Canyons Of Night (17 page)

“No.”

She sighed. “I should have known better than to ask a former
FBPI
agent to lie.”

“No, I never brought anyone else here,” he said very steadily. “Just you.”

She turned quickly. “Really?”

“Only you.”

She looked into his heated eyes.

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,”
she quoted in a whisper.

“What’s a tiger?” Slade asked.

“Old World beast of prey. Something like a specter-cat, I think. The line is from an ancient poem.”

“I remind you of a beast of prey?”

“No,” she said. She touched the side of his sternly etched face. “But I have always known that you were born to guard and protect. I am quite sure that you could be as fierce and relentless as a tiger or a specter-cat if it proved necessary to defend those who are weaker than you.”

He reached up and caught her wrist. Very deliberately he turned his head and kissed her palm. A great longing rose deep inside her, a longing that she knew had been there all along, unacknowledged, for the past fifteen years.

Slade looked at her with all the fierceness she knew was locked inside him.

“I don’t know what you saw in my aura rainbow that made you think I would regret making love to you,” he said. “But whatever it was you were wrong.”

“Was I?”

“I want you, and I don’t give a damn what it costs me.”

“There shouldn’t be a price to be paid,” she said.

“There is always a price. I want you to understand that I am willing to pay it.”

He let the pack slide off his shoulder and then he drew her close, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her with all the dark fire that she had seen blazing in his aura rainbow. Instinctively she started to touch the pendant at her throat but she stopped just before her fingers brushed the silver mirror. Perhaps it was the energy in the atmosphere around them. Or maybe it was simply that she did not want to screw up again and miss the experience she had been yearning for all these years. Whatever the explanation, she knew that this time she would try very hard not to view his rainbow.

He said he was willing to pay the price. She would take him at his word. Because she knew now that there would be a price for her as well, and she, too, was willing to pay it.

Her hand fell away from the pendant. She gripped his shoulders, savoring the sleek power she could feel there, and returned the kiss with a passion she hardly recognized as her own.

The kiss was desperate and all consuming; a kiss unlike anything she had ever experienced. She was suddenly shivering but not because of a panic attack; rather from the force of raw physical desire. Everything about Slade was hard, demanding, implacable, and relentless.

He wrenched his mouth away from hers and imprisoned her head gently between his two powerful hands.

“This is about you and me tonight,” he said. “Nothing else matters.”

“Nothing else,” she agreed.

He used his grip to bring her hard against him and kissed her again. She wound her arms around his neck and clung to him to keep from drowning in the sparkling, effervescent whirlpool. But she fell deeper and deeper into the churning energy. Slade groaned and crushed her lower body against his own.

He did not try to hide his hunger for her. He was hot and aroused and he obviously wanted her to know it. Liquid heat and a tight, urgent tension built deep inside her. He got her jacket open. She found the buckle of his leather belt. And then his hands were gliding up her body beneath her top. When he got her bra unfastened he closed his palms over her nipples. She was so sensitive now that she gave a small, startled cry.

He kissed her throat. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes.” She fumbled with the zipper of his trousers. “I’m not
that
delicate.”

“Ah.” He sucked in a sharp breath and pulled back. “I’ll get the zipper.”

Appalled, she went very still. “Did I hurt you?”

His laugh was half groan. “No. But timing is everything.”

She freed herself from her boots while he unzipped his trousers and got out of his own boots.

He reached into the pack and pulled out a plastic pouch. He tore open the bag and removed a thin emergency blanket. When he spread it out on the ground the tarp proved to be surprisingly large.

He drew her onto the blanket and then he went down on his knees in front of her. He pulled her down with him. She pushed her hands inside his shirt and let the heat of his body warm her. She was about to unfasten her jeans when he stopped her.

“Let me,” he said, his voice low and dark.

He eased the zipper down and worked the jeans over her hips. When he could not get them any farther he pushed her gently onto her back and peeled the denim all the way off. Her panties went with the jeans.

