Inked Magic

by Jory Strong

  Wild emotion surged through her with the sight of him. A tumultuous mix stripping away personal rules and leaving her as defenseless as she’d been in the shrinking confines of the interrogation room. The urge to get this over with dominated, her magic and gift shattering what little control she had left, taking over with ruthless purpose when he reached for her.

  She captured his hands. The eyes on her palms pressed to his skin, her will poised to cut directly to the answer. “Why me? Why did you come to Stylin’ Ink and ask me out?”

  Pain sliced into her with an unfolding scene, Cathal sitting in the backseat of a car with his father. Niall saying, “Show her a little love so she’ll want to help out here, and be willing to keep quiet about it afterwards. If you set your mind to it, you can get it done.”

  Cathal jerked out of her grasp before more of it played out, but she’d seen enough, though she understood that where it’d always been an excising before, with him it was a shared viewing.

  She didn’t care.

  “Now we both know where things stand,” she said, voice tight with a refusal to cry. “The cops came to my apartment tonight. They took me to the floor and handcuffed me, then hauled me in for sweating because they saw me visiting your uncle’s place. They told me the Dunnes are cold-blooded killers. For the record, I’ll tell you what I think about rapists. A quick death is too good for them, but I have no objection to it. I’ve seen what their victims saw. And because I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it.”

  She whirled away from Cathal and bolted from the office, determined to put distance between them, Parker’s words chasing her again. You can’t fucking run away this time, Etaín. Only she knew she could. She would. Not the run and hide of her mother’s life, but a return to the way she’d been before meeting Cathal and . . .

  Eamon.

  He waited for her outside the club, and despite thinking he might have viewed her time in custody as the opportunity to teach her a lesson, she couldn’t handle a fight with him. Not after the loss of control in Cathal’s office and the reliving of Brianna’s rape at the Hall of Justice. She felt too raw, too on edge.

  “I won’t ask how you knew I was here.” She willed herself to believe that exhaustion, the lingering aftereffects of trauma and terror, the freefall of surviving on adrenaline accounted for the tears sliding down her cheeks.

  He closed the distance between them as if approaching a wild, trapped animal. “Let me help you,” he murmured, and the gentleness of his voice, the depth of caring in his eyes affected her, stripping away her resistance to him so she allowed him to take her into his arms.

  He touched his mouth to hers. Not a kiss, but a gift she finally understood enough to recognize.

  Magic. He’d done it before, in front of Aesirs, when she’d been ill and weak after visiting Brianna the first time. He’d said her gift and magic were inextricably entwined, that where the one took the other protected her against what was taken, and now he demonstrated the truth of it. Magic flowed into her like a cool stream, turning Brianna’s escaped memories into leaves that were carried out of sight and once again sealed behind mental barriers.

  Her arms wrapped around him, the heat from his body warming her. He rubbed his cheek against hers, brushed his lips over her earlobe. “Liam came to me as soon as you were taken. I did what I could to send you aid, but some tasks take time to accomplish, even for me, Etaín. Despite what you might think, I’m not known to the people who come to Aesirs. I’ve made it a point not to be, though that will change so I can take better care of you.”

  Learning he’d been working to get her released loosened the tight knot her heart had become. He’d said he would never lie to her and she believed him. Like to like, if he was a part of the world her mother ran from, then he knew the value of both promises and truths.

  “Come home with me,” he said, stroking her back.

  The intensity of her desire to say yes scared her into saying, “No.” After Cathal, she couldn’t handle the increased vulnerability that would come with spending the night with Eamon.

  “No,” she repeated, pulling back, away from the comfort he offered.

  Eamon easily guessed what lay at the root of her denial, and though a part of him wanted Cathal excluded from her life, seeing her lost and hurting, her spirit subdued, eradicated any satisfaction he might feel at Cathal’s letting her go.

  “Cathal’s a fool,” he said, cupping her cheek.

  He felt her tears against his palm. Preferred her fury to this.

  She didn’t resist when he claimed her lips, silently promising them both that soon all separation would end. Another day, and then the fund-raiser. After that she would learn what her future held. She would become part of the world she was meant for.

  His tongue slid into the wet heat of her mouth. Twined gently with hers, delivering pleasure and comfort even as the flames of lust flickered into existence, burning hot between them as the kiss extended from one moment into another, and then yet another.

  “Let me drive you home,” he said against her mouth.

  “No. I’ll take a cab.” Her smile was a shadow of what it once would have been as she pulled away again. “I won’t be able to stop myself from inviting you in.”

  He didn’t press against her defenses but let her go, giving her the space she needed, Liam emerging from unlit night as she got into a taxi.

  “The same exit though a different vehicle,” Liam said, though there was less mockery in his voice and far more concern for the woman he would one day kneel before and call Lady.

  “Consider yourself freed of your task until morning. I’ll watch over Etaín tonight.”

  Cathal didn’t look away from the security monitor until Eamon got into a sedan. She hadn’t arrived with him, and by the expression on her face, hadn’t expected to find him waiting outside the club.

