by Неизвестный
She also liked looking at some of the other houses that backed on to it. None of them was as nice as Talon’s lodge, but they were all large and sturdy compared to the average house back in her own world.
As she walked, she silently debated the course of action she was contemplating.
Could she really sever Vandar’s control? Or was she going to end up with her mind fried and her body lying on the floor like a dead husk?
The image was all too real, and she shuddered. Feeling pulled in one direction and then the other, she kept walking. Finally, she knew she couldn’t stay out any longer. She was usually home by now, and Talon would wonder why she was out so long.
Retracing her steps, she hurried back toward the lodge. When she stepped out of the woods, she spotted Talon. He was standing on the brick paved area that he called the patio, in front of some kind of round table that she’d seen out there. It had shiny metal legs and a black body. When she’d passed it before, it had been covered by a black dome with a handle in the center.
This afternoon, the dome was sitting by itself on a built-in bench.
Wondering what Talon was doing, she kept walking toward him. He had a rectangular can in his hand, and he pointed it downward, shooting a stream of liquid into the curved bottom of the table. Even at this distance, the liquid gave off a sharp smell that she didn’t like.
Curious, she came closer, just as he pulled a box out of his pocket and dragged something across the edge. A small flame sprang up, and he held it toward the table.
As she stared in horror, a great mass of fire leaped into the air.
“Talon!”
At the sound of her voice, he spun toward her, but he was still so close to the flames that she knew his clothing was going to catch on fire.
CHAPTER TWELVE
KENNA’S HEART BLOCKED her windpipe as she took in the terrifying scene. It flashed through her mind that she could use her talent to shove Talon away from the fire, but he was still fifty feet away, and at that distance, he was much too heavy for her to push him to safety.
The table was much lighter. Gathering her mental forces, she sent a wave of energy toward it, pitching it over so that the flames shot away from Talon. The table landed on its side, the black pieces scattering across the patio surface.
“What the hell?”
When she saw Talon’s foot moving toward the still-burning pieces, she leaped at him, trying to throw him to the ground. But even with her arms around him, she couldn’t bring him down.
Holding on to him, she struggled to speak. “Stay away from it.”
“It’s okay.” His arms came up to cradle her reassuringly.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“Yes.” He stayed where he was but looked over his shoulder at the overturned table. “What just happened?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” she answered in a shaky voice. “The fire was going to burn you.”
He shook his head. “It was just the starter fluid for the barbecue grill.” From the quizzical tone of his voice, she suspected that he hadn’t been in danger at all. She’d simply misinterpreted another innocent event from his world.
He turned his head and stared at the barbecue grill where it lay on the ground.
Although desperation had made her throw the thing away from him and fling the burning black pieces across the patio, she couldn’t admit that she had done it. All she could do was hold on to him, because it felt like the universe was tipping under her, and he was the only stable thing she could grasp.
Or maybe she just wanted the excuse for the close contact. She’d thought that she was grateful he was keeping his distance. Now she understood that she’d been lying to herself.
And lying to him by her silence. She wanted to change the rules between them, and the only way she could do it was by telling him the truth about herself. Maybe he would be angry. Maybe he would send her away, but at least that was better than the shame of lying to him.
Making a sudden decision, she said, “I have to tell you . . . something important.”
“You’re finally ready to come clean with me?”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard. “I come from . . .” She was prepared to tell him the truth, but before she could finish the sentence, a bolt of lightning struck inside her head, sending a shock wave of pain through her skull.
She screamed, and her knees buckled. She thought she had built a fortress around her thoughts, walling her off from Vandar’s reach. She had, and the pain came from inside the wall, reverberating off the insides of the safety zone she had built.
Another scream bubbled in her throat. As she gasped and jerked in his arms, he tightened his grip on her.
“Kenna?” Above the pain, she heard the urgency and the fear in his voice. “Kenna, what’s happening to you? What’s wrong?”
Her lips moved, but no words came out. She was incapable of speech. All she could do was fight the agonizing sensation of hot needles drilling into the fibers of her brain.
She had practiced protecting herself. She thought she had put up barriers against the monster who held her in his grip. He was far away. Out of her sight. In a different universe. But she’d been wrong. He didn’t need to be here to punish her act of rebellion. The trigger was already in her head, put there before she left home.
The pain held her captive, robbed her of speech, and crushed the air from her lungs. She was going to drown, like a fish tossed onto the deck of a boat.
Talon had laid her gently on the ground. Above her, through wide, staring eyes, she saw his face wavering in her vision. He looked frightened and confounded as he stared down at her. When she tried to force his name past her lips, she found her muscles were no longer under her command.
She heard him curse as he crouched over her. “I should get help. But I don’t want to leave you,” he muttered.
MILES away, Ramsay Gallagher was about to step through the doorway of his office when he felt a jolt of pain in his head. His vision wavered, and he had to grab the doorjamb to stay on his feet.
