Forcing himself to draw back, Ashe ran a hand over his tingling mouth, trying to figure out what had just happened…to put his chaotic thoughts in order. Even if it weren’t for the danger bearing down on her, he knew this wasn’t the time. There was too much at stake to push things too far before he could handle them, his control as shaky as a wet dog that’d been left out in the cold.
“Well?” she pressed.
His voice was little more than a croak, his throat tight and hot. “Not yet.”
She pulled at the throw, trying to conceal the damp, sweet-smelling curls between her thighs, her tone almost hopeful as she said, “You’ve changed your mind?”
“Hardly,” he snorted, making himself roll off the mattress and back to his feet. Watching her from the corner of his eye, he headed around to the other side of the bed. With a grimace, he reached down and rearranged his cock again, the thick shaft pulsing with pain, his blood running hot not only from the Burning, but from the sight of Juliana sitting there on the rumpled bedding, so tempting he could feel the serum throbbing in his fangs.
A serum that if injected into her bloodstream would bind them together forever, like a preternatural marriage that could never be undone.
Insane, how badly half of him wanted to push that serum into her veins, while the other half violently recoiled at the thought of permanently bonding with a woman who, for all he knew, could be a scheming little liar. Just because he wanted to believe her didn’t mean that what she’d told him was the truth. Sex was one thing…but he couldn’t afford to give her more than that.
“I haven’t changed my mind.” He snagged his sweater off the floor and pulled it on. “But I know my own limits. Once I get inside you, I’m going to be focused on nothing but how good it feels. Before that happens, I need you someplace where I don’t have to worry about someone tracking us down. Someplace that’s completely safe.”
“Completely safe?” Her laugh was brittle. “Do places like that actually exist?”
He flicked her a shuttered look from beneath his lashes. “I’ll keep you protected while we get to the bottom of this. I won’t turn my back on you.”
“But you won’t trust me, either, will you? Which is why you called off our—” she flushed, gesturing toward the bed “—whatever you want to call this.”
“I’m pleading the Fifth,” he muttered, knowing that Gideon would call him a chickenshit coward for still holding out on her, but this wasn’t cowardice. This was pure goddamn self-preservation. If he was going to bed her, he needed to know he was in complete, absolute control of himself.
A quick glance down at his trembling hand told Ashe that, at the moment, he wasn’t even close.
Closing his unsteady hand into a hard fist, he shoved his other hand through his hair. “Come on. Get cleaned up and let’s get out of here.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, sliding to the edge of the bed. When she stood up, she took the throw with her, the soft fabric draping over the feminine curves of her body as she clutched it against her chest.
She looked impossibly young at that moment, reminding him of that glaring gap in their ages. Feeling like a lecherous old man, Ashe forced his gaze away from all that rosy skin and tumbling hair, and walked into the other room as he answered her question. “We’re heading someplace they won’t expect to find us.”
She followed after him, lingering in the doorway. “Can I have a little more than that?”
“You’ve heard of the Pinero Dominguez?” he asked, opening the small safe that sat on the top shelf of a coat closet.
“Of course.” She’d answered with a slight hesitation, sounding as if she was wondering if he could actually be serious. “It’s a kind of underground information and hideout network for criminals that runs through France and Northern Italy. It was named after its founder, a famous Spanish vampire who made a fortune sailing as a pirate several hundred years ago.”
“That’s right,” he murmured, focused on emptying the safe and putting what he needed in his pockets. The rest he would put in a bag and store in a locker at the St. Pancras train station. Grabbing the worn leather backpack he’d left at the bottom of the closet, he said, “We’re going to use some of their establishments to hide out in while getting to the bottom of those assassination orders.”
He could feel her gaze against the side of his face as he set the pack on the small coffee table and started gathering his things from around the room, but he didn’t dare look at her. Not yet. His control was already too thin as it was. One more glimpse of her clutching that throw against the front of her naked body and he’d have her on the floor, his cock buried a mile inside her, before she even realized he’d crossed the room.
“I told you that a passport had been left in the pack for me,” she said. “But won’t it be dangerous to use public transportation right now?”
“No more dangerous than it was for you to come over from Norway.”
From the edge of his vision, he caught the way her gaze slid to the floor, her lower lip caught in her teeth. “I didn’t actually use public transportation,” she admitted, flicking him a quick glance to gauge his reaction. “I hitched some rides, then hid onboard a cargo ship that was crossing the Channel. I think they were, um, some kind of black-market smugglers.”
“Christ,” he breathed out, a dark scowl settling over his face as he stopped what he was doing and stalked toward her. He was too angry now to be worried about falling on her like a sex-starved maniac. He wanted to wring her bloody neck! “Are you out of your goddamn mind? What do you think would have happened to you if you’d been found?”
