He was already leading her around the side of the house. “The front is for losers.”
“All right, then.” A wooden gate barred the way to more concrete steps that also led down. Where you’d normally see a latch, there was a wooden disc carved with a frowning face. Xia touched the disc, and the gate opened.
“I said no more crime. Really.”
“No crime,” he said. “I promise.”
“You are aware that breaking and entering is a crime in the state of California?”
He looked at her over his shoulder with a bracing display of the Xia that irritated her to no end. Thank God. “Yeah?”
“Do you even know whose house this is?”
“Uh-huh.” He held open the gate for her.
“Okay, whose?”
“I told you we were going to my place. This is it.”
When she’d gone through the gate, he closed it, and they continued down the steps to a flagstone patio with a metal table and two metal chairs. There were more painted wooden discs around the back door. Xia did something with his hands that made her head throb. They weren’t sharing their mental space anymore, so her headache was a coincidence. Had to be. Right? Right.
He opened the door and walked in with her behind him. She saw a mud room with a laundry room across a short corridor to a bathroom. He didn’t do anything like turn the lock when they were safely inside. He did, however, take off his shoes and socks.
To be polite, she did the same thing while he opened the back door and dumped what looked like a gallon of gray sand from his boots. He flapped his socks out the door, too. She followed suit. When she turned around, Xia was shirtless and working on his leathers. He threw his wallet on a shelf.
“Hey!”
Practically before the word was out, he was naked. He shook out his clothes, then bent over and scrubbed his hands through his hair. Gray dust rained down. “You better do the same,” he said. “You don’t want this crap on you longer than necessary.” He walked into the bathroom and started the shower.
“I’m not taking my clothes off in front of you.”
With one arm still in the shower adjusting the taps, he looked at her. “Why not?” He seemed genuinely baffled by her objection. “We’re going to do it later, anyway.” He smiled at her, and really, he must be the only man in existence who could make a beautiful smile terrifying. “Or are you taking that back?”
“I’ll just call you Mr. Romance from now on.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. I’m still not letting you in my house covered with that crap. You can shower in here or go hose yourself down outside. Your choice.”
“Fine.” The truth was, she wasn’t taking it back. Why should she? Plus, her skin was starting to itch. “Hand me a towel, please.”
He reached out of her line of sight and came back holding a black towel. Still naked, he grabbed his discarded clothes and dumped them into the washing machine. “Put your things in when you’re ready,” he said.
He got in the shower.
Alexandrine turned her back and stripped. Dust floated in the air and onto the floor. She threw her clothes in the washer with his. Now what? Was he expecting her to wait out here until he was done? Or something else? What did a girl do with a naked man?
The shower door was glass, and aside from a bit of steam, it was crystal clear. Xia had his back to her with his head bowed while he washed his hair. And what a lovely back it was. If he’d ever been injured, you sure as heck couldn’t tell now. She dropped her towel and got into the shower with him.
Chapter 14
Xia turned when she closed the door after herself but kept soaping his washcloth. Water dripped down his face. He blinked a couple of times, and Alexandrine smiled at him. Why, yes, she was a little nervous about making the first move. She could so easily crash and burn. What if he threw her out? “You’re not going to tell me you don’t take showers with witches, are you?” she asked.
His gaze traveled from her head to her toes, lingering on the bits in between. “Fuck, Alexandrine,” he said. He made room for her under the water. “You’re all legs, aren’t you?”
She looked down, partly for the sake of tweaking him but mostly to hide her smile of relief. “I’m okay, I guess.” There was, of course, nothing wrong with her body. She worked out hard, and that, combined with some lucky genetics, gave her something to flash at a naked hottie in the shower.
“Baby,” he said, “you are way more than okay.” He put away his washcloth to grab the shampoo. With a little adjustment and some deliberate clumsiness, they got her hair washed and grit-free. The soapy water around their feet ran less and less gray. There was a constant zing of magic between them, too.
She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t a bit giddy at touching him. Not the slightest ding marred his skin. Those thousands of bloody pinpoints were gone. So was the nasty cut on his shoulder. Best of all, he was aroused, his penis thick, and that was actually a relief. She didn’t think she’d ever been so turned on in her life, and judging from the evidence, he didn’t feel much different.
Then Xia put aside the soap and the washcloth and propped both his hands on the shower wall well above her shoulders while he leaned in. Closer and closer until his torso pressed against hers. They both ignored the fact that he was keeping his erection away from her. They were walking a fine enough line as it was. When they finally did do it, she didn’t want them to be in a shower. Not with the limitations he was placing on the act. Probably. Unless he started doing stuff like this, in which case, oh, God. She tilted her head toward his. She did like a man taller than she was. He kissed her and proved the spectacular first time was no fluke. The man knew how to kiss a woman senseless.
He leaned closer until his belly touched hers, his erection, too, and she about dissolved. The talisman was trapped between their bodies.
The stone flashed hot. Burning hot.
Alexandrine saw stars. Not the good kind. Her hearing and vision went out and then flashed back from a different perspective and a different body. The pain was incredible. Everything inside her was on fire. She saw and heard herself say, “Crap.”
