Edge of Oblivion (7 page)

Perhaps even more so.

“I’m not
sleeping
with you,” Morgan spat from behind him.

Against his will, he summoned the vivid, heart-stopping image of the two of them naked, entangled in the sheets on that very large and decadent bed, Morgan arching and moaning his name beneath him.

“Don’t be stupid,” Xander said through clenched teeth, banishing the lucid illusion. “And don’t flatter yourself. This is only for convenience. I’m not letting you out of my sight.” He turned from the window and leveled her with a lethal stare that drained the blood from her cheeks.

But—
God
. Even with her blood-drained cheeks and travel-rumpled clothes and the hostility that pulsed off her in waves, her loveliness was astonishing and otherworldly, the kind he’d seen only once before in a painting of an angel by Caravaggio. The kind that made every male in the airport and hotel stop and gape as she passed by.

The unforgettable kind. The
dangerous
kind.

Even now as he glared murder and mayhem at her, a flash of heat tightened his groin at the ghost of that wanton fantasy of the two of them together on the bed, the same blistering heat that had enveloped him the first time he’d glimpsed her at Sommerley. Tall and lithe and slender as a sapling, with the eloquent eyes of a silent-movie star, she’d walked in the room and all the air had gone out.

Then she’d tripped and he’d reacted on pure instinct to catch her and had taken in a lungful of her scent, warm skin and woman and exotic, dark muskiness, a perfume unlike anything he’d experienced before, fine and feminine and powerfully provocative.

Traitor
, he reminded himself.
Traitor and liar and mark.

“Well then,” she said, still frozen and fierce. “I hope you enjoy the floor.”

They stared at one another, deadlocked in silent animosity, until there came a tap on the door.

An accented male voice called out, “Porter. I have your bags, sir.”

Morgan sent him one last baleful glare, then moved with stiff grace toward the wheat-and-

cream striped sofa in the sitting room. She dropped her handbag unceremoniously on the floor and perched on the sofa’s overstuffed arm with her arms folded across her chest. One leg, slender and bare, clad in a strappy, high-heeled shoe that seemed useful only for accentuating the delicate bones of her ankle, swung back and forth in agitation.

He gritted his teeth again. Why in God’s name did she have to be wearing a
skirt
?

He went to the door, let the bellman in, and indicated where the man should set the bags. There was an inordinately large amount of them—all Morgan’s—and he had to make several trips back and forth from his bell cart in the hallway. The man kept throwing heated glances at the sofa, where Morgan perched while she watched him like a cat when it hears the can opener, all eyes and appetite.

Xander went to get his billfold from the duffel bag on the desk. When he turned back, the porter stood slack-jawed and silent in front of Morgan, stupidly gaping. She brushed her hair back from her face, a gesture that seemed somehow unnatural, as if her hands had just been doing something else, and smiled at him.

“Porter,” Xander snapped. Watching men fall to pieces all over his mark was going to get old, fast.

Blinking, the man turned. Xander held out a fistful of euros and jerked his head toward the door.

“Yes, sir,” the porter murmured and walked over to him—more correctly stumbled over—his face gone a curious and very unnatural shade of green. Xander frowned.

And was able to leap out of the way just as the porter opened his mouth and sent a jet of hot, yellow vomit spraying onto the vanilla carpet in the exact spot he’d just been standing.

Disgusted, he barked a string of curses. The man went to his knees, coughing and spitting, blathering apologies in Italian. From the sofa behind him came a laugh, low and pleased, and he looked up to find Morgan smiling at him, sweet as saccharine and just as fake.

“Oh my,” she said, still casually swinging her foot with its finely turned ankle back and forth.

“I wonder if it was something in the water. Too bad you weren’t able to assist him with a dose of your wonderful
acupressure
. It looks like his ‘inner gate’ could use a little oiling.”

