“Not yet. Oh…wow. Check this out,” he whispered.
“What?” she demanded.
He shook his head with mock gravity and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “It’s too soon to say what I see. I don’t want to scare you off.”
“Oh, please,” she said unsteadily. “You are so full of it.”
“And you’re so scared. Why? I’m a righteous dude. Good as gold.” He stroked her wrist. “Ever try cracking a safe without drilling it? It’s a string of numbers that never ends. Hour after hour, detail after detail. That’s concentration.” He pressed his lips against her knuckles.
“What does concentration have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with everything. That’s what I want to do to you, Abby. Concentrate, intensely, minutely. Hour after hour, detail after detail. Until I crack all the codes, find all the keys to all your secret places. Until I’m so deep inside ya…” his lips kissed their way up her wrist “…. that we’re a single being.”
She leaned against him, and let him cradle her in his strong arms. His warm lips coaxed her into opening to the gentle, sensual exploration of his tongue. “Come up with me,” he whispered. “Please.”
She nodded. Zan’s arm circled her waist, fitting her body against his. It felt so right. No awkwardness, no stumbling, all smooth. Perfect.
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“What the hell happened?” he demanded. A few drops of water fell off the tip of his nose onto my face. “Why are you lying on the ground? Are you okay?”
Was I okay? Hmm, wasn’t that the question of the hour? Trying to figure out that very thing, I looked back up into the sky, watching the raindrops coming down, one by one. Wow, it was really beautiful.
Every part of everything around me seemed deeper, more colorful, richer…
More intense.
“Rach?” Kellan tossed aside his glasses and leaned over me, protecting me with his body, stroking my hair from my face. “You’re silent. You’re never silent.”
A bird flew overhead, and when I concentrated on its body, its wings flapping, I found I could see its heart pumping, beating…
Oh.
My.
God.
“Rach.”
“I think I broke a nail,” I whispered.
He stared at me. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m kidding.” I lifted my hand and studied my plain, trimmed-by-my-own-teeth nails.
“You’re scaring me, Rach. Here, can you sit up?” He took my hand to pull me upright, then steadied me, his hands firm on my upper arms. “Are you all right?”
Without his lenses, his eyes were so clear and blue, I could have just looked at him all day long.
Wow. Gorgeous.
I wobbled, then set my head against his chest. Beneath the drenched shirt, his heart beat a bit fast but steadily, and he was warm, deliriously warm. Sturdy and solid and always-there Kel.
He extended his arms, pushing me back, so he could peer into my face. Man, he was cute. I smiled up at him dreamily, thinking I’d no idea just how cute…and while thinking it, a shiver wracked me. Probably it was the cold, but it might have been the totally and completely inappropriate surge of lust I was experiencing.
Kel kept his hands on me, drawing me back against his warm body, making me all the more aware of him, of his sweet but firm touch, of the strength that allowed him to easily take on my weight. I sighed in pleasure.
“You’re scaring the shit out of me, Rach.”
“Did you know you have the most amazing eyes?”
They narrowed on me. “Huh?”
“Seriously,” I said, reaching up, touching his face, which was wet from the rain. “I could drown in ’em. Anyone ever told you that?”
“Uh, no. You’re the first. Hold on there, champ,” he said when I tried to get up, holding me down with a hand to the middle of my chest. “Don’t move.”
Good idea, since everything had begun to swim. I put my hands to my head. “What happened to me?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
He was so cute with all his worry that it made me smile. “Kel? How come we’ve never gone out?”
“Out?”
“Hooked up.”
He went still, then lifted two fingers. “Okay, how many?” he demanded.
“I’m fine,” I insisted.
“I thought we were erasing that word from the English language.”
I tried to stand up on my own. “Whoa.” I reached for him, because maybe I wasn’t so okay after all. “Hey, stop the world, would ya? I want to get off.”
“You’re dizzy?” He gripped my shoulders. “What the hell happened? Did you fall?”
I closed my eyes. But just like on the plane, that only made it worse, so I opened them again. I focused on a tree. Again, I saw right through the tree, as if I had X-ray vision, meaning I could still see the long line of carpenter ants making their way through the trunk. I followed their line down to the ground, where they emerged from a hole only a few inches from me.
One crawled out near my foot, and I would have sworn on my own grave that it craned its neck and glared at me for being in its way. I stared at it, stunned. “Uh…Kellan?”
