He lifted his gaze to hers. Very composed, he said, “Because if I hadn’t, they would have killed us both.”
Ember opened her mouth, but no sound came out. They would have killed us both.
Christian asked, “Why did you come to Spain?” and took another careful step toward her.
She realized dimly that she was dripping rainwater in a widening pool onto the floor around her feet. “To forget,” she whispered, feeling her legs solidify to something like cement as he eased ever nearer, very carefully, watching her for any sign she was going to bolt.
“To forget what?” he insisted, but Ember shook her head; her turn.
“Is that what you do for a living? You kill things? That’s what your ‘work’ is?” Her voice was faint, tinged with disbelief and horror, until she had another chilling realization and her voice actually cracked. “Is that what you were doing that night—when you were late for our date?”
“That’s four questions. And the answer to all of them is no. Now, answer me this and I’ll answer all the rest of your questions, as many as you want: why did you come to Spain? And don’t tell me ‘to forget.’ I want a real answer, Ember. Tell me the truth.”
He was close now, within reaching distance, but he’d stopped an arm’s length away and wasn’t making any moves to come closer. Ember’s entire body was shaking now, her knees and hands and even her lower lip were trembling. The bravado she’d felt moments before had drained away, leaving only the cold, cold residue of fear. Water dripped into her eyes but she was too frozen to wipe it away.
“I-I came to Spain to forget…to forget…” she stopped abruptly when he stepped closer.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Christian said gently. “You should know that by now. Hurting you would only be hurting myself, September.”
Hearing him say her full name reminded her of something. She swallowed around the lump in her throat and asked, “How did you know my real name that first day we met?”
“I saw it.” When her brow furrowed in confusion, he explained, “There’s a framed newspaper article on the wall behind the register, with a picture of your father and you. ‘American artist opens rare bookstore in Gothic quarter.’ Both your names were beneath.”
For some reason, this was the little fact that finally embedded itself into her consciousness as incontrovertible evidence of his un-humanness. The wall behind the register was ten feet back from the counter; the framed newspaper article printed in—as newspaper articles are—tiny, six-point type. Her father had complained when the article came out that he could barely even read it with his glasses on, the paper held close to his nose.
Unnatural speed, immense strength and heightened senses, combined with the ability to turn into some other, animal form…Elsething.
But God, this Elsething was exquisite. Was that another of his gifts? Symmetry of features so perfect it would stun his prey into submission, like cobra hypnosis? He was so painfully beautiful it was next to impossible to believe this man standing before her had wreaked the kind of havoc she’d seen in the crime scene photos on the internet, the kind of things only a monster would do. The blood—so much blood.
And how could she ever trust he wouldn’t do the same thing to her, even by accident? Maybe his bloodlust was affected by the tide or the weather or even the full moon—
In one swift motion, Christian tore open his shirt, exposing his bare, muscular chest. Buttons popped and went flying, clattering and bouncing against the floor. Suddenly imposing and large and angry, he closed the final space between them and growled, “Do it then! If you really think I would ever lift a finger to hurt you, you might as well go ahead and kill me! I won’t try to stop you.”
The hysteria rose to a peak inside her, burning bright, razor sharp. She sucked in a breath, every nerve and muscle poised to flee—
Then he reached out and gripped her arm. Ember twisted away with a high-pitched shriek that sounded like a mouse when it sees the cat in mid-pounce.
But he was too fast and too strong, and she was too human. She was no match for him.
His arms came around her in a crushing tight band. She struggled against him to absolutely no avail, twisting and bucking, trying to gain release, but he only held her as she struggled, silently, patiently, until she wore herself out and sagged to the floor, her legs folding beneath her. Christian slid down behind her and continued to hold her as she gulped in lungfuls of cedar-scented air, her body wracked with tremors, her ragged breaths echoing throughout the quiet room.
“Breathe for me, little firecracker. Just breathe,” he whispered near her ear.
