Edge Of Danger

by Cherry Adair

  ALSO BY CHERRY ADAIR

  Hot Ice

  On Thin Ice

  Out of Sight

  In Too Deep

  Hide and Seek

  Kiss and Tell

  EDRIDGECASTLE

  MONTANA

  WEDNESDAY0600

  “I don’t give a damn if it’s a matter of national security or not,” Gabriel Edge savagely told the man he held at sword point. “I amnot having sex with that woman.”

  The two men could have been sword fighting in medieval Scotland instead of twenty-first-century Montana. But both the castle and the heavy claymores the two T-FLAC operatives so expertly wielded were the real deal.

  For several minutes the only sounds in the Great Hall were their breathing, the clash of ancient steel, and the soft sibilant shush of bare feet on stone. Swordplay was a well-choreographed dance, and they knew how to keep it interesting.

  Their blades slid against each other ritually as the men circled each other, feinting, testing for weakness, waiting for a split-second opening. Slightly better conditioned for a sport that required both strength and dexterity, Gabriel intentionally moved off balance to fool his opponent. Then, keeping his swift curse mental instead of verbal, sidestepped Sebastian Tremayne’s lightning-fast return thrust.

  Pleased with himself, Sebastian shot him a triumphant glance. “Your country nee—”

  “Same tune.” From a high guard Gabriel made a strong downward cut, the blade of his broadsword flashing silver in the early morning sunlight streaming through the high arched windows. He moved with a feline grace and speed that had Sebastian backing up. Fast.

  The first time Gabriel had set eyes on Dr. Eden Cahill he’d felt this same cold clench in his gut. It was getting worse.

  “I’ll find another way,” he assured his friend grimly. And he would. As soon as he damn well came up with something that would work just as quickly, and just as well, as having sex with her.

  Sebastian almost took off Gabriel’s hand because he was so distracted. He’d taught his friend well. “Good one.” He brought his attention back to the task at hand. Cutting back on the inhale, he halted his own strike an inch from his friend’s heart. Again. “You’re dead,” he said with satisfaction.

  They straightened and parted, each pausing to wipe the sweat from their eyes with their forearms. They were in hour two of practicing cuts and strikes. They’d stop soon. But not yet.

  “Ready?” Gabriel asked after a few moments’ rest, replacing both hands on the leather hilt of his sword.

  “Yeah.” Tremayne stepped back, sword raised.

  Agile and fast on his feet, Gabriel circled. The longer they practiced, the heavier the claymore seemed to become. That ten pounds felt more like fifty after wielding it for an hour. A good workout. Both for his body and his mind.

  “Been at it longer than you,” he pointed out, reading the familiar I’m-going-to-beat-the-shit-out-of-you-this-time glimmer in his friend’s eyes. They watched each other like hawks, slowly circling each other.

  Waiting for an opportunity. Waiting for an opening.

  From a hanging guard, Sebastian brought down a strong diagonal thrust. “Faster on my feet than you.”

  Knuckles white, Gabriel blocked. “You’ll have to be.”

  Tremayne was a little out of breath, Gabriel noticed with satisfaction. They were evenly matched; he was just better at hiding his uneven breathing than his friend was.

  Buttery light streamed through the leaded glass windows embedded in the thirteen-foot-deep walls. The Great Hall was constructed of rough-hewn stone the color of a good wine cork, and hung with enormous, priceless, centuries-old tapestries, coats of armor, ancient weaponry, and otherobjets d’art.

  One of Gabriel’s distant ancestors had built the castle in the Scottish Highlands for his young bride, Janet, in the first part of the fourteenth century. Hadn’t worked out too well forhim, but Gabriel wanted to live in the castle that had housed seven hundred years of the Edridge family. They might no longer use the old Scottish name, but the castle would always be home.

  A man with his abilities could always get what he wanted.

  As a boy he’d wanted the castle, and he’d gotten it. Using his wizard skills, he’d teleported his ancestral home stone by bloody stone until it stood, stark and proud, hundreds of miles from civilization. Somewhere inside that foolish boy had lived the naive hope that, with the ancestral home in Montana, his father would venture from his native Scotland to be with his family more often.

  Magnus, unable to resist the lure of his Lifemate, had wanted Cait badly enough to ignore the Curse. Thinking he could change it, he married her. The first year had apparently been idyllic. Then things had turned to shit.

  Terrified that she would die due to his close proximity, Magnus had spent the next twenty years in exile from his beloved wife and their three sons. Once a year he’d visit, but a series of near fatal accidents, or Cait’s failing health, would always compel him to leave.

  Their mother had been in ill health all their lives. She’d wasted away, pining for the husband who had married her and then lived to regret it. Their parents’ frustration and unhappiness had been a stark lesson for Magnus’s three sons.

  Gabriel and his brothers were certain their parents had died of broken hearts. In five hundred years, no Edge had ever broken Nairne’s Curse. None ever would.

  Okay. Hegot it.

  He could marry someone he didn’t love, but could never love the woman he married. Hell, he could neverlove. Period.

  No Lifemate.

