“Well, this is socially inexplicable,” she muttered.
“Hush,” Dragos said.
She hushed, blanked her mind and waited, while she watched him study strands of her hair.
Her hair had always seemed somewhat coarse to her, so thick and such a pale blonde it was almost white. The ends sparked with gold highlights in the sun. When she wore it loose instead of in the usual ponytail, it hung halfway between her shoulders and waist.
Dragos fisted his hand in the long bright strands and held it to his nose, inhaling. There it was. There was the mystery he didn’t know how to solve. He’d thought of it as wild sunshine, but that was when he’d had the merest scrap of scent on a piece of paper.
The actual reality floored him. Somehow her delicate feminine fragrance did more than capture the essence of the sunlit air. Somehow it took him back almost further than he could go, back to the morning of everything when he basked in transcendent light and magic. That ancient time, so piercing, young and pure.
He found his unhurried way back to the present and studied her hair again as he fingered it. It felt like Chinese silk, and the highlights were the same color of some alluvial gold deposits he had known. He had a thirteenth-century Peruvian statuette that was the same color. He dropped the handful of hair and proceeded to study everything else about this mysterious, unpredictable female.
“I didn’t think you would be so young,” he said. He felt the same wild surge of excitement he had in that other long-ago time, when he had lost control and crashed through the undergrowth in chase of—something. He looked at her supine body lying so still and submissive underneath him and exercised a ruthless clampdown on his self-control. “There is Wyr blood in you. Also human.”
He watched her long graceful neck muscles as she swallowed. “I’m twenty-five,” she said, her voice turning husky.
The predator in him noted she made no mention of the Wyr blood. But she gleamed with subdued Power, and he remembered in the dream she had been as luminescent as the moon. Had that luminescence been symbolic or literal? What Wyrkind or Fae would gleam like that? The Elves carried a light within them but not like what he had seen in the dream.
“Look at you,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re a baby, nothing but a moment, a heartbeat.”
She took a quivering breath. “I’m more than that.”
He quirked an eyebrow but otherwise ignored the faint protest.
For all her paleness she was rather jewel-toned. There were the gold highlights in her hair. The cream in her light skin was like pearls. Those large eyes that watched him with such frightened, perplexed arousal were a violet blue as deep as the midnight sky. Like sapphires. He could almost fancy he saw distant stars in those eyes.
He sat back on his heels and stood while he yanked her to her feet. “We’ll go now to wherever you are staying.”
She staggered a bit as she regained her footing, watching him with the wariness of a wild creature ready to bolt again. “Why?” she asked, dark blue eyes flashing. “You’re just going to kill me. Why don’t we get this over with already?”
“You have no idea what I am going to do,” he told her. That had to be true, because he didn’t know himself. He was awash in strange emotions and impulses. His lids dropped as he watched her face. He said, “I have a lot of questions. Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you go.”
“You mean that?” She searched his face.
He laughed, a husky, wicked chuckle. “No.”
Fury flashed across her face and was dampened. “Fair enough,” she said, voice flat. She turned and strode toward the beach house.
Dragos followed, frowning. Just like he didn’t like the photo of her walking away from the camera, he didn’t like her voice dull and flat or her expression shuttered. It muted those jeweled tones. The fear and stress in her scent jangled, depressing the intoxication of her arousal, the addicting young wildness of her normal fragrance.
That flash of fury had been much more interesting. Fury also had a scent, like the crackle of a bonfire.
She scooped up a pair of sandals. He watched her trim ass and long slender legs as she climbed wooden stairs to a balcony and entered a beach house by sliding doors. She dropped the sandals again just inside. As he entered, he closed and locked the door behind him.
She went to the kitchen sink and focused on scrubbing the sand from the abrasions on her palms. The house was growing chilled, the kitchen floor tiles cold under her sandy feet. Her ponytail felt like a rat’s nest attached to the back of her head.
Still in that flat, dull voice, she asked, “Are you hungry?”
He paused, surprised again by her. He leaned against a wall. There was no telling what the lunatic in her body would say next. “What if I am?” he said.
She glanced at him, face tight. “If you are, I’ll need to order delivery. I’m a vegetarian and you’re rather famously not. Assuming I’m not on the menu for your dinner, I don’t have anything to feed you that you’ll like.”
She meant to feed him supper?
He had serious questions for this female, his property to locate and an outrage and fury he had set aside, not banished. He had justice to mete out and vengeance to claim, but first he had to map out this unfamiliar territory he traveled in.
He realized something. For the first time in a long time, perhaps even centuries, he wasn’t bored. From the moment he picked up that scrap of paper in his lair, his little thief had continued to surprise him.
Dragos rubbed his jaw and prepared to be entertained. “Get something,” he said.
She began thumbing through a telephone directory on the kitchen counter. She flipped past the yellow pages, and the red pages for business, to the green pages for Elder businesses. Her head was ducked as she muttered under her breath.
Dragos leaned forward, barely catching what she said. “What?”
She paused and looked at him, eyes wide. “What—what?” she asked.
“You whispered, ‘Get something, please,’ ” he told her. “What is it you want me to get?”
