s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

all it took.
He crossed the room in three strides, grabbing my forearms, lifting me to my
feet. He was nearly a foot taller than I was, and he had to bend at an awkward
angle, but he managed. He put those kissable lips against mine, and the first
taste tore Jeremy's careful spell away. I was suddenly a throbbing, needful
thing. My body still wanted to finish what had been denied it earlier. I
kissed him like I was feeding off of his soft lips, my tongue seeking for
something deep inside him. My oiled hands caressed his face. The more oil that
touched him, the stronger the spell. He lifted me around the waist, raising me
to eye level so he didn't have to bend.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, and I could feel him through the layers of
cloth that separated us.
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My body pulsed with the contact, and I broke from the kiss, not to breathe but
to cry out.
He pressed me to the tabletop, his groin grinding into me. Lying on the table
he was too tall to maintain the kiss and keep our lower bodies pressed
together, so he raised himself up on his arms like a push-up, keeping his body
pressed into mine.
I stared up the length of his body and finally met his eyes. They held the
darkness that usually doesn't come to a man's eyes until later when the
clothes are gone and there's no turning back. I grabbed two handfuls of his
shirt and pulled them, sending his buttons flying, baring his chest and
stomach. I raised up, doing a sort of sit-up so I could lick down his chest,
run my hands across the flatness of his stomach. I
tried to put my hand down his pants, but his belt defeated me.
Suddenly, the room was full of uniforms and plainclothes detectives. They
pulled Alvera off me, and he fought them. They had to pile on top of him, ride
him to the floor in a mountain of uniforms. He was screaming, wordlessly.
I lay on the table, the skirt hiked to my waist, my body so full of blood and
need that I couldn't move. I
was angry, angry that they'd stopped us. I knew that was stupid. I knew I
didn't want to have sex in an interrogation room in front of an entire
precinct, and yet... I was still angry, still wanting.
A young uniformed cop was standing beside the table. He was trying not to
stare and failing. It was easy to grab his hand, to press the Tears over the
pulse point in his wrist. His blood beat against my hand, and he bent over me,
kissed me before anyone noticed what was happening.
Someone said, "Jesus, Riley, don't touch her!"
Hands grabbed Riley, tore him from my lips, my hands. I reached for him,
sitting up, screaming, "No!" I
started off the table to go to one of them, when another detective grabbed my
arms, held me sitting on the table's edge. He stared down at his hands as if
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he'd burned them against my bare arms. He said, softly, "Oh, my God."
Just before he bent and kissed me, he yelled, "Get some women officers in
here." I learned later that this medium-build, slightly balding man with the
strong hands and the muscled body was Lieutenant Peterson.
They had to handcuff him before they could carry him out of the room.
I was buried under a mound of female officers until I couldn't move. A couple
of the female officers had the same trouble that the men had, just as at least
one of the men had had no problem not manhandling me. Nothing like being outed
at work!
They got Jeremy back in to redo the warding. I calmed, eventually, but I was
in no shape to talk to anyone. Jeremy assured me that he'd talk to narcotics
for me, though he was pretty sure that the officers who had been in the room
with me would be persuasive on the dangers of Branwyn's Tears.
Roane was waiting for me, a pair of surgical gloves on his hands so he could
touch me, a jacket to throw over my head to keep people from recognizing me.
The police took us out the back way. So far the media didn't seem to know that
I'd finally surfaced and under what circumstances. But someone at the police
station or on the ambulance would talk. They might do it for money, they might
do it by accident, but the media would find out. It was only a matter of time.
A race to see which hounds would find me first: the tabloids or the Queen's
Guard. If I'd been well, I'd have gotten in my car and driven out of state
that night or caught the first plane to anywhere. But Roane took me to his
apartment because it was closer than mine. I didn't care where we went as long
as there was a shower. If I didn't get my body free
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of the Tears or have sex soon, I was going to lose my mind. I was voting for a
shower. What I didn't realize until too late was that Roane was voting for
sex.
Chapter 7
THE FRONT PART OF MY BRAIN KNEW I SHOULD HAVE HAD ROANE TAKE ME to my car.
There was a packet taped under the driver's seat with money, a new identity
complete with a driver's license and credit cards. I'd always planned on
simply driving out of the city or to the airport and taking the first plane
that caught my fancy. It was a good plan. The police would be contacting the
embassy by now, and before dawn my aunt would know where I was, who I was, and
what I'd been doing for three years.
The primitive rear of my brain wanted to jump Roane while he was driving
eighty on the freeway. My skin felt large and swollen with need. I actually
sat on my hands in the car so I wouldn't touch him. The last thing we needed
was for me to contaminate him with the Tears. At least one of us needed to be
sane tonight, and until I had a shower, it wasn't going to be me.
I mounted the stairs to Roane's apartment, hugging myself, fingers digging
into my arms hard enough to leave nail marks. It was all that kept me from
touching Roane as he moved up the stairs just ahead of me.
He left the door open behind him, and I followed him into the room. He stood
in the center of the large open space. Even in the dark the room was strangely
bright, the white walls gleaming in the moonlight.
Roane stood a dark figure in the midst of all that silver gloaming. He stared
out at the sea as he did every time we entered his apartment, stopped and
stared out the bank of windows that made up the west and south walls. The sea
rolled out and out from the windows in a gleaming, rushing spill of silver and
dark, with a rim of white foam riding like an edge of lace as the waves
spilled toward the shore.
I would always be second in Roane's heart because his love belonged to his
first mistress-the sea. He would mourn her loss when I was just dust in a
grave. There was a loneliness to that knowledge. The same loneliness I'd felt
at court, watching the sidhe squabble about insults that occurred a hundred
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years before I was born, and that the sidhe would still be quarreling about a
hundred years after I died. Bitter, a little, but mostly just very aware that
I was an outsider. I was sidhe so I couldn't be human, and I was mortal so I
couldn't be sidhe. Neither fish nor fowl.
Even feeling isolated, left out, my gaze slid to the bed. It was a mound of
white sheets and scattered pillows-Roane had stripped it but had only done a
haphazard job of remaking it. If the sheets were clean, he never understood
the reason for getting the wrinkles out. I had a sudden image of him naked
against those white sheets. The vision was so sharp that it hurt, tightening
my stomach, twisting lower things, until it was hard to breathe. I leaned
against the closed door until I could move, then straightened. I would not be
controlled by chemicals and magic. I was sidhe, a weak, lesser sidhe, but that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]