by LETO, JULIE
He nodded, then followed her toward the cabin. “I understand, but tell me about this fireless torch. What’s it called?”
“In Australia, a torch,” she noted with a snicker. “In America, where we are, it’s a flashlight.”
“Australia?”
“My homeland. You might know it as…” she started, trying to remember the history of her native country, “New South Wales.”
He stared at her blankly.
“Aren’t you British?” she asked.
His lip curled and his nose twitched, as if a skunk had discharged a warning directly in their path. “I am Romani.”
“Half Romani,” she said, remembering that his father had been a British earl.
He merely sniffed in response. “In my world, the Romani half was all that mattered.”
“Probably not to your father,” she said.
“Especially to my father,” he replied curtly.
Mariah let the matter drop. She understood better than most how relations with parents could be complicated and contentious. She loved her own father deeply, but he’d been a bush pilot in the Northern Territory who considered rough living to be the ultimate test of his manliness. He’d raised two sons the same way. He’d never exactly been sure what to do with his daughter.
Her mother hadn’t been any more insightful. When she’d abandoned the family to move to Sydney, she’d left Mariah behind, taking her in only after Mariah had reached puberty and Bert Hunter had left his ex-wife no choice. When Mariah wasn’t rebelling against high expectations and responsibility, she’d gotten on pretty well with her mum once they were reunited. Unfortunately, the damage to their relationship had been done. Mariah was still fending off the demons born of a childhood of not fitting in, and she didn’t want to stir up those memories tonight.
“We should get inside,” she said, pointing the beam of the flashlight toward the door just as a cloud opened up and dumped a flood of rain on top of them.
Lightning followed. Mariah cursed as sheets of cold rain doused her, ruining her chances of remembering under which clay pot she’d buried the key. Suddenly, Rafe took her arm and pulled her inside, shutting the wide-open door firmly behind them.
“How’d you do that?” she asked, swiping water from her face. “Wasn’t it locked?”
He did not reply. Mariah lit the kerosene lantern she kept on the table beside the door, then darted to the supply closet, where she pulled out a couple of towels. She handed one to Rafe, then dried her face and hair so that water didn’t drip down her back. Still, she was shivering, and if there was one thing Mariah hated, it was being cold. She longed to strip out of her soaking wet clothes, but realized she’d left her only change of wardrobe back in the chopper.
She wrapped the towel around her shoulders and tried to keep her teeth from chattering by whistling. Under the dim golden glow, she scanned the room, frowning at the layer of mountain dust clinging to every surface, and especially at the empty wood box beside the fireplace.
The previous owners had sold the place fully furnished, if you could call an old, scarred table with four chairs, a bookshelf filled with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and a stack of National Geographic magazines, a tattered sofa that pulled out to a sleeper, and a butt-ugly but comfortable recliner “furnished.” Not that she needed much. Mariah had often lived with less. She could do rustic. What she preferred not to do was dirty.
With a sigh, she started yanking the sheets off the furniture, coughing when the dust flew into her nose. Rafe, on the other hand, stood frozen near the door with his arms crossed over his chest, as if waiting for her to finish.
She tossed a sheet onto the floor. “You could help,” she suggested, shivering when an icy drop slid off her hair and down the front of her shirt.
“I suppose I should,” he said reluctantly.
“I know that men of your birth didn’t often do heavy lifting when it came to housework, but like it or not, you’re in the twenty-first century now. In our day and age, the men help.”
He arched a brow. “I’m not averse to assisting you, but what do you wish me to do?”
She smiled. She liked a man who could take direction. “Well, we need to make this place habitable. We’re stuck here for a few days while I figure out where to go next.”
He nodded, then rubbed his hands together as if about to lift something heavy. Then he closed his eyes.
She was about to comment that a standing nap wasn’t going to make the cabin any warmer when the pop and crackle of a fire caught her attention. She stared at the fireplace. Flames licked at a thick cord of wood cradled inside. The smell of smoke instantly reminded her that in closing up the cabin, she’d likely shut the flue.
Darting forward, she wrapped her hand in a kitchen towel and reached just above the flames to work the mechanism, She coughed and turned to ask Rafe how he’d lit the fire when what she saw nearly knocked her off her feet.
The entire interior had changed. Besides the warm fire, a dozen sconces magically placed throughout the cabin flickered with the light of thick candles. The walls, once rustic pine paneling, were now covered by draping tapestries that blocked out the windy cracks and made the space immediately warm and cozy. Even the furniture had been transformed. Dozens of tasseled cushions covered the couch, the bare floor was now hidden beneath a half dozen animal skins and the rickety table was now made of mahogany and burgeoning with fresh berries, steaming meat and a large carafe of wine.
“What…?” she said with a gasp. “What did you do? How did you—”
He held out his hand to silence her, his eyes still closed. The tension in his face, in his entire body, was palpable. She took a tentative step nearer and saw that he was shaking.
“Rafe, what’s wrong?”
His eyes flashed open. His pupils had expanded so that his irises were a slim silver circle around total blackness. His stare was unfocused, but penetrating.
