Adrian glanced at her, mouth quirked, knowing she stared, and entered the steam-filled stall. Smiling another smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes, he shut the opaque door, and steam swirled around to obscure his body.
Amber remained staring. What she’d seen between his legs as he stepped into the shower had been firm and well shaped. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining that firm cock rising to her hand while he touched her with languid fingers, his dark eyes promising sin.
In the shower, Adrian started to whistle. Amber swallowed hard and made herself turn around and walk from the room.
* * *
By the time Adrian finished his shower Amber was long gone. Too bad. Watching her hair get spiky in the steamy room, her gaze riveted to him as he teased her with his nakedness had made his blood burn.
But he was right that she wasn’t ready for what he was. Adrian had learned to take the best life offered and enjoy the hell out of it, because it didn’t last. But if he rushed Amber, he might hurt her, or scare her, and something was prompting him to take care of her, to be gentle.
Adrian dried himself off and pulled on his jeans, walking lightly through the guest room to the hall. The door to the bedroom he’d identified as Amber’s stood tightly closed. He sensed her behind it, in bed perhaps, her breathing too rapid for sleep. He grinned and retreated to his own room.
He sprawled across the double bed, hands locked behind his head. The taste of Amber’s kiss had been delectable. The feel of her gaze on him had been even more delectable. She’d wanted to look at him, and she’d wanted to touch him, which gratified something deep inside him. Adrian didn’t frighten or unnerve her—she was strong, and he’d sensed a wanting in her that was raw and basic.
He wanted her with the same intensity, and he was certain she felt it. Witches carried nature and a part of the mother Goddess in them, and he could feel in Amber her solid connection with the earth. Even her name, Amber, grounded her—amber being used in magic rituals for healing, protection, and strength. Her magic would complement Adrian’s if they coupled, and the experience would be rough and pleasurable, and hard to forget.
As soon as he judged Amber to be asleep, Adrian rose, and in only his jeans and bare feet, went softly down the hall to Susan’s bedroom. As he’d sensed when he’d first explored the house, Susan’s room felt different from the others in the house. She’d begun to explore negative energies, which had drawn them to her like a porch light attracting moths.
Dabbling in death magic drew death magic, a fact which Susan had obviously known, because she’d put a stand of black candles across her windowsill in effort to keep negativity from crossing. It hadn’t worked. Adrian could smell a taint in the air where it was absent in the rest of the house. There had been no tendrils of death magic in Amber’s room, and he was willing to believe her innocent of whatever Susan had been doing.
No, he wanted to believe it. He wanted to find someone who was exactly as she seemed, with no duplicity to her. Most witches he met were eager to tap into his power and often suggested complex sex rituals through which they could grip some of his magic. At times, he let them, holding back the strongest parts of his magics, which could hurt and even kill them, but the aftermath always left him unsatisfied.
Of course, if Amber wanted to practice sex magic with him, he’d throw himself down and invite her to come on in.
He stepped into the center of Susan’s bedroom and stretched his senses. She’d been dabbling in many things—from studying the hieroglyphs of a cult of Apep, dark serpent god of Egypt, to demonic languages. Why had she copied out the demon script? Susan would not have been strong enough to withstand such death magic if she invoked it, and she must have known that.
He wondered where she’d come across the script at all. The script had been used in ancient times by demons to write rituals to their own gods, invocations that contained strong death magic and unbelievable evil. Only an incredibly powerful demon, or one very, very old, would even be able to read or understand this language today. The suspicion that the demon Adrian had faced tonight was an Old One chilled him to the bone.
One of Adrian’s life tasks was to keep demons from overrunning the human world. He could not kill them all, much as he wanted to, because life and death magic had to stay in balance. Too much of one or the other could unmake the world. Adrian and his brothers had been created to keep that balance.
In ancient times, death magic had been immensely strong and had nearly wiped out living magic and the world time and again. Isis had gotten a priest of Amun to agree to give Isis a child, and she’d born Adremenhotep—now called Adrian—an immortal demigod who would help humans fight against death magic for millennia to come. Isis had wanted him half human so that he’d have compassion for humans, and half god to have the magic and lifespan of a god.
A hell of a life. Adrian’s four younger brothers had come along one at a time, each sired by a priest and a different aspect of the mother Goddess. A family of warriors, Immortals, living outside of time until summoned by a spell referred to as the Calling.
At first Adrian and his brothers had done nothing but answer the Calls, unaware that they had a choice. But so much happened since their creation, so many world changes—wars, power shifts, populations rising and falling, to rise again. All of them had experienced unbelievable loneliness and grief, as well as unbelievable joy. Now here Adrian stood in a Victorian house in the twenty-first century in the Pacific Northwest, his brothers far away, thinking of the kiss of a woman in a way he’d not in a long time.
He shook his head as he began opening drawers and going through them. He’d chosen not to answer any more Calls since Tain’s disappearance, sick and tired of the goddesses who refused to help him. Tain was gone, they said, and Adrian would just have to live with it.
But when a man saw nothing before him but empty years, fighting endless battles, while the most powerful goddesses in the universe couldn’t find his brother . . . It pissed him off a little.
