Captive Heart (23 page)

Andy …

She tried to see who was calling her, but smoke and fire blotted out everything except the bars in front of her face. Cage bars. She grabbed them. Heat rattled through her fingers and hands, up her arms.

She realized she was naked, and she started to sweat. Everything smelled like sulfur. Her eyes watered.

Andy …

August’s voice drifted through her awareness. Seductive and powerful. The sick sound of it made her heart race so fast she worried her chest would explode.

Andy let go of her cage bars as a figure stepped out of the swirling clouds of smoke. The stench of sulfur got stronger, with a spike of stagnant seawater and raw sewage. She coughed and squinted at the tall, thin man. His features seemed blurred but generally normal.

He came a few steps closer, and Andy registered his black silk suit just about the time she heard whimpering in the cage beside her.

She glanced at the barred floor—and all the blood in her body stopped rushing. Her breath caught so hard she pitched forward into the bars before she recovered and scrambled to grab Neala away from the flames licking toward the bars. The little girl had been wrapped in a blanket, and her red curls lay limp against her pale face. She moaned but didn’t open her eyes.

“It’s been a while,” the oily-voiced man said.

Andy gripped Neala and turned toward him, shielding the girl’s face with her hands like that would keep August from knowing who she was, or doing whatever he chose.

The tall man had red eyes now. A dart wound opened in his forehead. Black blood trickled down his face, which was rapidly growing scales.

“Vengeance is a dish best served hot,” the demon snarled.

It lunged for Neala.

Andy screamed.

“Look at me.” Jack’s voice sliced into everything, ripping the world in half. Flames exploded, sizzling into Andy’s skin everywhere at the same time, immolating her, burning Neala—

“Look at me, sweetheart.” Jack again.

The flames faded into sparkles. The red-eyed man vanished. Neala disappeared, too, and Andy opened her eyes. Sweat and water covered her whole body, and she shook as she lay in Jack’s arms. He held her gently, gazing down at her with brown eyes full of worry.

“You’re safe. I’m right here, and nothing in this room will hurt you.” His voice seemed as magnetic as the voice from her dreams, but without the menace.

Andy took slow breaths, letting her pulse slow as she made a quick check. Leather couch, hardwood floors, big bed—Jack’s room in the townhouse, the same room where she’d spent every night of the past two weeks. His firm embrace helped her calm down from the dream, but then the content started to piss her off.

“Great. Now I’m dreaming about dead demons, too.”

“Rakshasa?” Jack kissed her forehead.

“Worse. Bartholomew August.”

That made him draw back and stare at her. “The Leviathan? The demon you killed near Mount Olympus, with the Keres helping?”

“None other.” Andy pressed her head hard into her pillow. “He wanted revenge, of course.”

“That must have been terrifying.”

“I’m not scared of him. I killed him. What was awful—” She broke off, not wanting to say the rest aloud, but knowing she should. Jack brushed his lips across her forehead again and gave her the long seconds she needed to get out the true horror. “Neala was there. He wasn’t just killing me. He was cooking Neala, too.”

Jack didn’t offer any lame comforts or try to reason with her. He just turned her over, straddled her waist, and rubbed her shoulders more expertly than any professional masseur. Now and then he kissed her back, her neck, her head, until all the pieces of the dream faded from her senses and her temper eased.

Andy let him spoil her for another few moments, then turned over and gazed up at him, pressing her palm to his cheek. “Thanks.”

“Like I’ve said before, I have my share of nightmares.” He took her hand and kissed it. “And I’m feeling a little guilty because I’ve been keeping you from a full night’s rest for nearly two weeks.”

Andy blinked at him, trying to absorb that. Time had been moving so strangely she hadn’t been keeping up. Each day seemed too full—and yes, each night, patrol or no, turned into another blazing hot session in Jack’s big bed. When she was with him, she couldn’t stay focused on anything but him, and when she was away from him, all she wanted to do was find him again and end up like this, lying beneath him and staring into his brown eyes for hours.

I might be going insane. No, not
might be.
I’d say it’s pretty definite
.

“When I’m tired, that’s when I have the worst of my dreams,” he said. “The kind I can’t shed for a few hours after I finally get myself awake. The Rakshasa in the Valley of the Gods. Other times …” He trailed off and seemed to debate with himself for a few quiet moments. When he met her gaze again, the stark vulnerability she saw startled her. “I had a difficult childhood. Not all of it, but the last few years turned out to be a serious bitch.”

Andy sat up in the bed, pushing him up with her and covering herself with the sheet. He settled himself beside her almost shoulder to shoulder, hands clasped, and she waited, knowing he had something he needed to say. Something major. She got a fluttery sensation in her belly, like when Dio had warned her that Jack was a man with wind in his heart.

Was he about to tell her one of the reasons he blew in and out of places with no more care than a summer storm?

“My father was a bad man,” Jack said, and just getting those words out seemed to hurt him.

Andy thought about touching him, but decided against it. “How bad?”

Jack frowned. “The worst. A hired killer. We lived in Jersey, Atlantic City, and the casino he bought, he funded by carrying out mob hits. My mother and younger sister and me, we were just cover for the sociopathic bastard.”

Andy could tell there was more, something much worse, and Jack was still arguing with himself about telling her. She risked laying her fingers on his forearm. “You don’t have to censor with me.”

He looked around the room, at the walls, the ceiling, everything but her. “Some things I censor with everyone.”

She scooted closer, her hip against his, her leg pressing into his thigh, and she kept her hand on his arm. “Except me.”

His expression changed, and now Andy saw something like fear and worry. Maybe shame. “My aunt—his sister—talked to the FBI, and he killed her for it. I saw him do it, and that’s when I realized what he was.”

