Stolen Fate (6 page)

“He was a bloody big demon who packed a hell of a punch. I’ll be fine soon.”

She let them into the flat and turned to him. “Take off your jacket.”

His brows rose.
 

“I just want to check your ribs. You’ve been favoring them.” Gods, some weird, crazy compulsion had her wanting to take care of him. Nothing crazy, like washing his clothes, but check out his wounds at least. Besides popping the top on Fluffy’s Meowy Meal cans, she wasn’t really a caretaker. But she wanted to take care of him. She scowled.

“Well?” she asked.

He gave her a long look, then shrugged out of his jacket and drew the shirt up over his head. His arms dropped and he gripped the cotton loosely in his right fist.

She sucked in a breath at the sight of rigid muscles, then coughed, trying to cover the noise.
Smooth.
Broad chest and trim hips created a proportion that the ancient Greeks would have envied. Pythagoras would have discovered a golden triangle had he seen Ian.
 

“Move your arm.” She tried her damnedest to make her voice brisk, but the huskiness was plain even to her ears.

She walked to him and ran her fingers lightly over the bruise on his ribs, searching for a broken bone.
 

He hissed in a breath at her touch, but she swore it wasn’t a sound of pain. He stiffened as her fingers ran over his smooth skin and she was dreadfully, wonderfully aware of his gaze on her. It burned through her, from her scalp to her ankles, lingering at the more interesting bits in between.
 

With her fingertips pressed to his warm skin, she glanced up. Her breath caught at the look in Ian’s eyes.
 

Hunger. It cut through the exhaustion that had built up and hit her right in the chest, along with the reality of it all. She was in a tiny flat with a criminal. A man who hadn’t been with a woman in a century. The idea made her hot and cold at once.

She shook her head. Nerves over finding the book were making her jittery.

Liar.
Nerves weren’t the only thing making her jittery. He made her jittery. The way he watched her made her jittery. No one had looked at her that way in years, or if they had, she’d had her nose so far in a book she hadn’t noticed.
 

His dark eyes never strayed from her face, never moved south to the parts she was sure he’d dreamed about in prison, all alone in his cell. The idea made her mind buzz. She
wanted
his gaze to stray. The idea made her hot, made dirty images flash through her mind like a magazine that should be shoved under a mattress.

This was the best opportunity she had to get the book back. Her career depended on this. Weird fantasies would get her nowhere.

She stepped back. “Well, your ribs are fine.”

He nodded.
 

“So, um… It’s getting late. Probably time for bed.” She was babbling. She knew she was, but she couldn’t help it.

“I assume I’m sleeping here?”

“Aye. There’re two bedrooms.”

“Thanks.” He glanced down, then back up, uncertainty drawing his brows together. The uncertainty was strange on such a big man—one who could fight like a warlord. Broad shoulders, forearms roped with muscles and those sexy veins that popped, big hands that hung at his sides. “You doona have to worry about me, you know.”

“What?” She flushed.

“You’re a woman alone and you doona know me. But we’re sharing a flat. I understand that you’re nervous, but you doona have to be. I’ll respect your boundaries. Stay right away from you.” He looked like he was worried he might scare her off.

“Oh. I— thank you.” And suddenly she was no longer jittery. Not from fear, at least. “Um, I’m going to hit the hay. But there’s TV if it’s still early for you.”

“TV?”
 

“Oh, shite. I’m sorry. Could you watch TV in prison?” The enormous differences between their lives loomed in the tiny space between them. Not only was he out of prison for the first time in nearly a century, it was the twenty-first century. But there was no leeway in their schedule for him to adjust to the outside world.
 

“I doona even know what it is.”

“Crap. Uh, I’ll show you some other time. Sorry.”

“Doona be. You keep saying that, but doona be. I sure as hell doona like that you work for the university, but quit saying you’re sorry.”

She nodded. Her apologies were so futile. There was no way she could understand it. Or him. But she wanted to. She didn’t want to analyze why, when she hadn’t cared enough to try to understand any other guy in years. But she wanted to understand him. “What did you do for all that time in prison?”

His eyes darkened. “I spent an eternity doing forced labor in a hellish afterworld, constructing a monstrosity of a cathedral in the middle of an abandoned hell. In the midst of hundred-degree heatwinds and smoldering embers, I worked for nearly a hundred fucking years creating something in hell that was constantly destroyed before my eyes.”

Horror carved a hole in her chest. “What? Why?”

“I’ve no idea. The university wanted something built, and prisoners are good labor. It kept us too tired to cause trouble at the end of the day. But it was hell.” His fists clenched at his sides.

Fiona’s heart ached for him, for what she imagined it must have been like. She loved the university and truly believed that it was a foundation of good in their world. They worked hard to protect mortals and Mytheans alike. But they were an ancient institution. Using prisoners as forced labor wasn’t at all strange to those who ran the university.
 

Most of the elders who ran the place were ancient. She was far younger—a mere thirty-six chronologically, though she’d stopped physically aging sometime in her mid-twenties. An infant to Mytheans. She had modern ideals about ethics that many at the university lacked. For the most part, the prisoners were truly evil. Ian wasn’t, but hearing his story made her want to fight harder to drag the university into the twenty-first century.

Guilt streaked through her at the knowledge that she’d lied to him about the university possibly releasing him if he helped her retrieve the book. She’d needed his help so badly—to preserve her very sanity and her life—that she’d have said anything to get him to help. But that was before she’d realized that she liked him. And now she’d have to send him back to that hell, else risk her own freedom. Permanently releasing a dangerous prisoner could get her in
serious
trouble.

