Storm's Heart

EIGHT

A nearby broken light fixture emitted a fitful buzzing. Other than that, the hall was filled with total silence.

For a moment it seemed the whole world had gone still. Niniane pressed her face against the warmth of Tiago’s broad chest. She concentrated on the powerful rhythm of his heartbeat. She felt his ribs expand as he drew in a breath.

Then he released her. He pulled his sword and one of his guns. She pulled his second gun from its holster as he turned away. He let her take it. He ordered her telepathically, Stay behind me.

And let him get shot to pieces right in front of her?

Oh phooey! she snapped. She hopped out from behind to stand at his side. It earned her an infuriated growl.

Carling stood not five feet in front of them.

Drywall dust floated in the air. It lent a hazy dreamlike quality to the strange scene. Rhoswen stood unmoving in the center of the hall. The Vampyre who had first attacked Tiago was frozen in the process of crawling back through the hole where he had slammed through the wall. Another Vampyre lay sprawled on the floor, his chest singed black. The third male Vampyre had not reappeared from the stairwell. Eight humans dotted the hallway, each one held stationary by Carling’s Power.

Five guns were still trained where Tiago had stood just moments before. He nudged her gently with the back of one hand and moved sideways with her until they stood several paces to the left.

Carling mirrored their shift down the hall in a loose-limbed prowl, her hands relaxed at her sides, an elegant and barbaric woman in bare feet and Chanel suit. She regarded Tiago with her head cocked, her lovely dark almond-shaped eyes bright with interest. Her earlier anger and its accompanying disfigurement of cruelty appeared to have vanished as if it had never existed. And, Niniane noted with a surge of baffled irritation, Carling looked even more radiant than ever.

“You would have sacrificed yourself for her,” Carling said. “Interesting.”

Niniane rolled her eyes. Carling was too strange. She gave up trying to figure out what made the old Vampyre tick. Instead she turned her worried attention to Tiago.

The slashes on his face were already healing. He was no longer the monstrous Wyr caught in midshift. His bones had settled into a more familiar shape, and the terrifying hot white blaze that had taken over his eyes had darkened again. But lightning still flickered at the back of his black gaze, the muscles in his arms were cut with rigidity and his Power felt razorsharp, held in readiness for battle.

He exhibited a roaring disinterest in conversing with Carling. He said in Niniane’s head, I want you to move toward the stairwell. Do it now while she has her people in stasis.

She took in a slow, deep breath and cast a leery glance down at the huge weapon she had pulled from his shoulder holster. It was a large-bore .50 Magnum Desert Eagle. It probably fit the width of Tiago’s hand quite comfortably. In her much smaller grip it looked and felt like the hand cannon it really was. She had fired large-bore handguns before. They always knocked her on her ass unless she braced herself back against something. She found the gun’s safety and clicked it on.

She said to Carling, “You created this mess. What are you going to do to fix it?”

“What, indeed.” Carling lifted an eyebrow, turned her head to the side and said, “Rhoswen, make sure the guns do not fire.”

The blonde Vampyre flowed into smooth motion as if she had never been frozen in time. She moved from human to human down the hall, taking their guns, ejecting clips and placing them on the floor.

Niniane never took her attention fully away from Tiago. She was already braced when he lowered his head and gave her a goaded look. He bared his teeth at her in a classic sign of Wyr aggression. She put her hand on his forearm. She could feel the current of tension jumping through his body like a live wire.

He was incredible. His outside appearance was scary enough. Inside, his Power was barely held in check by the uncertain leash of his temper. She had heard that he called the lightning when he lost his temper. She had not realized he contained the lightning. She felt like she had been given the merest glimpse into the vast unseen landscape that lay cloaked inside him.

Raw emotion flickered in his dangerous face, and her heart melted.

I know, I’m sorry it’s hard, she whispered gently in his head. She stroked the hot skin of his forearm with a light touch, then she slipped his gun back into its holster underneath his arm. I didn’t do what I was told again. But Tiago, I am supposed to become a monarch. I can’t take orders and I can’t just run.

If she had not been touching him, she might have missed the slight ragged edge to his indrawn breath. Her heart melted further.

Carling spoke another foreign word. Her Power pulsed in the unnatural stillness. Down the hall, humans jerked in surprise and cursed to find themselves disarmed. The Vampyre Tiago had thrown into the stairwell raced back into the hall and slowed to a stop, his gaze locked on his mistress. The lightning-struck Vampyre twitched and groaned as his rapid healing resumed.

