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Authors: Rebecca York

BOOK: Dark Warrior
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As she came, she silently called his name.
Jason.
And she heard his silent answer.
Sophia.
From his mind? How could she get into his mind?
Then she was herself again, her heart racing and her breath coming in great gasps.
She had imagined the mental contact. She must have. Because what she’d thought had happened was impossible with a man.
She pushed at him with both hands. “You’re heavy.”
“Sorry.”
He rolled to his back and turned his head to look at her.
Desperate to distance herself from him, she clipped out, “Don’t say anything dumb like—was that as good for you as it was for me?”
“I don’t have to. I know.”
The arrogance of his response gave her the excuse she needed.
Briskly she stood and began gathering her clothing.
She felt a spurt of triumph when she saw hurt and disappointment flash in his eyes. “Where are you going?”
“I have work to do,” she answered, knowing that the brusque words gave away her own uncertainty.
She saw him swallow. “Don’t go.”
“I have to.”
“Tell me if I have the job.”
“Because you’re a good lay?”
“
You
said you had one more requirement.”
She struggled not to grit her teeth. She
had
said it. “You have the job,” she answered. “But not because of this.” She swept her hand across the hayloft.
He looked as if he wanted to say something more, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Instead he only watched as she dressed and pulled up the trapdoor so that she could escape.
 
JASON
pushed himself up and looked around, shocked that he was in the hayloft. And shocked at what he’d been doing.
He had only a vague memory of following Sophia up here. Lust had wiped everything from his mind but his need for her.
Well, lust was part of it. He knew damn well it was so much more. And she knew it, too, or she wouldn’t have gotten dressed and walked away from him.
Had she recognized him from the desert?
He thought so, but she wasn’t admitting it. Or had she rushed off to summon a squad of her sisters to strike him down?
He reached for his pants and pulled them on, then the rest of his clothing. When he descended the ladder, only the horses were in their stalls.
He strode past them to his truck, climbed in, and drove toward the gate, trying to sort out his emotions.
The night they’d met, he had vowed not to make love to her until everything seemed right. Then she’d led him up the ladder, and he’d followed like a stallion after a mare in heat, breathing in her tantalizing scent.
No. They’d both been in heat, and the sex had been as mind-blowing as he’d imagined it would be.
But maybe he should have played hard to get.
He laughed. Hard to get! Yeah, he’d been hard all right, and he’d been thinking with his cock, not his brain.
He’d been arrogant like all the Minot. He thought he could control his craving for an Ionian. He’d been wrong. As soon as he’d taken her in his arms, he’d been lost.
His father had told him it was like being offered a drug designed especially for you. His father had been a rational man, and Jason had thought he was just trying to scare his son into caution, but his need for Sophia was everything he’d been warned about.
Yet he wanted so much more than mere sex. He wanted a relationship, and he wanted to find out if that could change everything for him.
He might have blown his chances by following her up there. Worse, by taking control of the encounter.
That was something else he’d learned from his father. The Ionian women thought they had to be in charge in the bedroom, and when they weren’t, they would back away.
He clamped his hands on the wheel. No. He wouldn’t believe that he had lost her. Lost everything.
He would start again, slowly and patiently. He would let Sophia set the pace.
Of course, she’d done it this time. She’d been fast and direct, and he’d responded without even thinking. Until the moment when her mind had opened to him. And his to her.
He felt a jolt of excitement.
That mind-to-mind communication had been real. Opened by the sexual intimacy, even though he was sure she would find some way to deny it, until she was ready to accept what the two of them could mean to each other.
“Careful,” he muttered. “You’ve planned everything else in your life. Don’t let this be the one time you screw up.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
 