She shrugged. “The crew were all human. I could have handled myself.”
“One female vampire against how many men?” A cold sweat slipped along his spine, his insides twisting with a nauseating burst of fear at the thought of her in such a dangerous situation. “They would have been armed, Juliana. You’d have been raped before you could down five of them!”
“But I wasn’t,” she pointed out, her reasonable tone only making him angrier, “because I’m not stupid. I stayed hidden until it was safe to make my way off the boat.”
Telling himself to calm the hell down, Ashe stalked away from her, heading toward the window. He took a deep breath and scrubbed his hands down his face, then shoved them into his pockets. He was having a hard enough time trying not to think about how much danger she was in, and the Lycan attack they’d been through that night, knowing it could push him into some seriously risky territory. One where he stopped fighting and simply acted on his more primal, visceral instincts—instincts that would have him marking her, bonding with her, before he even knew what hit him…his male ego fooling him into believing she would be so much safer if she were his. But knowing she’d taken such a ridiculous risk with her safety just pushed him that much closer to the edge.
Did the foolish woman have a death wish? Didn’t she know it would destroy him if anything happened to her? Didn’t she know that— Whoa! Wait a minute…
What the hell was he thinking? Of course she didn’t know. How could she, when he’d never given her a clue about how he felt before tonight? And even now, he was putting it all down to simple animal lust, refusing to tell her about the Burning. Refusing to let her know that even though he didn’t trust her, he still thought she was the most beautiful, alluring, fascinating woman he’d ever known.
Completely oblivious to the intimate direction of his thoughts, she asked him another question about their coming trip. “Instead of the Pinero Dominguez, why can’t we simply stay at one of your family’s nesting grounds?”
Nesting grounds were sprawling castlelike communities where Deschanel families often lived for protection, the compounds protected by spells that made them invisible to the outside world. Most families had only one, but the Grangers were wealthy enough to have several smaller grounds, in addition to the main compound where he and Gideon had been raised, before their parents had passed away.
&nbs
p; “If they discover I’m helping you, the nesting grounds will be the first place they look,” he told her, turning away from the window. “But the P.D. won’t even make their list. The last thing anyone in the Pinero Dominquez would do is harbor an escaped convict. They wouldn’t risk drawing any Förmyndares onto their territory.”
“But will it be safe?”
“Let me worry about that.” He picked up the pack that held all her belongings from the sofa and tossed it to her, jerking his chin toward the bathroom behind her. The sooner her delectable little body was covered in clothes, the sooner he could start thinking straight again. “Do whatever you need to get ready,” he told her, forcing himself to turn his attention back to his bag. “But hurry. If we’re lucky, we can make all the necessary arrangements and be on the late train to Paris tonight.”
* * *
BY ELEVEN, THEY WERE on the Eurostar, heading through an underground tunnel beneath the English Channel on a high-speed train that would take them to the Gare du Nord in Paris. Ashe had surprised her with a forged passport of his own when they’d cleared customs, explaining that everyone on his Specs team carried several forged passports with them in the event of an emergency. He’d used one tonight because he didn’t want his name showing up on any government records. He obviously knew how far Raphe Delacourt’s reach could extend, and wasn’t taking any chances.
Despite the late hour, the train car was brimming with a group of British schoolkids on a foreign studies field trip, the lack of privacy no doubt a good thing, since it made any fooling around impossible. Juliana sat huddled inside Ashe’s leather jacket, her eyes closed, trying her best to ignore him as he sat beside her, his head tilted back on the headrest, his eyes closed. But it wasn’t easy. She’d been caught up in the powerful, sensual web he’d spun back in London, and now she couldn’t shake herself free. Every move he made seemed laden with sensual overtones, his scent rich and deep and musky, making her mouth water every time she drew in a breath.
Thanks to the bagged human blood he’d offered her before they’d left his hotel room, the hunger that had been gnawing at her stomach had eased, so she didn’t need to worry about feeding. The blood would also enable her to walk in the sunlight for a few days, thanks to a Deschanel vampire’s ability to assume certain traits of those species they drank from.
So with those concerns taken care of, she was left to worry about other things, her family’s safety residing at the top of the long, depressing list. And because of the spells that made the use of technology impossible in the Wasteland, she couldn’t even borrow Ashe’s cell phone to call and check on them.
For her family’s sake, she would endure the emotional strain being around Ashe put her through, knowing she owed them that and so much more. More than she could ever repay…but she was willing to die trying.
And if she was honest with herself, she knew there was a damn good chance it would come to that.