  Coward, he called himself for not joining them. He’d wanted a confrontation with Etaín over Eamon but in those moments after she’d—

  Even now his mind skittered away from acknowledging it, conscious, rational thought and instinctive fear battling against the radical shifting of reality. He forced himself to confront what had happened, though the shock and disbelief of it had glued him in place as she whirled and left his office.

  She’d seen his memory. His pulse throbbed wildly in his throat with the admission. He made himself face it again, more fully. She saw my memory.

  He understood then, how she’d been able to draw Brianna’s rapists. And what it had cost her to volunteer to help his family. She’d seen it. She’d lived it.

  Guilt threatened to savage him as pain rippled through him. He closed his eyes as if doing it would block out the tears he’d seen on her face as she stood outside with Eamon.

  He wanted to hate Eamon for being there, wanted to hate her for finding comfort in Eamon’s arms. Instead the conversation with Sean returned like a chisel opening his mind further to something he wouldn’t have considered days ago, that sharing a woman gave her someone to turn to, someone who might even hold the door of reconciliation open for a return to the relationship.

  Cathal replayed the scene he’d witnessed in his mind, the melding of her body to Eamon’s, the kiss full of tenderness and passion. He began hardening as a result of it, his cock becoming fully engorged as he remembered the last time she’d been in his office. When he’d pressed into her personal space and she’d allowed him to maneuver her backward, everything about her daring him to make good on his threat to fuck her if she showed up at Saoirse.

  I’m not a man to share when I’m serious about a woman.

  Then don’t get serious about me.

  He had outs. She’d given them to him.

  Eamon.

  The freakiness of what had just happened.

  The way she’d come here, carefully revealing what had happened and where she’d been without implicating either herself or Denis, then assuring him she had no problem with the justice meted out by his family.

/>   Now we both know where things stand.

  She wouldn’t come back. She wouldn’t contact him.

  He knew it with certainty.

  It should relieve him. Instead the prospect of it twisted his gut and made him curse.

  His arm swept across the desk, sending papers flying. “Fuck!” he said, and his cock throbbed in agreement.

  He wanted her, on more levels than the physical. He couldn’t let her walk away or end things between them. Somehow, he had to convince her that the reason for their meeting in the first place didn’t matter.

  He turned away from the desk and the papers scattered on the floor. As he did it, he heard a reporter’s voice on the small television mention the Harlequin Rapist.

  His stomach knotted at remembering his uncle’s warning with its multiple meanings. A chill swept into him at now having evidence she could be a real threat to the rapist, a target for more reasons than her appearance.

  If she disappeared, he would never know the truth of who took her. He might never know what had happened to her.

  By now his father and uncle would have heard she’d been taken in for questioning. They’d know she was no longer in custody.

  He went to his childhood home, brushing a kiss against his mother’s cheek before following his father into the office. The layout was similar to the one in Denis’s home and, like his uncle’s, the only place considered safe to talk freely.

  “Drink?” his father asked.

  “No. This is a quick stop for me.”

  “About?”

  “Etaín.”

  His father directed him to a grouping of furniture positioned next to a fireplace with kindling laid beneath an empty grate. They sat, a small table between them.

  “Go on,” his father said.

  “You know she was taken in for questioning.”

  “Yes. You’ve seen her since they cut her loose?”

  “She came by the club.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t tell the authorities about the drawings.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She has no sympathy for rapists. She has no problem with what you and Denis did.”

  “She said that?”

  “Carefully and in a way the authorities can’t use.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it. You believe her?”

  “Yes.” He met his father’s eyes. “I’d stake my life on it.”

  The barest nod indicated the message had been received. “Are you equally certain she didn’t cut a deal to make nice with you for a long game?”

  Cathal laughed at that. “If I let her, she’d be done with me after today.”

  “So she means something to you.”

  “Yes.” Cathal leaned forward. “I want a promise of safety for her. From you and Uncle Denis both. No hits ordered. No accidents. No disappearances.”

  “And if we won’t give it?”

  It was an effort not to bare his teeth. “If anything happens to her because of her involvement with us, then I’ll do everything I can, put every resource I have into getting justice for her.”

  His father swirled the liquid in his glass then took a sip. “I’m glad you understand about the need for justice. You haven’t asked about your cousin.”

  “How is she?”

  “On the mend. Like Etaín told you might happen, she doesn’t remember any of it.”

  He chilled with an icy reminder of what had happened in his office. Better get used to it if you intend to stay in her life.

  He turned his attention to the second of his reasons for approaching his father. “Where are the drawings?”

  “Here.”

  His father set the drink down long enough to retrieve a sheaf of papers from a wall safe. Returning, he spilled them across the table like still frames in a movie, giving reality to what had happened to Brianna and Caitlyn.

  A surge of protectiveness rolled through Cathal along with anger and regret and guilt. “These need to be destroyed.” He was surprised they hadn’t been.

