by Hazel Hunter
Working her fingers into Domnall’s hair as he filled her, Jenna curled them against his scalp. A groan from his throat met a whimper from her lips, and together made the sexiest sound to finish that first, devastating kiss.
She didn’t need memories to tell her that nothing had ever been like this for her.
His chest heaved against her breasts as he held her on him. Her body felt so hot now that she expected her skin to steam, but the flush making it rosy came with waves of tingling excitement. They’d come together in the most basic, carnal way, and yet it felt so beautiful and emotional that tears stung her eyes.
Domnall pressed his mouth to her brow before he looked into her eyes, his own glittering with fierce need and something more. “Dinnae let go of me, luaidh.”
“Never again,” she promised.
Wrapping one arm under her buttocks, Domnall held her in place as he began to draw out of her. He thrust back in, hard and deep and sure, his free hand stroking over her hip and up her waist to cup her breast. Watching her, he pumped in and out of her, his cock so hard it almost frightened her. Then the friction of his flesh inside hers flashed through her, wild and consuming and inescapable. She couldn’t breathe but instead panted, and tasted his breath blending with her own. Now he was becoming her air, her earth, her world.
Images poured through her thoughts, but the aching pleasure whirled them into a chaotic blur. The tightness of their fit made them both shake and groan, but it was the way Domnall looked at her that reached into Jenna and wrapped him around her heart. She felt his skin grow slick with her sweat and the sweet, honeyed arousal he drew from her with every stroke of his hips. She buried her face in his neck and tasted the salty musk of him. She pressed her mouth against him as her body furled and tightened around him.
Every night, Jenna thought, breathless and terrified and crazy with the need for release. She’d have him every night, and every day, and every moment they could be alone and naked and together.
Nothing else could be as important as this.
Domnall tipped up her chin, kissing her again as his big body shook. He pounded into her now, heavy and swelling even bigger inside her clasping softness. His tongue drew hers into a sweet, languorous dance that belied the frantic rhythm of his fucking. Then he went so deep it jolted through her, exploding in her head and rocketing through her breasts, and everything inside her shattered into mindless bliss. At the same moment he uttered a rumbling groan and stiffened, his shaft jerking as his jetting seed bathed her pulsing insides.
Jenna held onto his shoulders, sighing into his mouth as the explosion of passion rained through her and settled into soothing embers of sweet relief. Dimly she felt her lover drop to his knees, his arms cocooning her in his heat now. As she emerged from the depths of pleasure, she drew her hands down his arms, and smiled as he stroked her back. Nothing had ever felt as good as this.
But then he touched her spine, and Jenna remembered the last hour of her life.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jenna walked into Premier Plaza’s construction site that night without hesitation. One thing she’d learned while working in her male-dominated field was never to show any doubt in her own decisions. That would be viewed by her colleagues as a show of weakness, something like slicing her own wrist while swimming in a tank filled with hungry sharks.
Be clear, be firm, and find out what the blazes is going on with this job.
She’d jumped in this tank with her eyes wide open. Working for Maxwell and Associates, one of the oldest and most prestigious architectural firms in Seattle, was the first step on her career ladder. She’d been hired as an associate rather than a lead architect, but it was one step closer to the glass ceiling she fully intended to smash. Until she did, she got stuck with some lousy assignments like this one. Rumor also had it that M&A had been hemorrhaging too much cash lately, and she didn’t want to end up unemployed.
Being a good sport about it, however, didn’t include being made a scapegoat for someone else’s screw-ups.
“Lady, you can’t just wander around here,” the security guard said as he trotted to keep pace with her. His long ears, heavy jowls and droopy eyes gave him the look of a basset hound in costume. “You gotta make an appointment with the super.”
“I tried that.”
She tilted back her hard hat and used her mobile phone to take a picture of a slightly skewed support column. No large-scale construction site ever looked pretty, but this one appeared as if a horde of squatters had taken up residence. Plaster dust, wood shavings and other material debris covered the floors. Soft drink cans, take-out boxes and cigarette butts littered every flat surface. The stench coming from a row of portable toilets suggested they hadn’t been cleaned out since work began, if what Jenna was seeing could be called that.
In four weeks, Premier’s owners would be expecting to rent out the building at market premium prices. Jenna wondered if charging sixty dollars per square foot would also cover a hazmat clean-up crew and tranquilizers for the tenants.
I should have come here the minute Hal dumped this in my lap.
After a month of getting nothing but vague promises for a tour once the work had progressed to a suitable stage, Jenna’s patience had run out. She’d gotten stuck with this job when an overdose had put the original lead architect, Lyle Gordon, in the hospital. If she’d known that Gordon had been as sloppy with the project as his drug use, she would never have agreed to take charge.
Now she was going to see exactly how much trouble she was in. If that meant trespassing and upsetting the builders, she’d deal with it. Her name was on this budding disaster now.
“Is Junior here?” she asked, referring to the son of the construction company’s owner, Rodney Percell Sr.
Lyle Gordon had landed the account when his old USC buddy Rodney Jr. had been put in charge of the work.
The guard shook his head. “Mr. Percell don’t come in until around noon on Tuesday.”
