by LETO, JULIE
Still, there was so much he did not know, particularly why they were running from the men who had tried to capture the stone. Rafe did not believe in fighting, but turning tail from a blatant attack seemed cowardly and unwise. They knew nothing of their enemy. What would save them from falling prey to yet another offensive assault?
“Who do you think attempted to steal the stone?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I wish I knew. I’d suspect Hector Velez sent them, but he didn’t have the time. I’d only just gotten off the phone with him. Unless he was having me followed or tracked, which, I suppose, is a distinct possibility.”
“Who is Hector Velez?”
“A collector I pissed off.”
“A collector of what?”
She kept her vision trained through the glass windows of the helicopter, her mouth turned downward in a frown. She did not like his question.
“Antiquities. Coins, usually, but statues and jewelry and tools—anything associated with the Mayan empire. Or Incan. Or Aztec. I, um, acquired a collection of rare gold coins for him a month ago, but through absolutely no fault of my own,” she said, sarcasm tingeing her tone, “I had to dump them in a Mexican jungle. When I went back for them, the GPS device I’d attached to the package would not work. I couldn’t find them, and he’s not happy about it.”
Rafe spent the next hour asking her questions that would lead him to understand what she’d just said. She explained about a place called Mexico, about Spanish exploration and invasion against the native people, about the value of artifacts from this era, about her talent as a pilot of various aircraft and the basics behind a system of electronic tracking… and then electricity.
“There is so much I don’t understand,” he admitted.
She reached over and patted his hand. The minute their skin made contact, Rafe pulled back. Now that she’d explained the concept of electricity, he finally appreciated the sensation of her flesh on his. So much like lightning, yet more deliberate. More controlled.
And yet as wild as the open sea.
Her frown returned.
“So you think this Hector Velez sent his men to take the stone to replace the gold you lost?” he asked, hoping an increase in conversation would make up for his unfriendly reaction to her touch.
“It’s a theory, but it doesn’t quite add up. I told him I might give him something else willingly, after I found out what it was worth. But I never told him what it was. Those men who attacked me knew what they were looking for.”
Yes, they’d known about the stone. Had Rogan sent them? Had he also found a way to cheat death and was now seeking Rafe out? To what end?
He gazed out of the windows, marveling at the glow of a city beneath him. With miracles like electricity and air travel at the disposal of so many, a man like Rogan might never have risen to power. Despite the fact that Rafe had only hours ago fought against his release from Rogan’s cursed stone, his curiosity and natural need to understand the world around him fueled his desire to remain free.
If he had to battle the rogue in this century, he had to be prepared, though having Mariah Hunter as his guide in this new and fascinating world posed both problems and solutions. From her description of her profession, she was undoubtedly untrustworthy, and wily as a fox. He’d once believed his sister to be headstrong and resourceful, but Mariah’s actions thus far made Sarina look every bit the child she’d been. Even his wife, Irika, who possessed the wisdom of centuries, had not known how to fight like a man or how to protect herself against attackers intent on doing her harm.
Mariah navigated this strange world with a confidence he’d never seen before in a woman and a sensuality he believed she greatly underestimated or, perhaps, ignored completely.
“What will you do now that you know that I am still tied to the stone?” he asked.
She spared him a sidelong glance. “You’ve certainly complicated my plans.”
“I apologize,” he said, wholly unrepentant. “Of course, I might point out that I did not ask you to remove the stone from the forest of Valoren, nor did I request that you take me away from the man who seemed to know what Rogan’s marker was really about.”
“Those blokes were trying to kill me,”
“I mean the man you shot at in Valoren.”
“Ben?” she said with a laugh that was neither flippant nor funny. “He was bluffing.”
Rafe turned to face her as fully as he could, restrained as he was by the straps she insisted would assure his safety. “And how, precisely, do you hold to that judgment? He warned you that the stone was cursed by black magic. On this point, he was entirely correct.”
She scoffed at him, waving away his assessment. “I know Ben,” she insisted. “Intimately. Every so often, he makes a good guess. That’s all that happened.”
Rafe arched a brow. “You were married to him?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Crikey, no. But I wasted several years thinking he might pony up at some point. Suffice it to say I do know him well, and he was after the rock for profit and for profit only. His ramblings about black magic were meant only to scare me.”
Rafe focused again on the sky outside. Streaks of red and purple shot up from the horizon in the east, lightening the blackness to a dusky gray. Though sunrises remained constant, the world had truly changed more than he imagined if a woman could confess relations with a man outside of marriage with no shame. Even if she were not herself Romani, the conventions of his era precluded a woman speaking of such intimacies. Although the female servants in his father’s British household did not hold to such lofty ideals, coupling regularly with whatever soldiers had been sent to man the small garrison outside the valley, Rafe followed the customs of his mother and her Romani kin.
In the village of Umgeben, marriages were arranged by the elders and blessed by the puri or the Chovihano, as Rafe’s had been. His father, who had taken a Gypsy wife long after he’d been made a widower by Rafe’s brothers’ British mother, had tacitly approved. John Forsyth, Earl of Hereford, was a great many things that Rafe had not approved of, but he’d never been a hypocrite.