And she did. Shaking and hyperventilating in his arms, she did.
After a few minutes, Christian tentatively loosened his arms. Seeing she wasn’t going to make a move—she couldn’t, her muscles were frozen stiff—he peeled her soggy coat off her back and tossed it to a nearby chair. On his knees, he slid around in front of her and brushed her wet hair off her face.
“Look at me,” he said, when she didn’t lift her gaze to his. Childishly, she squeezed her eyes shut tight. “Look at me or I’m going to kiss you,” he warned.
Her lids flew open and she stared at him, wide-eyed and shivering with shock.
“You told me you wanted all of me,” he murmured, stroking a finger along her cheek. “Tell me that hasn’t changed.”
She groaned, hid her face in her hands. He pried her hands apart and forced her to look at him. “We’ll let that one go for the moment. But tell me this: why didn’t you turn me in to the police? Why didn’t you collect that big reward and end all your money troubles? You know where I live; you could have led them straight to me. But you didn’t. Why?”
His eyes searched hers, searing, haunted. She couldn’t have lied to him even if she’d wanted to. “The money?” she whispered hoarsely, shaking her head. “Christian, how could you think the money would mean anything to me? It’s you. But you didn’t even call me! All this week I had no idea what happened to you—”
“I wanted to call you, I wanted to see you—God you have no idea—but I can’t Shift when I’m injured,” he explained quietly, that finger still making slow tracings across her cheek. “I’ve been stuck in my animal form until today. I can usually heal very quickly, but this gunshot wound was nasty, my entire kneecap—”
“Gunshot!” Ember sat up stiffly, her eyes raking him for signs of injury. “Those bastards shot you?”
Amusement flickered over his face. “In the leg, yes. One of them Shifted and tried to eat me and the other one shot me. Does that make you feel better about it?”
For killing them, he was asking. Perversely, it did, and she nodded to let him know, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.
He seemed relieved at her answer. His eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, he said, very softly, “What are you in Spain to forget?”
It was a long while before she answered him, and his eyes never wavered from her face. “Everything,” she said truthfully. Then she realized with sudden, swift horror the two of them were more alike than she’d realized.
They were both killers.
The thought made her sick to her stomach.
She staggered to her feet, a hand cupped over her mouth, nausea rising in her throat. This was too much, it was all too much, and she couldn’t think with him so close, with his scent and his dark, molten gaze—she had to get away.
“Ember, wait—stop—”
Now.
She stumbled toward the door, barely seeing anything because her eyes were filling with tears. All those horrible memories she’d been so careful to repress came flooding back and mingled with the Internet images of the massacre on Christmas Day at the Vatican and the two corpses on the street last week, all of them mutilated and covered in blood.
Her footsteps sounded loud as cannon fire in her ears as she ran blindly toward the front door, a sob caught in her throat. Just as she lifted a hand to reach for the massive bronze ring that would u
nlatch the door and release her to freedom, something pulled her up short and had her scrambling back in shock.
Sinuous as smoke, a pale gray plume of mist snaked down in front of her, coiling and ruffling in the air. It gathered and shimmered for a moment, suspended, an odd cloud blocking the door, then coalesced, quickly gathering mass and taking shape as a form she knew all too well. Feet and legs, arms and chest, sculpted body, and breathtaking face, complete with a pair of green eyes so vivid they glowed.
Christian. He materialized in front of her eyes from nothing more than a thin cloud of fog.
He was naked.
The scream that clawed its way out of her throat was equal parts horror and disbelief.
“Wait,” he snapped with a hand outstretched. “Ember, just wait—”
“Let me go, Christian!” she sobbed. “If you care about me at all, just let me go!”
Without waiting for an answer, she ran past him, yanked open the front door, and ran out into the rain swept night.
The pounding on her apartment door was loud and unrelenting. So was the shouting.
“Ember! Open this door right now, honey! September! What the hell!”