For a long moment he stood in the doorway, fighting the sudden stab of disorientation that was so different from anything he had ever experienced in his long life.
The feeling of disconnection and the pain were real, yet he couldn’t relate to them in any normal way. Iron bands kept him from drawing air into his lungs, and sweat broke out on his forehead and the back of his neck.
Finally, as the pain began to ease, he drew in a full breath.
When he felt as though he could let go of the woodwork, he swiped his hand across his forehead and staggered to his desk chair, gripping the leather arms as he struggled to ground himself to reality.
He didn’t know what had just happened, and he didn’t like it. But he had always had a great deal of self-awareness, and he catalogued the sensations that had struck him.
The sudden pain in his head. The constriction of his chest. The cold sweat. The fuzzy sensation in his brain.
They had all struck at once, and he couldn’t recall a similar incident in his long life.
He had fought long and hard to protect himself from harm. Was he dying after all these years?
What had he done recently that could have triggered this sudden attack? Nothing, he assured himself, until he remembered the ceremony a few days ago, when he had let his mind drift where it might and found the woman who had been caught in the storm, then trapped by the great tree.
A ripple of alarm went through him. Did she have powers he hadn’t guessed at? Had she done this to him? Or were the two of them caught in something that neither of them understood?
He had thought he should try to find her. It had stopped being a choice. He must do it.
But first, he needed to get himself back to normal. After several deep breaths, he walked to the front door of the chalet, then out into the afternoon sunshine, dragging in a draft of the clean mountain air. A herd of deer was grazing in a sheltered meadow nearby. Although he couldn’t s
ee them, he knew where to find them, and he started through the pine forest, humming softly, telling them that he was coming.
WITH a terrible effort, Kenna managed to get out one word, “Stay.”
“Okay,” he murmured, his hand closing around hers. She felt her fingers twitch, but she couldn’t grasp him.
She didn’t know how long the awful spell lasted. But after a time, the pain in her head eased. Somehow she found she could move enough to press his hand and gasp in air.
His total focus was on her, and when he saw she was a little better, a look of relief flooded his face. “Kenna.”
“I . . . I’m . . . fine,” she managed to say before her voice died out again.
Tenderly, he scooped her up in his arms as though she weighed no more than a child and carried her to the house. Closing her eyes, she rested her head against his broad shoulder, feeling him climb the two steps to the porch, open the door, and kick it closed behind him as he carried her down the hall to her bedroom.
After laying her down, he sat on the side of the bed, his face drawn with concern. “What happened?”
She scrambled for an explanation, and a word popped into her head. “Migraine.” She hadn’t even known what it meant until she said it. But the knowledge came with the unfamiliar syllables. It was a kind of serious headache that some people got.
His brow wrinkled. “But you’re better now?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have medication for it?”
“It goes away by itself,” she whispered.
“I should take you to a doctor.”
“No!” A feeling of desperation welled inside her, and she didn’t know if it came from her own mind, or if it had been triggered by Vandar’s silent orders to her. But she knew she couldn’t risk having a man with medical knowledge examining her. He might know she was lying, and he might find out her secrets. What if he could tell she was from another world?
“You’re . . .”
“Fine now,” she said, reaching for Talon, telling herself she had to distract him, but that was only part—a small part—of her reasoning.
When he stiffened, she tugged on his shoulders.
“Talon, please. Hold me.”
As he hovered above her, the breath froze in her lungs. His face was taut, telling her that powerful forces warred inside him. She felt the same pull and push. But the pull was stronger. For her.
Was it stronger for him?
She searched his face, seeing the banked fire of desire in his eyes, certain that she had the key to breaking through his resolve.
She pulled him toward her, until she could feel his warm breath on her face. Then, finally, his lips touched hers, and she rejoiced at the emotion she felt surging between them.
The contact was heavenly, but she knew she needed more.
Opening her lips under his, she drank him in—the subtle combination of scents and taste that were uniquely his.
It was clear that he had stopped resisting, and she pulled him down to the surface of the bed so that he sprawled half on top of her. As his body settled onto hers, she clasped him more tightly, captivated by the weight of him—and by the way his hands roamed restlessly over her, moving from her shoulders to her ribs to her hips.
Boldly, her tongue met his to stroke and slide, the contact sending alternately hot then cold shivers over her skin.
“Talon,” she murmured into his mouth, getting it right this time, but she wasn’t even sure he heard her, because the syllables were lost in the pressure of her lips against his.
When he lifted his head a few inches, her breath caught as she saw the way he was looking down at her.
Fire burned in the depth of his gaze, a fire that sank into her soul.
He wanted her. And she wanted him. Because he could drive the terrible thoughts from her mind.
No. It had started like that. Now she was swept into a whirlpool of passion that threatened to drown her. But she wanted to drown in the passion.