The hair along the back of her neck, which had dried from her nearness to the fire, stood on chilled ends. Something was very, very wrong.
“Rafe?” she asked, taking a tentative step toward him.
He turned to her, stabbing her with his sharp gaze. “You must make love to me. Now.”
“Excuse me?”
She blinked, and he was standing directly in front of her. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers digging into them. “Make love to me, Mariah, or we shall both die.”
Nine
The demand ripped from a crack in Rafe’s soul he’d thought long sealed. Lust tore through the weakened fissure, hard and hot, tensing every muscle in his body, making his head rush as blood flooded to his loins. Never in his life had he made such a crass demand to a woman, not even to his own wife.
But the impulse to mate, to feel his hard sex buried deep within Mariah’s softness, overwhelmed him. The tips of his extremities prickled with fire. His eyes burned. The storm now raging outside mirrored the tempest brewing within his body. On impulse, he slammed out of the cabin and dashed into the rain. He threw out his arms and shouted at the wind, howling like a man who’d lost his mind, praying the water would cool this inexplicable heat.
He sensed rather than saw Mariah come out after him.
“Go!” he ordered, not daring to look at her.
“What’s happening?”
He wished he could tell her. He had no words to convey the madness crashing through him—a crazed blackness that burbled from deep within him like a foul and viscous sludge. He needed to purge the hot pitch from his insides, and he knew, somehow, that the only way to stem the flow of darkness was to make love with Mariah. To surround himself with her light. To bathe in her powerful strength and beauty.
He dropped to his knees. Icy water sluiced down his face, shirt and breeches, cooling only the outer layer of his skin and doing nothing to alleviate the burning deep inside. Lightning flashed above him, and with the thunder he wailed in anguish, the sound echoing against the tumult of the night.
“Rafe?”
Her voice was soft. Concerned. She’d come nearer. Too near. Had the woman no sense? He’d thought her so unlike Irika, yet here she was, looking for him in the dark night when she should be running in the opposite direction.
He took her by the wrist and dragged her to him until their lips smashed together. Instantly his heart lightened. The infusion from her mouth gave him enough self-control to push her away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She’d skidded across the wet ground, but pulled herself to her knees and swiped the back of her arm over her mouth.
“Look, I don’t know what kind of women you hung out with in your century, but I’m not hot for men who manhandle.”
He buried his face in his hands. The kiss had lightened the darkness inside him, but the living shadow still remained. Tied, he suspected, to the magic he’d wrought inside the cabin. He’d wanted only to provide comfortable quarters, but he should have known that using Rogan’s powers came with a bitter price.
As he looked up at her, he dragged his fingers down his face. “I would never force myself on you. It’s the magic. It has infected me.”
“What are you talking about?”
He flew to his feet, took her by the hand and attempted to throw her into the cabin, to remind her of the handiwork that had brought him down this path, but she was ready for him this time and countered his touch, flinging him to the ground. He fell to the sodden dirt with a painful thud, his breath stolen. She’d backed away, but stood at the ready, prepared to battle him again.
“Explain,” she demanded.
He closed his eyes, willed his lungs to obey him and attempted to comply. “The magic that imprisoned me within the stone is evil, and it is at my disposal. When I used it to make the cabin habitable, the darkness overwhelmed me. I feel it now, slogging through my veins like tar. But I know,” he said, looking up and blinking against the rain, “I know that touching you, kissing you, will purge the madness.”
She glanced back into the cabin, where the door remained open and the inside glowed with comfortable warmth. She stepped closer to him, then, shockingly, placed her hands on his shoulders.
“That’s the craziest pickup line I’ve ever heard,” she said. Her tone told him the comment should elicit humor, but he could feel nothing at the moment but the darkness and, thanks to her nearness, the renewed ache of desire.
“You should leave,” he said.
She smirked. “Which one is it? Do you want me to leave or do you want to kiss me?”
He couldn’t answer. The war raging within him between honor and insanity was too much for any mortal man to fight. Only, he wasn’t a mortal man anymore. He was something else—something evil and magical and trapped, and yet free. Mariah’s touch had released him, even as he’d fought against the pull she had awakened.
Swallowing thickly, he looked up into her eyes. The calm amber of her irises spiked his need.
“Kiss me,” he begged.
He saw the hesitation in her eyes, just as he saw the moment when her gaze narrowed in determination. She placed her hands firmly on either side of his cheeks and pulled him close. Their lips met with a clash. He hardly trusted himself to respond, terrified that the magic would force him to take too much, too fast, but she proved as deliberate and strong in intimacy as she was with the attackers who’d attempted to steal the stone.
He fought to give quarter to her hungry lips, to yield to her gentle coaxing. When he opened his mouth to thrust his tongue against hers, she stopped him, rubbing her thumbs along the edges of his lips until he relaxed. Then, slowly, she dipped her tongue into his mouth and, with slow, deliberate swirls, diminished the anger surging within him.
But it wasn’t enough. Concentrated in his center like a single beam from the white-hot sun, his lust did not abate. He mimicked her position, hands splayed across the sweet flesh of her face, and sucked from the kiss all the dizzying light he could take. But even as the darkness receded, his need for her increased. Not because of the magic within him, but because he was a man.
