by Cherry Adair
“Leave it, you have the sexiest hair I’ve ever seen. All those wild curls are messy from my hands. Looks sexy. Hot.”
He nibbled her fingers until she squirmed on the warm sheets. His broad shoulders were tanned, his skin smooth as satin overlaying rock-hard muscle. Eden ran an appreciative glance down his chest with its light furring of crisp dark hair. Small dark nipples beckoned her mouth and she lifted her head and closed her lips around one flat peak, thrilling to the sound of his harsh, indrawn breath.
She tasted the slightly salty skin on his chest, letting her lips climb to the steady pulse in the base of his throat. Brushing her mouth beneath his stubborn chin she felt the prickle of his beard abrading her lips. She smiled, letting her lips roam over his chin to find the firmness of his mouth.
“Yum,” she murmured, nibbling and laving until he moaned and opened for her. He rolled over, taking her with him, so she was on top. Head on his chest, Eden opened her legs to straddle his hips.
He was already hard and ready for her. She lifted her head an inch, and opened her eyes.
“Hmm.” She gave the opulent room a vaguely quizzical glance as she sheathed herself over him. “When. Did. This. Oh, God, Gabriel! Happen?”
“You were too busy to notice.” He nuzzled her neck, making her shiver deliciously. She closed her eyes again, more interested in what Gabriel was doing than in the heavy masculine decor surrounding them.
She shuddered as ripples of pleasure surged through her as he lifted her body so that he could reach her breasts. Then shivered at the brush of his lips across her nipple as an answering heat twisted through the very core of her. She clung to his shoulders; the very wildness of his hunger called out to everything in her that was female, and ignited her own fire to fever pitch.
He whispered against her skin. Words of admiration, shocking words, soothing words that blurred into the soft sibilant sounds of the ocean tide. Pulling her deeper and deeper into the riptide where her feet would be knocked from under her and she’d be pulled out of her depth with no hope of surviving.
She made a small pleading sound as the tip of his tongue traced a circle around the peak of her nipple. He closed his teeth with admirable restraint over the hard bud, and her body arched against his mouth. He cupped her other breast in his palm, gently massaging it, brushing his thumb over the nipple.
The heat of his breath caressed her skin, and she felt the mounting tension in his body as she ran her hands over the hard sculptured muscles of his upper arms. His skin was sleek and smooth, hard as tensile steel and hot beneath her marauding caresses.
She ran her hand down his body. He shuddered, capturing her hand and bringing it to his lips. He gently bit down on the fleshy pad of her thumb.
His long fingers caressed the soft skin of her inner thigh and then skimmed even higher to find a softer, more tender spot. She started to say something, but the words were lost as his thumb moved again.
She shuddered as the magical sensation shot through her body. His fingers took her to the pinnacle, then held her there, trembling on the brink of release.
Anticipation coiled impossibly higher. She tried to say his name, but coherent speech was impossible. He filled her, every part of her. Leaving room for nothing but pure, sharp, sensation.
It was a long time before the sensual storm passed, leaving them exhausted, their bodies damply entwined.
The sun shone directly over the bed, accentuating the dark stubble on his face that had so deliciously abraded her skin. His eyes shone like indigo crystal. Dark and glittering. Eden caressed his strong jaw, loving the feel of him, and ignored the regret she saw in his eyes.
A shower had gone a long way to waking her up after a long afternoon of lovemaking. While Eden felt lethargic and lazy, Gabriel appeared to be wired. He’d insisted on showering alone. Disappointed, she’d showered in his large, granite shower by herself. He’d been waiting for her when she’d returned to his bedroom. While she’d been in the bathroom he’d retrieved a change of clothes for her, jeans and a pale blue T-shirt, and her gold sandals with very high heels.
He’d also brought in the small blue bottle of Je Reviens perfume. He had specific ideas about where each dab should be applied, and they’d ended up making love again.
The setting sun lanced through the narrow Gothic windows directly opposite the staircase, spilling mellow golden light on the treads as they went downstairs an hour later.
They’d spent the better part of the day making love, and she ached in unexpected places. Under the circumstances, Eden felt ridiculously at peace. And not just because her body had been well loved. She’d never been kissed with such attention to detail by any man in her life. Gabriel Edge’s kisses were addictive. She loved the shape of his mouth, she loved the texture of his mouth. God, she loved thetaste of his mouth.
She felt…centered. Centered in a way, she now realized, that she’d never felt before. The man walking so far away from her right now knew her body intimately. More intimately than any man ever had. Yet she knew practically nothing about him. And what she did know should scare her to death, but didn’t.
In some strange and mysterious way she felt as though she’d known Gabriel Edge forever.