RAFE GARRISON NEVER let moss grow under his feet. After the disaster on the road, he’d chewed out his contact at the spa.
The guy had the skills to do his job at the facility and enough charm to disarm the women. In addition, he was willing to do things for money that most guys would balk at, but that was what made him useful.
Rafe didn’t like working through a surrogate, but he was stuck with the inconvenience because there was some kind of barrier that kept him out of the spa.
Not something artificial like he had at home. Something they generated with their psychic powers.
When he’d tried to get in, he’d almost had a heart attack. So he’d given up and found someone to work for him. Too bad the guy wasn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer.
The jerk claimed he hadn’t known about the change in meeting plans until after Sophia had come home. Rafe didn’t like it. He was paying big bucks for information, but he understood that the women could make last-minute changes in their assignments, because they served at the whim of the high priestess or the mother superior or whatever you wanted to call her.
Instead of shouting curses into the phone, he’d gritted his teeth and given the guy another chance to get it right. This time, they were going with a more direct plan. No chances of mistaken identity on the road. And the man knew that if he screwed up again, he was dog meat.
Rafe went to bed feeling satisfied that the situation was under control, even if he hadn’t made any progress in locating the other Minot. Nobody who fit the profile had moved into town in the past couple of months. But that didn’t mean he was going to give up looking.
He switched his thoughts back to the man at the spa. He had more control over
that
situation
.
As he lay on his soft Egyptian cotton sheets, he amused himself by thinking about ways to punish the guy if he fucked up again.
He felt peaceful as he’d drifted off. He even got a few solid hours of sleep.
Then he sank into another one of his damn dreams. The dreams that had dogged him all his life. Well, not when he was a boy, thank the gods. Then he might have grown up insane. The torture had started when he’d hit his late teens, and he’d never told anyone about it.
In the dreams he was always a Minot. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. But he was sure he was always another man who had lived in an earlier age. And each time the guy ended up with his ass in a sling.
Tonight’s was particularly bad. In this version of the old story, he was a man named Dean Conrad from an Arizona mining town called Thunder Hill. The year was 1832. He owned the bank, the hotel, and the livery stable, and with the silver mines outside of town going great guns, he was doing really well. He’d moved to the area because he’d been keeping track of the Ionians. And he knew they were in Sedona, less than thirty miles away.
In the dream, he breathed a sigh of relief because everything was finally going his way.
He had money and power, and he was plotting how to capture one of the women and take her to a ranch he had out in the desert, where he could do anything he wanted with her.
Just as he was about to kidnap the next one who showed up in town for supplies, outlaws came riding up the mudhole of a street—and shot him before he could duck for cover. Townspeople killed two of the gang members and chased away the rest. Some of them carried the wounded Dean Conrad to the doctor’s office. But he’d been shot bad—in the guts. There was nothing the doc could do to save his life. He’d lingered on for most of a day, cursing his fate, and died in horrible pain.
Rafe woke in a cold sweat, still feeling the agony of the massive wound. Teeth gritted, he climbed out of bed and stood naked for a moment, staring at the darkness outside the window, before hurrying down the hall to his office, where he booted his computer and looked up Dean Conrad. As he’d suspected would be true, Conrad was a real person whose life and death conformed to the dream.
He’d lived in Arizona. Been the leading citizen of a town called Thunder Hill, and been killed by outlaws invading the town. Only in the official version, he’d died fighting them off.
As far as he knew, that part wasn’t true. He didn’t even have the satisfaction of justifying his death.
But even if a few details were wrong, how the hell had he dreamed about the man—when he’d never heard of him until tonight?
Struggling to keep his hands from shaking, Rafe switched to a Word file that he’d been keeping for the past few years and added Conrad’s name and a bit of information about the guy.
He joined a list of twenty other men who had haunted Rafe’s dreams. Each was a Minot who had done well for himself in the world—then died at the peak of his powers.
None of them was a figure he’d made up from his own imagination. Each of them was real. He’d confirmed that through computer research, each time hoping that the guy wouldn’t turn out to be a historical reality.
Stanley Weston was a businessman in Philadelphia in the eighteen hundreds who had been swept away in a flood when he’d gone to inspect a cotton mill he was thinking of buying.
Will Tilden was a railroad executive at the turn of the twentieth century who had died of some terrible illness. Probably of appendicitis.
Ben Gunderson was a German beer maker who’d come to Milwaukee and cornered the brew market—before he’d gotten killed in an accident at one of his own plants.
There were more, but he didn’t need to scan the list. He’d memorized it long ago.
He wasn’t sure how he knew they were Minot. But he was certain of it, all the way to the marrow of his bones.
To be truthful, he didn’t even know what made a man a Minot—not really. Genetics, he supposed. Probably they had a bunch of dominant genes that were passed down from father to son. They must be sex linked, because he’d never heard of a female Minot.
Did all of them dream of long-dead men who had come to grief? He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was supposed to learn something from their failures.
And he had!
They’d made him realize that he didn’t have complete control of his life. Still, he was determined not to let their failures happen to him all over again.
He’d like to ask the others about their dreams. The problem was, Minot weren’t real approachable.
They fought for what they wanted, and that extended to fighting each other. To avoid the conflict that was building between himself and his father, he’d never lived at home after he’d gone away to college and never come back for more than a few days. Even when he’d attended the old man’s funeral, he hadn’t stayed in the house for long.
Too bad the Minot couldn’t join forces the way they had in ancient times. If they could team up, surely they could defeat the damn Ionians.
Maybe the last time they’d worked together was when they rescued the Ionians from the barbarians. The way he’d heard it, after the big blowup over the women’s escape, the Minot had all blamed each other. They’d been too angry to work together again, ever. Maybe the damn women had cursed them. And even if they could now join forces, then what? Each of them would want the spoils of victory for himself, and only one of them could climb to the top of the heap.
Of course, he did have a line on someone who he thought would join him in the current project. A man who’d had reasons to hate the Ionians.
That made the guy vulnerable, and Rafe was going to pitch his case to him once he had Tessa safely away from the compound.
 
BEFORE
dinner, Tessa tiptoed down the hall and slipped into the private library that the Sisterhood maintained. After stepping into the darkened room, she closed the door quietly behind her, breathing in the atmosphere of the room.
In the public part of the spa, there were books that guests might read, novels or interesting nonfiction.
But this small room was different. These books held the wisdom of the Ionians. Some explained how to work ceremonies and cure illnesses. Others described psychic powers and how to cultivate them. A few even had information on the Minot.
Some of the sisters were transcribing the information into electronic form, but she suspected that one book would always be kept in writing.

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