A feral growl sounded behind Niniane. It came from the Vampyre climbing through the hole in the wall. His glowing red eyes focused on Tiago, his long fangs distended. Tiago swept Niniane behind him with one hand as he shifted to meet the threat.

Carling said in warning, “Cowan, stop.”

The Vampyre launched with a hiss at Tiago. Tiago flowed into a defensive posture, sword held en garde.

Carling blurred. She caught hold of the Vampyre by the back of his neck. Her beautiful face was winter-cold, dark eyes twin shards of ice. In a move so fast Niniane couldn’t track it, Carling tore the Vampyre’s head from his body. The Vampyre’s body fell to the floor. Carling looked down into the face she held between her hands. The Vampyre’s mouth worked, as if he would say something, to plead for his life or to scream. Then his head and body crumbled into dust. Carling brushed her fingers together. She murmured, “He was always such an impetuous child.”

Niniane stared at the small pile of dust on the floor that used to be a thinking, reasoning creature. She stuffed her fingers against her mouth. Tiago shifted, holstered his own gun, put a heavy arm tight around her shoulders and hauled her against his side. She leaned against him, rested her head on his chest and closed her eyes. She wanted to crawl into that hidden country inside of him.

A noise from the stairwell made her jump. She made a muffled noise against Tiago’s shirt and his hold tightened on her.

The Dark Fae Commander Arethusa stood in the stairwell doorway, along with Hughes and a couple of the hotel security staff. They stared at the wreckage in the hallway, at Niniane and Tiago, and at Carling.

Niniane cleared her throat. She forced herself to say in a calm voice, “Everything is fine now. Scott, the bill for repairs on this should go to the Elder tribunal.” If the tribunal had an issue with that, they could take it up with Carling. Elder politics tended to be hard on architecture and the general population. Niniane looked at Carling and silently challenged her to deny it. Carling curled a nostril, but as her Vampyres had been the ones to initiate an actual attack, she kept silent.

Hughes nodded and backed into the stairwell. His expression was a study in horrified dismay.

Niniane’s gaze met the Dark Fae Commander’s hard stare. Arethusa had the tall, lean build that was typical of most Dark Fae, but instead of giving her a willowy look, her leanness was coiled with long muscles that gave her a pantherlike grace. Her black hair was pulled into a tight queue at the base of her neck, and her large gray eyes and angular face were cold with censure as she regarded Tiago’s arm around Niniane’s shoulders.

The Commander said, “You meddle where you do not belong, sentinel. Release the Dark Fae heir now or face the consequences.”

Niniane’s temper spilled over. She straightened and stepped away from Tiago, her hands in fists. “That will be enough, Commander,” she snapped. Arethusa’s gaze swept up to her face. “Please inform Chancellor Aubrey and Justice Kellen that I will meet with the Dark Fae, along with Councillor Severan, in the penthouse in two hours.”

“Your highness—” began Arethusa, her gaze turning flinty.

Niniane said between her teeth, “I am not having a good week, Commander. It is not a good idea to try my patience right now because at the moment I don’t have any. That will be all.”

The Dark Fae Commander’s mouth tightened as her gaze flicked back to Tiago then to Carling, who lifted one slender eyebrow. After a moment Arethusa gave a curt nod and stepped back from the doorway.

Niniane concentrated on getting her breathing under control. She focused on a mote of drywall dust dancing in the air. She growled, “Now I am going to take a shower. I am going to put on some real clothes, and I am going to calm down. Does anybody on this floor have a freaking problem with that?”

No one replied. Okay, fine. She took that as a no. She nodded to herself and headed for the stairwell.

The leashed lightning that was Tiago shadowed her. She had just stepped into the doorway, when Tiago said, “Just one thing.”

The rich, strong sound of his voice shocked her. She realized he had not spoken aloud since he had appeared. She swiveled.

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 hands 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.

Her body pulsed at the dark promise in his voice. He could make it so much better. He could make it delicious, but in the process he would demolish what was left of her mind, and she needed her thinking clear and sharp if she had any hope of holding her own against Carling and the Dark Fae.

She clutched at his thick wrist and gasped, “No, Tiago. Not like this.”

