The night air was thick with the smell of dirty water and fog. The river lay somewhere very close at hand. Winter could hear the sound of boats cutting through choppy waves and the lapping of water against wooden piers, riding on the foggy air. Overhead, the steel arches of the Brooklyn Bridge dominated the night sky.
Buried beneath the fallen timber framing and iron siding of the shed was the van with a ruptured gas tank and the bodies of the seven men. The police would hopefully reconstruct the scene as happenstance—the fire set the leaking fuel alight and it exploded. Only later, with autopsies, would the authorities figure that foul play was involved, and that would give them the time they needed.
Nial turned and walked back to where Sebastian and Winter stood.
“The memory stick!” Winter gasped, horrified, as she remembered Blue Eye’s laptop on the floor of the shed.
Nial smiled. “You’ve had it all the time,” he told her, and reached under her jacket. “Remember when I pushed you down the corridor?” He delved into the tiny change pocket at the waistband of her skirt and withdrew from it another memory stick and held it up. “One memory stick looks like another. The one they were busting a gut trying to break the password to access was full of gay porn. This one is the real one.”
Sebastian laughed. “And I was going to take a piece out of you for planting a bug on me. I think I’ll get pissed about that instead. I took a round-house punch in the mouth for pornography.”
“I saw it,” Nial said. “Sorry about that. But the bug wasn’t on you. Winter has it in her left pocket.”
Winter delved into her left jacket pocket and found the tiny patch adhered to the lining. “Damn,” she said. “I missed that completely.”
“Don’t feel too badly,” Nial said. “You weren’t expecting it from me, and I took advantage of that.”
In the distance, fire department sirens sounded. Someone had seen the flames and called it in already.
Nial looked over his shoulder. “I’m dead. I need to go. So do you. You know what you need to do?” He started to move backwards.
Sebastian nodded.
“Take care of Tera,” Nial said.
Winter held out her hand. “Wait! Where are you going?”
Nial stroked her cheekbone with his thumb, then kissed her, briefly but passionately. “Sebastian will explain.” He kissed Sebastian, hard and quickly. “Go dtí go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,” he told them both. Then he turned and moved through the darkness and was gone.
Winter let out a shaky breath. “That was Irish, wasn’t it?” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
“He said ‘Until we meet again’.” Sebastian took her hand. “We have a lot of work and a lot of running to do, Winter. I’ll explain, but we need to get a few national borders behind us first.”
She nodded. And it wasn’t until they had reached cruising altitude on the Lufthansa flight to Berlin, five hours later, that Winter allowed herself the luxury of tears.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Somewhere in Europe. Six days later.
WHEN THE SPECIFIC pattern of knocks sounded on the door, Winter relaxed and opened it. Sebastian gave her a smile, handed over a fat pile of newspapers, a mix of European and days-old North American tabloids, kissed her soundly on the lips and threw himself into one of the armchairs sitting under the big picture window that took in a spectacular view of snow-capped mountains.
Winter flipped through the newspapers. “Anything interesting?”
“We’re no longer the news of the hour. That’s interesting.” He leaned forward and held his fingers against the French press coffee pot, then poured himself a cup. “Coffee always tastes so much better in Europe. It has to be the water or something.”
She sat on the edge of the opposite chair, her knees together. “That just means the authorities have put us on the backburner. Nial’s faction could be turning over every anthill trying to unearth us, and we wouldn’t know.”
Sebastian put the cup down. “Nial would have spent the last six days ensuring every last trail to us was as dead as possible. That’s the reason he separated from us, Winter. He’s been protecting us all along.”
“How could you possibly know that?” she asked.
Sebastian stood up abruptly, his good cheer fading, and looked out the window, his back to her. “I miss him, too, Winter.”
“I didn’t mean—”
He turned to look at her. “I know. You’re too full of misery to think beyond it.”
She bit her lip.
“Why didn’t you ever tell him how you feel?” Sebastian asked gently.
