness, a longing that strengthened the more she thought of him. At the rate things were going, she’d probably end up without a man and have the Energizer bunny in perpetual employment just keeping B.O.B. primed and ready.
The stranger’s hair was gloriously thick that Gwen’s fingers itched to run through it. The only chance she had was to feel its texture at the back of his neck. Power and purpose exuded from him. He looked as though he had just arrived from a formal dinner but had taken off his black tie allowing Gwen a glimpse of the tanned column of his throat. And his arousal, oh God, had she just imagined the growing thickness that brushed her stomach, coaxing a yearning she hadn’t felt in a long time? She squeezed her legs together, running that one moment over and over again in her head. She had felt herself getting wet and she flushed at the answering gleam in his gaze.
Later he decided to become a downright jerk.
How long had it been since she felt a man’s touch? She also had herself to blame when after the fiasco with her ex, she didn’t want another relationship. She didn’t have that much luck with men. She could have been happy with Tim if only he hadn’t been hiding a wife and two children in the south of England.
After numerous times of not being able to speak to her, Tim had finally caught up with her in the lab. She was still too incensed with him. He refused to leave. So she threatened him with infected blood she had placed in a beaker if he didn’t leave her alone. She snickered at the memory of Tim’s face losing all colour before he clumsily left her place of zen. When he left, Gwen poured the raspberry marmalade over a cracker and popped it into her mouth. It was her quickie lunch and Tim was too scared to even notice that she had threatened him with something sweet.
Not infected.
Gwen didn’t know when sleep finally took over. Her dreams were a kaleidoscope of blue green eyes that seared into her very soul. Of blood samples in vials inside a centrifuge that separated the various components of the rare blood she had worked on. Of fires whose flames licked her skin with a scorching heat that only fueled the lust building inside her. She dreamt of ghosts, of people screaming in terror as they were hacked to pieces by swords and axes of solders dressed as Roman legionnaires, as knights, as Saracens or Janissaries at war with soldiers who fought in the Crimea. And in the centre of it all was the stranger who rescued her, bloodied and wounded. The stench of death was thick in the air, the copper scent of blood rising like steam from the receding warmth of the dead bodies. When the stranger’s blue green eyes emitted heat, it seared her skin leaving burns that slowly consumed her. Gwen looked up, panic making her body flush hot and cold. Her dangerous stranger had his arm extended, his bloodied hand inviting her to join him.
“No,” she shouted turning away only to see carnage surrounding her.
“You have to take my hand,” he said nearly growling the words. “If you don’t you will die. I need to take the plague out of you.”
“What plague?” she screamed at the sight of her arms covered in pockets of rotten flesh.
“That plague.”
She hadn’t noticed him sprinting to her. She gasped, cowering but he held fast. She was not the queasy type but her stomach churned at the sight of his bloodied hands that made his grip slippery.
“What are you doing?” she screamed once more. She knew she was inside a dream but she couldn’t wake up. She started to sob. “Please…don’t hurt me.”
Beneath the blood and grime on his face, the stranger’s eyes gentled.
“Trust me.”
Before she uttered another word, she was pulled down to the ground. The grip on her arm tightened. A pressure no different from that of a blood pressure cuff pressed on where he held her. She jerked and inhaled sharply at the stinging pain that shot through her before it eased to a uncomfortable throb. Her stranger had his eyes closed. The fingers of his other hand burrowed on the ground past the muck created by someone’s life force spilling out. Gwen watched the stranger’s arms glow, the light coming from within. She was mesmerized by the highway of veins running underneath his translucent skin pulsing with fire and something black that crossed her skin into him. The poison the stranger took into himself seemed to battle the fire inside of him. But the blood encircled the dark tendrils and pushed it further into his system before transfe
rring to the veins on his other arm. Cleansing fire pushed the black muck down to his hand buried on the ground and it continued this way until Gwen could no longer feel the plague inside her. She saw his veins fill with clean blood, the stranger’s skin becoming opaque until she could no longer see his blood vessels.
The moment he finished the task, he let go of her and they both fell to the ground that was cracked and dry save for the holes his fingers had indented on it. The battle sounded like a distant memory as though a vacuum shield protected them from the screams, from weapons clashing, from the stench of defeat and of triumph.
“You’re healed now,” he said, his baritone weary. He stood, walking away, his head down as though defeated.
“Wait!”
He didn’t turn back. He continued walking away from her past the shield that had covered them and into the fray of warriors from various times in history until Gwen could no longer see him, leaving her bereft and carving a void where her heart used to be.
She gasped as her eyes snapped open. The cold that enveloped her was replaced by sensory pinpricks that infused her with warmth. Sweat trickled down the sides of her temples and from her…eyes? She swiped a hand against her face. Was she crying? The memory of the stranger walking away from her filled her mind once more and she curled into a ball unable to stop herself from pouring out her sorrow on to the already soaked pillow.
“What the…hell?” she hiccupped, gritting her teeth as she concentrated on stopping her chest to jerk or her throat to constrict laying bare the desolation that came out of nowhere. She must really be exhausted to put fire, hell, and a handsome man in a dream that both terrorized her and fed a longing she still didn’t know what for. She sat up wiping the wetness from her cheeks. Her rational mind had no answer for why she was feeling so out of sorts. Was her forced abstention causing her to consider sex with the stranger? Maybe. But in the middle of a war?
Firebinders: Marek (The Firebinders Book 1) Page 4
