Overcome with emotion, my mouth covered hers. She reached for me at the same time, pulling my head down to her. I tasted her tears on our lips as I poured all my love and months of longing into the kiss. When I felt the faint joy of her Mori through our bond, it was like finding a lost piece of me.
I lifted my head and used my thumbs to brush away her tears, humbled by the love shining in her eyes.
“Ya lyublyu tebya,” I whispered gruffly.
It took me a second to realize I’d professed my love to her in Russian and she had no idea what I was saying. Smiling at my blunder, I took her face in my hands.
“I love you.”
Her smile stole my breath. “I love you, too,” she said huskily.
My lips captured hers again in a slow, lingering kiss. Then I wrapped her tightly in my arms and buried my face in her hair. I didn’t think I could ever let her go from my arms again.
“I wasn’t sure if you…” she whispered.
“And I didn’t think you were ready to hear it. I was waiting for you to say something, to let me know you felt the same way.”
God, I was such a fool. I should have told her how I felt months ago. I could have saved us both so much lost time.
“How…long?” she asked hesitantly.
I pulled back, and she looked up at me. Unable to stop touching her, my hand came up to caress her cheek.
“I was lost the first moment I saw you at that club in Portland. I just didn’t know it yet. Before I even knew who or what you were, I was drawn to you. At first, I told myself it was my responsibility to protect you. But the more time I spent with you, even when we were arguing, the more I knew what I felt for you was anything but duty. I don’t think I knew how deep my feelings were until that day you traded yourself for Nate.”
I took a ragged breath. “That ride from Portland was the longest of my life.”
Pain flashed in her eyes, and she leaned into my hand. “I’m sorry I put you through that.”
I brushed the lose tendrils of hair from her face. “I know. Your courage is one of the first things I came to love about you, and I should have known you’d do anything to protect Nate and your friends.”
“And you,” she declared fiercely.
I hugged her tightly again, half afraid none of this was real.
Sara made a small sound of embarrassment and buried her face against my chest. It took me a moment to realize why.
“They left.” I’d noticed we were alone after our first kiss, and I figured it was Chris’s doing. Jordan would have wanted ringside seats.
“What?” Sara murmured.
I smiled, wanting to kiss her until she couldn’t think of anything else.
“Chris and the others. They went outside.”
“Oh.”
I took her hand and led her to a nearby bench. She sat on one end, but that was too much distance for my liking. Scooping her into my arms, I settled her on my lap.
She sighed happily and nestled against me, her fingers toying with the fabric of my shirt.
“I was so busy trying to push you away that I refused to admit I felt anything for you at first,” she said softly. “I didn’t know for sure that I loved you until Thanksgiving, but I think I started to fall for you at my apartment the night of the storm.”
“Was it my mad cooking skills?” I teased, even though my mind reeled from the discovery she’d loved me all this time.
She laughed softly. “It was the first time I saw a different side of you, and you weren’t bossing me around for once.”
I stroked her hair. “We’ve come a long way since that night.”
“Yes, but you’re still trying to boss me around,” she retorted playfully.
“And you still make me want to tie your ass to a chair to keep you out of trouble.”
She snorted delicately. “Ha, you can try.”
I looked at a dead drex demon ten feet away and grimaced. “Sara, I hate the idea of you out there fighting, and I doubt I’ll ever be okay with it. I don’t think any male would be okay with the woman he loves putting herself in danger.”
She grew quiet. “Do you know what it’s like for me when you go away on a job, especially with the way things are now? I don’t sleep, and I spend every minute praying we don’t get word that you’re in trouble – or worse. It’s torture. That night we heard you were under attack in Vancouver, I almost lost it. I almost lost you. Seeing you in danger kills me.”
I knew she stayed at the command center whenever I had to leave on a job, and she refused to go home until I returned. After Raoul had told me that, I’d started calling her to let her know I was okay. But I hadn’t realized what she was going through until now.
“I never thought about how hard that was for you. I’ve spent my whole life being a warrior and not much else. Before you, I didn’t have someone waiting for me when the job was done or worrying about my safety.”