“Jesus,” he breathed, and for a minute my heart surged, thinking he could see through stuff, too, but he shook his head and pointed at my clothes.
They were smoking.
“You were hit by lightning,” he said, and looked into my face. “My God. Are you okay?”
His eyes still seemed luminous and filled with far more worry than before. I dropped my gaze from his, and then gasped.
Like with the moon, like with the tree, I could see through him. As in beneath his clothes.
Um, yeah, I was definitely different.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, what are the chances?” Leaning in again, he began to run his hands over my limbs. Up my legs, over my hips, over my ribs—
“What are you doing?”
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Rubbing her gloved hands together, she walked toward the man, slowing as she neared him.
“Hello,” Fabia said softly, blinking against the streetlight.
He stared at her—no, past her—his face expressionless. His face was smudged with dirt, a deep, dark red scratch running from temple to jaw, one eye blackened. Blood swelled the skin under his eye and hung in a painful purple moon over his cheek. As Fabia moved closer, she realized that his hair wasn’t matted so much from the wet, dank air as from dried blood. There was a clear, perfect circle of reddish, broken skin around his neck, and she noticed now that the dirt she’d seen under his nails this morning was actually blood.
Whatever had happened, he’d fought back. Whoever he’d fought with probably looked as bad as he.
“Are you all right?”
The man turned to her, tried to look up, and then took a deep breath, his mouth trying to move. He was trembling, his arms tight against his body now, his black eyes filled with fog and sadness. Again, she tried to reach for his mind, but the iron wall was still there, planted solidly.
What do you think? Fabia asked Niall without even meaning to.
All that blood, Niall thought. Maybe it’s not his. Moyenne are messy murderers.
He hardly looks capable of a right killing, Fabia thought.
True. He didn’t do his level best, there. So he might be on the lam. Injured from the barbed wire he crawled under, Niall thought. Just call the police.
Fabia stared at the man, ignoring Niall for a moment. Maybe she couldn’t read the man’s mind, but there was something about him. Something kind even in his quiet,
painful desperation.
Bloody bleeding heart, Niall thought. But just be ready to escape. Be prepared to step into the gray, okay? Hop back to your flat.
Yes, sir, Fabia thought, shaking her head. But Niall was right. It was easier to extend this kindness knowing that if the man grew strange or crazy or even dangerous, she could disappear in an instant, traveling through matter to the police station where she could report the crime she’d just escaped. The Moyenne she worked with at the clinic were always amazed that Fabia would go to flophouses and tenements and dark alleys looking for clients. What she couldn’t tell them was that she was protecting them by doing so, keeping them away from danger from which they might not be able to escape.
Fabia bent down, trying to attract his gaze. But he wouldn’t look at her, and she could feel the tension radiating from inside him.
“Hi, there,” she said. “My name is Fabia Fair. I live at a flat just down a bit.”
He didn’t move his eyes, but he blinked, once, twice.
“Would you like to come with me?” Fabia said, crouching down farther and looking into the man’s desperate, searching eyes. “How about a wee bit to eat?”
He licked his lips, breathing in, scanning the ground as if he’d dropped some change. Not drunk, Fabia thought. Schizophrenic.
Perfect, Niall thought. Go from Cadeyrn to just another crazy. Get yourself into another fankle.
Haver on, man! Would you mind affording me some space here? she thought back. Go watch your bleeding telly.
Fabia closed her mind to her brother and moved closer to the man. He was shaking, his knees hitting together. Again, he moved his mouth, but then shook his head, tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.
Fabia watched him, trying everything she knew to get inside his mind, but there was no opening, as if the block was put there on purpose. And not by the man, who clearly was in no shape to create or even maintain a block, even if he were Croyant, magic, like her. And there was something about him, even with his quaking gaze and his long, thin, dirty body. Fabia couldn’t read his mind, but she could feel…kindness.
“All right,” Fabia said. “That’s it. Please, come with me.”
She stood up straight and held out her hand. The man breathed in, looking at her hand and then her face, her hand, her face, and then slowly, he lifted his dirty palm from his knee, studying his movements with surprise as if he’d never moved before. His fingers quivered, shook, and Fabia took them in her small gloved hand, feeling how cold he was even through the leather and wool.
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The mantel clock began to chime.
Jessamyn’s head flashed around to stare at it before she looked back at Morgan.