Her friend Gigi, an artist, insisted on living every moment of every day with gusto. Eden decided she’d take a leaf out of her friend’s book. This feeling she had right now shouldn’t be wasted on regrets. Sunlight glinted off the metallic straps of her sandals and illuminated the deep gold swirls in the carpet. She smiled, sliding her palm down the smooth mahogany banister as she observed each step she took. She wondered if it would be safe to glance at him again, then realized that looking at Gabriel Edge would never be safe. He was always going to appeal to her. Always going to make her heart kick in her chest. Always make her want to be in his arms.
Gabriel and his Edridge Castle were a long way from a trailer park in Sacramento, California. And this fabulous staircase was a very long way away from the peach box her family had used as a makeshift step.
Gabriel, walking a good ten feet away, turned to look at her. “What are you smiling about?”
“Know what I wanted more than anything in the world when I was thirteen?”
He glanced over at her. “What?”
She shook her head. “You’ll think I’m nuts—Okay. Properstairs. We lived in a trailer park outside of Sacramento. Single-wide. My father wasn’t too handy. The step was gone long before I was born. As far back as I can remember we had a box—not always the same box mind you, but a box. I didn’t care about the inside of the house, but I’d seenGone with the Wind, and I wanted a staircase just like—” her smile widened. “This.
“And now that I come to think of it, I wanted that satisfied morning-after smile that Scarlett wore, too.”
“At thirteen? What a precocious child you were.” His eyes crinkled and his lips twitched. Oh, it wasn’t a full-blown smile, but hewas amused.
The look in his eyes made her heart thud in her chest. It was more complicated than mere lust. If anything about their relationship could be mere anything. His eyes showed her that he, too, had felt some of the magic they’d made together upstairs, that he found her attractive, and appealing, and at times amusing. He wasn’t just attracted to her brain.
The look in his dark blue eyes also told Eden that he knew that what they shared transcended the physical in some mysterious way.
Something inside her shifted and settled and she knew she was lost. She’d been right. Sex with Gabriel had changed her irrevocably. She wondered how she could recognize something she’d never felt before. How this jumble of insane emotions had suddenly gelled into…it couldn’t be love, for God’s sake. Could it? She almost stumbled, tightening her fingers around the handrail just in time.
He was looking at her expectantly. Was what she felt inside showing on her face? God. She hoped not. She marshaled the rational side of her brain and continued the conversation, hoping like hell she sounded halfway rational righ
t now. “I thought Scarlett was so happy because she had such a lovely big bed.”
“You were poor.”
“Yeah. We were. In every way there was. Dad got my mom pregnant with me when she was fifteen. Lust, not love got them to the altar. They were just kids, and didn’t like each other very much. Then I came along, and they liked each other even less, but stuck it out. I think more out of apathy than any real commitment.”
“Tough on a kid.”
“Tough on the two kids stuck in a single-wide with a baby,” she said dryly. “One thing I knew for sure; they both lovedme. Didn’t understand me,” she added dryly. “But they did,do, love me.”
All her life she’d been…apartfrom the people around her. All through school she’d been years younger, years less street-smart than the other students in her classes. In college she’d been stared at, never included. Her marriage to Adam had separated her further. She’d always felt somewhat detached from the people around her, a shield against the anticipation of rejection. She’d allowed Adam inside her insular little world because she’d been ripe for attention that had nothing to do with her IQ. She’d been wrong. So wrong.
And look at her now, Eden thought with an inward shudder. Falling in love with a man so far out of her normal world that to compare him to the mistake with Adam was like comparing a minnow to a great white shark.
“Are you close?”
She smiled, because the alternative was to run screaming for the hills. “As close as three people can be who don’t understand the first thing about one another. My father lives near Las Vegas; he never remarried after they divorced. My mother’s had a succession of boyfriends and two more husbands.” Her mother liked her men rich and dumb. The current flame managed the local gas station. Her mother’s high aspirations were low.
They stepped down onto the uncarpeted floor of the entry hall. The vast space was warm, filled with the last dying rays of the sun. Eden enjoyed the tap-tap-tap of her heels on the ancient stone floor as they headed toward the library. “MacBain told me a little about your parents. It must have been hard on your mom and you and your brothers to have your father so far away from you.”
“We didn’t know any different,” Gabriel said mildly, shoving open the door to the room. “The marriage was ill-fated from the start. They loved each other, had three kids together, and spent most of their lives apart, just waiting for the Curse to kick in, and for my mother to drop dead. Like your parents, they would’ve been better off not marrying. Not each other anyway.”
“I’m surethey didn’t feel that way,” she added, crossing to one of the dark leather sofas. “They had three children, after all.”
“A fact that they appeared to forget most of the time,” Gabriel told her. “They were so busy mourning their loss of each other, there wasn’t room for anything as prosaic as kids.”
Table lamps brightened areas of the room that were already shadowed as the sun set over the mountains. The discreetly-placed large screen TV was on, and the sound of CNN played softly in the background.
“That’s pretty cynical,” Eden said, not unsympathetically, inhaling the musty fragrance of the thousands of leather-bound books on the shelves, and the sweet, spicy scent of the fresh flowers gracing the stone mantel.