Though she trusted Ashe to do everything he could to keep her safe—despite the tension between them, he was obviously one of those rare breed of men who would always protect those who needed it—she didn’t have much faith that she’d survive the coming days. It made her ache for the life she’d never been given a chance to live. The one with a loving husband and children, a family to call her own. But she could accept her fate, as long as she managed to help her family escape the Wasteland, righting the wrongs that had been done to them. And as long as Ashe was able to walk away from this ordeal unscathed, which was why she would take her darker secrets to the grave with her, where they belonged.
A little more than two hours after leaving London, they arrived in Paris. Even in the middle of the night, the magnificent city was ablaze with lights. It had always been one of Juliana’s favorite places in the world, and she’d spent most of her summers there while growing up. She’d even planned to move into a flat near the Musée d’Orsay after she’d finished her studies—but then she’d met Raphe Delacourt, and all her plans had changed. A few short months later, she’d been banished to the Wasteland, believing she’d never see Paris again.
Though she was nervous at the thought of using the Pinero Dominguez as their hideout, she was privately thrilled that Ashe had brought her to this particular city.
They grabbed one of the private taxis loitering at the curb near the front of the station, sliding into the backseat together. It all felt strangely intimate, almost as if they were simply two starry-eyed lovers arriving for a romantic weekend in the City of Lights, when the truth couldn’t have been further from the truth. Ashe seemed determined to pretend she wasn’t even there, only speaking to her when necessary, his dark gaze focused out his window, a muscle pulsing every now and then in the rigid set of his jaw. So she spent the time staring lovingly at the city as it passed by her window…and stealing greedy glances at him from the corner of her eye, a small smile touching her lips when she noticed how long and thick his eyelashes were. If he was anything like her brother, he’d probably hated them when he was younger, thinking they were too feminine-looking. But they were perfect for him now, adding another touch of devastating sexuality to a face that was all perfect, masculine angles. A rugged, utterly male face that was too gorgeous for its own good, making her feel like a homely little waif as she sat beside him.
It took nearly twenty minutes to reach the antiquated streets of Saint-Germain, one of the oldest districts in Paris, and Ashe instructed the driver to leave them in the middle of a long street of quaint little shops and cafés. Draping her pack over her shoulder, Juliana looked up and down the moonlit street. “This is where we’re going?” she asked doubtfully, the appealing neighborhood so far from what she’d imagined for the Pinero Dominguez she wanted to laugh at herself.
“Not quite,” Ashe drawled with a lopsided smile. “We still have a little ways to go.”
They headed down the cobbled sidewalk, turning into a narrow walkway situated between a boutique and a bookstore. At the far end of the walkway there was an ivy-covered gate, and behind that, a simple black door, the modern keypad on the lock strangely at odds with the historic surroundings. Ashe keyed a number into the pad, and a second later there was a metallic click, like a lock disengaging. He opened the door, telling her to follow behind him, then started down what appeared to be a long, crumbling flight of stone stairs. Chewing nervously on her lower lip, Juliana closed the door behind her, and made her way down.
At the bottom, a long, dimly lit tunnel stretched out before them, raucous laughter and music spilling from several open doorways, the faded signs hanging above them impossible to read.
“This is more what I had in mind,” she whispered, wishing she could reach out and take his hand, her nerves squirming like a handful of eels in her belly.
“Just stay close to me,” he murmured, pulling his pack higher on his shoulder. “We’ve got a ways to walk.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” she muttered a few minutes later, the ceiling so low in several places that Ashe had to hunch down to keep from hitting his head on the rough stones. They walked for what must have been about fifteen minutes, going deeper into the noisy underground tunnel, until Ashe finally stopped in front of what appeared to be some sort of biker bar or nightclub.
Juliana stared at the blacked-out windows lining the bar’s front, the neon sign hanging above the closed door flickering too rapidly for her to read what it said. All she could make out was the shape of a topless blonde with fangs and a tail straddling what appeared to be some sort of motorcycle. “Um, wow.”
Ashe pushed his hands into his pockets. “I know it’s not much to look at,” he said, “but a friend of mine owns it.” His tone was wry, as if he knew just how horrified she was by the thought of going inside, half-expecting there to be strippers dancing on the tables. “I need his help to start our search,” he went on, “and he’ll be willing to give us a room for the night. Plus, the security is better than anything else we’ll find.”
“Ar
e you sure Raphe won’t think to send assassins here?” She scrunched her nose as she looked up at him. “I mean, this is a criminal underground network, and he’s one of the biggest vampire criminals in existence.”
His chest shook with a grim laugh. “Trust me, Delacourt has no connection to the P.D. At least, not to any of the places we’ll be staying.”
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