He could take her. The awareness beat in the back of his head like a throbbing tooth. She was ready.
But he wouldn’t. Not the way she wanted him. Not the way he wanted to. Lilith had destroyed his self-respect, but she’d also taught him self-control. In fourteen years, he’d learned to draw out his pleasure and his partner’s until they both shuddered on the point of pain, until every muscle begged and every nerve screamed for release.
So he could control himself now. He could control Janet and her response to keep her safe. To bring her pleasure.
He drew back his head. Janet’s eyes were closed, her lashes spiky. Her lips were swollen and pouty from his kisses.
She touched his cheek. “Ross,” she whispered.
And any hope he had of resisting her, of protecting her, went up in smoke.
Grabbing her elbow, he dragged her into the bushes.
Chapter Four
SHE’D called him Ross. How stupid. How rude. No man wanted the woman he was with to confuse him with another lover.
Janet stumbled, clumsy with lust and mortification. Branches scratched her arms. Thorns snagged her skirt.
He jerked to a halt, his hand hard on her elbow.
Janet’s heart thudded against her breastbone. They stood at the edge of an old farm field overgrown with grass and wild-flowers and silvered with moonlight. The scent of roses drifted from the broken hedge.
And maybe he hadn’t heard her call him by another man’s name, after all, she thought hopefully. Or maybe he didn’t care. Because he didn’t look angry.
In the stark light of the moon, his face was hard and intent. His eyes were dark. Dilated. But not with anger.
Janet’s breath shivered out. Her nipples tightened.
“I won’t stop this time,” he warned her.
A rush of excitement weakened her knees.
“No,” she said, accepting.
But even then, his hand, which had lifted to cup her face, paused. Janet leaned into him, seeking his warmth, craving the fit of his palm against her cheek.
“No?” he repeated huskily.
Oh, God, she’d said the wrong thing. Again.
“No, I mean, yes, I don’t want you to. Stop, I mean. I—”
His mouth came down on hers, cutting off her nervous flow of words. What a relief.
He kissed her with a kind of ferocious purpose that should have scared her and instead made her dizzy with heat. He hauled her against him, his body hard and heavily, gloriously aroused, his tongue penetrating her mouth.
And it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
Janet shuddered and reached for him, her arms twining around his shoulders, her hands grasping his hair, as if she could hold him, have him, pull him into herself.
He dragged her down with him onto the ground, flattening the tall grass around them, and fell on top of her.
That was better. She relished his weight on top of her, his body long and lean, muscled, his angles squashing her curves. He levered up, raising himself on his elbows, and she made a soft sound of protest.
But it was all right, because he didn’t leave her. He pushed up her skirt. He yanked down her panties, and she lifted her hips to help him. He thrust his knee between hers, making a place for himself between her thighs, and an instant of hesitation tightened her belly.
You don’t know me, what I’ve done, where I’ve been.
But she wanted him.
She was ready for him. She had been ready for him since he’d trapped her against her car and touched her through her clothes. The memory made her squirm.
He choked out something—her name?—and jammed his hand between them to adjust his own clothes. She felt the brush of his knuckles and raised herself, reaching, seeking more. She was slick and soft with wanting him. He grunted with satisfaction as he filled her with his fingers.
It still wasn’t enough.
She tugged at him. His shoulders were smooth and hot, his chest rough with hair. The texture tickled a memory deep below the surface of her mind, down in the secret places where dark and slippery things dwelled.
Ross. She bit her lip to keep from saying the name out loud.
His chest shuddered with his breath. She felt him, blunt and hot and hard, searing her body’s entrance. Pressing her feet flat on the cool grass, she lifted to take him. His weight shifted. His head blocked the stars. And then he thrust himself inside her, all the way inside her, deeply, thickly inside her, again and again.
Her head reeled. She contracted around him, everything inside her spiraling, tightening to a point. Their bodies strained together, sleek and sweaty.
“Janet.” Her name on his lips was a groan. A plea. A prayer. “We shouldn’t—I have to . . .”
His muscles bunched. She felt him withdrawing and jerked in protest. Instinctively, she clung to him, twisting to keep him with her. To keep him inside her.
His fingers pressed into her buttocks. He rocked against her harder, faster, his rhythm overtaking and controlling them both.
Janet arched. She was almost there. Almost . . .
He gasped. “I can’t—”
“You have to,” she cried, frantic. “Ross!”
He pounded into her; quaked and convulsed in her arms. She felt the quick, hard shudder of his release and it started her own rippling through her like rings of water in a pond. Stirred to the heart, shaken to the depths, she sucked in her breath and went under.
THE flowers stared up at the sky with innocent white faces. The stars looked down.
Janet floated somewhere in the middle, grass sticking in her hair and to the small of her back, every muscle limp with gratitude. The scents of summer grass and roses mingled with the smells of sweat and sex. She closed her eyes and inhaled, holding the moment inside her as long as possible.
At some point, they’d reversed position so her lover laid beside her, his shoulder hard against her cheek. His heart pounded under her palm.
His voice rumbled from his chest. “You called me Ross.”
