City Of Souls (22 page)

I sighed at the slamming of his door. I’d waited too long to speak. Other than a few intermittent beeps from within the warehouse, complete silence enveloped me. Hunter disappeared inside. The bay door lowered to encase me in darkness.

I leaned back my head, closed my eyes, and sighed again.

While Hunter busied himself putting space between us, I again cursed the timing of our return to the warehouse. He’d opened up to me for a moment there, like the dappled edging of the sun through the trees, the first real opportunity at intimacy since I’d left his bed in this very warehouse more than a month earlier. I knew even before stepping from the car that the precious sliver of vulnerability, like the sun, would be clouded over again by the time I joined him inside. Again I wondered why it couldn’t be simple.

No, not simple, I silently clarified, but true. Undivided. Decisive. A woman wants to be chosen, after all, the one deemed precious above all others. The thought made me think of Hunter’s eyes fixed on the road as he asked about Ben. Could that be what he wanted as well?

“Wow. I’m always leaving, aren’t I?” I laughed, a small, unamused puff trapped in the cab of the car. How ironic that I could do so much
leaving
while trapped in Vegas, in this body, in this life. How ironic also that my return from another world was what emphasized all those little departures.

Before I could think, or back out of it, I went inside and said that same thing to Hunter.

“What are you talking about?” He was occupied at his drawing board, shuffling papers and tossing foam pieces into an open bin. He looked like he wanted to shrug off my words but couldn’t quite. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

I just smiled. “I mean, I left Ben…actually, I left him a note. In a mailbox.” I shook my head at the stupidity of thinking that was somehow acceptable. “Then I left you for him…then him again. But you helped me return from Midheaven, do you know that?”

He swallowed hard and shrugged. His actions were jerky, not at all his usual lithe, catlike movements.

I leaned against the table, toward him. He turned, disappearing behind the clouded plastic screen separating the workshop from the shooting range. I raised my voice. “You did. I was…trapped there. It would have been easy just to…”
Give up. Die
. The words slipped away. “Anyway, it would have been easy. But I remembered you once talking about my strength, how you thought it was beautiful, and that memory made me want to fight.”

It’d been in this very workshop, the sole time we’d made love. I’d left him then too. I edged around the hanging plastic sheet to find him standing before it, unseeing, motionless. He licked his lip, still not looking at me. “Not now,” he whispered. “Please.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that.

“You also said it was okay to change, to want something new. To admit you made a mistake and then make a new choice. For a new person. In a moment.”

I thought of what Solange had said as we were spinning in her planetarium, that I doubted my place in the world.

But I didn’t doubt this.

Sure, I wasn’t Solange, with her confidence and authenticity—her powers—but I was certainly the best
me
I’d ever been. I put my hand on his arm, hoping he’d choose this moment too. That he’d choose this new me. Hunter lowered his head for a moment.

Then he turned away.

It hurt. I closed my eyes. Yet I still wanted him. I opened them again.

And when he strode off to clear the target, I followed. A firing range, I thought. How appropriate.

“What are you doing?” he said, stopping in front of the first bull’s-eye, feeling me behind him.

Keeping my expression pleasant, I inched closer. “Sticking,” I said shortly, slipping my smile into the word.

“No, you’re being obnoxious.” He yanked on the old bull’s-eye, crumpling it in his hands. “Not to mention aggressive.”

“I know.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s
so
unattractive.”

He loved my strength. He loved my stubbornness. I stepped closer.

Hunter moved away, not looking at me. “We tried this before.”

His resolve was so firm it made me ache to shatter it. I smiled. “And we’re going to do it again.”

He whirled.
“No.”

“Yes.” I snorted. He was right. It was obnoxious. “What,
hero
? Nobody and nothing touches you just because you’re bulletproof?”

He lifted his chin. “That’s right.”

I tilted my shoulder and batted my lashes. “C’mere, Bulletproof.”

His mouth actually twitched at that.

“See. You’re going to start liking this.” I let my glance fall to his mouth. “I promise.”

He swallowed hard, serious again. “Stop.”

Maybe I would have. If his gaze hadn’t slid over my halter top, lingered on the belly ring, caught on the zipper of my chaps. My smile widened, he took another step back…and I picked him up.