She nodded when he held up a bottle of wine. Eden knew that Magnus and Cait Edge had had a Romeo and Juliet kind of forbidden love that had kept them apart. Judging from Gabriel’s expression right now, he was bored with the subject.
She settled back into the corner of the comfortably squishy sofa. “Tell me about the people you work for.”
Eden didn’t give a damn about the counterterrorist organization he worked for. What she really wanted to know was who Gabriel Edge was. Her body still felt the effects of their lovemaking, which had transcended anything she’d ever experienced.
She wished he’d come and sit beside her. Having him stand halfway across the room, after spending the last several hours in his arms, felt wrong on every level.
He came close enough to hand her a crystal glass of pale wine. A zing of electricity passed from his fingers to hers and her heart started beating faster. God. The attraction she felt for this man was mind-boggling.
“At least you can still manage to walk,” she said dryly, and felt her heart trip over the extra beats as his lips curved in a sensual smile. “Talk to me.”
“T-FLAC is a private organization to counter terrorism worldwide. We go where we’re needed. And God only knows, we’re needed often.”
Eden sipped the crisp fruity wine, waiting for him to sit down. He didn’t. He wasn’t drinking either. “And is everyone…a wizard?”
Honest to God, as a scientist she knew no such thing existed. She was positive. Yet here she was and here he was and unless this entire surreal experience was a hallucination, he was very much what he said he was. She looked at him across the vast expanse of the library. Tall and fit, his body hard—not an ounce of fat anywhere.
She shivered. No matter what magical powers he professed to possess, bottom line, he was a warrior.
A man far removed from the scientists and mathematicians she was used to dealing with on a daily basis. A man far removed from her normal life. If not for Rex, her and Gabriel’s paths would never have crossed.
He glanced at the big-screen TV, where they were covering an uprising in yet another war-torn country. “No. T-FLAC operatives don’t have our skills. I work for the psi/spec ops paranormal unit.”
On the screen a car bomb exploded, shrapnel flew. People screamed. Was that the sort of thing he did in his job when he wasn’t babysitting scientists?
“And all of you in this special unit are wizards?” Eden heard how normal her voice sounded asking the abnormal question, and was amazed.
He shook his head, clearly only half listening to her as he watched the action. “Everyone in the unit has their own unique talent.”
His special talent must be exquisite lovemaking, Eden decided. “And what’s yours?”
“This and that. Transmogrify into a living thing—”
She’d noticed. Didn’t believe what she’d seen with her own two eyes. But she’d definitely noticed. “Can you transmogrify into someone else?”
“Not a human. Animals only,” he told her as absently as one might mention the ability to play the piano. “Invisibility. Teleporting. Making people see what I want them to see. For instance, anyone approaching the castle will see a derelict ranch house. The original house my mother lived in with her parents.” He glanced at her with a small frown. “More interesting at the moment are the things Ican’t do.”
“Like what?”
“Usually I can extract information from someone’s mind very easily.” He looked disgruntled. “Everyone’s except yours, unfortunately.”
The concept that he could do any of the things he claimed to be capable of was as bizarre as it was fascinating. What intrigued Eden even more was the fact that some of them didn’t work onher. “Why is that?”
“Hell if I know.” He was lying. She knew instinctively. But she had no idea why. Despite the absolute impossibility of it, Eden hadwitnessed Gabriel transform himself into a panther. She’dseen him teleporting. Been teleported with him, God help her. Wizards didn’t exist except in fiction. But here he was.
She gave him a curious look. “You can read my mind when I’m climaxing, though. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“Yeah, when your shields are down.”
Wasn’t going to happen. She needed all her shields up with him around. “Can you really duplicate Rex after reading my mind?”
“Yeah. Ready to give it a shot?”
She shuddered, loathing the idea of anyone, even this man with the dark magnetic eyes and body that had given her so much pleasure, getting into her mind. It gave her the willies. “No, I’m not. I told you, once I’ve spoken to Homeland Security I’d be willing to rebuild Rex in your lab. I’d need Marshall here to help me.”
“I have
SA Dixon arriving any minute. Do you remember him?”
“Of course,” Eden said dryly. “He interviewed me several times. Does he know who and what you are?”
“I’m a T-FLAC operative,” Gabriel said shortly. “Everyone in the business knows T-FLAC.”
“Well, excuse me for being so out of the loop.” She had a sudden thought. Preposterous, but she asked anyway. “Can you duplicatepeople ?” How would she know if Agent Dixon was the real deal or not?
“Jesus, Eden. This isn’tThe Stepford Wives. What the hell do you think I am?”
Her eyes locked with his. “You know what? I’ve never met a wizard before. I’m not even sure if what I’ve seen is real or not. And since you appear to be quite capable of turning into apanther, and you keep dematerializing m—”