For a moment he knelt beside her, studying her with burning eyes as though he had never seen anything quite like her before, as if he did not want to forget a single detail. With his strong shoulders silhouetted against the night sky, his features starkly etched in psi-light, he could have walked straight out of her most intense fantasies.

He put one hand on her thigh and moved his warm palm upward until he cupped the full, damp place between her legs. Her body reacted instantly to the intimate touch. She lifted her hips, straining against him. He stroked her slowly until she was as tightly coiled as a spring, until she was trembling with the force of the urgent need inside her.

She seized his wrist and pulled him down alongside her. He rolled onto his back, taking her with him. She tumbled across his granite-hard body. His rigid erection pressed against her bare thigh.

He arranged her so that she straddled him and then he worked her with his hand until she was almost screaming with need.

He gripped her hips and pushed himself slowly inside her. As badly as she wanted him, her body resisted at first. He was too big. She hesitated, not knowing if it was going to work.

He felt her go still and he stilled, too. She did not need to view his rainbow to know that he was fighting for his control. The heat of his body and the sweat on his chest told her very clearly. She also sensed that he would not lose the battle. Slade was always in control.

“Okay?” he got out hoarsely.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Tentatively she allowed him to go deeper. Her body slowly opened to accept him but the steady invasion caused the tension inside her to heighten to a level that was almost unbearable.

“Yes,” she said. She tightened around him.
“Yes
.
”

He locked his hands around her hips and started to move, driving in and out of her in a powerful, relentless rhythm.

In the end, she could not resist temptation. She had to know the truth. She touched her pendant with her fingertips and opened her senses to the fullest extent.

Slade’s dark rainbow blazed in the night. She knew then that he was not holding anything back this time. He had told her the truth. He wanted her and he did not give a damn about the consequences, whatever they were.

But her intuition told her that he still expected to pay a heavy price.

There was no time to second-guess what was happening and she had promised herself she would not ruin things by trying to analyze him. She took her fingers off the pendant.

“Slade.”

In the next moment the tension inside her was released in wave after wave of deep, satisfying currents. She was flung into the heart of the glorious storm.

Slade’s fingers tightened around her thighs. He thrust one last time. With a hoarse, husky growl, he came in a surging, pounding climax.

The silver meadow blazed around them.

HE
FELT
CHARLOTTE
STIR
BESIDE
HIM
. HE
OPENED
HIS
eyes and his senses to the night and watched her sit up on the blanket. She reached for her panties and jeans. Her hair had come free. In the otherworldly glow of the meadow she looked magical, mysterious, and incredibly sexy. He could have looked at her for the rest of the night, the rest of his life.

Something twisted deep inside him. How much longer would he be able to see her like this, with all of his senses? Whatever happened, he would never forget this night. He wondered if she would remember him in the years ahead.

He pushed the dark thoughts aside. He had made his decision and he was content. He would not destroy what was left of the night with questions that had no answer.

He levered himself up on one elbow. “Hey there, gorgeous.”

She paused in the act of wriggling into the jeans and looked at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were still gently luminous.

“Hey there, yourself, handsome,” she said.

Her voice had a sexy, throaty quality that stirred the embers all over again. He tried to come up with something clever in the way of postcoital conversation but nothing occurred to him. He did not want to chat. He wanted to drag her back down onto the blanket and make love to her again and again before he lost his talent forever.

But for all its heat-retention and waterproof capabilities, the sheet of high-tech plastic did nothing to soften the ground underneath it.

He watched her shimmy partway into her jeans. Then she got to her knees in order to pull the pants up over her hips.

“It’s getting late,” she said. She stood and adjusted her top and the jacket. “We both have to go to work in the morning.”

He sat up reluctantly. The plastic crinkled under him.

Charlotte watched him close his jeans.

“I’d like to hear the story,” she said.