Everything winked back, and she landed in her own head, her own body. Her sensations instead of his. Only now she was hypersensitive to everything. The sound of the shower hurt her ears; water hit her skin like boiling rain. Xia’s back was flat against the opposite wall, his irises were red-flecked white, and then back to neon blue. His knees wobbled. She would have helped him, but she was too dizzy to manage much besides turning off the water.
“Are you all right?” she asked. The amulet lay ice-cold on her skin.
Instead of answering, he put a hand to the shower door and bowed his head like he was praying for patience.
She felt pressure behind her eyes. “Are you doing magic?” she asked.
He rested his forehead against the door. His shoulders slumped, and then he tensed like he was getting a full-body cramp. “Fuck,” he ground out. Alexandrine put a hand to his shoulder, expecting him to shrug away the contact. He didn’t. He fumbled with the door and stumbled out.
Alexandrine followed. Gently, she closed the shower door. Unlike Xia, she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself. “What happened?”
He shook his head. Water dripped off him, and she handed him a towel, too. He scrubbed his face dry. “We have got to do something about that goddamned talisman. It’s dangerous.”
“Agreed,” she said. She felt more than a little apprehensive about the talisman, but she wasn’t deluded enough anymore not to recognize the way the thing worked on her—drawing her in, making her feel like she wouldn’t survive without it. “But how?”
“We need to crack it.” He met her gaze. It seemed impossible that two minutes ago they’d been about to become extremely personal with each other. Now he was all business. “What’s inside needs to come home.”
She took a step back and wrapped her towel tighter around her. The amulet was hers. It belonged to her
. It wasn’t for Xia to decide what they should do with it. She understood how twisted and even evil her sense of possession was, but that didn’t stop the reaction. She made a tight fist and forced herself to ignore the creepy-crawly way the talisman made her feel. Xia was right. Whatever was in there needed out. No matter what it did to her before or after. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I know.”
Xia rubbed himself dry. How like a guy to be so freaking low maintenance. He headed into the laundry room and threw his towel into the washer. He grabbed a box and measured out detergent. “Bring me your towel, would you?”
“I don’t have any clothes.” At least he didn’t seem to be angry with her.
“So?”
She gave him a look, and he relented.
“All right, all right. Here.” He snatched a T-shirt off a shelf behind him and tossed it at her. “That’s all I’ve got for you until our clothes are clean.”
The shirt was plain white, and when she had it on, the thing hung halfway down her thighs. Long for a T-shirt. Short for anything else. Great. So much for modesty. She gave her hair a quick rub before she took her towel to the washer and dropped it in. “I need a comb, if you have one. Some moisturizer would be good, too.”
He twirled some dials, and the washer started. The man had no shame whatsoever. Every muscular cut he had was on view. Thank God, because the sight gave her something to think about besides what it would mean to crack the talisman. “Cabinet above the sink.”
Sure enough, back in the bathroom there was a comb, along with a moisturizer so expensive she had to wonder about the woman who’d left it behind. Jealousy was not a pretty thing, but, yes, indeed, she was jealous. She sat on the john and worked on her hair. Didn’t take long seeing as how her hair was so short. Now for the moisturizer. Cucumber scented. While she put it on, Xia walked into the bathroom. He’d put on a pair of jeans, and he stood in the doorway with a thumb hooked through one of the front belt loops. No shirt. She tried not to be obvious about looking at him. Golly, though. He smiled at her. The sort of smile that acknowledged the sort of look she was giving him. What if they never managed to work out this sex thing? By now they both knew they’d be hot together. They just had to find a way around this. Please.
“A lot could go wrong,” he said. “There’s no guarantee it will work. And if it does, it might not work right. I might not survive.” His gaze stayed steady on her. “You might not.”
She put the tube of moisturizer on the floor. “I know the truth now, Xia.” She pulled the amulet out of her shirt and let the carved panther lie on her open palm. Inside her, a dark and unpleasant voice whispered that she could hide the amulet or say she dropped it somewhere, and while he was looking for it, sneak out of the house. And it was telling her that if she ran, she could keep the talisman forever. She waved her other hand. “I used to look at it and imagine the person who carved it and think, wow, what a talent to make something like this out of a lump of rock.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s beautiful anymore.”
Hell. Was she even getting through to him? From his tense expression, no. “Now that I know what it is, I can’t live with this.” Inside, she was nervous and jumpy and a bit sick to her stomach. “I don’t care what it does or doesn’t do to me or what happens when you take it back.” She hung her head for a minute before she continued. “Okay, I do care, but I can’t have this around me. I just can’t. There are some things, Xia, that are just wrong.” Her stomach clenched. “And this amulet—talisman—is one of them. I’d rather be dead than tied to something like this.”
“Just so we’re clear about the risks, baby.”
She blocked off her panic about what would happen to her without the talisman. “From here, my future looks bleak no matter what. So let’s just do what needs to be done. Now.”