It was Asher, roused most likely from a Xanax-induced sleep by the sound of her footsteps pounding up the stairs, the door to her apartment slamming shut and her hysterical sobbing, the last of which hadn’t let up since she’d collapsed back into the waiting taxi outside Christian’s house.
The ride home had been interminable. She kept expecting a cloud of smoke to filter in through the air vents and coalesce in the passenger seat into the naked form of Christian, which would terrify the driver—for so many different reasons—and they’d wind up in a fiery crash.
Ember didn’t think Fate would grant her the luck to survive not one but two fiery crashes in a lifetime.
Still in her soaked clothes and shoes, she’d flung herself face down on the bed as soon as she got home, buried her face into her pillow, and pulled the covers over her head. Then she tried not to think about how a supernatural cloud of mist—ethereal, insubstantial—would not be hindered by silly little human things like doors and locks.
The pounding on the front door ceased. Thinking he’d given up, Ember enjoyed a brief moment of relief until the sound of it being unlocked and swung open intruded through her sobs. When Asher burst through her bedroom door and started shouting up close, she wished with all her heart she’d never given him that extra key.
“Jesus Christ, honey, what’s going on? Are you hurt? I’ve never heard you cry! And I’ve never heard anyone cry like that. It sounds like someone’s skinning a cat! Tell me what’s happening, I’m about to blow an O ring!”
Obscure car engine references from a hysterical gay man who’d broken into her house in the middle of the night after she’d discovered her sort-of boyfriend was something right out of a Steven King novel; the world had officially ended.
From under the covers Ember moaned, “Nothing’s wrong, Ash. Leave me alone.”
She heard his disbelieving “Puh!” just before she felt the bed wobble under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the mattress. A hand began to rub slow, relaxing circles on her back through the comforter. It reminded her of something her mother would do when she was sick as a little girl and brought on a fresh wave of tears.
“Please—you have to tell me you’re okay. You’ve refused to see me all week and I’ve been worried sick and now you come home like this. I haven’t talked to you since right before your date last Sunday—what the hell is going on?”
She blubbered, “It’s…it’s Christian. H-he—” She paused, then wailed, “Oh God!”
“That son of a bitch!” Asher shouted at the top of his lungs, scaring the wits out of her. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you? I swear to God, Em, just say the word and I’ll get out my gun and go find that bastard and blow off his di—”
“No!” she groaned, cutting him off. “It’s not like that! He didn’t hurt me…” She trailed off, realizing she’d put just enough emphasis on that last word that Asher, if he was paying attention, would have picked up on it.
Fortunately, Asher was too busy having his own meltdown to notice.
He leapt from the bed and began stalking around the room, punctuating every third word with a foot stomp. “I should have known he was too good to be true! That face! That body! That wardrobe! That accent! I bet it’s all a ruse, isn’t it? He doesn’t really even have any money. He’s some kind of con artist, isn’t he? He’s a grifter! He lures innocent young women into his trap and then has his way with them—or their bank accounts!”
Ember thought it prudent not to mention she was neither innocent nor in possession of an enticing bank account.
Then Asher pulled up short and with a gasp said, “I bet he’s not even British…he’s probably from somewhere completely horrific…somewhere like…somewhere like Utah!”
Ember threw the covers from her head and shouted, “Asher, please! You’re only making me feel worse!”
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” He wrung his hands together, chagrined. Wearing fuchsia pajamas with a pattern of gold and scarlet peonies and a pair of mauve tufted slippers, he hurried to the side of the bed, sat down again, and took her hand. “But you have to tell me what happened or my imagination will get the better of me! What did he do? Or what didn’t he do? Tell me!”
Looking into his worried, beseeching eyes brought a fresh onslaught of tears. She hid her face into the covers again and blurted a muffled, “He’s not the person I thought he was.”
Her inner voice amended that to a derisive, He’s not a person at all.