He was probably visiting Gordon in rehab to reminisce about all the co-eds and coke they’d shared as frat brothers. Jenna never understood people who partied their way through life. During her last year of high school, she’d lost both parents to a drunk driver, and had no extended family to support her dreams. Their small life insurance policy had paid only for their funeral and outstanding bills. After she’d been accepted to Cal-Poly, scholarships and every penny she could earn working part time had been her only safety net.
Grief had killed her social life, and by the time she emerged from it she’d become entirely focused on her education. Friends and a love life had to wait. Her future couldn’t.
“You need to call Percell right now,” she told the guard as she headed for the basement access stairwell. “Tell him to get his butt down here pronto. Say his new architect is here and she’s very unhappy. If he says no, then call his father.”
The guard’s jowls trembled. “Come on, Lady–”
“Or I’ll call them before I go downstairs,” she offered, taking out her phone again. “And you’ll get fired for letting me roam around.”
“Okay, but the lines ain’t hooked up in here. I gotta go out to the trailer to make the call.” He watched her head for the lower access stairs. “There’s no electric in the basement.”
She tugged the flashlight from her back pocket and held it up as she switched it on. “Brought my own, thanks.”
Jenna used it to illuminate her path as she picked her way down the debris-cluttered stairwell, and skirted around the detritus left crowding the landings. No one had bothered to roof the stairs, so she had to step over cloudy mud puddles left behind by the last hard rain. Given that this was Seattle, that was probably ten minutes ago.
By the time she reached the bottom door Jenna began to hope that Junior was too busy to come down. Her boss would never approve of her kicking a contractor’s ass from here to Tacoma.
The light steel door leading to the basement level groaned as Jenna tugged it open, an
d a waft of damp air sourly greeted her. Muddy water sluggishly flowed over the threshold. She saw more as she slowly moved her flashlight from side to side. More materials had been left in haphazard piles, most of them soaked by the flood. Countless lengths of rebar, most of it broken, lay quietly rusting. Swollen sacks of finishing plaster wept congealed white ooze. The sheer waste appalled her, and then she checked the structure and got a much bigger shock.
Every wall and column her light illuminated showed dozens of fresh cracks. Some looked wide enough for her hand.
“Can’t be.” She let the door slam shut behind her as she stepped into the shallow water and splashed past empty palettes and crumpled tarps to get a better look. “Junior, what did you do?”
When she’d first looked at the initial plans Gordon had drawn up for Premier Plaza, Jenna knew that he hadn’t calculated the load distributions correctly. The maximum slab load had been off so much it had taken her breath away. She’d gone directly to Maxwell, who assured her that Gordon had later corrected the error.
From what she could see Gordon hadn’t done squat, and Junior had followed his flawed plans. That meant the uneven weight of the top four floors would create too much pressure on everything beneath them, including the foundation. During and after construction all buildings shifted as part of the settling process, adding more stress.
The cracks she saw all around her assured her it was already happening.
Jenna tucked the flashlight under her arm and pulled out her mobile to take more shots of the damage. Knowing this couldn’t wait until morning, she called her boss at home.
“Ms. Cameron, it’s ten o’clock at night.” Hal Maxwell sounded tired or exasperated, probably both.
“I know, sir. It’s just that I’m standing in two inches of water in Premier’s flooded basement,” she told him. “And I’m seeing so much crack I should be in a drug den.”
His voice immediately chilled. “I’ll call Percell in the morning.”
“You have to call him now. This can’t wait.” She approached one of the walls and touched the half-inch gap snaking from its top down to the water on the floor. “With this much damage, this place is a house of cards.”
Her boss made an exasperated sound. “You’re an architect, Ms. Cameron, not an engineer.”
“I minored in structural engineering, sir.” She’d also studied failures and collapses obsessively to learn how to build her own designs stronger and better. “No one can come back inside this building until it’s been shored up and reinforced. If that’s even possible.”
“Very well, I’ll call Percell. Stay where you are, and take as many photos as you can.”
While Jenna waited, she snapped dozens of pictures, moving deeper into the basement as she did. After twenty minutes she decided she’d taken enough, and turned to head back to the stairs. That was when she spotted a tiny green light on one of the support columns, which with the lack of power made absolutely no sense.
She dialed her boss again as she slogged over to it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Maxwell, but I think someone rigged something down here.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he said, his voice very soft and aggrieved now. “I’d hoped that…but it doesn’t matter. Please understand, it’s nothing personal.”
She crouched down to peer at the device. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“By now Percell will be there.” A sigh came over the line. “Just know that the money from the insurance will save the firm. Good-bye, my dear.”
Jenna stood up and stepped back as the light turned red, and then dropped her phone and ran. The muffled sounds of explosions over her head came an instant before the structure shuddered violently. Streams of dust and chunks of concrete began to rain down around her.
She almost made it out.
A few steps from the stairwell door the world fell on her, slamming her under a terrible weight. Only her head and shoulders remained untouched on the threshold of escape.
Jenna shifted in and out of consciousness. Slowly, blessedly, she grew cold and numb. She could see a small patch of night sky through the crazy jumble of rubble above her. It meant that the entire building had collapsed, and she probably wouldn’t be found for days.