“I wasn’t sure,” she confessed. “Not at first.” She looked up at him. “It’s fine for you, Sebastian. You’ve loved him for centuries. You seem to know exactly what love is. I don’t. Even with you, it took me weeks to know, to be sure.”
Sebastian sat down again and took her hand. “Do you think that might be because you’re afraid of love, Winter? Afraid to be attached to someone like that? So you fight to avoid recognizing it.”
She gave him a small smile. “I managed okay with you, didn’t I? I even agreed to marry you.”
“As long as I can figure out how to legally marry you. You gave it a condition, Winter.” He smiled to take the sting out of his words. “You have difficulty loving unconditionally. That’s the part of Nial that scares you. That’s the part you couldn’t tell him, isn’t it? You couldn’t tell him that you love him.”
Winter could feel the ache of tears in her throat and eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. And her tears fell. “Why can I tell you how much I love you, Sebastian, but not Nial?”
Sebastian threaded her fingers through his. “It took you three years to tell me. You’ve just had a bit more practice with me.” He wiped her tears away.
“I saw the scar on his chest, Sebastian, and I knew then. I knew I loved him as much as you, that I never wanted to have to choose between the two of you. I felt sick with it, Sebastian.” She looked at him miserably. “He loves you, but I’m just his lover, his dilecta. A passing human plaything. Here today, gone tomorrow. How soon before he gets bored with me and puts me aside so you two can move on?”
Sebastian jerked, like he’d been jolted with electricity. “Críost thuas,” he breathed. He pushed his hand through his hair, staring at her.
After a moment, he lifted her hand up and kissed the palm. Then he flipped her hand over and kissed the back of it. “How many times has Nial done that, Winter?” he asked, staring at her over the back of her hand.
“Dozens of times,” she said.
“Like it?”
“Yes,” she confessed. She could feel herself blushing.
Sebastian spread her hand on his thigh and stroked the back of it gently. “Nial doesn’t have a religion as you and I count them. He was raised a pagan, and he’s pretty much thrown off any ideas of a higher power. But what you learn first you keep the longest.”
He touched the Claddagh ring on her finger with gentle reverence. “These rings, Winter, were used by the poorest of the Irish folk, back in the eighteenth century, as a way of indicating their attachment to one another when there was no such thing as clergy or a church they could afford, or they believed in, come to that. Even as late as then, the Celtic gods still had a grip on the wilder pockets of Ireland.”
“What are you saying?”
“By simply putting the ring on the one you loved, the right way around, you were declaring yourself married, Winter.” His green eyes met hers. “The poor Irish followed the custom. And Nial knew of it, because I told him when I gave him the ring. He liked the idea. It appealed to his childhood roots.”
Winter’s heart was racing. “Sebastian…”
He touched the ring. “When I gave him the ring, Winter, I made him promise never to give it away, unless it was to another whose heart had stolen his the way he had taken mine.” He again lifted his gaze to meet hers.
Winter could barely breath. “But…he had onl
y…only known me…”
Sebastian nodded. “Nial has considered you his wife since he slipped the ring on your finger, somewhere over the Pacific, all those days ago. He knew what he was doing. It was no prop. He let you think that, to give you time to get to know him. To learn to not be afraid of him the way I had taught you to be.”
Winter pressed her free hand to her chest, trying to relieve the pressure there. “There was a word he used, when we…when we made love. He only said it once, and then he dismissed it.”
“Was it coniunx, perhaps?” Sebastian asked softly.
She nodded.
Sebastian smiled. “It’s Latin. It means ‘my wife’.”
She closed her eyes. “Oh god, Bastian…and I was afraid of him.”
“I know.”
“This is what you were thinking about when you kept trying to tell me to trust him, wasn’t it?” She opened her eyes. “As soon as you noticed the ring on my finger, all your hostility evaporated almost instantly. And it never occurred to me to question why. But that was why, wasn’t it? You knew that Nial wasn’t playing around.”