He felt the tiniest twinge of admiration that she would risk something so bold purely out of spite, right before it was swallowed by a wave of blistering anger so strong he had to curl his hands into fists to control the itch to curl them around her neck.

“Try something like that again,” he said, his voice very low in his throat, “and you’ll find yourself missing a pair of hands.”

She flushed red, and he was gratified to see it. The porter struggled to stand. He found his footing and backed away toward the door, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his beige linen uniform, still stammering apologies and assurances that someone would be up directly to attend to the mess. He reached the door and disappeared through it at a run.

Morgan bent and retrieved her handbag from the floor, then rose, all without the slightest bit of haste or discomposure. She retrieved one of her smaller suitcases from the row against the wall, then walked in easy, graceful strides to the door of the master suite. Inside the door she paused and turned, her hand on the doorframe, a smile on her face, the picture of untroubled elegance.

Only her eyes gave her away. The heat in her emerald gaze scorched the air between them like a lit fuse.

“And if you ever threaten me again, errand boy,” she said quietly, swinging the door shut, “you’ll find yourself missing your
di
—” The door slammed closed before he heard the final word, but he didn’t have to. He knew exactly what it was.

When the woman from housekeeping arrived twenty minutes later to clean the carpet, Xander was still standing in the middle of the living room, staring hard at the closed bedroom door.

It was two hours before she was sufficiently calmed to leave the master suite, and by then Xander was gone.

The shower helped. It was a mosaic-tiled, glass-enclosed expanse of luxury with silky lavender shampoo and French-milled grape seed oil soaps and three sets of jets set at various heights, the better to massage a body with hot, pulsing water from all angles. Seething, she spent what felt like forever under the sprays before she began to relax. When she emerged—puckered—there were Egyptian cotton towels, plush and pristine white, there were ivory cashmere robes hung from a gleaming silver dowel, there was a marble fireplace and what appeared to be a real Picasso hung above the dressing table. There was even a window with a view to the faraway, sunset-emblazoned hills.

What there was
not
was a gun. Which she very much would have liked to find hidden in one of the vanity drawers.

Bastard. Cold, arrogant bastard. If it weren’t for her promise to Jenna, she would put a bullet in his head and burn this place to the ground.

But she had work to do and couldn’t afford to spend any more time envisioning putting a gun against his temple or pushing him off the balcony or Suggesting to one of the hotel staff they poison his food. The sooner she found what she’d come for, the better.

And then to hell with him.

She dried her hair and dressed, then went out to the living room, expecting to find him skinning kittens or swallowing live goldfish, but there was only a pair of black kid-skin gloves—women’s gloves, supple and delicate—laid out beside a handwritten note on the glass-topped desk in the living room.

A pair of gloves and seven words, all harmless in themselves. Yet nothing in as long as she could remember struck such a raw chord of bitter resentment deep in her heart. The collar, now
this
.

Did he really expect her to humor him and wear the gloves, voluntarily giving up the final Gift at her disposal? Leaving her defenseless, completely at the mercy of fate?

No. Her hands would remain bare, and God help him if he tried to force them on. As for dinner...she’d rather have dinner with the devil than with him.

She ignored the gloves, balled up the note, tossed it to the floor, and went down to the lobby, where she hailed a taxi and disappeared into the purple-blue haze of the warm Roman dusk.

From his position behind the spreading branches of a potted raffia palm in the lobby bar, Xander watched her go and won a bet with himself. Then he took the next cab and instructed the driver to follow her.

Morgan had no idea where she was going until she saw, ethereal and enormous and uplit in a vivid wash of gold, the jagged stone outline of the Colosseum. It was the hugest thing she’d ever seen, an ellipsis of pale yellow blocks of travertine and tufa the length of a football field with a three-story façade of superimposed arcades, arched hollows where enormous statues of gods and emperors had once stood. The dark hollows stared out over the city like rows of empty eyes.