He groaned and went rigid as he bowed over her body, his eyes shut tight. She looked up at the harsh dark lines of his face and wanted to bite her tongue, wanted to take it back, wanted to claw at him and demand he give her everything he had. She teetered at the brink of losing control.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. Violence and sensuality teemed in that obsidian gaze, so that for a moment she thought he was the one who had lost control, and the part of her that had already plunged over the brink was fiercely glad.

Then he pressed his lips to her forehead with extreme gentleness. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Not like this.”

Before she could protest her own edict, he rocked back on his heels and stood, and he drew her up along with him. At first her legs were too shaky to support her. She put her arms around his long, lean waist and leaned against him. They stood quietly together as he stroked the hair off her damp forehead, and for a moment she felt a crazed kind of desperate need to hang on to any part of him that she could before he slipped away and was lost to her for good.

Okay, now she was starting to scare herself. It was past time she got her careening harebrained self back on track.

She bit her lips and forced some iron into her spine. Then she stepped back, looked in the general direction of his face and gave him a sort of idiotic nod as if that meant anything. She turned away and—

His hand clamped down on her wrist. He yanked her back to him. The breath woofed out of her as she came up hard against his muscled torso. He grabbed her by the hair at the back of her head. Her mouth fell open. Before she could utter some version of the what the hell? that was ricocheting through her stuttering mind, he turned her face up and drove his mouth down onto hers.

There was nothing civilized about his kiss. He was rough, rampantly dominant, as he dug his hardened tongue into the soft crevices of her mouth, in and in and in, and it was such an invasive raw imitation of the sex act that desire roared through her like a runaway eight-thousand-pound freight train engine. Her inner muscles clamped down in involuntary need, and a high, thin whine broke out of her. She heard the desperate animal sound as if someone else had made it; it was that much beyond her control.

Tiago lifted his head. He was breathing hard as if he had just been sprinting, or as if he had just hurtled through the air in manic flight.

“Like that,” he said. The burning words came from the back of his throat and singed her nerve endings. “It’s going to be like that.”

So how did one recover from Tiago’s particular style of demolition and scrape together enough poise to meet with the senior officials of one of the oldest governments on Earth?

Along with Carling. Oh no, we mustn’t forget Carling.

Niniane sat on the bed and stared at the bedroom clock for several heartbeats. And in a half an hour, no less. Yes, apparently she and Tiago had squandered away that much time.

Well. Whatever else happened, she would meet her fate clean.

She dug through the shopping bags and grabbed items of underwear and outer clothing. There was certainly no point in agonizing over what to wear. It wasn’t like she had much from which to choose. She had two pairs of jeans, a polo shirt, a scooped neck tee, and a cashmere sweater. It was all Burberry Brit casual wear from Nordstrom and very nice, for what it was, but of course it wasn’t suitable. All of her suitable clothes were being held hostage by the people she was going to meet. That might not rank high on anybody’s list of affairs of state, but it ranked pretty high on the list of things she resented.

She went into the bathroom, closed the door and started the shower. When the water had warmed, she stripped off the peach lounge suit and stepped into the tub. She stretched and turned under the steaming cascade. It felt incredible to move freely and without pain. She could almost be grateful, except for that whole scaring-her-to-death thing when Carling—along with all of her people—had confronted Tiago.

Niniane knew herself pretty well. She read Elle and People magazines, not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. She had half a dozen lipsticks in her purse, all of them varying shades of pink. She loved pretty clothes, chocolate truffles and a good Pinot Noir. Her genetic makeup, not her designer makeup, was the only thing that qualified her to be a potential head of anybody’s state. If the Dark Fae had a civil servant exam for the monarchy position, there was no way she could qualify even if they graded on a curve. She was not by any stretch of anybody’s imagination a weighty faerie, but she was an efficient one. It had taken her two minutes or less for her mind to gallop back to the object of her obsession.

It’s going to be like that, he had said. With such simple words and a single kiss, he shredded her sense of mission and all of the convictions she had held about herself like they were so much party-colored tissue paper.

She squirted a dollop of lilac-scented shampoo into one palm. As she worked it through her fine black hair, she let herself wonder what it would be like to walk into the upcoming meeting and announce she would not take the Dark Fae throne. She could do it too. She could drop everything to be with this man. The frenzied passion he roused in her was that overpowering.

