Bacon. He smelled it through the glass, and his stomach growled.
He stepped out onto the terrace and took a seat opposite her. Neither of them spoke for several minutes while they filled their plates and ate. Birds began to chirp in the trees beyond the plant-filled patio, hesitant little sleepy peeps at first that grew into full-throated songs of welcome as the sun rose over the horizon.
“You didn’t catch him,” she said, stating the obvious.
He tore apart a croissant with his fingers. “No. I know where he went, though. I’m going out again.”
“That must be handy for an assassin.” She glanced up at him. “The walking-through-walls bit. I’ve never seen that before. And you have Vapor, too. You’re very Gifted.”
He didn’t reply. Church bells throughout the city began to toll.
“I like that,” Morgan said quietly between bites of scrambled egg. Xander froze with his fork halfway to his mouth.
“The bells,” she said, looking down at her plate. “We don’t have church bells in Sommerley.”
“Oh.” His heart eased out of his throat. Fool.
When he was able to breathe again, he sensed something different. She was so somber. Her finely arched brows were drawn together, her generous mouth turned down.
“Are you all right?” he said, low, not quite looking at her.
She blinked up at him, startled. “Me?” She let out a small, brittle laugh. “I’m...yes! Of course I’m fine! I’m just...so very...”
Then she carefully put down her fork, dropped her face into her hands, and fell silent.
“Morgan,” he said, harsher than he intended.
She put up a hand. “Just give me a minute.” Then she put the hand back over her lowered face.
The impatience that lashed through him was almost unbearable. He held himself immobile, staring at her gleaming dark hair, the fine sweep of her collarbones exposed at the open neckline of her blouse, her long, tapered fingers that were just slightly trembling on her face.
He said her name again, softer. She inhaled, then let her breath out in a sharp exhalation that sounded like she had come to some kind of decision. She lifted her head and looked straight at him, and her gaze was steady and clear.
“I have to know how you’re going to do it.”
He frowned. Do what?
“It’s just the not knowing. I think if I know, I can...it will be easier for me.”
The food he had eaten turned to a sour lump in his stomach.
“Please tell me,” she whispered. The look she gave him then, pleading and vulnerable, shattered the dull hunk of wood in his chest to pieces.
Glowering, he shoved his chair back from the table and strode across the patio, stopping only when it ended in a balustrade of pink marble lined with baskets of flowers. He had a wild thought to jump off. Somehow that seemed much preferable to answering her question.
How are you going to kill me? was what she was asking.
How, indeed?
He heard her walk up behind him, slowly, her step soft over the stone. He didn’t turn to look at her when she stopped just inches beside him. He felt her gaze like fire on his face.
“I’m not going to run away from you,” she said, very quietly. “You have my word, if that means anything at all.”
There seemed to be a steel band tightening in degrees around his chest with every breath. He crossed his arms over it and stood still as a rock, glaring daggers at a potted red geranium.
“And I want you to know that I’m sorry.”
That got to him. He looked at her, shocked. “You’re sorry. For what?”
She smiled, and he thought he had never seen anything so sad in his entire life.
“For us. I’m sorry for both of us. For the way things are. For the people we could have been, in another life. And I don’t blame you.” She shook her head. “I know it’s just your...”
She faltered, dropped her gaze from his, and turned to the view of the city, dusky rose and amber in the morning light. “I know it’s just your job.”
He was staggered. If this was a ploy to disarm him, it could not have been better planned or targeted more perfectly.
I know it’s just your job. She was granting him absolution for having to kill her. She was forgiving him.
“We’re going to find them,” he said roughly, only half believing it.
“Maybe,” she agreed softly. “But if we don’t, I have to know how you’re going to do it. I have to know. I can’t go on like this, imagining every possible thing you could...” She made a vague gesture with one hand, and it was so helpless and resigned and utterly sweet he wanted to scream in impotent rage.
But he didn’t. All he did was lift his hand, reach out to her, and place two fingers very lightly on the nape of her neck between the C1 and C2 vertebrae.
Her skin was warm and so very soft. Her hair was cool and heavy and silken on the back of his hand, as if he had plunged wrist-deep into water. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, and he couldn’t remove his hand no matter how many times he told himself to.
“A knife?” she whispered.
Wordless, he nodded.
“Will it hurt?”
“No,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse.
She took a breath and seemed to gather herself. She lifted her head, and he allowed his hand to fall. The sudden loss of the heat of her skin was a cold shock against his fingers.
“Well then.”
She looked at him without fear or reproach, her eyes vivid and shining, almost relieved. She exhaled. She smiled. The change in her was immediate and profound, as if invisible shackles had been released and dropped to her feet. “Let’s finish breakfast, shall we?”
And she turned and walked back to the table, leaving him, once again, stunned and silent.
“The Vatican?” Morgan turned to Xander in shock.
He gave the cab driver instructions in Italian, then gave a curt nod, ignoring with great effort the view afforded him as Morgan’s skirt rode up over her knees and a pair of long, tanned legs emerged in all their toned glory.