She let out a deep breath. “This is new for both of us, and we’re going to have to learn to deal with it.”
“Something tells me you’re going to cope with this a lot better than I will.”
She touched my jaw to get me to look at her. “We’ll figure it out together. Knowing us, it won’t be easy, but I’ll try if you will.”
Easier said than done. “I’ll try, but I can’t promise to have any civil words for the faerie.”
She made a face. “I’ve had a few choice words for him myself. At first I didn’t like his idea of training because he pushed me out of my comfort zone. He always had more faith in my abilities than I had, and he kept pushing until I believed in myself too. He’s been a good mentor and a friend to me, and he always has my back.”
I tried not to be jealous of the affection in her voice when she talked about the faerie. “You like spending time with him.”
She smiled. “Sometimes, but I like being with you more.”
My lips met hers again. “Good answer.”
She rested her head against my shoulder again and surveyed the damage in the room. After a moment, she sighed and sat up straighter. “I guess we should get this mess cleaned up.”
I reluctantly released her and looked around the deserted market.
“I’m sure Chris has already called for a cleanup crew. We should probably put one on speed dial for you.”
She scowled at me, but Jordan’s voice cut off whatever she was going to say.
“Hey, is it safe to come in now? We’re freezing our butts off out here.”
Sara smiled at me. “All good.”
Jordan breezed into the building with Chris behind her, both of them grinning at us.
“Thank God!” Jordan wrinkled her nose at us. “Well, you two look disgustingly happy. And it’s about damn time.”
“Amen,” Chris said. “I called in a crew to help with this mess. I told them they might need extra guys.”
I laughed at the look Sara gave him before she walked away to talk to some of the vendors who had returned to their stalls. She walked around, conversing with them as if she hung out in wrakks every day. I’d never seen her around demons, and it struck me how quickly she put them at ease. I couldn’t hear their conversations, but I saw it in their posture and the smiles and nods they gave her.
I also noticed her outfit for the first time. Dressed in tight black jeans, a black T-shirt, and combat boots, she looked ready to kick ass and take names. I could barely take my eyes off her.
“Hey, Romeo?” A hand waved in front of my face. “I hate to interrupt your ogling, but duty calls.”
I tore my gaze from Sara to glower at Chris. “I don’t ogle.”
“Right.” He shook his head and walked away, stepping over several gru-eels flopping around on the wet concrete. “Jesus, what a mess.”
“You want to give me the rundown?”
He picked up his sword and shook the gore from it before he wiped it on the body of a ranc demon.
“It was quiet here until the gulaks arrived – eight of the bastards with the drex demon. As soon as they saw us, they cornered the three of us in the loading bay and started talking about delivering us to some vampires for cash.”
He waved at Will, who was limping with a strip of cloth wrapped around his thigh. “We fought them off, and Will took a gulak claw to the leg. Jordan was ready to take on the whole lot of them herself, and she might have tried if those damn ranc demons hadn’t arrived with flamethrowers.”
I looked at a dead gulak with bulking eyes and his tongue hanging out. “Skip to the part where Sara made her big entrance.”
“How do you know she didn’t come in quietly like a ninja?”
My eyebrows rose.
Chris laughed. “Honestly, it was kind of hard to see her at first with the wall of gulaks in the way. I heard her fight with one of them, and then I saw her when the rest of the gulaks turned to look. She took down a gulak with her bare hands. I have to say I was pretty damn impressed, and I had no idea it was her at that point.
“After that, all hell broke loose. She knocked over the gru-eel tank, but I was too busy fighting to see what happened. Then it was over, and she was standing there. I knew it was the vigilante, and I went up to her to thank her for helping us. She shocked the hell out of me when she showed me who she really was. Jordan wasn’t surprised, of course.”
“Of course.” I looked over at Sara and Jordan talking to a quellar demon. Those two were as thick as thieves. I wasn’t surprised Sara had confided in Jordan.
“So, you okay with all of this now?”
I raked both hands through my hair. “What do you think?”
“I think there’s a case of Macallan in your future.”
“I think you may be right.”
