“What on earth is the Court of Divine— Oh!” Thaisa came to a halt at the massive wooden slab table that dominated one half of the open area, the other being the living room. “Those windows—are those windows?—those are amazing! Is it a glass wall?”
He looked with satisfaction at the retractable glass doors that replaced most of the walls on this side of the house, affording a floor-to-ceiling view of the ocean, with only occasional interruptions where stone-covered steel girders supported the structure. “It is, in effect. They can be opened or closed as I desire.”
“You get to move the walls…that’s insanely wonderful.” She dropped his hand to step through the opening onto a broad patio that sat between the house and the infinity pool. Beyond it, the garden rolled down to the natural barrier fence that separated the beach from the grounds. He eyed the fence, noting with satisfaction the two men who lurked in the shadows. He would go out and speak to the patrols later, after he had Thaisa safely settled.
“This is like something out of a magazine,” she said, her face shining with delight. “I can’t believe you live here.”
“It will be less impressive once you have been here awhile,” he answered, taking her back into the house and up a broad flight of white stone stairs. “Although I hope you never lose the pleasure I take in it.”
“It’s just gorgeous.” She looked somewhat dazed before she stopped midway up the stairs. “Once I’ve been here awhile? Archer, you’re not asking me to move in, are you?”
“You are my mate.” He wondered why she fought that idea so much. Although he’d been surprised when she first took his fire and returned it to him, he had quickly acclimatized himself to her new role in his life, and moved on to planning how best to keep her protected. “Of course you will move here. Mates live together.”
“I’m not your mate. We’re just friends with benefits. Really hot benefits,” she said, pulling her hand from his and marching determinedly up the stairs. He allowed himself a moment to admire her ass, wondering how long it would take her to accept the inevitable.
If she thought he was going to let her go, she was mad.
“The subject is not open to debate,” he told her, knowing full well she would object.
“Like hell it’s not! You can’t just make statements about me like that!”
The glare she cast over her shoulder at him was really one of the best he’d ever seen.
He ogled her ass a little more, unable to keep from watching the swing of her hips. Those hips, he mused, could convince him to do much.
“I mean, I admit that we have something—” She stopped at the top of the stairs to face him, making a gesture with her hands held about a foot apart. “We do the steamy forest sex well, and your fire is kind of fun to play with, but that doesn’t mean we have a future together.”
“If you are going to reference my appearance again—” he started to say, feeling her objections were headed to that subject.
“No, of course not, I’m not that shallow!” she interrupted, then thought for a moment before conceding. “All right, I was going to say that, but it’s only part of it.”
“I’ve already reassured you that we will both be faithful to each other,” he said briskly, gesturing to the left. She moved in the direction he indicated, a frown pulling down her eyebrows. He liked her eyebrows. They were straight slashes set in an otherwise pleasantly round face, the coloration on her left brow and eyelashes giving her an intriguing air. She was unlike any other woman, but she didn’t seem to celebrate that fact. “I cannot change how I look any more than you can.”
“The difference being that you’re insanely gorgeous,” she grumbled, then stopped and faced him. “I know you’re tired of hearing this, and I know I should get over it, but I can’t! You’re so handsome, and…gah! It’s like you do it on purpose! Look at you!” She waved a hand at his torso. He looked down at himself, not seeing what the problem was. “Standing there in that lovely blue shirt that matches your eyes when they go sapphire, with your chest taunting me, and your jaw with that bit of stubble that I just know is going to be soft and wonderful, and do not even mention your mouth!”
“All right,” he said, wondering how the hell he was supposed to make her happy short of defacing himself. “I won’t.”
She stared at his mouth, licking her lips and blinking a couple of times before she continued. “And then there’s your hair!”
“Do I need a haircut?” he asked, wondering if she was ever going to get over his appearance, amused despite himself.
“No! Just the opposite! It’s too damned perfect! It’s silky and shiny, with a little bitty widow’s peak. It’s just a little bit long so that a couple of strands sometimes hang over your forehead, and I love men with shiny black, slightly long, widow’s-peaked, forehead-hanging hair, and you’re just standing there flaunting yours at me like you have that right!” Her breasts heaved in her dress as she panted a little. “It’s too much, Archer! It’s just too much!”
He would have enjoyed looking at her breasts, but he felt that it was more important to let her know she had his full attention. He didn’t understand why she was so distressed, but she would no doubt feel better once she worked this odd fit out of her system. He brushed back a bit of hair that had fallen over his brow.
Her fingers spasmed, and she took another deep breath, her breasts swelling above the bodice of the dress, but he kept his eyes on hers. It almost killed him, but he did it. “Well, I’m not going to take it, do you hear me? I’m not going to take that from hair!”
Without warning, she reached out with both hands and vigorously ruffled his hair until it felt like it stood on end. “I’m going to mess it up and then it will stop calling to me to touch it, and touch you, and wonder what it feels like sliding across my belly, and on my thighs, and slicked back wet from a shower. There!”
He waited.