Christ, he thought, gritting his teeth. This is a goddamn disaster. He sat back against the hard taxi seat and stared out the window.
They’d finished breakfast quickly, and she’d showered and changed at the hotel. He wanted to get an early start, picking up where he’d left off yesterday, and she’d insisted on joining him. Two heads are better than one, she’d said, only with her scent in his nose and the sight of that body displayed so spectacularly in a simple black skirt, a fitted red blouse, and those sky-high heels she favored, only one of his heads was working. And it wasn’t the one on top of his neck.
He really needed to get some sleep.
“But—but—how can that be?” she was saying, leaning forward.
By chance, Xander glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the taxi driver gaping in slack-jawed admiration at the reflection of her cleavage, peeking out in all its creamy, rounded perfection from the undone top button of her red blouse. He bared his teeth, and the man blanched and snapped his eyes forward.
“Aren’t the Expurgari associated with the church? Why would one of us go anywhere near the Vatican? Does he not know?” Morgan leaned even closer, so close he could smell exactly where she’d dabbed perfume at the hollow of her throat. To his great horror, his mouth began to water.
“Sit back,” he snapped, glaring at her, “and stop asking so many damn questions!”
She stared back at him, cool, with her eyebrows raised in twin dark quirks, not one iota impressed with his display of anger.
Wonderful. She wasn’t even scared of him. He’d told her exactly how he was going to kill her, and even that had failed to frighten her. If anything, it made her happy.
Of all the deserters and criminals and threats to the tribe he’d tracked in his lifetime, he had to get stuck in Rome for two weeks sharing a hotel room with a headstrong, sexy, intelligent, fearless woman who also happened
to be so beautiful it stopped men dead in their tracks in the street.
Shit.
She eased back into the seat, crossed her legs, and calmly said, “Well. I suppose if you’re not interested in my input, I probably shouldn’t tell you that our new friend is a telepath.”
The cab bounced along the road. American rock music played on the taxi’s tinny radio. Sunshine streamed through the windows, lighting her hair to a blaze of shining, coppery brown. And his blood ceased to circulate throughout his veins.
Telepaths were unheard of in the tribe. Of all their Gifts—Vapor and Suggestion and Foresight and Passage and many, many others—he’d never encountered a telepath. Even their new Queen’s Gift of Sight was limited to touch. His mind raced with the possibilities.
“And you know this because...?”
Inexplicably, she flushed red. She dropped her lashes and began to inspect her flawless manicure with great interest.
“Morgan,” he said, an imperative. She looked up at him from beneath her lashes.
“Tell me what he said.”
But he could guess. From the flush on her cheeks to the way she squirmed under his penetrating stare, he could guess.
“He didn’t threaten you—”
“No,” she said, too loud, then cleared her throat and looked away. Her voice dropped. “No, he did not threaten me.”
His voice came flat and accusing. “He knows you’re unmated.”
Her flush deepened, spreading down her neck. She nodded, once, and he wanted to break something.
It was the scent that gave it away. Unmated females exuded a different scent—wilder, more primal—than their mated counterparts. The bonding scent was subtle but distinctive and softened the sultry siren’s perfume of an unmated female Ikati.
An Ikati like Morgan.
He’d trained for years to become immune to it, in the same way he’d trained to become immune to pain or fear or Gifts like Suggestion. A soldier can’t afford distractions, his capoeira master had told him as a very young man, over and over, even as he was becoming ensnared by the most dangerous distraction of them all, one that no one thought to train him to resist because no one thought it was possible.
“This is too dangerous for you. You’re going back to the hotel,” he said through clenched teeth, but she sat up ramrod straight and caught his arm just as he was about to lean onto the sliding plastic window that separated the front seat from the back and bark instructions to the driver. Her fingers clenched so hard into his bicep he thought he felt a bruise form.
“This is my life we’re talking about,” she snapped, eyes blazing a hot, brilliant green. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be tracking the Expurgari, I’m the one with everything to lose, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you boss me around and decide what’s best for me just because you’re bigger and carry a bunch of knives!”
He felt the cab driver’s worried glance in the mirror, but he didn’t turn away from Morgan’s livid, pale face. “This is not a game, Morgan,” he said harshly. “Do you know what a feral Alpha will do if he catches you? Do you have any idea what he will do?”
“Yes,” she said icily. “And that’s far preferable to what you are going to do to me.”
Her words hit him like a fist in the gut. The cab slid to a stop—he didn’t turn to look where—and she released his arm and gave him a one-two punch before opening the door and stepping out into the street.
“And at least I’ll get to have sex before I die.” She muttered it, then slammed the door behind her, turned, and walked away.
If a grenade had gone off in his lap, it would not have had near the explosive effect those words caused on his body.
Everything went into instant overdrive. His heart rate, respiration, hormones, everything spun wildly out of control, including his thoughts, which were saturated with the most carnal, vivid images of Morgan’s naked body, wrapped around his own.
He hunched over, clenched his hands into his hair, and sat there with his eyes squeezed shut, breathing in great gulping breaths of air, until the taxi driver cleared his throat.