Her flesh was like satin. She tasted of rain and smoke from the fire. He moved his mouth so he could drink in the rivulets of rain flooding down her face, tasting her skin with renewed hunger. His shirt clung to him so tightly he could hardly move, so he ripped it off and allowed the deluge to soak him completely.
She pulled away, but in her eyes now, where there had been both fear and anger, he now saw blatant desire.
“Better?” she asked.
Had he incentive to tell the truth, he might have said they could stop—that her kiss had broken the dark spell. Her wide, round pupils and softly panting breaths convinced him to stay the course.
“Not quite yet,” he replied.
This time, he kissed her. Immediately, she slid her hands down his chest, sighing against his mouth as her fingertips grazed his skin, tangling her fingers in the hairs on his chest and tugging until he groaned in grateful appreciation. She pressed closer, and her nipples, taut with need beneath her blouse, grazed his heated flesh.
The kiss was slow and deliberate and thorough. He licked her lips, prying them open with soft, gentle flicks, working his hands down her back as he progressed to a full mating of mouths. He curved his fingers over her backside, enraptured by the groan of pleasure she pressed from her lips into his. She wanted him as much as he wanted her—and she had no magic to blame.
“We should go inside,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s cold,” he replied, though the chill had utterly surrendered to the heat of their embrace.
“Then let’s get warm.”
* * *
Mariah took Rafe’s hand in hers and led him to the cabin, unsure about what was happening. Over the course of the last forty-eight hours, she’d gone on the run from her ex-lover, nearly fallen to her death off an isolated cliff, flown back to the States while dreaming of a swarthy man whose kisses made her dizzy, and escaped an attack in her hotel room with the help of that same dark stranger.
She could no more deny that he possessed a real and powerful magic than she could refute the fact that she wanted him with the kind of desperate need she hadn’t felt in years.
That alone had pushed her over the edge into recklessness. Whether or not she believed that the dark magic he’d used to conjure the now beautiful interior of the cabin stoked him to lust no longer mattered. She wanted him. And Mariah was nothing if not indulgent of her desires.
Once inside, the storm shut out by the locked door, Mariah silently stripped out of her clothes. She neared the fire, loving how the heat evaporated the wet chill clinging to her skin, wondering how far Rafe would go to warm her through and through.
When she turned, her backside growing hot so near the fireplace, she was surprised to see him still standing by the door.
“I thought you wanted to make love?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out until after he’d cleared his throat. “You are… beautiful.”
She attempted a smile, afraid her jaded attitude might have turned the genuine curve into more of a smirk. “You say that as if you’ve never seen a naked woman before.”
“It has been centuries,” he admitted.
Mariah brushed aside the weight of his confession. “But you haven’t forgotten how this works, have you?”
His stride made the cabin seem instantly minuscule. He took her hands and, as he dropped to his knees, tugged her to the ground with him. “I have not forgotten?”
She glanced down at his pants and boots. “You sure?”
An instant later, they were gone. She had only a split second to register the aroused length of him when his mouth descended on hers. The magic seemed to fire his lust, and as her mind swirled with the intense pleasure of his lips on hers, she decided the aftereffect was a definite perk.
His hands played across her flesh with a gentle urgency that reminded Mariah how long it had been since she’d ha
d a lover. That was, she surmised, the reason she’d given in so easily. Never one to guard her sexuality, she indulged her needs whenever the mood struck her. And damn, but the vibes were slapping her hard now.
She learned his body with her palms and fingers, marveling at the power in the musculature of a man who claimed to be a ghost. And he was responsive to her touch, groaning with pleasure as she ran her fingers down his spine, rounded them over his strong backside and teased the crevice between his buttocks. He responded in kind, though he tugged her forward so that his full erection pressed against her belly.
Her sex quivered and wept with anticipation. When he skimmed around her belly and then stretched his thumbs upward to tease her breasts, she nearly cried out.
“You are…” he started, but he dropped his lips to her neck, and whatever words he’d begun to say died as his mouth found more delicious pursuits.
“I am hot to feel your mouth all over me,” she said, filling in the blanks for him.
He stopped long enough to look her in the eye.
“All over?” he asked.
She licked her lips. “English hasn’t changed that much over two hundred years, has it?”
“No,” he said with a grin, “but women have.”
“It’s all for the better,” she assured him.
“Undeniably.”
Locking her hands around his neck, she tugged him down so that her back was nestled in the warmth of the furry bearskin and her chest was pressed against his. She speared her fingers into his hair as he restarted his downward exploration. He ran his tongue along her collarbone, nipping at her shoulders with just enough pressure to spawn a raging wildfire of gooseflesh across her skin. When he swiped his tongue across her nipple, she felt sure she’d combust from the inside out.
“Yes,” she goaded. “Right there. Just like—”
He needed no more instruction, plying her sensitive flesh with lips and tongue and teeth until she nearly came undone. As he stroked and laved and teased, he murmured foreign words against her skin that fired her further. By the time he licked around the edge of her belly button, she was convinced she was losing her mind.