Her eyes narrowed on him. “Dammit! Now you look like you just got out of bed after making love all night, all tousled and steamy and sexy as hell!”
Before he could respond, she turned on her heel and stomped down the hallway, tossing over her shoulder, “Which room is yours?”
He pointed toward a pair of double doors.
“Fine,” she snarled, jerking open a door across the hall from it, one of the three spare bedrooms his house afforded. “Is this one being used?”
“No.”
“I’m taking it, then.” She glared at him from the doorway, her eyes all but spitting fire at him. His fire, he noted. “And don’t think I’m going to come crawling to you in the middle of the night, licking your chest, and touching your thighs, and nibbling on your jaw that you insist on keeping right there where anyone can ogle it, and letting my breasts have their way with you, ending in incredibly hot, fire-laden sex, because that thought isn’t even on my mind!”
She slammed the door shut before he could reply.
He rubbed his jaw, thought about shaving, and then with a long look at the door, changed his mind. He retreated first to his office, making sure all the members of the tribe had checked in and taken precautions, then went out to verify the perimeter of his own house was protected.
Now that the knowledge of the manuscript was likely spreading, there would be an attack, Archer thought with grim knowledge. His most precious possession was at risk, and there was no way in this world or the next he would anyone to do the unthinkable.
Thaisa was his. That was all there was to it.
He just hoped that someday she would also realize it.
Chapter Nine
I WAS SOUND ASLEEP WHEN THE SMELL WOKE ME UP.
“Wha’?” I pushed my hair off my face and rolled from my belly to my side, squinting into the darkness of the room. A faint glow from lights that caressed the outside of Archer’s fabulous house stole in through blinds I’d left partially open, enough for me to see that someone was moving across the room. The second I opened my mouth to ask Archer what he thought he was doing
creeping around my room while I slept, I realized that the smell wasn’t at all his. This was dank and smoky, like leaf mold under a long dead bonfire.
“Ah. You are awake? Excellent. I have come to warn you.”
I clicked on the light and stared with surprise at the last person I expected to see. “Naamah?”
The blond man smiled and sat on the foot of my bed, adopting a conversational tone. “As you see, it is me. And I have something of much importance to impart.”
“It had better be that you are giving me back my boss’s demonic rug.”
He just looked at me.
I sighed. “So you thought you’d…what…just pop in and wake me up?” I pulled pillows up behind me, leaning against them while pulling the sheet up over my bare breasts. “At two o’clock in the morning?”
“Deep night,” he said with a little tip of his head. “It’s when demons are at their best. I’m here to warn you about the dragon.”
“Archer?”
“He is manipulating you.”
I blinked a couple of times, hoping I’d misheard him. “Hunter? Yes, I can totally see him as a master manipulator, but Archer? No.”
“There is an internecine war. You are now caught in the middle of it.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Nonetheless, it is true.”
I thought for a minute. “Okay, let’s say what you’re right, and Archer is trying to use me. How? What does he want? And why?”
“He is a dragon. He prizes treasure over all else, including people.”
“It’s possible, but not probable. Proceed.”
“He will seduce you to do his bidding because he seeks the medallion so that he might destroy the other tribes.”
That totally did not sound like Archer.
“The medallion is just a story,” I argued. “It’s not real.”
The demon smiled, and I felt a bit of my soul tatter and fall to the ground. “Isn’t it? If that is the case, why do two dragon masters want it so badly?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, my vision turned inward. What was going on with that manuscript? I made a mental promise to eyeball the original just as soon as I could…before giving it back to Edgar. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
He shrugged. “You summoned me. Until you release me, I must protect you.”
I shivered at the thought of being protected by a demon, an actual being of hell. “That’s…nice.”
His lips pulled back in another smile.
I looked away quickly. “I’ll make you a deal—if you bring me back that prayer rug, I’ll release you and you can go back to doing whatever it is demons do.”
“When I can devote myself to protecting you?” he answered. “Perish the thought. I just thought I’d warn you that he’s using you for his own purposes, and once he’s done…poof! You’ll disappear.”
“You’re insane,” I said, a little skitter of worry making me continue the conversation, rather than getting rid of him, as I knew I should. “What purpose would he have to use me?”
Naamah made a face. “I can’t just come right out and state the obvious. We give hints. You have to figure out the rest.”
“I don’t have anything that Archer wants,” I said. The demon was just trying to get into my head.
But why would he bother to do that?
“I’ll pop off now, shall I? Unless you wanted to indulge in a little deep night wrestling?”
“Huh?” It took me a few seconds to come back from a dark vision of Archer manipulating me for some unknown purpose.
Naamah leered at me, his gaze on my breasts hidden only by a thin sheet. “I am fully equipped in this form to pleasure females.”
I kicked at him from under the blanket. “Ew! No! I don’t know how you got past Archer’s security, but I don’t want you here. You can take your warning and stick it where the demon don’t shine. Oh, wait—give me back the prayer rug first.”
“Why should I?” he asked, getting to his feet, adopting an injured expression. “You summoned me, and yet now you don’t seem to want me in your life.”