She started guiltily. Oh, dear. This was one of those awful lovers’ etiquette moments, like using the bathroom after sex, only worse. Why couldn’t she have cried out “darling” or “sweetheart” or even “Oh, my God” instead of another man’s name?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—”
“When did you know?”
Sex must have made her stupid. “Know what?”
“When,” he said with exaggerated patience, “did you recognize me?”
Janet’s breath whooshed out. Slowly, she lifted her head from his shoulder to stare.
He watched her, his long hair spilling on the ground that pillowed them both, his lashes thick and dark above angled cheekbones. In the dark, it was impossible to see the color of his eyes. But she knew his face. She knew.
“Ross?” she whispered.
One eyebrow lifted. “Yeah?”
A weight pressed on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t—
“You can’t be,” she blurted.
His mouth quirked. He reached up to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, and the rose she wore tumbled to his chest.
“I think we just proved I can. Anyway, you knew.”
She shook her head, rejecting the possibility. Rejecting responsibility. Rejecting him. “No.”
He frowned. “Sure you did. You might have changed some, but you’re still not the kind of girl who puts out on a first date.”
But she was, Janet thought with a terrible clutch at her heart. She had. He didn’t know her at all.
And she didn’t know him.
“I have changed,” she said. “I’m thirty-six years old. You’re . . .”
Hot. Young. Incredible.
Impossible.
“Still twenty-two?” he supplied. His tone was dry, but his eyes were wary.
“Yes.” She seized eagerly on the number as if, by sticking to the facts, she could somehow make them all add up. “Ross Mac
Lean would be in his thirties now. You haven’t aged at all.”
He shrugged, but the casual gesture didn’t hide the tension she felt in his body. “The sidhe don’t age. I can’t either, as long as I’m with them. But time passes, all the same, Janet. Years of it. Years of them.” His tone turned slightly bitter. “I don’t feel twenty-two. I feel about a hundred.”
She didn’t want to feel the tug of sympathy. What he was saying, what he was asking her to accept, was just too bizarre.
“What are you talking about? What—who are the shay?”
“Shee,” he corrected her. “The ancient ones. The people of the hills, whose world intersects with ours at times and places when we’re most vulnerable.”
She stared at him, her mouth ajar.
“Oh, Christ, Janet,” he snapped. “The fair folk, okay? I was abducted by the fucking fairies.”
He rolled to a sitting position. Janet was left on the ground, feeling as though the earth had suddenly shifted off its axis.
Which it pretty much had, if she accepted even part of what he was saying.
“We had a fight that night. Remember?” the one-who-could-not-be-Ross asked over his shoulder. “You were upset because you thought I’d paid attention to some girl at a party, and I got mad because you didn’t trust me. So I got on my bike, figured I’d ride around until we both cooled off some.”
“That wasn’t it,” Janet whispered. There was a bitter taste in the back of her throat, like bile or disbelief. “I needed to hear the words. After four months, it wasn’t too much to expect the man who was sharing my bathroom to tell me he loved me.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged. “And maybe I thought I’d make you miss me. Or make you sorry. Maybe I would have wised up and apologized. Only before I got smart, I stumbled onto them.” He stared out over the field, his profile bleak in the moonlight. “The equinox gathering of the sidhe.”
Janet’s head throbbed. Her brain couldn’t absorb what he was telling her. She rose cautiously to one elbow, afraid if she moved too quickly, she would throw up.
“I was still sore over what you said,” he continued softly. “And just pissed off enough to fall for their whole line. Never grow old? Sex without commitment? It sounded pretty good at the time. And Lilith knew it, damn her. No.” He shook his head. “Damn me.”
There was so much quiet self-loathing in his voice that Janet shivered in sympathy. The temptation to comfort him scared her.
“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. How could she believe him? “You’re not Ross.”
He looked at her then, his eyes burning. Dark. “Then who am I? How do I know about us? About that night?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I can’t think,” she burst out. “But you can’t make me believe that fourteen years ago my college boyfriend walked out on me and never came back because he fell under the spell of—of—Who is this Lilith, anyway?”
He exhaled. “She’s the ruler of the sidhe. Their queen.”
It was too much.
“You want me to believe you were kidnapped by the queen of the fairies?”
He winced. “Yes.”
“Right.” Janet stood, shaking out her skirt. Oh, God, where were her panties? “And I’m Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.”
His shoulders shook. If he didn’t look so miserable, she would have thought he was laughing.
And maybe he was.
The thought was like an arrow to her heart. If this wasn’t all some elaborate con, he had to be laughing at her.
She scooped her underwear off the grass and balled it in her fist. “What do you want?” she demanded.
He stood, too, uncoiling his long body until he towered over her. “What are you talking about?”
She gestured impatiently with her free hand. “There has to be some reason for this . . . this charade. You must want something to make up such a stupid story.”
He looked down his nose, his expression so much like Ross’s that her breath abandoned her. “Honey, what I want from you, I already got. I don’t have any reason to lie.”
She was confused. Her head pounded.
“What you want . . .?” she repeated blankly.
His gaze dropped briefly to the panties in her hand. He didn’t say a word.