Adrian found what he’d expected to find in a witch’s room—boxes of candles sorted by color; herbs tied into bags or loose in jars; incense, both readymade sticks as well as loose incense she’d mixed herself; a mortar and pestle; and common plastic spoons to measure out various herbs and salts. A rustic broom stood in one corner, its handle decorated with colorful streamers.
And he found books. Shelves upon shelves and piles upon piles of books from the latest popular press on Wicca to old texts on herb lore, folk lore, and folk magic. Susan had marked up her books, highlighting lines or circling rhymes, folding down pages or marking them with scraps of bright paper. None of the books bore the demon script or even made reference to it.
In the bottom drawer of Susan’s desk, he found her notes in three-ring binders, neatly organized into one notebook per year. Within those organized into seasons, rituals, notes of tarot readings and scryings, spells and esbat workings.
“I’ve already been through all those,” Amber said from the doorway.
Adrian didn’t jump. He’d heard her footsteps in the hall, caught her scent on the air, felt the unmistakable touch of her aura. Adrian knew, somehow, that he would always be able to sense her coming.
He flicked slowly through Susan’s last notebook without looking up. “I know you have. But I might see something you missed or didn’t understand.”
She came to him, feet whispering on the carpeted floor. She wore a long nightshirt loose at the neck, which gave him a glimpse of the soft woman inside.
“How could I not understand?” Amber asked. “Susan and I were trained together.”
“I meant you might have missed the significance of something, or she might have hidden it from your eyes.”
“With a spell, you mean?” Amber moved uneasily as she peered at the page he read. “I would detect any glamour Susan cast.”
“Not if she really wanted to hide something from you.”
“And have you found anything?”
&n
bsp; “Not in here.” He closed the notebook. “If she wanted to hide something that much, she’d put it someplace more secret, especially if she didn’t want you to find it. Hiding in plain sight sometimes works, but probably not with you, not from her.”
Her brown-gold eyes held caution. “You know so little about her. And I know nothing about you. You say you want to help me, but why should you? Susan’s murder has nothing to do with you—you aren’t even from around here.”
She was grieving, and Adrian tried to keep his voice as unthreatening as he could. “Because this goes beyond Susan’s death. It’s about death magic and its wielders, not the murder of one insignificant witch.”
Angry tears filled her eyes. “She wasn’t insignificant to me.”
“I know.”
Adrian set aside the notebook and turned Amber to face him. He peered down into the depths of her eyes, to a place most people kept closed off from the world. He felt her resistance, her push back at his magic, which made her unusual. Most people were unaware of his gentle probing of the psyche.
“You have such innocence, Amber.” He brushed her cheekbone with his thumb.
She made an effort to blink back her tears. “Innocent? Just proves you don’t know me. I did some pretty wild stuff in college.”
He wanted to laugh. “Trust me, you are innocent. You’re like a shining light in a world of darkness.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “Poetic.”
“I’m a bad poet. I’m a fighter. I don’t have a way with words.”
“Seems to me you’re doing just fine,” Amber said.
Adrian’s heart beat faster, her warmth wrapping his senses until nothing else should matter. He touched her face, the smoothness of her skin easing something inside him.
He couldn’t stop himself leaning down to her, brushing his mouth over hers, which parted for his kiss. A taste of lips, smooth and warm with sleep, then the spicier bite of her tongue, stirred heat deep inside him.
Amber made a faint noise in her throat. Her hand came up to rest on the back of his neck as she deepened the kiss. Wanting thrummed through him.
Adrian knew how to keep sex casual—he fulfilled his needs, and his partners fulfilled theirs. Mutual pleasuring, nothing beyond. But he knew already that one short burst with this woman would never be enough. He’d want her again and again and again, and that would be foolish for both of them.
She slid her fingers through his hair. “So, do you have a girlfriend?”
Adrian frowned. “No.”
“Wife, fiancé, significant other?”
Amusement trickled through him. “No.”
“Just checking. I don’t either, by the way. Have a significant other, I mean.”
“I know.”
She raised her brows, her lovely eyes so close. “How could you know? I might have a boyfriend.”
He flicked his tongue across her lower lip. “If you had, his pictures would be in your room, his clothes would be lying around, and you’d have beer in your refrigerator. There’s nothing masculine in this house, and the only pictures of a man are ones of your father in the living room.”
She shot him a look of grudging respect. “Are you a detective or something?”
“Let’s just say I like to solve problems.”
“And you want to solve mine?”
He smoothed her hair from her forehead. “I find that I do.”
If she leaned into him, she’d find his obvious arousal pressing his jeans. Good thing he’d left Ferrin behind in the bedroom. The snarky snake would laugh himself sick.
Adrian wanted more than anything to pick her up and carry her back to her bedroom and lay her across her bed. He’d run his fingers through her short hair, smiling to see it curl around his fingertips. He’d kiss her brows, her nose and mouth, her chin and throat, and nuzzle the opening of her nightshirt. He’d strip the nightshirt away altogether and let his hands drift over her body, learning its curves.