Despite the grimness of her situation, she was surprised to find amusement bubbling up. She kept a stern grip on it.
“It’s normal,” she told the dragon, “for people to say please when they make a request. You said, ‘Get something.’ Most people would say, ‘Get something, please.’ ”
“Ah.” Dragos folded his arms. “But I did not ask for anything. I ordered it.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “That you did.”
Her finger traveled down the green page and stopped at the number for an Elder restaurant. Hands shaking, she punched in a number.
A youthful, musical voice answered the phone. Elven.
All too aware of the keen gold gaze focused with relentless patience on her, Pia said, “I’m calling from a beach house on Folly Beach.” She rattled off the address. “Will you service this area?”
“Of course we will,” said the voice. “We know the address well.”
“We would like a dozen porterhouse steaks,” she said. She looked at her captor. “Dragos, do you want them raw or cooked?”
“Just seared,” he said.
The person on the other end of the connection drew in a swift breath. “We will be with you soon as we can,” he said. “It may take a little while. Delivery in about an hour.”
“Soon as you can will be fine,” she said.
She deleted the number from the cell phone’s memory, clicked the off button and placed it on the counter. She didn’t think Dragos had looked away once since they had entered the beach house. It was just one more thing to add to a growing list of things that felt unreal.
Then she stood, staring at her hands. An hour, she thought. God, it felt like forever. Her shoulders sagged. She didn’t think she had any more adrenaline left to pump into her system. “They’ll be here soon. Now what?”
He pushed himself away from the wall. “Now,” Dragos said, “you tell me why
you stole from me. And how. Most especially we will discuss how.”
FIVE
Pia kept her gaze down. She touched one abraded palm with a finger. “My ex-boyfriend blackmailed me into doing it.”
“Keith Hollins,” he said.
Startled, her head jerked up. “You know who he is?”
His black eyebrows rose. “I know a lot of things.”
His sentinels had worked fast that morning before he left New York. While the witch had cast the tracking spell for him, Aryal and several others had run a background check on Pia Giovanni. They winnowed through other possibilities until they found the right one. A team had been dispatched to search her apartment and follow any leads they found. Soon after the spell was in place and he had collected preliminary information, Dragos had taken flight, arrowing south for his prey.
“Your boyfriend is dead,” he told her.
Just like that, she had had too much. Her vision grayed and the world tilted.
Dragos leaped forward, hard arms snaking around her before she could collapse. He eased her onto a bar stool and pushed her head down. Her ponytail was a mess, he noted with disapproval as it spilled toward the floor. He kept one hand at the back of her neck. With the other, he worked the puffy elastic thing out of her hair until it fell free, if still somewhat tangled. He slipped the puffy thing into his pocket.
She asked, muffled, “Did you kill him?”
“No. Nor did my people.” The skin at the back of her neck was chilled. He felt the shiver ripple through her. “They found him earlier today. Bad death.”
“Damn that poor idiot. I tried to warn him.” She covered her face with her hands.
Jealousy spiked. His lip lifted in a silent snarl. She was his thief, nobody else’s. “You loved him.”
“No,” she said, wretchedness in her voice. “Yes. I don’t know. I thought I did once, but he wasn’t who I thought he was. After I broke things off with him, the bastard blackmailed me. I knew he was going to get himself killed. I even tried to warn him but he wouldn’t listen to me. He got what he deserved, but it’s still hard to hear about someone I used to care about.” She clenched her fists. “Let me up. I’m not going to faint.”
He released the pressure he had been putting on her neck. She sat upright in the bar stool. She looked composed but her skin was ashen. There were goose bumps along her bare arms and shoulders.
“You are too cold,” he said. “That means shock, I think. We will change that.” He noted the bottle of scotch on the counter by the sink. He retrieved the bottle along with a coffee mug from the cupboard. He poured a drink and shoved it into her hands. “Drink that while I find a blanket.”
She looked at him askance as her fingers curled around the mug.
“Yes, I know,” he said, impatient. “I am going to rend you from limb to limb. Someday. When I feel like it. In the meantime, you will not faint, you will get warm and you will stop being distressed.” His nostrils pinched. “I don’t like how it smells.”
Her pretty mouth fell open. “You don’t . . . like . . .” A hysterical giggle bubbled out and turned to outright laughter. She listed on the bar stool, the coffee mug tilting.
He covered her hands with one of his own, steadying the mug, and pressed a finger against her lips. “Stop that.”
“Sure.” She hooted. “Whatever you say.”
He wasn’t by any stretch of imagination an expert on emotions, let alone female emotions. Scowling, he tapped her lips.
“I’ll just, I don’t know, be happy until you decide to start rending.” She hiccupped. “How will that do, Your Majesty?”
“I was being sarcastic,” he said.
“Which is very reassuring, coming from a pissed-off dragon,” she told him. “Kinda like the whole ‘tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go’ joke. Definitely has its own charm. I bet all your other prisoners love it.”
Her slender body continued to shake. She was out of control. He would get no sense out of her as long as she was this overwrought. Dragos cupped her chin. He stared into her eyes, intending to beguile her into a sense of calm. Instead he came up against a mental barrier. Intrigued, he inspected it, feeling along the borders.
