by Cherry Adair
“I want to take a walk around the perimeter.”
His dark blue eyes smoldered in reaction to something he must’ve seen in her face. Serena gave him a cool glance, getting a firm grip on her emotions and controlling her expression, because not to would invite conjecture. She was not going to go there. “You don’t have to. My protection spell is solid.”
“I don’t doubt it.” His eyes lit up, as if he knew what she was thinking. Which he didn’t. Thank God.
“But I’m going to check anyw—” The cardboard package flew out of the trash can, and almost hit him squarely on the forehead. “Holy shit, Fury,” he said with a wide, sexy grin that deepened the dimple near his mouth.
He simply cast a glance at the crumbled cardboard and it flashed into flames, instantly reducing it to a small pile of gray ash at their feet. “Temper, temper.”
“Annoyance, annoyance,” she mocked his tone. “If I actually lost my temper the entire building would fall on you.” She stuck her hands in her pockets. Damn it, she hadn’t even realized she’d subconsciously attacked him until she’d seen the cardboard go flying. “If you want to be the manly man, go for it. Fly free.”
“If you won’t come with me, then stay here,” Duncan said softly. “Wait for me.”
He meant, Serena told herself watching him open the door, wait until I get back inside. But the words sounded like a sensual promise. Ridiculous. She telekinetically rerolled the thermal blanket, rewrapping it in its protective covering. Duncan didn’t like her any more than she liked him. So what if the sparks flew when they were in close proximity? Just because there was some sort of pheromone thing going o—
A fusillade of gunfire cut off her thoughts and made her jump. A bullet ricocheted off an outside wall with a high-pitched ping. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she started running for the partially open door, then pulled herself up short. Was she nuts? There were bullets flying out there.
“Duncan!”
Duncan teleported back inside the warehouse just in time to observe Serena racing for the door, screaming his name. Which might have been intriguing if she wasn’t running straight out into the barrage of live rounds directed at the door.
He’d find out the who and why later, he thought grimly, keeping his weapon trained on the doorway. Right now he had to get Serena out of the line of fire.
He yelled her name. She kept going. Jesus, the woman had always been focused and intense, but this time it could get her killed. Duncan shimmered directly in front of her, grabbed her arm, and yanked her away from the partially open door just as a bullet ricocheted off the corrugated wall beside them.
Screaming bloody murder, she swung blindly, almost putting his eye out with her fist.
He didn’t waste time. Lassoing her struggling body with his arms he teleported them the fuck out of there. She was still fighting him when they arrived in his apartment. The bedroom, to be exact.
Bracing his body against the wall, Serena’s back to his chest, he locked his arms around her waist. “Whoa! You’re safe. Stop fighting.”
“Let me go, damn it.” She wiggled out of his hold.
He put his hands up in the surrender position.
Serena, being Serena, whirled around and punched him in the stomach as soon as she was free. She curled her fist as he’d taught her in seventh grade, and put her whole body into it. Apparently it hurt her a lot more than it hurt him, because she jerked her arm back.
“Ow! Damn it to hell, you son of a bitch. Ow!” She shook out her hand, annihilating him with a glare. “You had a gun with you. You knew those men were going to be there, didn’t you?”
“I always carry a weapon, and no, I didn’t expect anyone to be there.” Not there in particular. But he was always prepared. And rarely disappointed. This little jaunt had been no exception.
“Funny how you just attract that kind of excitement, isn’t it?” she said furiously. “Nice work. You’ve progressed from fistfights to bullets. Were you shot?” she demanded through her teeth, scanning his body as if she had X-ray eyes. She’d barely taken a breath.
Probably. There was a smear of blood on his palm. “No. I—”
She punched him again.
“Hey! Stop that before you hurt yourself.” He sucked in a breath, thinking it was actually fortunate that his artwork wasn’t flying off the walls. He half expected the damned carpet to be yanked out from under his feet and the fire sprinklers to go off, she was so annoyed. This was Serena at her best.
He choked back a laugh. “You sure do a lot of hitting for a pacifist.”