Because life has a cruel and capricious sense of humor, her cell phone rang at exactly that moment. Before she could stop him, Asher had flung himself across the room, retrieved it from where she’d left it atop the dresser, picked it up, and shouted, “Hello?” He listened for approximately two seconds, then screeched into it, “What the hell did you do to her, you bastard?”
Ember moaned into the pillow and put her hands over her ears.
“No, you absolutely will not! I don’t know what you did but I’ve never seen her like this and so help me God if you come over here I’ll—” He cut off abruptly, listened for another moment, then with a muttered oath that included the words “roasted balls” he slammed the phone down.
Ember sat up in bed. “What? What did he say?”
Furious, Asher looked at her, his face a mottled shade of red. “He says he’s coming up.”
“What—now?” She looked wildly around the room as if he was lurking behind the curtains or beside the bookcase. “He’s here?”
In answer, there was a violent pounding on the apartment’s front door.
Seeing the look of pure panic on her face, Asher pronounced with venom, “I’ll take care of this jerkoff,” and marched out of the bedroom.
He slammed her bedroom door behind him so she couldn’t see what was going on in the living room, but within two seconds there was the muffled sound of shouting, another door being slammed, more shouting, this time louder, then a few unidentifiable thumps and bumps that had her cowering on the bed in terror, imagining the worst. Then her bedroom door burst wide open, disgorging an apoplectic Asher, wielding one of the set of carving knives from the block on the kitchen counter, and a snarling Christian, dressed only in the pair of linen trousers he’d been wearing when she saw him standing in front of the fireplace.
Ember shrieked, “Asher! Put the knife down!”
Then commenced the loudest, most convoluted shouting match Ember had ever heard. Asher screamed something, Christian shouted something back, the two of them volleyed threats and insults and ignored anything the other one was saying until Ember, exhausted and so strung out she thought her head might actually explode, yelled, “STOP!”
They froze. Both their heads whipped around in her direction.
Asher—athletic and muscular, but easily outsized by Christian—was in Badass mode. She�
��d seen this a few other times when he’d had occasion to divest some bigot of a misconception that gay men were nothing but effeminate, promiscuous, Streisand-loving sissies who’d been molested in childhood, triggering some kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome whereby the victim would forevermore “choose” to be attracted to other men in an effort to heal their painful past.
Despite the pretty pajamas and fluffy footwear, Asher was scary as hell. Color stained his cheeks, his face was hard as granite, his chest rose and fell in sharp, staccato bursts. The hand that held the knife shook. His fingers were curled so hard around the hilt his knuckles showed white. He was Italian, with that Mediterranean passion and volatility, and it showed.
In contrast, Christian seemed relatively composed. Until she looked into his eyes.
What she saw there made her mouth go dry.
He was furious, too, but it was cold and feral and utterly deadly, a savage blackness unfurling even as she started at him, a violence so thick and profound it actually had heft. It was nothing like Asher’s hot, blustering outrage, and though he was the one holding the very wicked-looking knife, Ember felt a thrill of fear slice through her, straight to the bone.
Her friend could take down the best of the best…humans.
Now, he was in mortal danger.
She whispered, “Ash. Put the knife on the dresser. Please.”
“I’m not doing anything until you give me a very good reason why I shouldn’t relieve this prick of an important body part.” Asher’s angry gaze flickered to the general vicinity of Christian’s crotch.
“Please,” she reiterated, keeping her voice as calm as she could. “Christian hasn’t done anything to hurt me, physically…” She swallowed and began anew, hoping her voice wouldn’t crack. “Or emotionally. We’re just having a-a fight. It’s nothing fatal, there’s no need for any amputations.”
After a long, murderous glare in Christian’s direction, he finally complied. Then he folded his arms across his silk-clad chest, tossed his head and said to her, “That was probably the worst lie you’ve ever told me, honey. And I’m pretty sure you’ve told me a lot.” He huffed a breath through his nostrils and shot another glare at Christian. “You’re lucky she’s not PMSing, or you’d be missing your baby-maker, Romeo.”
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