Sebastian picked up her hand and cupped it in his. “That was one of the toughest moments of my life, Winter. The woman I loved, the man I loved, bonded while my back was turned and madly in love. I could already see you were falling head over heels for Nial, and Nial’s ring on your finger was his open declaration of his feelings for you, although you were unaware of it and he made me swear not to tell you until he thought you were ready to know. But I think Nial was scared to reveal himself as much as you were. It’s been several centuries since he had to declare himself and risk his heart. He’s out of practice.” Sebastian lifted her hand and kissed the palm. “So I’m pulling the plug for both of you.”
She smiled a little. “He’d kill you if he were here and knew you were giving him away.”
“He is here,” Sebastian said.
Winter’s heart lurched.
“He’s down in the lobby,” Sebastian added. “Where do you think I got the American newspapers from?”
Winter stumbled to her feet. “Here?”
“He won’t come up. He’s afraid you’ll be indifferent,” Sebastian told her, “even after you almost knocked him over in the shed that night, although I keep trying to tell him he’s wrong.”
Winter rushed over to the mirror. “Jesus Christ, Sebastian! Look at me!”
“I do. Constantly. You look stunning,” he told her.
“Where’s my clothes?” She looked around wildly.
“You’ve been wearing a robe or nothing for three days,” Sebastian told her. “Now you start worrying about clothes?”
“I’m going down there,” she told him.
“Go in the robe,” he told her. “Nial will enjoy that.”
“In a hotel lobby?” she gasped.
“In this country you could walk around naked, Winter, and no one would raise much more than half an eyebrow. Besides, there’s a heated pool off the lobby. You could say you’re going swimming.”
She ran her fingers through her hair. “I’ll kill you for this,” she muttered.
“Nial will, too, so you’re a set,” Sebastian said complacently. He leaned over and pushed her toward the door. “You look edible and you’ll make his heart stop. Go. I left him by the east end of the lobby by the pool.”
She went back to his chair and kissed him. “I love you.”
Sebastian took a breath and let it out. “I won’t ever get tired of hearing that.” He pushed her toward the door. “Go.”
* * * * *
Nial was sitting in one of the antique wingback chairs in the corner of the old section of the lobby, where the original black and white tile floor still gleamed and brass and potted palms competed with flock wallpaper and overstuffed chairs.
He had been reading a book, but now it sat on the table beside him, forgotten, while he watched kids playing in the water of the indoor pool, visible through double glass doors just off to his left.
It had been Winter’s intention to go straight up to him, but she found her steps slowing, until she was standing in the middle of the lobby, simply watching Nial, absorbing his appearance and readjusting to him with her new knowledge.
My wife.
He looked around, as if he knew he was being scrutinized. When he saw her, he straightened. A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. Then he stood and came toward her. He was wearing a suit and a light overcoat, for it was cold this high in the mountains. The garments were all the last word in sartorial elegance, and looked very European.
Winter could feel her knees shaking. Adrenaline overload. She let it be. She wanted to feel everything this time. The whole thing.
Nial stopped very close to her, but not close enough to touch. “Sebastian has a big mouth.”
“I know why you won’t come up,” she told him.
He drew a sharp breath.
Winter lifted herself on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck. Because of the space between them, she had to lean forward to do it and Nial automatically reached up to steady her, his hands on her waist.
“Ask me why I was afraid of you, Nial.”
“Was afraid?” He sounded merely curious, but his gaze was roaming her face as if he looked for the tiniest hint, the smallest chink of hope.
“I didn’t think a man who had lived as long as you could love someone like me.”
His fingers brushed across her waist in a tiny movement. Nial shook his head. “Live as long as me, Tera, and you learn that love comes easier. Not harder. You learn to appreciate humanity in a way that you never can when you’ve only got ninety years to sample it.”
“But you’ve never loved a human and I was—I thought I was—human.”