I watched Sara say something to the quellar demon who was looking at a piece of paper in his hand. Then she and Jordan walked over to join us.
“Giving out your number, Sara?” Chris teased. “He doesn’t seem like your type.”
Her eyes met mine. “He’s not.”
Heat curled in my gut. Mine, growled my Mori.
“You ready to get out of here?” I asked her, looking forward to getting her home and spending some time alone with her.
“Yes.” She glanced around. “It looks like my ride left, so you’re stuck with me.”
A smile curved my lips. For once that accursed faerie had done something right.
“Something tells me he doesn’t mind one bit,” Jordan said slyly.
Sara and Jordan walked ahead of Chris and me to the open door. Jordan went through, but Sara slowed and put up her hands as if she was pushing through a heavy curtain.
I gave her a questioning look when we got outside, and she made a face.
“Demon wards and Fae blood don’t mix.”
Outside, two black Escalades had been pulled up to the front of the building. Chris spoke to Will, who said he was staying with Elijah’s team to help with the cleanup, and then the four of us went to one of the SUVs. Sara and I climbed into the back seat, and I took her hand in mine as Chris started the vehicle.
Jordan immediately launched into the story about what had happened in the wrakk, although her version was a lot more colorful and entertaining than Chris’s telling.
“When that ugly lizard grabbed me, I wanted to cut his male bits off, but he held me back,” she griped, tossing Chris a sour look.
“You might have been able to take him, but you’re not fireproof,” he argued. “And those ranc demons looked way too trigger-happy.”
“Might have?” She made a huffing sound.
Chris rolled his eyes. “You got to kill him, didn’t you?”
Sara grinned at me. I wanted to lean over and kiss her.
“What were you guys doing in a demon market in the first place?” she asked them.
“We discovered Adele has been sending letters to someone there,” Chris said. “We thought it was worth checking out.”
She snorted softly. “People still send letters?”
“People who suspect their electronic communications are being monitored,” I told her. So far, Adele had proven to be very good at evading any attempts to listen in on hers.
Chris nodded. “And who have something to hide.”
“Did you find anything?” Sara asked with a note of excitement in her voice.
“We found the demon she was sending them to. He said he was paid to drop them in a mailbox. Inside the envelope was another envelope with an address and postage. Unfortunately, every time he tries to remember the address he draws a blank.”
She looked at me. “Some kind of memory spell?”
“Looks like it,” Chris answered. “Adele is proving to be more covert than we gave her credit for.”
Sara made a sound of disgust. “So I’m learning. And I bet it’s Madeline she’s writing to. Turns out they have been friends for a lot longer than she let on to us.”
My eyebrows shot up. “How do you know that?”
She smiled as if she had a great secret to tell. “I brought a box of Madeline’s things back with me from New Hastings today and –”
Jordan whipped around in her seat to gape at Sara. “Whoa! Hold up. You went to Maine? Today? How the hell did that happen?”
Her eyes flicked to me. “And why is Nikolas not freaking out about it?”
Why indeed? Most likely because I’d temporarily forgotten about it after learning she was the vigilante and hearing her tell me she loved me. Jesus, had that all happened in the last hour?
Sara lifted a shoulder. “Eldeorin took me there and we didn’t stay long. I found a box of things belonging to Madeline that Nate had mentioned last fall. I was going to give them to Tristan, but I wanted to look through them first.”
Jordan’s gaze swung back to me. “And you were okay with her going there?”
“I didn’t know until after she got back.”
“We were in the middle of discussing it when he got the call that you guys were in trouble,”
Sara said.
“Discussing it. Riiight,” Jordan drawled.
“What did you find in the box, Sara?” Chris asked, reminding me of the books and papers scattered across her bed.
“Pictures of Madeline and Adele that were taken back in the seventies,” she said dryly. “And they look pretty chummy in them.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “That would have been just a few years after Madeline left Westhorne.”
Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised to hear that she and Adele were friends. Madeline had wanted to rebel against her life, and what better way than to befriend someone like Adele?
“Looks like we need to pay Adele another visit, Nikolas,” Chris said.