Her flush burned all through her body and flamed in her face.
“I’m going back to the car,” she said.
He let her go two steps, three, before he started after her. “Janet—”
Turning, she kicked him in the shin as hard as she could.
“Ow.” He stopped. “Honey, be reasonable.”
“Be reasonable?” Her voice rose to a near shriek, and Janet, who prided herself on her library-quiet tones always, didn’t even care. “Be reasonable? You dupe me into having sex with you and then make up some cockamamie story about the queen of the fairies, for crying out loud, and you expect me to be reasonable?”
She was shaking, bitter, blinded with tears, deafened by the crashing of her foolish hopes and the breaking of her stubborn heart.
“Stay away from me, Ross. Just stay away.”
This time, she was the one to leave.
This time, he let her go.
ROSS bent under the hood of the 1936 Auburn Speedster he was restoring. Life as a sex slave actually came with a lot of downtime. Especially after the first seven years or so, when the novelty wore off and escape attempts mostly ended in frustration and refined torture.
Besides, Ross liked cars. Cars didn’t have emotions. Cars didn’t make demands. Compared to the shifting shadow world of the sidhe, mechanical engineering was simple. Concrete. Manageable.
He listened to the engine. One, maybe two, of the pistons wasn’t firing correctly. He’d have to adjust the timing. He reached to test the spark plug connections.
A voice broke into his concentration. “Shouldn’t you be smiling?”
Ross straightened and smacked his head on the edge of the hood. Turning, he glared at Puck.
“Shouldn’t you be minding your own business?”
“You are my business, boyo. And you’ve been mighty poor company lately.” The little man hopped off a stump and shuffled forward. “I thought it was because our Lilith had lost her taste for you. But now you’ve had a tasty morsel of your own, and you’re still gloomy as a man who’s missed his dinner.”
Ross leaned over the Auburn’s engine. He was not discussing his sex life with the sidhe. He was not discussing Janet. He didn’t even want to think about her. About last night.
Puck cocked his head. “Wasn’t she any good?”
Ross threw a wrench at him.
Puck skipped out of range. “So, she was good,” he said with satisfaction. “What’s your problem, then?”
Ross went back to checking spark plugs. “I don’t have a problem,” he said through his teeth.
“She’s going to help you?”
“No.”
“Did you ask her to help you?” Puck persisted.
“I don’t want her involved.”
The little man clucked like a bird. “Bit late for that now.”
Ross’s fist clenched on the metal frame. Too bad he’d already thrown the wrench. He’d like to bury it in Puck’s skull.
“That’s your fault,” Ross said. “You’re the one who called her.”
“I’m not the one who shagged her,” Puck pointed out smugly, and Ross winced.
Okay, so it was all his fault. Mostly his fault. He should have resisted her. He should have protected her. He should have pulled out.
He thought of Janet, warm and wet and straining under him, and reached blindly for the distributor cap. It burned his hand.
Swearing, he jerked back. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, sucking his knuckles. “She won’t come back.”
“Sure of that?” Puck asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Ross said grimly. “I made sure of it.”
“Then you’ve screwed her twice, boyo. And yourself. You’re not like
ly to save yourself that way.”
Not himself.
Her. He’d save her.
Ross ducked under the hood again and began testing the cables that led from the distributor cap to the spark plugs, one by one.
THE farm looked different by daylight. Shabbier. Decrepit.
That was good, Janet told herself as she nosed her car down the rutted lane. She needed to see the farm and its inhabitants in the bleak and bracing light of day. She wanted to prove to herself that whatever she’d felt or been tempted to believe two nights ago was only a trick of moonlight and music. Once the carnival was exposed as the trumpery thing it was, once she accepted her one-night stand as the tawdry thing it was, she could put both behind her and get on with her real life.
Such as it was.
The thought left a flat taste in her mouth, like soda when the fizz was gone. She tightened her grip on the wheel.
The lane was empty. Were they gone? The farmyard was deserted. Had she missed him? Janet switched off her engine, feeling her resolution sputter and die.
Get over it. Get on with it.
She looked around. Despite the general neglect, she didn’t see any fair debris, no overflowing trash bins, no crushed cans or blowing papers. Only a rusting car on cinder blocks and a well choked with weeds. The farmhouse stared at her through dirty panes of broken glass.
Slowly, she climbed out of the car, feeling as empty as the house. As abandoned.
Stupid. He got what he wanted from her, didn’t he?
I don’t have any reason to lie.
Or to stay, either.
The bonfire site was cold. When Janet stooped to touch the circling rocks, the blowing ash got in her eyes. Blinking, she straightened. The carnival had moved on.
Bereft of her target and her purpose, she wandered through the trees, finding her way at last to a break in the hedge. Taking a deep breath, she pushed through the bushes.
The sun beat down on her head. Insects droned and whirred from the trees. The field was silent. Empty. A lark darted against the blue bowl of the sky.
There was nothing to show that Janet had ever been here before. No evidence that anyone had ever been here.
Except there. Her heart beat faster. Below the nodding heads of Queen Anne’s lace, a crimson splash against the flattened grass.
Man of My Dreams Page 29