“There!” she said to the driver, excited, pointing through the open window.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He was graying and paunchy and utterly nondescript, but his eyes were like dark chocolate, liquid and sweet, and she saw the echo of the younger man he’d once been.

“
Dove?
” he said around his cigarette, pulling the two syllables out in a languid, sensual tenor that also belied his age. And made her appreciate his ambition.

“The Colosseum,” she said, hopeful. Surely that translated to any language?

“
È chiuso.
” He made a gesture with his hand that sent pale gray whorls of smoke rising in ghostly circles from the cigarette now held between his fingers. “
Tour fermano a cinque.
”

She recognized only one word of this languidly delivered answer, which was
chiuso
—closed.

“It’s okay.” She gave him the international sign for approval: a thumbs-up. “Please—
per favore
—take me to the Colosseum.”

He shrugged and kept on through the snarl of evening traffic, several times barely avoiding hitting one of the dozens of scooters that whizzed by the taxi at lightning speed. They turned onto Via dei Fori Imperiali, and Morgan watched it grow closer and closer, a hulking giant erected right in the heart of the city nearly two thousand years ago. The cab slowed to a stop at the curb. This garnered a chorus of irate honking and shouts of
“Spostati!”
from the line of cars behind them.

“
Grazie
,” she said, the only other Italian word she knew besides
please
. She leaned over the front seat, touched her hand to the driver’s shoulder, and met his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“
Grazie
,” she said again, softer. He nodded, slowly, and she left him with a smile and the impression he’d been paid for the ride. And handsomely tipped.

Though denied access by locked iron gates, three times the height of a man, that closed off every arched entrance, throngs of people still strolled around the grassy perimeter of the Colosseum, talking, laughing, smoking, taking pictures in front of it. She felt like a tourist herself, awed and amazed, craning her neck to gaze up in wonder. She’d only ever been allowed out of Sommerley once, on a trip with Leander to Los Angeles, and that city was so elementally different from this one that trying to compare them would be like comparing water to fire.

But Rome. Oh, Rome.

Even the air was different here, warm and soft and filled with life, ripe with birdsong and honking horns, nearby laughter and far-off singing, heady with the scent of fresh-baked bread and sun-

warmed stone. A stocky, bespectacled man with a mouth like a dried prune approached and said something to her in Japanese, gesturing to his camera and his tiny, smiling wife standing a few feet away beside a low fence.

“Of course. Yes!” she said, without realizing she’d never held a camera in her life and had no idea how to operate one. Her confusion became quickly apparent, and the man, in broken English, gently showed her how to focus the lens and which button to push.

When it was done they were beaming and bowing and shaking her hand, and Morgan experienced a feeling so unfamiliar and strange it took her a moment to identify. Like optimism but stronger, a buoyant confidence and goodwill and sweet anticipation all rolled into one.

Hope. She felt hope.

The Japanese couple thanked her one last time and moved away, leaving her standing stunned and alone, awash in sentimentality for this new bud of feeling she’d glimpsed, which she knew without question wouldn’t live long.

And neither will you
, a small voice whispered in her ear,
if you don’t get going
.

She stared up at the golden stone bulk of the Colosseum.

One look inside, she decided, just a tiny bit of sightseeing since she’d most likely never have the opportunity again, and then she’d figure out where to begin her search.

Starting off at a casual stroll, Morgan made her way across the greenbelt of grass and around the cobblestone-paved perimeter, wondering at how open it was, how accessible even with the iron gates. She could walk right up and
touch
it. And she did, running her fingers over cracks and bumps and warm, roughened stone, over a small, faded patch of blue-and-black graffiti on the inner curve of a graceful Ionic column, missed by whoever was tasked with removing it. She moved on, noting with no small satisfaction that she was alone and unwatched—practically
free
—in a foreign country, something that even two months ago would have been unthinkable, a total impossibility.

She couldn’t help the wicked smile that curved her lips, wondering what
he
had done when he’d discovered her gone. She hoped it involved a stroke.