“Jesus. How old were you?”

“Seventeen. For a while, it messed up my brain, but then I knew what I had to do. I started spying on the asshole, collecting whatever evidence I could.”

Jack stopped talking again, and his eyes had gone dark. The lines of his face hardened. Rage and despair rolled off his skin like little tides, and Andy didn’t so much as take a breath, because she knew he didn’t need to stop.

“It got close to my eighteenth birthday, and I was going to turn over what I had to the FBI, but Mom and Ginger beat me to it. They had made their own realizations about him and started talking, and he found out, and I knew what he’d do to them. I got them out and told the FBI where to pick them up, and then I went back and took care of him.”

This time when he stopped, Andy knew he’d gotten out the worst of it—and it was bad.

Dear God. He had to kill his own father. He was just a kid, and he had to do something like that. No wonder he seems detached so much of the time
.

Jack’s stubbornness and lack of social graces when she’d met him—all of that made more sense now. He needed that persona, that gruffness, because he didn’t have wind in his heart, like Dio thought. He had too much agony for any normal man to bear.

Andy tightened her grip on his arm, wanting to do so much more, wanting to give him something that might ease that kind of pain, but she knew that would just push him away. Instead, she let the police officer still living in her soul say what needed to be said. “With a man like that, your mother and sister never would have been safe as long as he lived.”

Jack nodded. “He would have found them himself, or paid somebody to do it.” He stared at the ceiling for a long minute, then added. “When we faced off, I couldn’t shoot him—not until he tried to pump a round into my head.”

Shame. Definitely the emotion now. Shame mixed with regret and self-doubt.

Andy wanted to cry for his pain, couldn’t stop the tears from coming to her eyes, but she held back the rest. “You hesitated because you weren’t like him. You had doubts—and still have them—because you’ve got a heart and soul and mind. You’re not a stone-cold son of a bitch.”

“Thanks.” His hand covered hers, and finally, finally, she sensed a little relief mingling with his frustration and distress.

“What happened to your mother and sister?”

“I don’t know. We got to see each other one more time, then we had to go our separate ways to keep my father’s associates from coming after us.”

“Witness protection.”

Jack didn’t answer that question, which was answer enough. He’d had to kill his father, then surrender everything about who and what he was, who he had planned to be, and lose his mother and kid sister, too. To keep them safe, he let them be dead to him, even though he knew they were probably alive and well somewhere, living out their days without him.

She thought about what he’d asked her to do in the hospital, about using herself as bait to draw out the supermobsters.
If you have to do this thing, wait for me. Let me be there with you
.

That meant more to him than she’d realized at the time, but she knew it now. He needed to fight beside her, needed it at a soul-deep level, because Jack couldn’t stand to lose anybody else who meant something to him. If it came to that, he planned to go down shooting to save what he cared about, just like he’d done when he was seventeen.

He’s taking a huge risk, letting me come this close
. The jolt of understanding that she wasn’t the only one laying everything on the line to see what might grow between them woke Andy in entirely new ways.

Jack’s emotions washed into her again, from the hurt to the worry to the warmth and caring, and she dropped her sheet, moved into his lap, and kissed him. Somewhere between the third and fourth kiss, she whispered, “I love you.”

He didn’t flinch at the words, and the stream of feelings flowing between his heart and hers only got warmer and stronger.

“I love you,” he said, his voice low as he held her tighter. He captured her lips with his, kissing her as he eased her to the pillows again and covered them. Chest to chest, leg to leg, their bodies became one creation under the single, soft sheet. He kissed her until she couldn’t stand it, until her whole being ached for more and she wanted to beat his shoulders and beg him to give her relief.

Finally, finally, he lowered his head, pulled her tight nipple into his mouth, and stroked it with his tongue.

All the water and blood in Andy’s body surged at the same time. She arched backward into the bed, pressing her breast into his mouth, doubling her own pleasure and raking a razor’s edge of erotic pain. His hand swept up her belly to squeeze her other nipple, soft, then hard, soft, then hard, and her hips bucked. She rubbed herself against his hard length, throbbing with each touch, letting water slide across her skin as she held him tighter.

He had her now. He had her completely. Captive heart. He might as well hold it in his hands.

His soft growl of pleasure made her moan. “You want me to beg, don’t you?”

Another growl, this one deeper and even more stimulating.

Jack shifted his weight and moved his hand away from her breast. Down, lower, into her curls, into her folds, cupping her and pressing against the wet center, and all the while, his teeth and lips and tongue teased her sensitive nipple.

Andy cried out from the hot pleasure, feeling completely owned and possessed and loving the sensation in ways she’d never imagined. He stroked between her legs, circling and pressing and giving gentle pinches until she thought she’d have to start screaming and keep screaming until he got himself inside her and made the ache stop.

“Jack.” Her voice had gone ragged. She couldn’t control the words.

And he let go of her nipple. Moved his hand. Moved his whole body down, his bare chest scrubbing across her belly, her sex, giving her new shivers, more shivers, until he settled between her thighs. That’s when he took hold of her ass, pressed his mouth against her aching core, and made her moan out of control.

He tasted her, teased her even more, each of his low rumbles of pleasure traveling like wild waves through her body. Andy closed her eyes, lost and immersed like she was falling to the sea miles and miles under the heavy, hot waters above. Her body thrashed almost outside of her awareness, and Jack kept sucking and kissing, moving his lips and tongue like he’d never in his life known anything so good.

Andy’s breath got more and more shallow. She couldn’t take it, but she had to, she wanted to. So incredible. “Don’t stop. Please. Don’t stop.”