“Oh, get over yourself already. Where is the rug?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have it with me.”
I was annoyed, really annoyed. The demon had woken me up from a nice dream where I was licking ice cream off a certain sexy dragon’s chest, and for what? To pester me with some cock-and-bull story about Archer using me? I had a feeling there was an ulterior motive for his presence, but I was damned if I could see what it was. “Well, get it. I want it back. It’s not yours.”
He strolled to the door and opened it, glancing back at me. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, I believe.”
A little chill touched my back with his words. I really did not want to tell Edgar I’d lost two of his finds. “I summoned you, though, and according to all the books I’ve studied, that means you have to do what I say.”
“Isn’t that sweet—you believe what you read,” he said, smiling.
“It was good enough to summon you.”
“I let you summon me because…well, because it suited me.” He smiled a third time. It sent chills down my spine. “If you had used a different spell, one that was proper and not so far from the original by being retold time and again before being written down, then perhaps the situation might be different. But as it is…”
The silent shoosh of the door closing as he left sent another ripple of chills down my back. Or was that the threat so obvious in Naamah’s voice?
“I have to get that manuscript back,” I said to my now-empty room. “And that means Archer just has to return it.” He didn’t seem inclined to do so, however. Could that be because he was using me, as Naamah said? Maybe he planned on booting me out the door as soon as I translated the leaf…
“No,” I told myself, pushing down the worry and doubt. “He’s not like that.”
He’s a man, an inner voice said.
“Dragon,” I corrected it, then realized that didn’t make it better. A man I could understand, but a dragon in man shape?
I shook my head at my own murky thoughts. I would drive myself insane if I started doubting my own judgment. Holding firmly to the thought that I couldn’t be deceived so easily, I settled back to go to sleep.
I was just drifting off to the memory of my fingers in Archer’s hair, the look of surprise in his eyes as I rumpled him in an attempt to make him a tiny smidgen less attractive (it was a lost cause—the man refused to be anything other than so handsome he made my toenails steam) when the house shook.
“Earthquake,” I murmured, too familiar with the little ones to be worried. The sound of a muffled explosion following immediately thereafter, however, had me on my feet and running to the door, yelling, “Archer!” before I realized I was out of bed.
My heart felt like it was held in a vise, my stomach turning over with fear, and panic, and a desperate need to make sure Archer was not harmed. I was at the door when I remembered I was clad in nothing but my underwear. I dashed back to the chair where I’d set my clothing and jerked my dress over my head before racing out of the room.
Voices called from outside the house. Archer’s bedroom door was open, but when I skidded to a halt in the middle of his room, expecting to see a vision of bloody horror, I found the bed empty. I ran quickly down the hall, flying down the stairs, my heart in my throat as a little chant started up in my head, praying to whoever would listen that Archer was all right.
My bare feet hit the marble floor between the dining room and living room, and I stopped, my mouth an O of horror as I viewed what was once one of the retractable glass walls that separated the living room from the patio. Archer stood in nothing but a pair of jeans, his hands on his hips while he surveyed the remains of one of the massive glass panels. One part of my mind was happy to see his back had healed, but the rest of my brain was shrieking. Shattered glass lay over the three beige and blue couches that made up the living area. Two men
stood outside the now empty wall where the glass had hung on a slider, talking rapidly to Archer in Magyar.
“It had to be a rocket launcher,” one of the men said, shaking his head. The other, a tall, gaunt man with a shock of copper hair, wrung his hands, and said in the same language, “We didn’t hear them coming. They must have drifted in with the tide so that we wouldn’t hear the boat’s engine.”
“Set up a patrol offshore,” Archer ordered his men before turning to face Miles when the latter entered from the dining room. “If they come back, blow them up. Anything?”
“No sign of them,” Miles reported. “They must have had a fast boat…that or they are holed up somewhere nearby.”
“Was it your brother?” I asked, amazed that anyone could hate his twin so much that an attack by rocket was the result.
“Do not come any closer, Thaisa.” Archer frowned at my bare feet. “There is glass everywhere. You will cut yourself.”
“The same might be said about you,” I answered, picking my way carefully through the tiny square chunks of glass. The wall must have been made out of safety glass, similar to windshields, since it didn’t splinter in the normal pattern. “You don’t have shoes on, either. What is going on, Archer?”
He tsked and marched over to where I was carefully nudging aside a glass-covered pillow that had been blown off the couch by the explosion. “Why do you not listen to me? I talk, and you do not listen. No, do not take one more step. I don’t have time to pick glass out of your feet.”
Before I could do more than give him a sour look, he scooped me up and started toward the stairs. I won’t say I didn’t have a moment where my inner self squealed girlishly over the fact that he could hoist me up as if I were light as a feather—which I most definitely was not—but I managed to wrestle my brain away from the fact that my arm was pressed against his naked chest and focus on what was important. “Why did your brother bomb you? Was it the manuscript? Or is he just pissed that I ran away? It’s me, isn’t it? Oh, Archer. I’m so sorry.”
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