“We were all human to begin and we’re all human at our core. I don’t take human lovers, Winter, because for the last two hundred years or so, I’ve had Sebastian. And when he was gone, I wasn’t in the mood for another. Not so soon, not while Sebastian was still roaming the earth.”
“But you took me.”
He sighed. “I had to.” His hands tightened around her waist.
“Nial, I was never afraid of you. I had to let you think that because if I corrected your impression it would lead to the truth.”
“So you were never totally honest with me,” he said.
“Not about this.” She laid her hand over his chest. “I was afraid of how much I loved you. How much I wanted you in my life and never wanted to let you go. I love you so deeply, Nial, and I had no idea how you felt about me.”
He became still for the space of a heartbeat. Then he drew in a long deep breath that made his shoulders lift and his chest expand. He picked up her hand from over his heart and lifted it to his lips. “Coniunx,” he whispered.
“My husband,” Winter replied.
Nial groaned and wrapped his arms around her tightly. She could feel his heart racing.
But then his lips captured hers and she forgot about his heart and vitals, and everything but the joy of being in his arms once more. Her body caught fire as his mouth seared a path from her lips to her throat and descended to the nape of her neck, and his hand moved over her ass in restless, arousing circles. Through the thin silk of her robe, he might as well have been stroking her bare flesh.
“You’re naked beneath this,” Nial said, his lips brushing her throat.
“Of course,” she replied, blinking to adjust her vision against the suddenly blinding light in the lobby.
“We’d better go to your room, Winter, or what I intend to do to you next will get us arrested, even here.”
Her pulse spiked hard. “This way,” she told him, moving reluctantly out of his arms. They climbed the grand old staircase to the first floor and moved along the corridor to their room.
Winter gave the knocking pattern and the door was opened almost immediately. Sebastian leaned against the edge of the door. “She got you up here,” he told Nial.
Nial stepped pas
t Winter and pushed Sebastian further into the room. Winter followed, shutting the door behind her.
“I should take a piece of your hide, Bastian. You gave your word you would not betray me on this, yet you blurted it all to her.”
“I did,” Sebastian agreed. “Someone had to. You two were at an impasse. You’re both as stubborn as each other.”
Nial grabbed Sebastian’s face and kissed him. It started as an expression of frustration but swiftly turned erotic and rich with arousal.
Winter’s body was already heated and ready to burst. She could not stand idly by and simply watch such passion. So she moved up behind Nial and stripped him of his overcoat even as he kissed Sebastian. He cooperated enough to let the coat drop off his arms one by one, but he lifted his hands back to Sebastian’s shoulders afterwards.
Winter reached around Nial’s hips, past the opening of his jacket, and found his belt buckle. Moving swiftly, she slid it undone and pushed the ends aside so she could tackle the fastenings of his trousers.
“Here,” Sebastian said softly.
Winter looked up.
Sebastian was gripping Nial’s shoulders and turned him to face her. “Do your worst,” he said.
Nial groaned.
Sebastian wrapped his arm around Nial from behind, his hand splayed out flat over his abdomen. He reached over Nial’s shoulder and yanked his tie undone then began unfastening buttons. “You’re wearing way too much,” he said, as his hand slid down inside Nial’s trousers.
Nial’s groan was harder, guttural.
Winter yanked his trousers open and pulled the layers down his thighs, to reveal Sebastian’s hand curled around Nial’s rock hard shaft. She bit back her own desperate moan, and quickly took Nial into her mouth, her tongue sliding over the flared edges of the head and touched the side of Sebastian’s hand.
Nial’s hips jerked under their combined assault and this time his groan had a desperate quality to it. His hand clenched in her hair. “Tera…” he breathed.
Sebastian grabbed both sides of Nial’s shirt and tore the rest of the buttons away, then pulled his shirt, jacket and tie from his shoulders in one movement, while Winter removed the rest of his clothes.
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