She forced back her body’s awareness of him. “I needed him as my husband, you fool! For two hours, starting now.”
“Husband?” Jealousy swept over his face.
“In a lawyer’s office,” she snarled back. “I have to be there with a husband in fifteen minutes, or all is lost. Damn you, let me go!”
The clock chimed again.
His eyes narrowed for a moment then he pulled her up to him. His grip was less painful but just as inescapable as before. “A bargain then, Jessamyn. I’ll play your husband for a few hours—if you’ll join me in a private parlor for the same span of time afterward.”
She gasped. A devil’s bargain, indeed.
“Nine years ago, before you married Cyrus, I promised you revenge for what you did—and you agreed my claim was just. Two hours won’t see that accomplished but it’s a start,” he purred, his drawl knife-edged and laced with carnal promise.
Her flight or fight instincts stirred, honed by seven years as an Army wife on the bloody Kansas prairies. She reined them in sternly: No matter how angry he’d been, surely Morgan would never harm a woman, no matter what preposterous demands he’d hurled nine years ago when she’d held him captive.
Her fingers bit into his arms, as she tried to think of another option. But if she didn’t appear with a husband, she’d lose her only chance of regaining Somerset Hall, her family’s old home…
The mantel clock sounded the third, and last, note.
She agreed to his bargain, the words like ashes in her throat. “Very well, Morgan. Now will you take me across the street to the lawyer’s?”
Morgan escorted Jessamyn across the street with all the haughtiness his father would have shown escorting his mother aboard a riverboat. It was a bit of manners ingrained in him so early that he didn’t need to think about it, something he’d first practiced with Jessamyn when she was five and their parents first openly hoped for a wedding between them. Such an ingrained habit was very useful when his brain seemed to have dived somewhere south of his belt buckle as soon as she’d agreed she owed him revenge.
What was he going to do first? There were so many activities he’d learned in Consortium houses: How to drive a woman insane with desire. How to leave her sated and panting, willing to do anything to repeat the experience. More than anything else, he needed to see Jessamyn aching to be touched by him again and again.
A black curl stroked her cheek in just the way he planned to later. He smiled, planning, and reached for the office door.
Ebenezer Abercrombie & Sons, Attys. At Law announced the sturdy letters on its surface.
Morgan stiffened. Her lawyer was that Abercrombie? Halpern’s friend and Millicent’s godfather, with whom Morgan had dined last night? Who’d beamed approval as Halpern and his wife had shoved Morgan at their daughter and he’d made no mention of a wife?
Damn, damn, damn.
Jessamyn, who’d never been a fool, caught his momentary hesitation and glanced up at him.
He shook his head slightly at her and put his hand on the doorknob. Suddenly it turned under his fingers and swung open to frame Abercrombie’s well-fed bulk. The man’s eyes widened briefly as he took in both of his two visitors.
Jessamyn leaned closer to Morgan and squeezed his arm, with all the assurance of a long-married woman. God knows he’d seen her do it with Cyrus before.
Morgan shifted himself so she could fit comfortably, as he’d seen his cousin do. She settled easily within a hand’s-breadth of him and tilted her head at Abercrombie expectantly. The entire byplay took only a few seconds.
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened, before a polite professional mask covered his face. “Good afternoon, Evans. What an unexpected pleasure to see you here today.”
Morgan smiled with all the smooth charm he polished as one of Bedford Forrest’s spies. “The pleasure is entirely mine, Abercrombie. I’ve the honor of escorting my wife. Jessamyn, my dear, have you met Mr. Abercrombie?” He could have kicked himself. His Mississippi drawl was slightly heavier than usual, a telltale sign of nervousness.
Jessamyn took Abercrombie’s hand, with all the charm of her aristocratic Memphis upbringing. “Yes, Mr. Abercrombie was my uncle’s lawyer for years. I’ve known him since I was a child. Hello, sir.”
Abercrombie kissed her cheek. “My dear lady, I’m so glad you were able to bring your husband.” His eyes flickered to Morgan but his countenance was impassive. “Your cousin Charles and his wife are seated in my office, waiting for the reading of the will to begin. Please come with me.”
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“In Bad with Someone” copyright © 2006 by Rosemary Laurey
“Run of Bad Luck” copyright © 2006 by Karen Kelley
“Come to a Bad End” copyright © 2006 by Dianne Castell
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