Xia reached behind him and pulled out his knife. He did that whenever he was upset or in the process of making a decision. He drew a fingertip along one of the surfaces. It was a relief to know she didn’t have to hold back with him. She didn’t have to pretend she was normal or hide what little ability she had. She didn’t have to omit details about her past or lie about it, either. A flare of light between his finger and the blade fluctuated through the colors of the rainbow, and the back of her head got cold. Magic. That was his magic she was feeling. She waited to hear what he’d say.
“The problem,” he said without looking away from his knife, “is that with you wound up around the talisman like you are, you’re going to need to pull in order to help keep you safe.” He lifted his head, but only enough to see her. “You understand?”
“Not really. I mean, I’m not sure,” she said. The toilet seat wasn’t comfortable. No matter how she shifted, her butt was cold and getting numb. “It’s better if things are perfectly clear. Especially since we both know I can’t pull reliably.”
“Copa solves that for you.”
Her heart headed for the floor, taking her stomach along with it. “Copa.”
“You’re going to have to pull. Alexandrine.” A frown quirked at his mouth. “I know how you feel about taking drugs, but it’s the safest way to do this. If we do it. Otherwise it’s like I’ll be in there with a machete when what I need is a scalpel.”
Alexandrine rocked forward. “You said it’s addicting to mages.”
“Yeah. Eventually.”
“But not so much for mages without much magic?”
He shook his head. “No exceptions that I know about. But it’s only addicting when you keep using.”
Alexandrine took a deep breath. “What’s it like? Taking copa.”
“You’re magekind, Alexandrine. I’m not. I don’t know what it’d be like for you. All I know is taking the copa will help you pull enough magic to make this safer.”
There had to be another way. But as the panicked thought clamored in her head, a voice in there whispered, You could use magic. Real magic. At last. “That doesn’t mean it would work on me.”
He rested his head against the doorway. “It’s not about whether you have much magic or not, Alexandrine. You have plenty. It’s just you can’t use what you have because you didn’t get taught before it was too late.” He frowned. “It’s like this. Rasmus has an open door between him and his magic. You have a pinhole. Every now and then, the talisman widens your access, and if you knew anything about what to do with your magic when that happens, you could probably take Rasmus’s head off. The copa will make your pinhole wider. Give you better access and allow you to pull more than otherwise.”
She stared at him. Great. Just great. “You sure there’s no other way?”
“Nothing that isn’t way more risky than this.”
From somewhere deep inside her, a place she knew could never be buried deep enough, she felt a buzz of anticipation. She would feel what it was like to have the kind of magic that mattered. She’d be able to do things. Create fire from atoms in the air, turn on a light when she was nowhere near the switch. Hell, she might even be able to impress her father. She could pull magic and change her reality with a thought or a word. Her throat closed off. She refused to blink for fear she might cry. It wasn’t fair to want this so bad and have it be for all the wrong reasons.
“You could keep the talisman,” he said. “We could wait for Nikodemus to get back and see if he can’t do something to help.” He drew a breath. “He saved Carson from something similar. Maybe he could save you, too.”
“There’s no way of knowing how much longer it’s going to hold together, right?” she asked.
Xia nodded. “It could crack in you, Alexandrine, and I don’t know if I could bring you back from that.”
“So,” she said softly, “we wait. Or we crack the talisman now. Either way it’s risky.”
“Pretty much.”
“But the longer we wait, the more unstable the talisman gets.” He nodded. She traced a line on the floor with her bare toe. There was another side to this they were both avoiding, and it was time t
o get it out in the open. “The longer we wait to do something,” she said while her stomach turned to lead, “the longer what’s trapped inside suffers. Isn’t that true?”
He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth before he answered her. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s true.”
“All right, then,” she said.
He touched the side of her head, taking a lock of her platinum hair between his fingers. She wondered if he was thinking about Rasmus. “I’ll throw it away afterward,” he said.
“The talisman?”
He gave her a look. “The copa.”
It didn’t matter, but she didn’t tell Xia that. The real danger wasn’t that she would steal some copa off him afterward. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. The real danger was the bone-deep hunger for magic she’d lived with all these years. If she fed the hunger now, after starving for so long, she’d spend the rest of her life knowing there was a way to have the magic back. No wonder mages abused the stuff.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Xia said. His hand slid around to her cheek.
“Now,” she whispered. Her heart pounded in her ears. “Let’s do it now, okay?”
He inclined his head. “There are rituals,” he said, “that can make this easier. For us both.”
She knew he meant easier for her. “Rituals.” She licked her lower lip. “What kind of rituals? Do I have to do something disgusting to you?”
“Well, it helps,” he said with no change in expression, “if I’ve had a mind-blowing orgasm beforehand.” He ogled her. “Two or three would be even better.”
“Pervert.” She was grateful that he’d tried to make her laugh. That was really very sweet of him. And coming from him, that meant something. Her heart kind of twisted up. Here he was being decent to her, thinking of her when he hated her because of her father and because of what she was and what had been done to him by people like her. She resisted the urge to throw her arms around him and hold on tight.
“So?” he said.
My Forbidden Desire Page 14