Mystical Seduction: full-length sensual paranormal romance (The Protectors) (10 page)

Faith’s expression remained vacant. Stone needed to release
her and let her have her own thoughts again. And that would happen only if
Horace was successful in convincing Stone to release her.

“You were working to vanquish Ballou from the club, and yet
it pointed its gun at Faith and pulled the trigger. Don’t you think we need to
find out why?”

Stone chewed on his lower lip and frowned. It wasn’t a
promising sign. “I’ve already pushed several of her memories away,” he said
after a long span of silence. “It might be dangerous to stop now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her memories are fractured. Look at her.” Stone waved his
hand in front of her face. “She’s not able to process any of this because there
are too many holes. I’ve never tried to reverse someone’s memories. For all I
know, I might end up entangling her in this haze forever.”

“No.” Horace knew he was being stubborn, but he didn’t care.
“I won’t let you take her away from me. Not like this. Not yet.”

Impulsively, he slanted his lips over hers and claimed her.

* * * *

Faith felt like a fairytale princess and the dashing hero’s
searing kiss had just broken through the evil wizard’s spell that had bound her.
She blinked several times as her thoughts pushed through the thick haze that
had clouded her mind. She liked that image of Horace. A dashing hero prepared
to fight for his lady. A prince riding on a glorious white steed.

The hero image suited him.

Gradually, Faith’s mind cleared. The fog and the fairytales
floated away. She didn’t need the power of Horace’s kiss to hold her thoughts
together anymore. But her arms tightened around his neck all the same. She
enjoyed the feel of his lips against hers, and she didn’t want him to stop.

After all, if they stopped kissing he’d probably try to
break up with her again. He seemed to do that every time they stopped kissing.

Didn’t two people have to be dating to break up? She decided
she’d use that argument the next time. And there would be a next time. She felt
quite confident he would try to wiggle out of this relationship of theirs every
chance he got.

But oh, but he could kiss!

She could feel the brush of his lips and the touch of his
tongue all the way down to the curl of her toes. She opened her mouth to him
and encouraged him to deepen the kiss. He took her cue and plunged into her
mouth, stirred her desire. Naturally, she wrapped her legs around his waist
while feeding on the sensual movement of his seeking tongue.

But like all beautiful things, their kiss couldn’t last
forever. Feeling breathless and more than a little unbalanced, she found her
footing again.

“You okay?” he asked. He gently caressed her cheek.

Not willing to trust her voice to be steady, she nodded,
slowly.

That made him frown. “Are you sure?”

“If I say no, will you kiss me again?”

Stone shouted a laugh. “She’s okay. And I think we should
get out of here before the police arrive and start asking questions.”

“Where should we go?” Horace asked.

“The café.”

Those two words—harmless in and of themselves—had an ominous
ring when coming from Stone’s lips. Horace gave Faith a long, assessing look
and then nodded gravely.

The café
.

God help her.

“I don’t understand. Why are you so reluctant to talk to the
police? What are you afraid of?” Faith asked as Horace led her toward the bar’s
exit.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Horace said.

“The police are an inconvenience we don’t need right now,” Stone
explained.

“An inconvenience?” Faith blocked the exit and crossed her
arms over her chest. “The Chicago police are professionals. You should trust—”

Horace lifted her into his arms and carried her through the
doorway. “Trust me. The police, no matter how competent, can’t help us. Not
with this.”

“Why?” Someone had tried to kill the both of them. Faith’s
every instinct screamed that they needed to call in the professionals. “Someone
needs to investigate. Why not the police? Or the federal government? Or better
yet, the military? Someone needs to be called in. Why are you fighting me on
this?”

Horace’s lips remained stubbornly sealed as he carried her
to his obscenely large and luxurious black SUV. He set her down and opened the
passenger door for her. Stone smiled when she glanced in his direction, but
remained just as tight-lipped.

Well. Fine. Faith brooded—for all the good that it did her.
Horace didn’t appear to even notice that she was giving him the cold shoulder
as he drove to this café Stone had mentioned. Stone followed in his own car.