He could go further, ease his fingers inside her, gently stroking her to arousal, and then enter her. He’d be surrounded by the scent, taste, and feel of her, and he’d let go until they climaxed together.
A nice dream. Her kiss told him she would be passionate under him. He could make her do this for him, and he could even make her forget afterward.
But I’ll remember.
Her fingertips grazed his biceps while he kissed her again. His bare skin was damp with sweat, her touch raising goosebumps. His cock was plenty hard and the tip would poke above his waistband if he didn’t stop this. What if she slid her hand down his torso and found it there? Would she back off? Or would she run her fingers around it, rubbing the excitement already there?
“No,” he said under his breath.
He tried to make himself push her away. It didn’t work; he only got a hand’s length away from her warmth. “Like I said before, you’re not ready for what I am. Not because I don’t want you,” he said quickly as hurt flashed in Amber’s eyes. “I do want you—very much. You’re doing something to me, Amber. I want you right now and to hell with discovering what’s going on with death magic. But I can’t always have what I want. Never, in fact.”
Amber’s brows drew down. “Never? What does that mean?”
“It means that as much as I tried to break away, I never can. I can be bad-ass and refuse to come running when the goddesses call, but I’m as defeated as if I’d gone back to Ravenscroft like a good boy and pretended my brother was dead.”
“Ravenscroft?” Amber jumped, her whiskey-colored eyes widening, as though she’d fixed on only the one word in his entire speech.
Adrian stilled. “You’ve heard of it?” Most mortals knew nothing about Ravenscroft, the Valhalla where he and his brothers had grown up and trained, where they’d waited to be Called. Those were the old days, when everything had been as neat and organized as Susan’s notebooks, when Adrian had thought his life had a purpose.
“I found mention of it in Susan’s notes,” Amber was saying, “when I searched her room the day after she died. What is Ravenscroft and what does it have to do with you?”
Chapter Four
Under her touch, Adrian went very still. The enigmatic darkness of his eyes showed nothing, but the fierceness of his expression told her much.
“Show me what you found.”
His teasing, provocative tone had vanished, and in place of the man who’d kissed her thoroughly stood a hard warrior who’d faced down enemies she couldn’t imagine. Amber had only half believed him when he’d said he’d been alive since before the great pyramids of Giza, but now she realized she stood in a room with an ancient being, one powerful enough to erase her with a single thought.
But within the harshness was a man in pain. So much pain. The grief Amber felt for Susan had been magnified in him a thousand times, for this brother whose very name seemed to send him into despair.
“Come with me,” she said.
She took him by the hand and led him down the hall. Adrian didn’t grip her hand but cradled it loosely, as though holding himself back from crushing her.
Amber took Adrian into her own bedroom, opened the drawer of her bedside table, and withdrew two more of Susan’s notebooks. She laid them out on her rumpled bed, and Adrian sat next to them, bracing his bare feet against her carpet.
As he lifted the first notebook and started flipping through it the glare of her bedside lamp highlighted the mass of scars on his back and across his shoulders. He’d fought plenty of demons, likely werewolves and vampires too, that had scored his skin and never killed him.
Amber sat beside him, the mattress dipping with their combined weight. Adrian skimmed the pages quickly, flipping them in rapid succession before Amber could focus on more than two words at a time.
Adrian stopped suddenly, his gaze riveting to a page. Amber looked over his shoulder to read what Susan had written: Ravenscroft. Is it real? Not enough data. Waterhouse mentions it as a mythical place of the Immortals, but no f
urther reference. Waterhouse deceased now, and none of his other works speak of it.
When he turned the page, Adrian went rigid beside her, his eyes focused with dead stillness on the next sheet. It was covered with sketches, with a note: Images from riding between, February 28.
Susan had sketched a man with an incredibly handsome face, who looked enough like Adrian to make Amber draw a sharp breath. Several profiles of this man filled the white space.
The next page had a note only: Nearly caught while riding between last night by a demon stronger than any I’ve ever known. But learned a name. Tain. If I am right, he was an Immortal, and if I am right, they must be stopped. If his intent is what I think it is. The notes broke off and Susan had drawn a circle with a line through it, with one caption, The end of the world.
Adrian looked up, his eyes sparkling with fury. “Show me the rest. Show me every single thing she ever wrote down, no matter how unimportant you think it is, and don’t hide anything from me.”
The ferocity in his voice brought Amber to her feet. “You saw everything. I left all her journals in her room, except for these two.”
Adrian was up before she finished the sentence. “We need to search the house.” He kept his thumb in the notebook at the page with the drawings, and held the book so tightly that his fingers were bloodless white. He was huge and strong, a half-naked warrior in Amber’s bedroom, body firm under skin that had been ravaged by the same battles that honed his muscles. He could do anything, but he held back, even in his anger.
“Wait,” Amber said. She slid off the bed. His eyes still sparkled, white hot specks swimming in the darkness. “Is this why Susan died? Because she knew about Tain, your brother?”
“Yes,” Adrian said. His voice was so cold that Amber expected the air to freeze with his words. “This is exactly why she died.” He turned on his heel and headed for Susan’s bedroom.
* * *
From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series Page 46