In this charged moment, she knew that the only important thing in either universe was what was happening between the two of them.
Struggling to hang on to that truth, she tugged on his shoulder again. Resisting the pull, he shifted her in his arms, easing her to the side so that they lay facing each other on the bed.
As her hands traveled over his face, his broad shoulders, the corded muscles of his arms, her heart raced, the beat frantic, as frantic as her need to get closer to him. As close as a woman could get to a man.
Reaching for the placket of his shirt, she began to open the buttons, revealing the broad expanse of his chest. Without giving herself time to think, she swept the fabric aside, then plunged her fingers into the crinkly hair that fanned out across his chest. When her fingers slid over his flat nipples, he sighed his approval.
She wanted that same pleasure. Tossing away any pretense of propriety, she dragged his hands to the front of her shirt, cupping them around her breasts.
He made a sound of pleasure, shifting his lower body against hers so that she could feel the pressure of his stiff rod against her thigh.
She knew about this. From whispered conversations at school—about how a man’s thing got hard when he was ready for sex.
In Breezewood, a decent woman must be married to get this close to a man. But she wasn’t home, and the rules didn’t apply. Certainly they didn’t apply to a slave. Those rationalizations went through her head as she eased into a more intimate position so that his sex was pressed to hers, with only scant layers of fabric separating their heated flesh.
“Lord, Kenna” he groaned, his hips moving rhythmically against hers, his body like a furnace, heating her.
The hands at her breast stroked and pressed, skimming over her stiffened nipples, sending a quivering wave of need surging downward through her body.
“You’re not wearing a bra,” he said in a thick voice.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m supposed to, but it’s not comfortable.”
He muttered something that was a cross between a laugh and a curse. Then he found the hem of her shirt and dragged it up, exposing her breasts to the cool air.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
“Am I?”
“Don’t you know?” Lowering his head, he took her breasts in his hands, pressing his face between them.
“Oh,” she gasped.
She ran her hands through his thick hair, heard his breath coming hard and fast. Like hers.
Nothing in her life had ever felt this good, this intimate. And even in her inexperience, she knew that there was only one way this encounter could end.
But when he lifted his head, the words he spoke astonished her.
“We have to stop,” he said between gasps of air.
“Why?”
“Because you just had a . . . migraine attack, and I’d be taking advantage of you now.”
“You’re not! I . . . I started this.”
He eased away, flipping to his back and lying with his body rigid and his eyes closed, breathing hard.
What if she shifted herself so that she was lying on top of him? Would that change his mind? Probably. But he’d given her a moment to think, and she knew he was right, at least for him. If she forced him into something that he thought was wrong, she would regret it.
So she lay beside him, struggling to hold back the hot tears forming at the backs of her eyes.
She ached to tell him the truth about herself—so much. But that wasn’t an option.
“After you have a migraine, what do you do?” he asked.
Scrambling for an answer, she answered, “Rest.”
“Okay.” He made a dismissive sound. “I guess you don’t want steak for dinner.”
“What?”
“I was going to grill steaks. That’s what I was doing with the barbecue.”
“I’m . . . sorry I didn’t understand.”
“Don’t worry about it.” As he spoke, he climbed off the bed.
She
looked at the rigid set of his jaw, expecting him to say something else, but he exited the room, leaving her alone.
Her hands clenched as she lay staring after him. She might have pushed herself off the bed and followed, but she wasn’t sure what she would say. Or do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TALON WALKED DOWN the hall, trying to will his heart to stop pounding—and will away the trembling feeling in his arms and legs.
Christ!
One moment he had been comforting Kenna. In the next, he had been on the verge of making love to her, until a burst of sanity had swept over him.
He cursed again. He could be lying next to her, feeling totally content. Instead, his nerves were jumping. His feet carried him to the front door. Outside, he righted the barbeque grill, then used a shovel with a squared-off blade to scoop up the charcoal briquettes and dump them back into the grill. A few were still burning.
How had it tipped over? Had he caught one of the legs with his foot when he’d whirled around? He didn’t think so. But maybe he hadn’t felt it in the heat of the moment. Heat, yeah.
At dinner, he was going to tell Kenna about the upcoming canoe trip. He’d still have to take care of that.
Back inside, he headed to his office. At the computer, he Googled “migraine” and scrolled through the symptoms, which included throbbing or pounding pain in one temple. Interestingly, the temple afflicted usually changed sides from one attack to the other.
Kenna had been in severe pain. That was certain. But the attack didn’t match what he was reading about migraines. Take the duration, for example. These headaches usually lasted for four to seventy-two hours, which didn’t exactly square with what had happened to Kenna. The pain had come on her suddenly, when she’d been trying to tell him something.
What had she said? “I come from . . .”
That was as far as she’d gotten. Was the timing of the attack significant? Could it have something to do with her words? She wanted to tell him, but the pain stopped her.