What would be the result?

Someone else would become Dark Fae King or Queen. Hell, as far as she knew, it would be someone far more qualified than she was. But it wouldn’t be someone closer to the throne. There was no one closer. That throne had cast a shadow over her all of her life. Whoever became monarch would always know she was out in the world, the real heir with the unshakeable claim. It would undermine everything he tried to do. At the first test of his ability or crisis in government, it could shake him to his foundation.

The smartest thing for a capable ruler would be to solidify his power and rid himself of the threat, but then she already knew that. Walking away would not stop the attempts on her life. But would it gain her anything else?

She sagged against tiled wall. No.

It’s going to be like that. With as many words Tiago signaled his intention to take her as his lover. She could follow him back to New York. She could work to make as much as she could out of the time they could have together—but sooner or later Tiago would go back to leading Dragos’s troops and living his nomadic warring lifestyle.

She could follow him, if he would let her, but she cringed to think it, silly woman that she was, with her fashion magazines and makeup and pink lipsticks and high-heeled shoes and purses. Sooner or later he would grow to resent her, or worse, he would become impatient, contemptuous and bored. Even if she abandoned her heritage and left everything behind, she could still hope to gain only a limited amount of time with him.

So she would stay her course, not because of her convictions since Tiago had destroyed those. She would stay her course because there wasn’t anything else to do. Days ago she had embarked upon a solitary road that had no turning point. She would be a good-hearted monarch, if not the most qualified or talented. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

It was time to take another step along that road. As she had said to Tiago, the innocent young Niniane of the past had been killed along with her family. She could never become that Niniane again, so she would just have to forge a different Niniane for the future.

She wiped her cheeks. What kind of time could she manage to get with Tiago? A couple of nights together, maybe at best a week? She would have to hoard every moment, to concentrate everything she had on remembering the slightest detail, because the memories were going to have to last her a very long while.

Faeries could live for thousands of years. If something didn’t kill them first.

That’s what it was going to be like.

Something had happened and Tiago didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one fucking bit.

She had gone to take a shower, smelling of an intoxicating blend of bewilderment and intense arousal. He liked putting that shattered look in those gorgeous gray eyes and being the one to lavish attention on all her sexy pieces. He didn’t like for her to walk away with that shattered look only to emerge again with the pieces put back together in a new unknown, cooler pattern. Unknown patterns meant something had happened in her head that might shut him out.

He was coming to understand why the other sentinels had nicknamed her Tricks. It wasn’t just because they had taught her all the dirty fighting tricks they knew. There was something about her that was just not bloody quantifiable. It was more than the effervescence that winked out of her like sunlight on water. It was an unpredictable feminine quality that could start off at say, point A but then jump to, hell, he didn’t know, an entirely different alphabet instead of going through a logical thought process that led from B to C then D and so forth.

That meant he couldn’t track from where she had been to where she was now.

He might have to break down and ask her what she was thinking.

He scowled.

While he was on the subject of things he didn’t like, he also didn’t like her disappearing from his sight. The last time that had happened, a freaking Djinn had made off with her. The memory caused him to break out in a cold sweat. It held him shackled to the outside of her door, straining to hear her slightest move, the rustle of her clothing, anything to reassure him that she was still safe and sound in the hotel suite.

He’d had a couple of bad moments when she had been in the shower. For a heart-stopping while she hadn’t seemed to move, and all he could hear was the steady sound of the water running. He had almost broken through the door to check on her. Then there had been a muffled clatter like she had dropped a shampoo bottle or bar of soap. The tight band around his chest had loosened, and he had been able to take a breath again.

It was okay when she ran the hair dryer. He could hear that all the way from the bathroom in the second bedroom where he dashed to tear out of his clothes, shower, towel dry and dress in clean black fatigues in five minutes flat. He was clean-shaven in just under two and a half minutes more. By the time she had clicked off the hair dryer he was back in the living room again with his steel-toed boots laced, buckling on his weapons.

He glanced up as she stepped out of the bedroom. In an instant he was so hard for her it nearly doubled him over. She wore jeans that molded to every inch of her tight, round little ass, a pretty shirt with a scooped neck, and a thin sweater that molded the sides of her curvaceous breasts, looked butter-soft and begged to be stroked. She wore the tiny flat slip-on shoes she had worn earlier. Her black hair was clean and shiny, and she had put on makeup. Somehow she had made her high cheekbones stand out, and glossy pink color emphasized those soft, plush lips. She had used a dark smoky gray eyeliner to devastating effect. It made her eyes even more enormous and compelling. They seemed to gather and reflect all the light in the room.