“I’d hit harder if you’d just stand still!” Her hair caught the light from the wall sconces, shiny as satin and the color of living flame as it fanned out around her. Fire.
A hectic flush made her skin seem lit from within. Damn she was gorgeous. He kept that incendiary thought to himself.
She stepped away from him, her flaming hair settling inside the fur-lined hood of her coat hanging down her back. Rubbing one hand with the other, she narrowed her lovely gray eyes until they glinted like pewter between her long, dark lashes. “Damn it, Duncan! Why is it that whenever you’re around, violence erupts? I told you I didn’t want to go to the warehouse. Activity invites interest and we’re trying to keep a low profile until the blanket is loaded on the train.”
He admired her ability to shift blame at the same time as he counted guns from memory. Three of them. Double-action semiautomatic RAP-410s by the sound. “You’re blaming your robbery on me?” he asked innocently, wondering what the Russians were doing with South African weapons in a small, nothing town on the edge of Siberia.
No one could have known he’d be there. And Serena, the Humanitarian, didn’t have any enemies other than her two middle-aged stepsons. And Duncan couldn’t see them lurking around an industrial neighborhood in Siberia.
Still, he didn’t believe in coincidence either. He put it on his mental checklist. He watched her decide whether retreating from the argument was the better part of valor. “I didn’t have anything to do with those guys shooting up the place.” He rubbed his palm across his belly because he knew it would give her satisfaction to think she’d hurt him. He’d been hit by harder things than the small fist of a woman.
“Oh, please,” she scoffed. “You show up and ten minutes later bullets are flying. Of course you’re responsible.” She suddenly realized where they were. “And what the freaking hell are we doing in someone’s bedroom?”
“Not someone’s bedroom. Mine.”
She twisted around, taking in the surroundings in one visual sweep. The bed was king-sized, covered with a heavy, scarlet silk, Oriental spread—thing. The furniture was black lacquer. The lighting was low and dim, the wallpaper textured charcoal silk. It was sumptuous, sexy, and masculine. Or that’s what the decorator had told him. The jury was still out. Looked like a freaking dark bat cave to him. The only thing that he liked, and he’d had them for years, were a series of black-and-white etchings.
“What do you think?”
“About your décor? The red silk is a little…chichi isn’t it? How about orange?” She waved a hand and the red silk became a heavy, nubby material the pinkish-yellow of the inside of a Travita orange. She dusted off her hands. “Much better.”
The moment she turned to study his artwork, Duncan changed the spread to a navy blue. He didn’t much like that either, and tried the soft gray of Serena’s eyes. Silk? No, velvet. That worked.
“Have you slept with all these women?” she asked, walking across the thick carpet to inspect the twelve nude etchings lined up along one wall, stark in their black frames. There was a large brush-and-ink nude over his bed by the same artist.
He wondered if she’d notice that the model bore a striking resemblance to herself. “I collect them,” he told her, watching her face. She didn’t see the likeness, which was fine with him. When he’d started collecting the pieces, he’d never imagined that he’d ever have Serena in his bedroom.
; “Of course you do.”
He knew she wasn’t talking about the Hans Esneck etchings, but didn’t bother disputing her assumption. She was swaying on her feet. “You look a little pale.” An understatement; her paprika-colored freckles were standing out in sharp relief on her chalky skin. “Feel okay?”
“Sure, why would a few bullets flying over my head be a problem?” she snapped sarcastically. “No, Duncan, I’m not okay. I’m a long way from okay.”
He frowned when he noticed the slight tremor in her fingers as she brushed a strand of hair from her face. “That’s a given,” he murmured, concerned. “Stay and have a drink before you go. Some coffee at least.”
“No thanks, I—Oh.” She sat down quickly on the foot of his bed.
He suddenly had an image of Serena’s naked, freckled body, spread pale and supplicant against the gray spread. “You’ve gone from pale to green.”
“I can tell,” she said weakly, closing her eyes. “I feel kind of pukey, actually.”
Her admission ratcheted his concern up another notch. “Lie down,” he told her gently, but his tone was implacable.