Nor was Rafe. He’d made love to only one woman in his lifetime, and she had been his Irika. And yet, the idea that Mariah had experienced the pleasures of lovemaking freely and without disgrace spawned an interest he had no right to feel.
“Did I shock you?” she asked, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Then our next discussion needs to be about the society’s changed attitudes toward sex.”
Rafe had no idea whether he was prepared for what he was about to learn, but he knew without a doubt that if Mariah Hunter had decided to impart this knowledge, he would not have a choice but to listen.
That was, until a bright light broke through the windows to his right. He had only a moment to recognize the full sunrise before his world went dark. The last thing he heard was Mariah shouting his name.
Seven
“This doesn’t look good,” Cat said, eyeing the destruction that had once been Mariah Hunter’s hotel room. When they’d lost her in Europe, Ben had insisted they travel to Texas, where he’d guessed—correctly—that she’d pick up a getaway car she kept stashed near the airport and then would register in a hotel under an assumed name, paying with cash. They’d been calling around to low-cost car-rental companies when the police scanner had given them their first solid, albeit disturbing lead—an assault of some sort in a hotel room rented to a woman using one of Mariah’s nom de plume.
Again, Ben had anticipated his ex’s actions to the letter. Either Mariah Hunter was a terrible creature of habit, or Ben had seriously underrated the intimacy of an affair that ended a decade ago. Either way, Cat found herself inexplicably miffed. She was too self-confident to be jealous, but she copped to annoyance, which wasn’t lessened by the concerned look on Ben’s face while he knelt over a patch of dried blood on the carpet.
“You think she’s hurt?”
he asked.
Cat pushed away her exasperation and fingered the watch she’d slid into the pocket of her slacks. Rugged in condition and techie in design, the slim and feminine timepiece she’d found near the stairs matched Mariah’s psychic signature. But that’s all she could sense. If Mariah wanted to be found, Cat’s special gift with objects might have allowed her to key into her location. But as it was, the last thing the woman wanted was for anyone to know her whereabouts.
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to at least get a bead on the state of her health. Enough people had gotten hurt in this quest to reunite the Forsyth brothers and stop the K’vr from possessing the magic of the formidable Lord Rogan. Mariah didn’t deserve to die just because she’d been greedy in stealing the stone when Ben had warned her to leave it alone.
Truth was, if Ben had been Cat’s ex-lover rather than her current one, she might have ignored his advice, too.
“She’s fine,” Cat replied.
Ben glanced at her with wary eyes. “You’re certain?”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Well, you know her better than I do, but she’s proved resourceful so far. I don’t think you need to worry about her too much.”
Ben blinked, as if shocked by her suggestion. “I’m not worried about her.”
Cat turned and headed into the bathroom. She and Ben didn’t need to have this conversation now, especially when she knew that confronting Ben’s residual feelings for Mariah meant she’d have to confess her own growing sense of insecurity. Best just to focus on the task at hand.
After paying a hefty bribe to the night clerk, they’d learned that the police had found one man unconscious after the people in nearby rooms had called the front desk to report a loud disturbance. Another witness reported seeing a woman matching Mariah’s description tearing out of the parking garage, alone but in a damned big hurry. Though the cops had taped the room off, Cat’s donation to the bored employee manning the front desk gained them ten minutes to look around. And they were running out of time.
Cat couldn’t help but wonder if following Mariah was worth the trouble. She’d beaten them to an artifact in that dank and dense forest of Valoren, but neither Cat nor Ben knew exactly what she had. For the past six months, they’d been trying to find artifacts associated with Valoren, Lord Rogan or the Forsyth family. Ben had checked with some of his old contacts and, to his surprise, learned that his former partner in crime had flown to the exact part of Germany where the little-known Gypsy enclave had once been. Convinced this was no coincidence, they’d followed. They still didn’t know how or why Mariah had come to learn about Valoren, unless, as Cat suspected, she’d been tracing Ben’s reemergence in archeological circles and had simply tried to beat him to an important find.
Which she had.
Unfortunately, the item she’d nabbed for profit meant much more to Ben than financial gain. It could contain a connection to his family—a family he didn’t even know he had until a year and a half ago.
Suddenly, Ben’s hands slid over Cat’s shoulders, his fingers kneading into the knotted muscles at the base of her neck. “What’s wrong?”
“Men shouldn’t ask that question unless they really want to know the answer,” she replied. “Don’t expect a coy ‘nothing’ from me.”
Despite her mild annoyance, his chuckle did more to alleviate the stress in her body than his increasingly delicious massage.
“Only an idiot would associate the word ‘coy’ with you, sweetheart.”
“True,” she conceded. “Maybe it bothers me a bit that we’re spending all our time tracking down your ex.”
“She has something we need,” he replied simply.
“And she’s your ex.”
“With very good reason,” Ben said, with more laughter in his voice than she appreciated at the moment. “You met her, Cat. She’s not exactly pining after me. She nearly shot my foot off.”
Mariah’s pining for Ben wasn’t her worry. Ben’s unresolved feelings for his ex were. The thought of losing him, either emotionally or physically, was quickly becoming a major concern. And Cat didn’t like it one bit.