  No three sons on three sons.

  No such fucking thing as happily ever after.

  Screw it.

  He had his work with T-FLAC. The counterterrorist organization was his life. His passion. It was enough.

  Between missions he relished the isolation, the ancient history, and the drafty halls of Edridge Castle. In a world filled with death and betrayal, the connection to his past kept him centered.

  In his daily life as a T-FLAC operative in the psi or paranormal branch, he used the most sophisticated high-tech military hardware coupled with ancient magic. When he was in his ancestral home he used the weapons hanging on the walls. Weapons his family had collected and used for centuries.

  His weapon of choice for today’s exercise was the claymore.

  Weighing close to ten pounds, and with an overall length of more than four and a half feet, the claymore was a formidable weapon. Despite its antiquity, the lethal sword could deliver great sweeping slashes or powerful thrusts. Just what he was in the mood for this morning. He’d slept like shit last night, thinking about the good doctor. Or rather—tryingnot to think about her.

  Narrow-eyed, Gabriel choked up on the leather-covered hilt with both hands as he anticipated his opponent’s next move.

  “If I could read minds,” Sebastian said, clearly flagging, “I’dsleep with her.”

  “I’m sure you would.” He used Sebastian’s distracted focus to springboard his riposte off his blade. And the game was back on. “But you can’t,” he told his friend, who was T-FLAC but not part of the special “psychic phenomena” branch. The psi division was considered, by some, to be the elite group of the counterterrorist organization. By others it was the whoo-hoo division that they didn’t understand. None were permitted to acknowledge the group outside the organization.

  While there were still a few hundred known wizards in the world, the general population—normal people—were totally unaware that they even existed. And Gabriel and his brothers wouldn’t evenbe wizards if not for that long-ago Curse.

  Jesus. Talk about a woman scorned. The witch Nairne had laid one on his cheating great, great, how ever many greats, grandfather, Magnus Edridge, several hundred years a
go.

  The Edge family had changed their name, and had paid for the slight ever since.

  Thank God he and his brothers had decided that the Curse, like the proverbial buck, stopped with them.

  Not that any of them believed there was such a thing as a “Lifemate.” But they weren’t taking any chances. It wasn’t difficult to keep women at arm’s length, not in their business. The hours were long, their whereabouts frequently top secret.

  The three of them had long ago agreed that they’d keep their relationships with the opposite sex casual. And if one of them should veer off the straight and narrow, the other two would pull him back from the abyss.

  In thirty-four years, Gabriel had never met a woman who tempted him to change the “casual” rule, not even a little.

  Until he’d laid eyes on the gorgeous doctor Eden Cahill.

  He’d been near her that once. It had been enough. He’d taken one look. One. And been consumed by an unspeakable lust. It had been instantaneous, overwhelming, and dangerous as hell. He’d wanted to breathe her breath, to absorb her distinctive scent, to learn her textures. He’d hungered to taste her soft mouth, and run his hands over her silken skin.

  For the last three days he’d been able to think of little else.

  He blocked Sebastian’s parry, edge on edge, with theincrosada, the crossing of the blades, bringing both weapons to a bone-jarring, shuddering stop. The vibration shimmied up his arm. The very air reverberated with the sharp scraping sound of steel on steel echoing off the ancient stone walls.

  Their eyes met. Held.Not sleeping with her, he telegraphed as he gave a sharp twist of his wrist to indicate that his opponent should step back. Bloodlust raced through Gabriel’s body.

  Don’t think about her,he told himself, feeling feral and slightly out of control at the memory of Dr. Cahill’s glossy dark curls and her big brown eyes—

  Jesus. He had to put a stop to his thoughts. He’d give anything right now to have a tango opposite him rather than a trusted friend and fellow operative. He’d trained Tremayne well enough to know that his friend could most certainly block a full force blow from him if he lost control enough to deliver it. But this was supposed to be merely an exercise, not a fight to the death.

  “Why not—”

  “I’m not discussing my sex life with you, Tremayne,” he said coolly when inside he was anything but. He felt—annoyed. Hot. Twisted. And, if he didn’t know better, scared as hell.

  His friend raised a brow at his vehemence. “But it doesn’t have to be sexper se. Does it?”

  “At the risk of repeating myself: I will categoricallynot have sex with that woman. I made that crystal clear at the onset. When will Stone be back from Prague?” This wasn’t the first time that Gabriel wished to hell he lived in the fifteenth century, when lopping off a man’s head with the sharp blade of his broadsword wouldn’t have the local cops inconveniently pounding on his door.

  “After the Terrorism Summit.” Sebastian parried another blow, grinning as he made a lunge of his own. “Another three weeks. I don’t believe his presence would make this situation any less onerous for you, Edge.”

  Gabriel swept the claymore in a wide arc that had Sebastian dancing back a step or two. “Perhaps not. But having you breathing down my neck isn’t improving my disposition any.”

  “Easily resolved. Extract the necessary data from Dr. Cahill’s memory banks, and you may paint me gone.” He advanced again, clearly determined to impress Gabriel with his prowess with the blade. “Until such time as you’ve accomplished your mission, I shall remain a guest in your…home.”