“Not without me,” Sara declared.
Jordan nodded. “Or me.”
Sara’s expression told me she wasn’t going to back down. After all I’d seen and heard today, I knew she could take care of herself, even if my gut lurched every time I thought about it.
“We’ll go see her tomorrow.”
* * *
“Heb, do you have a fire hose around here?”
The dwarf blinked at Jordan and shook his head. “No, miss. Master Eldeorin’s home is impervious to fire.”
She waved her dessert fork at me. “Yeah, but he’s not, and he’s going to combust if he keeps staring at her like that.”
Chris barked a laugh, and across from me, Sara’s cheeks turned pink.
I chuckled and watched as she demurely lifted her eyes to mine. The warmth in her gaze told me I wasn’t the only one wishing it was just the two of us there.
As much as I enjoyed Chris and Jordan’s company, all I wanted was to take Sara somewhere private and kiss her until neither of us could think straight.
But then, the night was still young.
When we’d returned home, my plan had been to take Sara out to her favorite Italian place and then spend the rest of the evening making up. But Jordan had protested that we had to have a celebratory dinner, so here we were.
“Hello? Earth to the lovebirds.”
I smiled at Jordan who smirked back at me. It was impossible not to like this girl, and I could see why she and Sara had hit it off. They were different in many ways, but they had the same fiery spirit and passion for what they believed in. Jordan was good for Sara, even though the two of them did share an uncanny talent for trouble.
“I asked if you are going next door after dinner,” she said.
“No.”
Sara’s lips parted in surprise. “I thought you had to work.”
“Raoul can handle things for a few hours, and I told him to call me if something comes up.”
She gave me a radiant smile as she laid down her napkin. “I’m glad.”
I stood and looked out the window at the moonlit lawn. “It’s a nice night. Would you like to take a walk with me?”
She pushed back her chair. “I just need to grab my coat.”
“Don’t mind us. We’ll just entertain ourselves,” Jordan quipped as Sara ran from the room.
Laughing, Chris stood as well. “Come on, Jordan. Let’s go write up the report for today.”
Her face fell. “Report?”
“All part of the job,” I told her. “You’ll get used to them after the first hundred or so.”
“Ugh.” She made a face. “Why can’t we just kill vampires and let someone else do the paperwork?”
Chris and I exchanged grins because we’d been saying the same thing for many years. I had a feeling Jordan was going to give the Council more heartburn than I ever had.
“Field reports are also used to keep track of our kills,” I told her. “You’ll be entered into the central warrior database today.”
“Really?” She jumped up from the table. “Let’s go, Blondie. We have a report to do.”
Sara appeared in the doorway as they were leaving. We used the French doors in the dining room to exit to the back lawn. It was a cool, clear night, and we could hear the waves crashing against the base of the cliff the house was built on. We turned away from the cliff, and I took her hand in mine as we walked toward the gazebo that had been rebuilt on the other side of the small lake.
Sara gasped in pleasure when we entered the small building and it lit up with thousands of faerie lights. “Wow, it’s beautiful here.”
Eldeorin’s light display was impressive, but it paled next to the picture she made as she stood by the rail looking at the lake.
I wrapped my arms around her from behind, blocking her from the small breeze that blew off the ocean. “Are you warm enough?”
She leaned back against me. “Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment. “What do you think would have happened if someone else had found me in Maine? Or if I’d been found when I was little?”
I brushed my lips against her hair. “What do you mean?” The thought of someone else finding her in Maine didn’t sit well with me, but that was a moot point now.
She shrugged. “I mean, who knows when we would have met? I would have been just another orphan, and you might never have noticed me.”
I laughed and hugged her tighter. “I’m pretty sure I would have noticed you.”
I’d often wondered how different our relationship would have started out if she’d been raised at Westhorne. I would have known her already, and she would have understood bonding and what was happening between us.
A warm breeze suddenly blew over us. Sara turned in my arms, tilting her face up to me as her hands stroked my abdomen through my sweater. Her bold caress took me by surprise and sent heat curling in my stomach.
“Sara?”