She pulled away from Ben’s amazing hands and the solace they imparted, and went back into the bedroom. She’d come to depend on him too much. Her life and his had been inexorably intertwined by both their professional interests and their personal attraction for too long. But now, over a year since they’d first met, they were still in the same place—hunting down artifacts, making love when it suited them and never planning for any future that focused on only the two of them.
“So,” she said, needing to change the subject, “what do we do next?”
Ben shoved his hands into his pockets, and Cat watched a disappointed look skitter across his face, then disappear. “We keep looking for Mariah.”
“What about your father?”
“What about, him?” he asked sharply. “Does he still not want to be found?”
Cat slipped her hand into Ben’s back pocket, taking a split second to revel in the fine muscles of his glutes, and retrieved the photograph of Ben’s mother that he’d been carrying around for months.
“Hey,” he protested, his expression somewhat abashed.
“I knew you had it with you,” she replied.
“That’s the danger of living with a psychic.”
“That’s the danger of living with someone who pays attention,” she countered.
After Paschal had disappeared, purportedly on some sort of mission with outcast K’vr princess Gemma Von Roan, she and Ben had searched his Texas home for clues to his whereabouts. Of all the items in his house, she’d gotten the strongest psychic vibrations from this tiny picture. He’d kept the locket-size photo with him ever since.
“I didn’t want you to think I was a mama’s boy,” he said.
She laughed. “Your mother’s been dead a long time. I don’t have to compete with her, too, do I?”
“You don’t have to compete with anyone,” he assured her, but Cat ignored his obvious attempt to alleviate her insecurity and focused on the photograph. Unlike Paschal, who used psychometric power to connect items to specific events in the past, Cat’s ability allowed her to zero in on the owner’s emotions and, with extreme effort, their current location. If they wished to be found. From touching the picture, she knew that Paschal had loved his wife deeply and had been committed to her happiness until the day she died. But that was all she got.
“Still nothing.”
Ben pressed his lips together. “But he’s alive, right?”
Cat blew out an anxious breath. Paschal wasn’t a young man, a fact both Ben and she accepted but rarely discussed. That he went willingly with Gemma—a known enemy—was disturbing enough. Factoring in his advanced age made it hard to remain optimistic.
“I’m not sure,” Cat admitted, “but I think if something happened to him, we would know. Besides, Gemma needs him, for whatever reason. She won’t let anything happen to him until she has what she wants.”
He snorted, but without humor. “That’s the problem. We don’t know what she wants. She might already have it. My father could already be—”
“He’s not. You know he’s not.”
Ben didn’t reply, and his eyes, gray like his father’s, were stormy with his unspoken fear. She couldn’t blame him for worrying. The danger to Paschal was very real, just as was the danger to Mariah. Anyone connected with the Valoren curse put their lives on the line, which made Cat feel all the more like a stupid girl for concerning herself with the state of her relationship with Ben when his elderly father had run off with a woman of dubious alliances, and Mariah had disappeared from a trashed hotel room with blood on the floor.
“Where do we go next?” Cat asked.
Ben ran his hands roughly through his thick, dark hair, breaking Cat’s heart with the sense of loss that surrounded him.
“We go back to the beginning,” he answered.
“Back to Valoren?”
He grabbed her hand, reeled her in and kissed her with such passion, Cat decided to let her doubts about their future melt away with the heat. “No, back to my office at the university, where we first met.”
The light in his eyes was one she knew well. He wanted to make love, and far be it from her to deny such a request. “The university still considers you an employee?”
He shrugged. “Last I heard, they haven’t moved our stuff out yet. Officially, Dad and I have applied for a sabbatical to do research on the Romani culture that will be the stuff of legend, or so I told the department chair. And I think it’s time to put some truth behind that statement. Until Mariah tips her hand. She’s smart, but she can be sloppy when she’s under a lot of pressure.”
“You mean that business with Hector Velez? You still don’t want to contact him, maybe find out what he knows?”
By his immediate frown, she knew he wasn’t yet willing to poke that sleeping dog. “Men like Velez don’t give up information on the cheap. I’d rather not tangle with him if we can avoid it.”
“And if we can’t avoid it?”
“Then once again, we’re in big trouble.”
* * *
Morning did not bring the answers Gemma had sought. She and Paschal had spent most of the night on the floor of the repository, sleeping off a fatigue Gemma hadn’t experienced since she’d battled the flu. By four o’clock a.m., she’d regained enough energy to drag herself and a barely conscious Paschal up to the first-floor bedroom. She dropped him on the bed, covered him with a blanket, then grabbed a quilt and cuddled into a ball on a chair at his bedside. When the sun defied the drawn wooden blinds at sunrise and flooded the room with light, she awoke with a start.
Paschal was watching her, a hint of a smile on his still-pale lips.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, instantly defensive.
“You snore,” he replied, implying that he’d been awake and watching her sleep for quite some time. His skin still looked as thin as paper, and the circles under his eyes made him resemble a raccoon.
She sat up, yanking at the blanket that had tightened around her. “Yeah, well, so do you.”