Gingerly, she lay down on her back, her feet still on the floor. The fact that she’d obeyed his order, no matter what his tone, without protest brought him to her side immediately.
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“You’re the first woman I’ve brought into this room.” Because he’d only bought the flat six months before, and the decorator had only finished dicking around with fabric and swatches he didn’t give a rat’s ass about, a week ago.
Her eyes were closed, but her lips curved in a small smile. “Are you telling me you’re a virgin? Do I look—What do you think you’re doing?”
He was tugging down the long zipper of her coat. “Taking off your coat. This is London, not Siberia.” He could easily have stripped off the garment, and anything else he chose, without so much as touching her.
But touching Serena was pure pleasure.
“I don’t want you undressing me.”
He pulled her left arm out of the sleeve without any resistance at all. “Ah, love words,” he teased as her arm fell limply to the bed as soon as it was free. “Don’t toy with me, Fury.”
“I’m serious, Duncan. I’m not just going to lie here while you undress me. This is a very, very, very, very bad idea. Very.”
He started to smile. Any other woman, and he’d be thinking she’d finally come to her senses and decided that making love would ease the tension left by the shoot-out. But Serena wasn’t any other woman. The amusement disappeared instantly as he started pulling off her other sleeve and saw the blood.
She’d been shot.
A straight line slicing through her down coat showed the path of the bullet across her upper arm. Damn it to fucking hell, he thought, hit with panic and a pain so sharp it could have been his own. Adrenaline was preventing her from feeling it, but any second now she was going to realize she’d taken a hit and then she’d feel it. With a vengeance.
What he’d at first attributed to the dissipation of the adrenaline rush, was instead loss of blood. He swore under his breath. Screw the slow removal of her clothing, he wanted to check her arm now. He used magic to strip off the coat, and materialized a glass of Scotch at the same time.
“Hey, Fury.” He tapped her cheek with his finger. She was conscious, but just barely. He lifted her head and pressed the glass to her lips. “Take a sip.” Unless she’d changed drastically over the intervening years, Serena rarely drank. She had a low—make that extremely low—tolerance for alcohol.
Which he’d discovered the night she’d chugged shots of tequila at Trey’s sixteenth birthday party. He’d teleported her home to Henry and Martha, making sure to shimmer to the spot where the old oak blocked the front door light.
He’d kissed her, there in the jasmine-scented darkness. She didn’t remember their kiss.
He’d never forgotten.
She took a small sip of whiskey, choked, and made a face, all without opening her eyes. “God. That’s disgusting.”
Ignoring her dismissal of his prized, very expensive single malt Macallan Scotch, he magically removed both her sweater and the shirt beneath it. Which left her pale, upper body clothed in nothing more than a wisp of a semitransparent bra already stained with her blood. The room was cool, and her nipples peaked beneath the thin cloth.
“Medicine,” he told her firmly, looking down at her arm instead of the temptation of her breasts while he held the glass to her mouth. The crease from the bullet wasn’t too deep. No muscle damage that he could see, but it was bleeding copiously. The velvet spread beneath her was already darkening.
He couldn’t heal her as his brother Caleb could have done, but he materialized the necessary items he’d need to clean, stitch, and bandage the wound. Fortunately he could do what needed to be done without physically holding needle and thread. “Swallow.”
“Poisoning m-me?”
Trying to get you to pass out. “Open your mouth and finish this or I’ll kiss you.” He managed to get another ounce of whiskey into her before she clamped her teeth together. Stubborn.
“I have to treat your arm. It’ll hurt like hell if you’re not anesthetized in one way or another. Whiskey or pain? Here or a hospital?”
He studied her face as she took a quick inventory of her own body, and gauged the pain. “Whiskey.” She shuddered. “Here.” She grudgingly allowed him to finish pouring the rest of the amber liquid into her. “Better get a—get a b-bucket. Know what happens when I drink.”
Yeah. He did. He materialized a bucket from under the bathroom sink. If he could still be this attracted to a woman about to hurl he was in serious trouble, he thought, half amused and half terrified as he placed the container within easy reach.