  “I wanted you to see them first. So you’d know in your heart that what you did for the family was the right thing.”

  His father reached into a decorative Wedgewood bowl at the center of the table and removed a box of matches, offering it to Cathal.

  Cathal took it. “This is all of them?”

  “Unless you’re wrong about your girlfriend.”

  Fear came with the realization that Etaín living Brianna’s memories meant she could reproduce the pictures. His heart beat against his chest in an unneeded warning of danger. “I’m sure about her,” he said, lighting the stack of kindling in the fireplace.

  He placed the drawings on the grate one by one, forcing himself to look, to endure, to face a question he had no answer for even after the last of them had burned and he’d left his father’s home. What would he have done if he’d seen them first and had a choice between turning them over to his uncle or involving Parker?

  He slowed instinctively when he spotted the sedan parked a short distance from Etaín’s apartment. Though he couldn’t read the license plate number, the odds told him it was the same one Eamon had gotten into outside Saoirse.

  Seeing it here, imagining them inside together making love was like slamming into a brick wall. Truth time. Stop or continue on?

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel, wisps of jealousy returning though they were drowned out by a greater need. He wanted her, almost to the point of obsession.

  He couldn’t explain it, other than she felt right on so many levels. With her, he didn’t have to worry she was with him because of his club, or his money, or his family.

  There was a moral core to her, as evidenced by her involvement with the shelter and her willingness to help Brianna and other victims, despite the cost to her. And yet that moral core was threaded through with the kind of loyalty it would take to keep her alive and safe from his father and uncle.

  His heart beat like he was about to step into a fight ring. But he knew he had no choice other than to climb into it or she’d be gone from his life.

  If he was going to do this thing, accept another man in her life, he needed to confront it up close and personal. He slowed the car further, but only so he could make the turn into the driveway.

  Not a fool after all, Eamon thought as he watched Cathal park in front of the garage housing Etaín’s bike as the Hummer following it pulled to a stop along the curb.

  Cathal emerged from his car, but the driver of the other didn’t get out. Protection, Eamon guessed, pleased by Cathal’s actions despite having mixed emotions about Cathal being part of Etaín’s life.

  Not my choice, but the magic’s, he reminded himself, and nothing had changed in that regard. He wouldn’t challenge the primordial elements of Elfhome. Nor would he do anything to risk Etaín as she neared the point when she would successfully transition from changeling to Elf, or would die as a result of it.

  Twenty-eight

  Etaín startled in reaction to the knock on the door, dropping the hairbrush as her heart rabbited in her chest with an instantaneous urge to bolt and run.

  No, she told herself. No. She refused to live like this. She left the bathroom, hair still slightly damp from her shower.

  Tugging on shorts and a sweatshirt over naked skin, she crossed to the window and peeked out to see Cathal standing there. An ache blossomed in her chest at the sight of him, slowing the fast beat of her heart into a painful throb.

  She tried to cloak herself in anger as a way of protecting against the insidious emotions and needs his presence brought, but it didn’t come. The fury sustaining her earlier had burned itself out, leaving something far more frightening in its place, a craving for comfort and connection, for the intimacy that came not just from shared pleasure but shared, inextricably entwined lives.

  He knocked again, lightly, as if he sensed her on the other side of the door. “Etaín. Please.”

  His voice was husky and low, raw wit
h echoes of the pain she felt. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the back of the door.

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She’d never had trouble avoiding relationships before.

  But then she’d known in the instant when she’d seen him through the window of the shop that he wasn’t like the men she usually chose. Instinct had warned her away from him and she’d ignored it, just as she’d chosen to ignore the warning against offering to help Brianna. Just as, apparently, she couldn’t let her stop by Saoirse be the end of things with Cathal.

  She sent a skittering glance sideways, to the sketchpad on the desk and the drawing of the tattoo she’d been compelled to embellish when she first got home, despite what she’d learned when she touched him at Saoirse. She opened the door.

  His eyes met hers. Determined. Pleading. “Talk with me?”

  “Yes.”

  She stepped backward to let him in but rather than enter he said, “In my car, unless it’s okay if I have your place swept for listening devices. I’m sorry, Etaín. This is part of the baggage that comes with the Dunne name. I arranged for someone to take care of it, if you’re willing.”

  She shivered at the thought of having her privacy violated. It hadn’t occurred to her that listening devices might have been left behind. “I’m willing.”

  Cathal turned and motioned with his hand. A man emerged from a black Hummer parked along the curb in front of her apartment.

  Surprise lightened her mood. Given the choice of vehicle, she expected a military haircut and clothes sharp enough to be a uniform. Instead he wore a Harley jacket and black jeans.

  His hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he sported a thin mustache and goatee, shades of Johnny Depp, and she was a fan. She’d have looked at him twice if she’d encountered him on the street.

  “Sean McAlister,” Cathal said by way of introduction.

  “Quinn’s friend.”

  Sean smiled. “The very same.”