I don’t want to die.
Golden-white light filled her eyes, making Jenna believe that she had done just that. A beautiful, ethereal creature appeared over her, his handsome face glittering with frost as his wings spread out over her. He reached down to her, and then into her, and she felt his cold hand close over her stuttering heart.
Jenna screamed.
Domnall held Jenna against him as her terrible story unwound. Even as his own memories seethed inside him, he was unwilling to let her go. Her voice faltered only when she described the moment the Sluath had found her, broken and dying in the rubble.
“Everything beyond that night is still a blank, but I know who I am now.” She looked up at him. “I’m from the twenty-first century. Somehow the Sluath saved me, and then brought me back through time.” Her hand touched his cheek. “Do you believe me?”
He kissed her fingers. “Aye.”
“I think the way that I…nearly died,” she whispered. “I think it explains why I have to explore this castle. It’s like something I’ve left undone.”
Domnall helped her dress, but after he’d pulled on his own garments, he knew he could put it off no longer. He had to tell her what he’d remembered.
“Lass, I ken why the Sluath took you.”
In the underworld, shadows and light danced over Domnall as he paced the confines of his new cell. Hundreds of gemstones glittered from the high cave walls they studded, suggesting its former occupant had been one of the demons. All manner of sumptuous furnishings, fabrics and food, doubtless stolen from the mortal realm, had been crammed into the chamber. Opposite where the entry had been, one of their enchanted hearths crackled with white-blue flames that radiated heat and light, and yet never burned anything.
The bastarts so love their illusions.
This one suggested that he would be pampered and fed very well. A table set with golden dishes held savory-smelling roasted meats, deep bowls of colorful fruits, and mountains of pale breads. Three kegs of whisky and innumerable bottles of wine waited to be drunk in sparkling goblets. In the very center of the space stood an enormous platform strewn with silk curtains and fine linens, all in shades of snowy white, draped over a ticking that looked as soft as a cloud. Even the air he breathed had been scented with the fragrance of an exotic sunlit garden.
He guessed it to be yet another of their torments, as inexplicable as all the others they’d inflicted. He’d been tossed into pits so dark he couldn’t see his hand before his eyes, and chambers so filled with light he’d been blinded for hours. But why lock him in this bejeweled cell? Would the drink poison him? Would the food burn through his tongue and throat?
One wall dissolved into a shower of frost, and Domnall ran toward it only to be hurled back across the chamber. He shoved himself to his feet as Prince Iolar entered in a flurry of snowflakes. The leader of the demons glowed as white-gold as his wings before he folded them away. Domnall looked down to see the prince dragging after him a small, limp body. It was a woman, her garments sodden and filthy with gray mud and huge swaths of scarlet.
“On your knees in his presence,” the big Sluath that came in after Iolar bellowed.
Domnall smiled and uttered again the only two words he’d said to the demons since being dragged into this place.
“Fack ye.”
The prince chuckled. “Still defiant, even when coddled. You see, Danar? I was right.”
“As ever, my prince.” The bigger demon ducked his head.
“I bring a gift, Hunter.” He hoisted the unconscious female to her feet and clutched her chin, turning her slack face from side to side. “Rather disheveled at present, but she should clean up well. I neglected to ask her name when I took her. No matter, I’ll etch her with yours.” He turned her, and ri
pped open the back of her strange tunic.
“No,” Domnall shouted, and then tried again in a more moderate tone. “’Tis no need to mark her.”
“She’s our property.” The Sluath’s claws began to glow with a black light before he dragged them along the woman’s spine, etching glyphs into her skin. “You needn’t think of her as a being. She’s more a toy.”
Danar licked his lips, watching the torment.
Iolar finished the marking. “There. Consider her yours until we return from the next culling.”
Domnall stared at him. “I dinnae want a female.”
“A pity. You might have mentioned that you prefer males. Or perhaps I might have guessed it from the company you kept.” The prince turned her to face him and took hold of her neck, squeezing. “I’ll dispatch this one and fetch something more to your taste. Do you prefer them older, younger, or perhaps…” He smirked. “…very, very young?”
Domnall rushed over and snatched the woman away from him, tucking her against him. Beads of blood from the marks the Sluath had made spread warm wet spots on his arms.
“Return the lass to her tribe, and I’ll no’ fight ye or yers again.”
“Lying to me is foolish. I’ll always know when you do.” The demon smiled. “But I find it encouraging that you would try. The endless litany of ‘fack ye’ has become so boring. Enjoy yourself.”
Iolar and his guard retreated through the wall, which solidified into stone. Domnall felt two small hands grip his tunic, and looked down into the captive’s mud-smeared face. Her eyes, more beautiful than the sapphires and amethysts studding the walls, shifted quickly as she found her footing.
“Are you one of those things?” she asked, her voice low but steady.
She’d been pretending to be unconscious, Domnall realized, even through the pain of being marked.
“No, lass. I’m a prisoner, like ye.” Carefully he released her and stepped back so she could see what had been done to him. “I’m Domnall mag Raith, a Pritani hunter.”