“What the—”

I threw him into the sidewall ten feet away, hard enough to knock some sense into him without causing injury. He was a big boy. He could tell the difference.

He was already on his feet as I advanced again, looking at me like my body had been taken over by aliens while I’d been visiting another world.

“You’re thinking too much,” I said, closing in. The thick silver encircling my wrists jingled. My leather pants rubbed when I walked. Hunter watched me warily. All combined? It was a huge turn-on. “It’s starting to annoy me.”

He swallowed when I stopped before him, body tensed, ready to deflect another shot if he had to. “One of us has to.”

I feigned turning away…and pitched him across the room extra hard for that.

“Joanna!” Now he was really pissed. I wanted to throw back my head and laugh.

I stalked him again, took the shooting stand he was keeping between us in an underhanded grip and flipped it across the room too. Steel clattered against concrete to send my blood soaring. I knew Hunter scented it. He inhaled deeply and his dark eyes dilated. I was hunting, I realized. Still hunting, still fighting, and—oh, look—damned feminine while doing it. God, this felt good. “Don’t say my name if you’re going to say it like that.”

I reached him, and he caught my wrists so I couldn’t pitch him again. I stepped closer. He angled his body, shielding choice body parts. Not a bit of trust in the boy. “How should I say it?” he asked.

“Like this.” And, gently, I lifted to my toes and breathed the syllables into his mouth.

It was a reluctant enfolding, his mouth closing so gently over mine that I might have missed it were it not for the accompanying warmth. I moved my lips, opening to him further, and his hands gentled on my skin, but he didn’t let go.

“I won’t leave again,” I murmured, leaning into him. The warmth spread to all the places my body met his—lips, arms, breasts. I pressed. “I won’t leave
you
again.”

He swallowed hard and I knew I’d hit on a fear too deeply felt to even voice. Even the next one, which he did murmur, had him averting his eyes. “Looking back is a form of leaving.”

“Hunter.” I took his face in my palms, so gently you would have never known I’d thrown down only minutes before. “My mother is
MIA
, my sister’s dead, my ex has no idea who I am, and I can’t even revisit the last week of my life because I never lived it. If any of that is an issue between you and me, then, Hunt? I’m not the one looking back.”

“That’s not fair.” He drew back from my touch, though he didn’t let go. “Look, you’ve had time to think this through—”

I moved in again, eyes on his lips. “Just thought of it, actually.”

“And right now you might be confusing what you think you want—”

“I want you.”

His jaw clenched. “You have to give me time.”

“You’ve got thirty seconds.”

His eyes went wide.

I shrugged. “Thirty seconds and either these chaps come off or I walk away forever. Twenty, now.”

“You can’t expect me to make that sort of—”

“Fifteen. C’mon, Hunter. I’m keeping it simple.”

“Jo!”

“I told you. Don’t say my name like that.” I slid my gaze down his body, lids going heavy with what I saw. Damn, this man spoke to me. “What do you want?”

“What exactly do
you
want?”

I smiled, my gaze flipping back up on his, warming once there. “I want to know what you crave and need and desire in the next…” I looked at my bangled wrist. “Five seconds.”

“I want you to stop throwing me around!”

And he also wanted to take the words back as soon as they were out of his mouth, because we both froze in their wake. He meant physically, but the accompanying scent said it was his emotions that were battered. As did the way his brows furrowed, as if pained.

“Oh.” I drew back and swallowed hard, my amusement fleeing. What was I doing to this poor guy? I thought, eyes wildly searching his face. He was right to want time and space. He had a right to his feelings, and to take as much time as he needed to come around to them. I could wait for him to come to me…if he chose.

“Phew.” I ran a hand over my head as I turned away. “Okay.”

Thank God for the wall, because my back was against it so fast it was like the earth came unhinged from its axis. Hunter’s mouth brought everything swimming into its proper place again, and I thought, Yes. This is right. This is fate. This is mine.

He pulled back long enough to catch his breath. “I still had two seconds left.”

“Three cheers for time management.” I flipped on him again, not throwing him around this time, but rolling with him. We pushed each other in tandem, working together now, mouths and hands frantic, until I halted it with a leg snaking up his side. I wrapped it around the back of his left thigh as he pressed, then shuddered. I smiled. “So you
do
like the chaps.”