By the time Horace pulled into a parking space in a part of
town Faith rarely visited and knew nothing about, Faith had worked herself into
an impressive temper. She had no intention of going anywhere with him, not
unless he planned to tell her why they shouldn’t talk to the police. When
Horace stepped out of the SUV, she refused to move. Instead, she crossed her
arms over her chest and stared forward.

With a frustrated huff, Horace came around to her side of
the SUV and opened the passenger door. Faith bit her lip to keep herself from
saying something nasty. She shouldn’t put the blame completely on his
shoulders. They didn’t know each other well enough yet. At least, he didn’t
know her well enough to understand that her opinion shouldn’t be ignored.

“I know you’re upset with me,” he said quietly.

How kind of him to have noticed. Even so, she refused to
budge from the soft leather passenger seat of his SUV.

“You don’t understand the situation, Faith.”

“And do you plan on ever explaining it to me?” She didn’t
like the bitchy tone of her voice. She blamed him for it.

“I’m taking you to the heart of things so I can explain,” he
said, his voice still low. “I’m bringing you somewhere no human has ever been
allowed to go before.”

She couldn’t have heard that correctly. She turned toward
him. “
No human
?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So, this place you’re taking me, this café?” she asked with
great care. “You’ve never been there either?”

His dark blue gaze touched hers. They reminded her of a
midnight sky. Faith had to struggle to not lose herself in eyes like that.

“Faith…” He sighed deeply. “The Oblique Café is like a
second home for me.”

“But you said…?”

“Yes, I did say that.”

She swallowed deeply, but her voice still wavered when she
whispered, “
Not human
?”

“Come on,” Stone said as he walked up behind Horace. He
sounded entirely too cheery for the situation. She leaned forward to take a
good look at him. Was he human? “They’ll be waiting for us.”

“
They
?” she asked.

Stone looked human. And Horace looked even more human! All
the parts had been in the right places. And yet, he’d made her feel things that
she’d never felt with another man. Could that be because he wasn’t…he wasn’t…?
She couldn’t bring herself to even think it.

“You better give us a minute,” Horace said.

Stone’s gaze bounced between Faith and Horace. “Is she going
to be okay with this?”

Horace dragged a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”

“You need to make it okay,” Stone said. It sounded like a
threat to Faith’s ears. “I’ll do what I can to help, but she’s your
responsibility.”

“I know,” Horace grumbled.

Nice.
She felt so welcomed, so wanted. And about as
desirable as a big, fat credit card bill.

“Take me home,” she said once Stone had gone on toward that
crazy café of his, leaving her alone with Horace. “In all my life, I have never
been a burden. Even when my parents were neck-deep in research and too busy to
spend much time with me, do you think I whined and insisted they stopped their
important work to pay attention to me? No, I didn’t. I helped them out by
organizing their books, or by interviewing the tribal children, or by simply
staying out of their way.”

Horace didn’t say a word, but she could feel the tension
humming between them.

“Take me home,” she said, more forcefully this time. Her
neck had begun to ache from staring forward when what she really wanted to do
was to turn her head and look at him.

“No,” came his flat refusal.

She waited for him to explain why. She should have figured
he wouldn’t be so accommodating.

“Then I’ll walk home.”

That was a bluff. A petulantly made one at that. She’d
slipped on a pair of sandals that she rarely ever wore because the heels were a
little too high and the straps a little too tight. Her feet would be ripped to
shreds before she managed to make it a block. She couldn’t possibly walk clear
across the city to get home.

“Like it or not, your life is in danger,” he said with a
long sigh. “Even if I wanted to send you away, I couldn’t. Not anymore. There
is a reason that gunman wants the both of us dead. And the people waiting for
us inside the café are the only ones who can help us figure out why.”

Finally, she turned and looked at him. “People? You mean the
non-human
kind of people?”

He held out his hand to help her step down. “Think of this as
a research project,” he suggested. “What would your parents do if they
discovered a new civilization living in the midst of the crowded streets of
Chicago?”