“Mi scusi, signore. Stiamo andando in?”
“No.” He took a few more ragged breaths. “I’m going.”
He pulled some money from his back pocket and threw an uncounted wad of euros through the little plastic window. “Keep it,” he said in Italian as the driver protested it was too much.
Money. Who cared about money? Leander would wire him as much as he needed for as long as he needed it. No, money was not the most pressing problem at hand. And neither, if truth be told, was Morgan.
The problem was him.
This woman—this mark—had somehow managed to splinter his control every time he got near her. Everything about her got under his skin, from her eyes to her scent to that smoky, come-hither voice, that fire and passion, that fragile, appealing lostness that leaked from her in unguarded moments when she thought no one was looking. And the things she said, the impossible, crazy things! Things that lingered in the back of his mind on replay for hours, one on top of another, a layer cake of confusion and fantasy and horrible temptation and worst of all—
Understanding.
Somehow, impossibly, he knew she understood that he didn’t want to kill her but he would because he had to. Because that’s who he was. That’s all he was and all he had been, for so long he couldn’t remember anything before. And her acceptance of that was the worst thing he could imagine.
Haven’t you ever wanted another sort of life?
He stood on the street corner as the cab slid away into traffic, watching her walk away, watching the heads turn in her wake, hearing the chorus of whistles that followed those swaying hips, and for a brief, terrible moment, recalled another woman who had spoken those exact words to him, so many years ago.
A woman who’d died because of him.
And if they didn’t find the Expurgari, Morgan would have to die, too.
Son. Of. A. Bitch!
She was almost blind with rage. If she’d had a machine gun in her hands, she might have mowed down everyone in sight, all these cheerful Italians and chattering tourists and those stupid nuns. There seemed to be a thousand nuns to every church in this city. Honestly, it was starting to freak her out.
“This is too dangerous for you,” she mimicked under her breath as she stalked down the busy sidewalk, not bothering to get out of anyone’s way. “Ha!”
Too dangerous. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right! I’ve never been in any kind of danger before. I’ve never been convicted of treason and locked up for weeks and faced my imminent, gruesome death. I’ve never fought off a pack of wild panther boys or kicked ass over all those other savages who wanted my spot on the Assembly or shared a hotel room with a killer!
She raked a hand through her long hair and cursed out loud, garnering a disapproving stare from another of those multifarious nuns who stood outside a little sidewalk café, sipping espresso.
“Stuff it, sister,” she said, and walked on.
Where the hell was she, anyway? She paused for a moment to look around and get her bearings.
They’d gone only a few blocks from the hotel in the taxi, and she didn’t have a map or speak Italian. She had money so she could hail another cab, but when she put a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun she saw, unmistakable and huge, the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica less than a mile away on the other side of the sluggish, winding Tiber.
She decided to walk.
It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny, and every bird in the city seemed to be singing sweet little melodies from the pockets of trees that were everywhere. She crossed the river over an arched stone bridge, mossed and dark with age, and made her way along the tree-lined boulevard, dodging pedestrians and leaping out of the way of insane Vespa drivers who all seemed to share the same death wish.
She passed fountains and ruins and one ancient, weathered fortress that turned out to be the emperor Hadrian’s mausole
um, topped by a massive, sword-wielding bronze angel. The city was a feast of art and architecture, all casually laid about in plain view for everyone’s enjoyment. She loved the vitality of it, the open green spaces and the ancient buildings and the sense of magic that permeated everything, even the air.
And Italian men, she thought, eyeing one spectacular specimen lounging idly against a tree, are pretty magical, too. They dressed well. They moved well. They were tall and dark and elegant, much like her own kind. Even the slouchy, paunchy, balding ones had a certain je ne sais quoi.
The lounging dark-haired boy lifted his head, caught her looking, and whistled, low and husky. His eyes burned. She looked away, kept walking, and tried not to think of other burning eyes, kohl-rimmed, amber, and endless.
Xander watched as Morgan bypassed the noisy line of hundreds of people waiting to enter the Vatican, sashayed to the uniformed officer operating the metal detector at the entrance, and touched his arm.
The guard, smiling a glazed, faraway smile, led her away by the hand into a private side entrance. Xander rolled his eyes and snorted.
She was shameless.
But he wasn’t about to stand in line himself, especially with that metal detector and the knives concealed in his boots and belt, so he strolled around until he found a relatively unpopulated area—no easy feat—and backed himself against a soaring granite wall. He closed his eyes and concentrated, sending his awareness out, looking for the warmth and motion that would indicate the presence of people on the other side. There was nothing. He took a breath and pushed back.
The stone was cool and very old, much harder than brick or marble and harder to Pass through. The drier, dustier volcanic tufa of the Colosseum had left a residue on his clothes and skin, but granite left nothing but a slight alkaline taste in his mouth. He concentrated on moving forward through the dense mass of it, his legs and arms and chest pressurized as if he were underwater. It was harder to breathe in this type of rock, too, and he didn’t attempt it.
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 10