Gods, this was all too complicated. She needed some space. “I’m headed to bed.”

“All right. I’m going to get cleaned up in the bathroom and do the same.”
 

“Do you know how to work the shower?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

She nodded, then spun and walked toward the little hallway that led to the bedrooms, grabbing her bag on the way.
 

As soon as she was in the tiny room, an image of Ian in the shower flashed in her mind. She rubbed a hand over her forehead, trying to banish the thought. There was a hell of a lot more complexity to this situation than she’d planned on.
 

She liked him. And boy, did she want him.

 
Wow, celibacy was so easy when there was no one around to tempt a person. His presence in her normally bare and boring life was so out of the ordinary it was like she now inhabited a different life entirely.
 

She tried not to think about all the things that work had evicted from her life. Like men. Like sex.

Those things had no place in her life, not until she found the book. She couldn’t afford them. He was here to work for her. And he was a damned thief. This was her best chance at getting the book back, and she couldn’t afford to lose her focus.
 

There was a job to be done.
The
job.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ian shut the bathroom door and leaned against the smooth wood. A great sigh shuddered out of him. Adjusting to the real world was going to be harder than he’d expected.

He turned and braced his hands on the small pedestal sink. A glance in the mirror confirmed it—he barely recognized the man looking out at him.
 

In prison, it hadn’t mattered that he was changing. He’d changed to survive.
 

Had he expected to return to his old self when he got out? Hell, he didn’t know. He didn’t even know if he remembered that man.
 

But he hadn’t expected to lose his damned mind over a university Acquirer. He didn’t want to like her. He didn’t want to want her. She worked for the organization that had thrown him in prison and tortured him for nearly a hundred years. She would throw him back in again when this was all over.

 
His mind should be on getting the book in order to barter his way out of this collar. Instead, his thoughts were on the woman who’d sprung him from hell—and it pissed him off.
 

Maybe he liked her because she was the first woman he’d seen in a century. Or hell, maybe it was because she was nice to convicts and worried about his ribs and was passionate about her work and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.

Shite, he’d turned into a sap. Being so close to her all night, trying to keep the nature of his thoughts hidden, had been hard as hell. When she’d called lights out, he’d thanked the gods, if only to have a chance to hide the damn hard-on that wouldn’t go down.

Ian pushed away from the sink and turned on the shower. His clothes hit the floor seconds later, and he was under the cold spray before it could heat up. When the cold water did nothing for his erection, he reached down to grip himself. He was hard and heavy and
fuck
, it felt good.

“Gods damn it,” he muttered.
 

He couldn’t jerk off in the damn shower he shared with her. It was fucking barbaric and a shitty way to thank her for getting him out of prison. He squeezed hard, punishing, then let go with a groan. He touched the collar around his neck, reminding himself of where he stood with her.

He let the spray pound down on him and tried to get his mind off Fiona. He forced himself to remember what being trapped in that damned prison had felt like. It wasn’t hard. Hell, he’d been out only a few hours. Except the memories highlighted the contrast between where he’d been and where he was now.

It wasn’t the damn lust or the insistent fucking hard-on for Fiona that bothered him the most. No, it was the fact that it felt so damn good just to be with her on the outside, like a normal gods-damned Mythean. When prison sucked your soul out and wrung you dry, freedom felt like the best thing in the world.

He’d never wanted that closeness, that casual comfort in his first life. He’d been living it up. Young and stupid and careless. First struggling to survive, then so wealthy he hadn’t known what to do with the money besides spend it on women and fucking Model T’s.
 

Model T’s. Jesus. That’s how long ago it had been, and prison had made him realize how little he cared about that bullshite now.

He turned off the shower and scrubbed a towel over his skin. He had to keep his act together, do this job for Fiona, and get this collar the hell off. Finding the book was the best way to do it.

Scowling, he glanced around for his duffel bag. Damn it. He’d left it out in the living room. Fiona was in her bedroom now, so it was probably safe to run out there. He wrapped the towel around his waist and opened the door.

He stepped out into the tiny hall and right into Fiona. Who looked fucking gorgeous.
 

Of course.

“Oh!” Her back hit the wall and she stared up at him, lips slightly parted.
 

They were so damn close he could see her eyelashes, spiky and dark and framing steel-gray eyes that raced over his face. The damned hard-on that had dissipated began to spring back to life. He stepped back, reached to secure his towel.

Oh fuck, she looked good. She was wearing some kind of huge T-shirt. It was ugly and old and so soft that it floated over her curves until it stopped above her knees. He’d never seen anything so hot or so exactly perfect, not in his first life, not in his dreams in prison.
 

He wanted her more than he’d wanted anything in his life. He wanted to push her against the wall and bury his face in her hair. Smell her, taste her. Touch all the soft parts of her that he’d been denied for so long but looked glorious on her.

Doona think about it.

“Sorry. Just getting my bag.” His voice was rough.
 

“Oh, uh, sure. I was going to get some water.”

They stared at each other, the air too thin between them, and he tried to keep his eyes on her face. Hers glanced off his naked chest and bounced back to his eyes. Seconds passed and she had every chance to walk away, but instead she kept glancing down at his chest and the towel clutched around his waist.
 

He knew he should go get his bag. Just as soon as he could tear himself away from her. If she wasn’t going to walk away, he should.

“Um, I just realized I haven’t asked you if there’s anyone you wanted to call. You know. Like a girlfriend?” She bit her lip, eyes worried.