“What story?” He leaned down to pick up the blanket. It dawned on him that he felt incredibly relaxed, better than he had in months. Maybe better than he ever had in his entire life.

“Earlier you said that some doctors at a clinic had slapped you with the ‘delicate’ label. I asked you why. You said it was a long story. We have a long walk out of here. I thought it would be a good time to tell me the tale.”

“Damn. Should have seen this coming.” Talking about his problems was the last thing he wanted to do.

Charlotte stiffened. “Don’t ask.” Her voice had gone very cool.

He concentrated on folding the blanket into a small square. “Don’t ask what?”

“Why women always want to chat after sex. Speaking personally, I don’t. Not usually. In my experience it invariably leads to a bad outcome. But, then, all my dates end badly.”

“At least you’re consistent.”

“True. But I think I need to know why you wound up here on Rainshadow.”

He thought about it while he crammed the blanket back into the pouch.

“What the hell,” he said finally. “It’s not like it’s not in both my Bureau file and the Arcane clinic files.”

“My goodness,” she said. “What on earth happened?”

He was saved from an immediate answer by a familiar chortle. Rex fluttered across the glowing meadow. When he reached them he bounded up to Slade’s shoulder. He was still holding the small purse.

“Well, well, well, where have you been, Big Guy?” Charlotte said. She reached up to pat Rex. “I’ll bet you went hunting, didn’t you? I don’t even want to think about what you dined on this evening.”

Slade knew he was probably anthropomorphizing, but judging by Rex’s jaunty attitude, he had a hunch the dust bunny had gotten lucky. Probably hadn’t had to have a complicated, mood-shattering postcoital chat afterward, either.

He slung one strap of the small pack over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They tromped across the sparkling meadow, past the obsidian pond and into the trees. Slade gathered his thoughts, searching for an entry point into a nightmare he relived every night.

“It happened on my last assignment,” he said finally. “It was supposed to be a straightforward investigate-and-take-down-if-necessary job. A researcher from a low-profile government lab died in a diving accident on an island in the Harmonic Sea. Seemed routine, but any time a government lab employee goes missing or dies unexpectedly, the Bureau looks into the situation.”

“So you went to check out the accidental death and concluded that it was murder?”

“No, I concluded that there had been no death at all,” he said. “Well, there was a dead guy and he had been murdered while diving but he was not the missing researcher. He had, however, been killed by paranormal means in an attempt to make it look like a heart attack. The missing lab tech’s ID was on the body.”

“So you investigated further,” Charlotte said.

“That’s the job. Turned out the lab tech was very much alive and working for a drug lord named Masterson, who had a walled compound, more like a fortress, on one of the other nearby islands.”

“What on earth would a drug thug want with a government researcher?”

“You may be surprised to learn that the drug trade is highly competitive,” Slade said.

“Gee. Who would have thought so?”

“For obvious reasons a successful drug lord needs to stay one step ahead of the competition. It just so happened that the lab tech’s expertise was in pharmaceuticals. Masterson wanted him to produce a new designer drug for the gray market.”

“A club drug,” she said. “One that’s not quite illegal because the chemical composition has been tweaked just enough to keep it off the list of banned pharmaceuticals.”

“Law enforcement is always one step behind the chemists in the drug trade.”

“So this drug lord abducted the researcher with the goal of forcing him to make a new drug?” she asked.

“As far as I could tell, there was no strong-arm work involved,” he said. “Masterson used a more traditional business approach. He paid the lab tech a hell of a lot of money up front and offered to cut him in for a share of future profits.”

“You interrupted the plan, I assume?”

“I went into the fortress one night with the intention of searching the lab. I was about to crack a mag-steel vault when things got complicated.”

“How?” she asked.

“What I didn’t know until then was that Masterson had rounded up a few end-of-the-line alcoholics and junkies to use as subjects in the drug experiments. The poor bastards were locked up in a lower level of the basement. I went down to get them out.”