They also held an expression of distant composure that drove him insane. He stared at her in baffled fury. He was as hard as a rock from wanting her, and everything he had done to bring her to the peak of sensual awareness and desire—it had vanished as if it had never been.

“Are you ready?” she asked. She came to a stop beside him, and those breathtaking luminous eyes of hers narrowed on him. “What is it?”

He glared at what he held in his hands. It was a leather custom-made knife sheath with a leg tie.

He said between his teeth, “You’re so goddamn beautiful it’s about all I can do not to throw you down on the floor and take you right here and now, and even I know that’s not acceptable behavior.”

Dead silence. He shot a glance at her from under lowered brows. That fine clear skin of hers had gone white, the expression in her eyes turned stricken. Then she flushed a deep betraying red and her stricken look turned into a scandalized sparkle. She clapped her hands over her mouth and giggled.

Giggled. What a foreign, feminine sound. And he loved it.

One corner of his mouth lifted in response, and his fury dissipated and blew away on an intangible wind. He threaded the knife sheath onto his belt and buckled it. When he bent to fasten the leg tie, her hands came over his.

“Let me do it,” she said. Her voice was breathless.

He froze and then straightened slowly as he stared at her.

Her eyes dancing, her piquant face alive with mischievous sensuality, she put those sweet, delicate little hands on his thighs as she sank into a kneeling position in front of him. She tilted her head back and looked up at him.

Holy fuck. His abdominal muscles clenched and the blood in his veins transmuted to slow-moving lava.

She reached between his legs. Her slender wrist brushed against the heavy muscles of his inner thighs. He broke into a fine sweat, his thinking crumbled into a wasteland, and his rigid cock strained toward her plump, smiling lips.

She pulled the two lengths of leather around his thigh and tied them together. “We’re supposed to be upstairs in five minutes,” she whispered. “We have no time right now. But when we do—”

She leaned forward to put her arms around his hips. His hands fisted in the air above her head, and he broke into a fine trembling as she nuzzled the pulsing bulge at his crotch. She rubbed her cheek against his cloth-covered erection, and it was such a happy, sensual, affectionate thing for her to do, he almost fell to his knees in dumbfounded worship.

He gasped her name, an incoherent hymn.

“When we do have time,” she said against him, her breath warming and moistening the cloth over his cock, “I want it to be just like this.”

The penthouse suite was just three flights up from their floor, but one needed a key to access it by elevator. Rogers was still doing guard duty in the hall. The tall policewoman offered the penthouse key to Niniane as they stepped out of the suite. Niniane paused to have a brief exchange with the other woman that had Rogers’s pleasant freckle-sprinkled face alight with pleasure.

He didn’t pay attention to what the females said. He was too busy struggling to get his raging hormones under control, to actually let Niniane walk away from the hotel suite and not drag her back inside, throw her on the floor and do what he had threatened to do. Each step they took down the hall was an uncertain, hard-won triumph.

Then his brain started working again, really working, and he began to think about the attendees of the upcoming meeting.

Not one of those elegant elderly piranhas was going to welcome his presence, and wasn’t that just too fucking bad. There wasn’t a Power on Earth that could keep him from guarding Niniane’s back.

One of the two guards at the stairwell already held the elevator open for them. They stepped inside. After Niniane inserted the key and pressed the button for the penthouse floor, he took her hand and threaded his fingers through hers. She gave him a startled smile that faded as quickly as it had bloomed. Her sparkling sensuality had vanished again, leaving her a pale, sober stranger.

The elevator purred to a stop. He reached out to punch the door-closed button, and she looked at him in surprise.

“This time you listen to me, faerie. Everything will be all right,” he said to her small, tense face that was turned up to his so trustingly. “No one who will be in that room will hurt you. We go in as a united front, and we leave as united front. Got it?”

She nodded. “Got it. Thank you, Tiago.”

“You’re welcome.” He smiled at her, let go of the button, and the doors opened.

He couldn’t have been more wrong on all counts. They walked in to the penthouse, and their united front got slaughtered.