It didn’t take long for the Scotch to hit her overloaded system, and before she could puke, she was out like a light. Duncan tended to her arm quickly and efficiently. He’d done the same procedure dozens of times, both on himself and others; it was all part of his T-FLAC training. Cleaning and stitching by rote, he didn’t enjoy sticking a needle into Serena’s soft flesh.
She was going to hold every single one of the small, evenly spaced stitches over his head like the freaking Sword of Damocles, too.
When her arm was bandaged, he picked her up and carried her to the head of the bed. Mentally stripping back the covers, he gently laid her on the mattress and covered her.
Nine stitches.
Damn those sons of bitches to hell. Who were they? Had the shooters been after the technology for the thermal blanket? Did they even know what the fuck the thermal blanket was? Or were they just willing to kill anyone who got between them and what they thought might be inside that warehouse?
He’d locked the door, and more effectively, strengthened Serena’s protective spell, even though the one she’d cast had been excellent. No one was supposed to have been able to get that close to the warehouse. That fucking close to her. Didn’t make sense.
But he’d find the answer soon enough.
He’d never had the leisure of looking at her this closely before. Her skin was as fine-grained as a child’s, the freckles charmingly sprinkled across her pert nose and cheekbones. She’d been such a complete and utter pain in his ass for so damned long that it was strange to allow himself a moment to let down his defenses and just enjoy looking at her. His chest filled with an overwhelming surge of desire. Still. After all this time. He’d always had a serious case of the hots for Serena. And as strong as that attraction had been, had been the knowledge that he could never act on it.
Emotional commitment had never been in the cards for him. Duncan had known that from childhood. Known the Curse so well, and so completely, that he never had to think about it. It just—was.
Over the years he’d observed Serena growing from a gangly, engaging little girl to a beautiful young woman. And every year it had become harder to ignore the compelling pull of attraction he
felt for her. Even knowing that a relationship between them was ill advised, if not downright dangerous, it had been hard enough to resist Serena’s allure when they’d been teenagers.
But now…
Resist her he must. Nothing had changed.
But God, he wanted her.
He was dying of thirst, and she was a cool, still well.
Duncan brushed his fingers lightly across her warm cheek. So soft. She was so delicate and yet so damned strong. Seeing the small, feminine outline she made beneath the covers, it was difficult to relate her sleeping form to the larger-than-life persona she was when she was awake. She’d hate knowing just how vulnerable she looked when she was asleep. She’d hate, Duncan thought wryly, shrugging back into his coat, really hate, knowing that she snored.
With a grin, he teleported back to Schpotistan, and Vladimirskaya Street, to have a little chat with the bad guys.
Joanna listened with half an ear to the after dinner conversation. Hurry up, people, she thought with rising panic. My son’s life depends on us working through this problem. Now!
Casey must be terrified. I’m going to give those bastards what they want, sweetheart. Mommy is going to get you home. Soon.
Please God. Let it be soon.
“Thrust augmentation methods can be used to increase the effectiveness,” Dr. Stuart Menzies suggested, shoving his fingers through the pale, flyaway hair over his left ear. The yellow-white strands stuck up in all directions because he was always pulling at it as he talked.
As they did every evening after dinner, the scientists gathered around the junk-food laden coffee table in the common room. Serena had made sure that the meals at this facility were top-notch and plentiful, but the thought of eating when she was this stressed made Joanna’s stomach churn. The thought of making idle dinner conversation made it worse, so she’d stayed working at her computer until the dinner bell had sounded, then she’d slipped into the kitchen and baked a cinnamon swirl cake. Her son’s favorite.
Despite the frigid weather outside, the lounge was toasty warm with two space heaters going. The aroma of strong coffee and cinnamon hung in the air, but Joanna found no comfort in the familiar scents tonight. She let the sound of the other team members’ voices lull her into a feeling of safety and she wondered for the thousandth time if she should tell Serena how badly someone wanted to steal the technology for the thermal blanket.