The barrier seemed to be both natural and intentional. There was the echo of another feminine Power interwoven in it, a subtle presence very like her own and yet separate. It was an altogether beautiful construction, an elegant citadel that protected the female’s core.
This was why she was able to break the beguilement in the dream. He could batter that wall down if he wanted to, but that would be like taking a sledgehammer to an opal. There would be nothing coherent left to salvage of her afterward.
“Stop it,” she whispered. Her body had stiffened, straining away from his touch. “Get out of my head.”
He held fast and used his voice instead of his mind. “Quiet, female,” he murmured. “Be quiet now.”
His deep voice murmured. Tendrils of the sound curled into the air and wrapped around her. It soothed and reassured. Her breath shuddered and she grew still.
She stared in Dragos’s gold eyes. Impossible depths existed in those brilliant pools. She could fall into his gaze and never come out. “Valium’s got nothing on you,” she murmured. “Bottle that, and you could make another fortune.”
“You are calmer now,” he said. His severe dark face was inscrutable.
“Yes.” She wrenched her gaze away and stared into her coffee mug. She forced herself to say, “Thank you.”
He let go of her chin and hands and stepped back. “Drink.”
She looked up as he disappeared into the hall. Then she raised the mug to her lips and drank it all down. Scotch napalmed her veins, hitting her all the harder since she hadn’t eaten well the last week.
She put the mug on the counter and inspected her hands, felt along her jaw. She had taken a battering when he slammed her into the ground, but his handling of her since then had been quite careful. How remarkable. What did it mean?
He strode back into the kitchen, the light blue hoodie she had bought earlier bunched in one hand. He nodded at the empty mug and dropped the hoodie in her lap. She shrugged it on as he crossed his arms. Perched on the bar stool as she was, he towered over her even more than he would if she were standing upright. She had thought the house was quite spacious until he had walked into it.
“We will begin again,” he said.
She kept her gaze focused on his crossed forearms that looked very dark against the white silk shirt. The distance across his pectorals was extraordinary. On another man it would be too much. On him, those heavy muscles armored a body long enough to carry them with power and grace.
“Keith blackmailed me into stealing something from you,” she said. “It didn’t matter what it was. He owed some people a lot of money.”
“Gambling debts,” he said.
She lifted her head. He had settled into a hunter’s patience. “You got that far already?”
“We found his bookie. Also dead.”
Icy fingers slid down her spine. She pulled the hoodie closer around her torso. “I dated Keith for a few months. For a little while I thought—it doesn’t matter what I thought.”
He tilted his head. “You thought what?”
“You’re not interested in all that.” Color tinged her cheeks.
“Don’t make assumptions about what I am interested in or what I will think or what I will do. You have no idea what interests me,” he told her. He settled back against the edge of the dining room table and crossed one ankle over the other. “We clear?”
She nodded, her color deepening. She went on, “We’ve already established I was an idiot. Keith came along when I was feeling low, and I fell for his charm. I was . . . indiscreet. I should have known better, and I screwed up.” Her throat closed.
“You said you had broken things off,” he prompted when she fell silent.
She nodded. “I had, a while ago. Then last week he showed up. He was full
of this scheme that was going to pay off all his debts and make him rich. Of course by then my rose-colored glasses were gone. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, or him. Then he . . . made me.”
“Blackmail, you said. Over your indiscretions.”
He spoke in a neutral tone. He had throttled the aggression down. She was very aware that he was “managing” her, but he still sounded pitiless. She covered her throat with one hand as he dissected her expression.
“Can we please not talk about that?” She tried to steady her voice. “Please?”
His lids dropped down, hooding his gaze. “Go on with your story.”
“There’s what I know.” She stressed the last word. “There’s what I think, and then there’s what I’ve guessed. Keith was all about his ‘associates.’ People he met through his bookie that he was going to do business with. He was somehow a bigger man in all his stories than he was in real life, know what I mean?”
He nodded, keeping silent.
“Well, I think he was half desperate, half boasting and all-the-way manipulated. He started promising those contacts of his anything he could. His loans had come due. He said he told them he could get them anything they wanted.” She swallowed hard. “And they said, how about something from Cuelebre, then. They gave him a charm that would locate your lair, and Keith came to me.”
“Did they, now.” He hadn’t moved, but he had tensed all over. What radiated off him had her heart pounding.
She licked lips that had gone dry and whispered, “I think Keith told them something about me but not much. He would have wanted to keep me a secret because he wanted to be the big player, and he thought he could control me. He was hoping to set up a repeat business. But I think someone very nasty and Powerful was manipulating him, and now, thanks to me, they’ve got something of yours.”
“They do indeed.” He bared his teeth in that machete smile. “I’ll have to thank you later for that one.”
She whispered, “That charm scared the shit out of me. If I didn’t do what he wanted, I knew Keith would sing like a canary. Would he give me up? In a heartbeat, if it would save his own ass. Then they would come after me. So I was in that damned if you do, damned if you don’t place.”
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