“They’d investigate, of course.”

“And what will you do?”

The decision to go into the café rested on her shoulders. If
she wanted to stay in the car, to pretend that none of this ever happened, he
was going to let her do it.

“But I get the feeling I will never be able to tell anyone
about this so-called discovery. No lectures. No scholarly papers.”

“No, you won’t. Does that matter?”

It wouldn’t to her parents. They loved the research, the
quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. They’d witnessed deeply sacred
ceremonies they had never shared with the outside world. Her mother and father
didn’t have a problem with that. They had promised several times over to guard
secrets. For them, protecting those fragile societies from the outside world
often outweighed their desire to write papers or tell other academics about
their discoveries. And Faith had never disagreed with her parents on that
point.

So why not go with him?

Finding no good reason to object, Faith took Horace’s hand
and slipped from the SUV. Her heart raced at the thought of stepping into a
world filled with beings who weren’t human. What were they? Would she be safe
with them?

Images of werewolves and vampires bombarded her.

“I’m not throwing you to the wolves, sweet,” Horace assured
her as he guided her down the sidewalk. “I’ll be by your side the entire time.”

“And if I want to leave?” she asked, entertaining second
thoughts with every step.

“You will leave with me,” he said.

“You promise?”

He smiled at that, showing off his sexy white teeth. “We’re
not monsters, you know. They’re not going to bite.”

“
You
bite,” Faith reminded him.

Color tinted his cheeks. “Umm…” he said.

“Well?”

“I bite,” he admitted. “But I don’t remember hearing you
complain about it.”

Power ebbed into his voice when he said the last. It reached
out and caressed her. The mark on her breast and the one between her legs
tingled. And her body suddenly ached for his touch. She didn’t care that they
stood in the middle of a busy sidewalk. She needed him to touch her. To fill
her. Her mind clouded with thoughts of pure lust, and her legs turned to water.
She stumbled, and nearly fell flat on her face. Horace caught her before her head
hit the pavement.

“Sorry,” he said. “I got a little carried away.”

“A little?” Faith dreaded finding out what would have
happened if he’d really put his heart into that seductive mental push. That he
had so much control over her scared her to the tips of her toes. “And the
others? They can do this to me as well?”

“No one will hurt you.”

Horace put his hands on her shoulders and steered her toward
a blank brick wall between two storefronts.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

“The wall, you mean? The wall I’m about to walk into?”

His grip on her shoulders tightened. “Look again.”

Before her eyes, the brick faded away. A battered old sign
with a scrolling script that read “The Oblique Café” hung over a glass door
that hadn’t been there a moment before.

This is really happening, she felt a need to tell herself.
Faith drew a deep breath and put on a brave face as she reached for the door
handle.

Surprisingly, her hand connected with cool steel. The door
felt real. The café looked real. She glanced back at Horace. Even though he
might not be human—an idea she couldn’t quite accept—he appeared to be sticking
by her.

It was all too much to absorb. Faith still hadn’t gotten
over the fact that less than an hour ago she’d stared down the barrel of that
madman’s pistol. And the madman had pulled the trigger. She should be dead!

Perhaps her view of the afterlife had been completely wrong.
She’d always expected to see angels and pearly gates, not a grimy, slightly
run-down section of Chicago. But what did she know?

Come to think of it—Faith swallowed hard and remembered that
she’d been lapse in attending Sunday services lately. Perhaps she
had
died, but this
wasn’t
Heaven.

Be brave, she told herself, and closed her eyes as she
yanked open the café door. She stepped inside, half expecting to bump her nose
on a brick wall. Silence greeted her. Hadn’t Stone said that they were all
waiting? Where was everyone? What would
they
look like, anyhow? Funny
green men with tentacles for arms?

Horace’s hands remained steady on her shoulders, feeding her
courage. Why was it so dark? She drew in a deep breath and remembered she’d
closed her eyes. She peeled them open to find nearly two-dozen very
human-looking eyes staring back at her.