  “Guest my ass. You needed another lesson. You’ve gotten lazy.”

  “You could always do what other operatives do—use the damned telephone.” Sebastian ignored the sweat running into his eyes, his concentration just as fierce as Gabriel’s. “A castle, appropriated from the Highlands of Scotland and incongruously placed in the middle of Montana, isn’t my idea of a vacation hot spot. The halls are drafty, it’s two miles to my room, and the electricity is iffy.”

  “Edridge Castle isn’t a hotel, Tremayne.” Gabriel circled him, holding his gaze as intently as a cobra did a mongoose. Right now it was a toss-up as to which of them was which. “You’re at liberty to fuck off any time you like. Now would be a good time.”

  “It’s big enough to be a hotel.” Sebastian’s incoming attack was lethally fast. Gabriel moved faster. “Let’s expedite this situation as rapidly as possible,” he said, breathing heavily. They both were. Unfortunately, they were each ferociously competitive. Neither would back down until Gabriel’s majordomo, MacBain, stepped in and had their half-dead bodies hauled upstairs.

  “Get over your aversion,” Sebastian rasped. “Have sex with the doctor. Close your eyes and think of Scotland if it’ll help you stomach it. Just get it done.”

  If only it were an aversion,Gabriel thought furiously, slicing down his opponent’s diagonal sweep with a descending cut, knocking his friend’s sword away. “I’m going to say this for the last time.” To control the other man’s weapon Gabriel needed a lever. He stepped in closer. Tighter. Met his friend’s predatory eyes.

  “I. Will. Not. Have. Sex. With. Dr. Cahill. I’ll get what we need from her in my own way. Is that clear?”

  “Abundantly.” The point of contact between the two shiny blades was halfway. There were no knucklebows on their broadswords and there was a very real possibility of cutting off a finger or two.

  Steel clashed against steel, and the whisper of the men’s feet moving across the stone floor echoed in the vast room.

  They parted and Sebastian recovered quickly as Gabriel forced him to sidestep inside the cut, meeting his blade with a solid blow. “Good one.”

  His friend paused to draw in a ragged breath. “I’m just saying. We need that intel. It’s the means to an end. Could save the lives of millions of people.”

  Gabriel knew that, God help him. The Edridge family Curse hung over his head like the sword of Damocles and he felt the swish of that heavy blade nearly parting his hair.

  “It hasn’t come to that.” He aimed his cut at the midpoint of the incoming blade. “Yet. If and when it does, I’ll take action.”

  “See that you do. When will you attempt it again? She doesn’t need to be asleep for you to bring her to orgasm, does she?”

  Gabriel allowed Sebastian’s blade to travel to his crossguard, then struck with the edge of his own blade so their faces were inches apart. “Listen to yourself, for Christ’s sake!”

  Lightning fast, Gabriel attacked, swinging his sword intoposta frontal as he sidestepped, meeting the other man’s blade in a clash of metal and flying sparks. “Does anything about this conversation strike you as off limits?”

  Sebastian, quick as always, met him withmezza spada. Gabriel’s blade slid down to his friend’s crossguard again.

  Hilts and eyes locked.

  “I’ll tell you how it strikes me. It strikes me that Dr. Cahill has all the information about the robot in her freakinghead. It strikes me that the only way to get said information is to read her mind, and that you can’t read this particular mind because of some ancient and ridiculous curse. It bites, that’s how all of this strikes me.”

  “You don’t think I know that?”

  “You are first and foremost a T-FLAC operative, Edge. A wizard in the psi divisionsecond. If you can’t extract the information we need from Dr. Cahill in the usual manner, then you’ll use whatever mumbo-jumbo re—”

  Gabriel gave a savage thrust and disarmed his opponent.

  “Ow! Shit! That stings like a son of a bitch!” Sebastian’s sword skittered across the stone floor as he nursed his hand.

  “Want MacBain to kiss it better?” Gabriel knew everything Sebastian was saying was only the truth. But hell, it didn’t make it any easier to take, did it? “Jesus. I miss Stone.”

  Sebastian dropped his hands to his knees, hanging his head as he tried to catch his breath. “Don’t we al
l.”

  Gabriel had triedagain to probe Dr. Cahill’s mind for the vital information he needed. He’d failed. Goddamn it. Hehated to fail.

  He’d cloaked himself, gone to her computer lab in Tempe, Arizona, three days ago. All he needed was a few seconds to retrieve the data and then get the hell out. Easy. She’d never even know he’d trespassed.

  She’d been alone. Perfect timing. But much to his surprise, he hadn’t been able to penetrate the hot, soft darkness of her mind. Something he could usually do with ease when he wanted to. And damn it to frigging hell. Hewanted to.

  He’d also wanted to shake her and demand how the hell this could happen. But he knew instinctively why he couldn’t extract the secrets he needed from her mind. Somehow, God only knew how, she had him blocked. He’d tried to get her to lower her defenses—even a few seconds would have done it—but he’d found his every attempt unsuccessful.