“Not so much.” He hooked his thumbs into the waistband, I lowered my leg and braced. Diana’s chaps ripped free, attached silver studs tinkling as they hit the floor. Hunter quirked a brow.

I rolled my eyes. “I know, they’re like wind chimes. I have no idea…”

How I was going to finish that sentence, I thought as his mouth recaptured mine. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he braced me with his core, hand fisted in my hair as he pushed me higher.

I winced as my lower back took most of the impact. “Ow.”

“What?” He pulled back, brows drawn.

I grabbed him again. “Nothing.”

A month ago we’d been tentative, uncertain, gentle and giving. This time we were ravenous in our demands, active and punishing. I didn’t feel bad about raking my fingers over his back as I stripped his shirt from him, because his knuckles dug into my hips as he tore off my briefs. So I bit his shoulder until he growled and redirected my mouth. He kissed me so long and hard my heartbeat actually slowed.

Flipping my hair to one side, he dove for my neck. I countered, angling for his, and we tussled until he created space enough to flip me, remaining behind this time. My protest stuttered off as he angled my palms on the wall, higher than I’d have chosen, exposing me more, before his hands pushed aside my leather halter, pinching as he again captured my neck with his mouth.

I arched back on a moan, arms spreading, and he wrapped one forearm around my chest, bracing me there. There was the slide of a zipper, and my breath quickened from expectation alone. Nothing happened. I held still. Still nothing. I bit my lip, whimpering some wordless plea, but there was only that one bracing arm around my core. Frustrated, I angled a look back. “Hunt—”

He plunged, a gorgeous, solid stroke that set off the first of my orgasms. I wasn’t even letting him take me, instead arching, reaching back with every sense to demand more, wanting friction and heat, his strength in return for mine. I wanted him to go on forever. I wanted…I wanted…I wanted…

He wanted too. Hands returning to my breasts, he hooked his thumbs beneath my arms, nipples captured beneath long, strong fingers. I continued to open to him, luxuriating in his demand, and when I thought I couldn’t open any further, I gave some more. I wanted to pull him into me. I wanted to disappear into him. I wanted the one person who knew me to find shelter inside of me so I could do the same.

And right when I felt I was giving and getting just that, the magic of the aureole whipped across us. It was like the cresting tide of a monsoon, and having experienced it twice before, we each braced for the flash of color and knowledge to soak our senses, we both cried out as our minds intertwined. The energy gathering like a cosmic disaster in the sky was nothing compared to what arrowed between us. Our individual minds and thoughts slipped past skin and bone so that Hunter’s memories took root in my head, he took ownership of mine, and the separately lived moments merged as one.

His worry as he’d realized I’d disappeared into the pipeline a week earlier was an ache in my chest, like a fist squeezing my heart. I felt it now just as he had then.

The pain that had assailed me in the crossing between worlds reached out like an ice cream scoop to hollow his middle, and I actually heard his breath stutter.

After that I had a vision of him hunched over papers in the map room attached to the warehouse, making connections, his determination fueling long hours. In return, the memory plucked from me was of staring down Harlan Tripp across a pile of poker chips, and of sweeping those chips into my bag. The bag, connecting memories, was next seen hanging around a pipe as I huddled, barely breathing, feet away from the Tulpa and Regan in the dark.

The linear connection broke then, and we were flung back in time where a slash of stark moonlight lit Hunter’s face as he spoke the words I’d last read in a Shadow manual.

Everyone should have their greatest desire.

I wanted to turn to him, to question that, but the pain of the rejection he’d just endured, because of me, ran through me like a guillotine. To escape it, I squeezed my eyes…

And recalled for us both Solange in silhouette, stars spinning around her.

Hunter and I gasped together as the power arching between us reached its apex then, a shuddering pause before the coaster of emotion thundered downhill, picking up speed as we found our bodies again, renewed our rhythm, regained the present, and came together as one. Hunter’s aura, a gold spinning behind my closed lids, burst through me like a rocket. My red aura was weak, but my emotion was concentrated, and it spun from my mouth on that final cry.