Her smile was seductive and shy at the same time. “Will you kiss me?” she asked huskily.
“You never have to ask me that.”
I framed her face with my hands and captured her mouth with mine. She opened to me without coaxing, kissing me back with a passionate abandon she’d never shown before. In all my previous sexual encounters I’d been the seducer, but I’d never known a woman who could unravel me so completely with a kiss.
I sucked in a sharp breath, and a groan formed deep in my throat when her hands slid beneath my sweater to trace the muscles of my stomach. Fire raced through my veins and pooled low in my belly as her fingers moved over my bare skin, branding me and marking me as hers.
Deepening the kiss, I let my hands slide down her shoulders to the front of her coat. I undid the top buttons, needing to be closer to her. One of my hands slipped inside and cupped her perfect breast through her shirt and bra.
She moaned softly against my mouth, and I –
I stared in confusion at the moon reflecting off the lake as the wind cooled my heated skin. Sara was in my arms, but her back was to me as it had been a few minutes ago. I felt disoriented and…aroused?
Shock rippled through me. What the hell was going on?
“Sara? What just happened?”
She turned to face me, wearing an apologetic smile. “Eldeorin paid us a visit. He put you in some kind of dream state.”
“Khristu!”
That son of a bitch. Only Eldeorin would toy with someone’s private thoughts that way.
“I really don’t like that faerie.”
“Eldeorin’s a bit outrageous, but he does have a good heart.” She reached up to touch my face. “You’ll be happy to know that he’s gone to Faerie for a few weeks.”
“This must be my lucky day,” I muttered, trying to shake off the very real aftereffects of the not-so-real dream.
She smiled up at me. “Best day ever.”
Her expression was so like the one from the dream, I thought for a second I was back in that place. I lowered my head and kissed her long and slow, with all the reverence she deserved. Her hands curled in my hair, and her lips were pliant and sweet under mine.
The kiss only fanned the flames created by the dream, but I’d already decided not to take it beyond this tonight. Today had been an emotional rollercoaster for us, and I wasn’t going to overwhelm her with the heavy emotions of sex.
As much as I wanted her, I also wanted her first time and the last step in our bonding to be perfect. And I really didn’t want it to happen in Eldeorin’s home. I wouldn’t put it past that bastard to pop in and say hi in the middle of our lovemaking.
I’d have to figure something out soon though. Neither I nor my Mori could bear to be apart from our mate for much longer.
I lifted my head and gazed at the desire in her green eyes. God, if she kept looking at me like that, I was going to forget everything else, take her back to her room, and not leave until we were good and truly mated.
My phone rang, startling us both. I wasn’t sure if the groan I let out was one of relief or frustration. Perhaps a bit of both.
“Nikolas here.”
“Hey, sorry to interrupt your evening,” Raoul said. “Brock just called. He said you wanted to talk to him as soon as he found something.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
For the last week, Brock had been watching Adele’s home and club, and he was the one who’d given us the San Francisco lead. If he had any news, I wanted to hear it firsthand.
“Duty calls,” Sara said, not hiding the disappointment in her voice.
“Sorry. One of our teams reported in with some intel and I need to be there. I wasn’t expecting to hear from them today.”
“You don’t need to apologize. It’s your job.”
We walked back to the house, and the closer we got to it, the more unwilling I was to leave her.
“Do you want to come to the command center with me?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she blurted.
Everyone gave us knowing smiles when we entered the control room, but Sara seemed too happy to notice. She sat on the couch with Jordan while I made some calls, and I found her asleep there when I finished up an hour later. I wasn’t surprised after the exciting day she’d had.
Raoul came to stand beside me. “Is she really the vigilante?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“Yes.”
His breath came out in a whoosh. “I thought Chris and Jordan were messing with me. I still can’t believe it.”
“You and me both.”
“But she’s so…small. How did she do it?”
I watched her sleeping, curled up on her side with her hands tucked beneath her chin. She was the picture of innocence, and she looked so vulnerable and young. But beneath that soft exterior was a fighter who would do anything to protect the people she loved.
“She’s a warrior.”
