Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (2 page)

“More?” He walked to the window and tilted the blinds, blocking the glare of the late afternoon sunlight.

It meant she could see his face clearly. She noted the tension at the corners of his eyes and mouth. And now that she looked, his shirt was just a fraction too big for him, indicating recent weight loss. How much more could this man bear?

He carried a nearly intolerable burden of grief for his burned out magic, plus vulnerability to attack and immense responsibility. Gina had told the dragon Morag as much. They needed to let the man handle his current challenges before they piled on more. But Morag had insisted that Gina put to him the offer of teaching him the Deeper Path, and convince him to accept it.

Perhaps Gina could have argued harder against the dragon’s order, except they both knew how much she wanted what was being given to Lewis. If she’d argued too hard, would it have been partly sour grapes?

“I don’t need anything more,” Lewis said simply. “Please, convey my thanks along with my refusal to your dragon.”

And she still couldn’t tell if he meant it, or if he thought her crazy and Morag no more than a figment of her imagination.

She checked her watch. “I have ten more minutes. I know you’re busy and fitting another thing into your day might seem impossible, but if you learn the Deeper Path it’s like sorcery to the pale flame of magic. You’ll be able to do all the things your magic once did and so much more. It is worth sacrificing sleep, energy, time, anything…and you don’t have to tell anyone that you’re doing this. It can be a surprise, a power to astound, no, confound your enemies.”

“What do you know of my enemies?” He came back to his chair.

“You were commander of the guardians and now you’re president of the Collegium. Enemies are part of both jobs.”

He leaned back in the chair. “Ah.”

She had the impression her response had both relieved and disappointed him, and she had no idea why. “
I’m
not your enemy.”

“But you promise me power—what I have lost, and more—to enter into a secret with you.”

Looked at that way… “This is not a trap.”

“Do you have proof that your dragon is real?”

“No. I considered it, but Morag’s presence is a secret my family has kept for centuries. I don’t want to be the one to reveal her to the Collegium, and any magic I bring from her, you can’t test or trust since you lack magic, so you’d have to ask one of the senior mages to study it.”

It was a conundrum. One she’d considered a hundred different ways. But there was no wriggle room. No way for her to protect the secret of Morag’s existence and yet convince Lewis to trust her, Gina, just a little.

Silence. Stalemate.

Gina watched his hands resting idly along the sides of his thighs. With a start, she realized that he was allowing her the full twenty minutes of the interview she’d claimed by virtue of Uncle Asey, but Lewis wasn’t about to change his mind. He wouldn’t accept Morag’s offer. He would refuse to learn the Deeper Path.

“It won’t take many lessons,” she said. “Attaining clarity of sight is the hard part, and you’ve done that. Meeting with Morag, you’d only have to be away from the Collegium maybe four or five times.”

“The guardians would insist on accompanying me. That would reveal your secret dragon.” He pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, but not as if they mattered. He sounded distracted, probably pondering some problem unrelated to her.

She was losing him…had never really had him. “I thought of that. You’d need a cover story, a personal reason to leave the Collegium, and that would be me.”

He blinked and focused on her. “You?”

“I’ll pretend to be your girlfriend. I have a cottage on Cape Cod. There’s a portal about three miles from my home. You can use the portal here in New York to travel to my place, and from there, Morag can translocate us. That’s how I travel to her.”

“People would notice we weren’t at your cottage.” Suddenly he was giving her suggestion, and her, his complete attention.

It was unnerving, that intensity. She could only imagine that trainee guardians had fainted in front of him when he’d been their commander.

She, however, was a dragon knight. She stiffened her spine. “My home has been in the family for two centuries. Each generation has reinforced the privacy wards. People underestimate house witchery and that works to our advantage. Believe me, no one will be able to tell whether we’re in the house or what we’re doing.”

“Sidhe Hotels. Your family has the Avalon Inn in Wiltshire.”

“Yes.” She knew where his line of questioning led. “Through the years my family has used the same magics on what is now my home, so privacy is assured.”

The Avalon Inn was a small, discreet service her house witch hotelier family offered to a chosen few. In reality, the inn didn’t exist. Its stated physical address was a cow field in the Wiltshire countryside, not all that far from Stonehenge. But it was a cow field saturated with privacy wards, look-away spells and see-what-you-will enchantments. Selected guests could register as staying at the non-existent hotel and everyone would believe the address, but the guests wouldn’t be there. They could be anywhere in the world.

“Have you ever registered at Avalon?” she asked.

Lewis shook his head. “Someone at the Collegium has always known where I was.”

It gave her an itchy feeling to imagine her comings and goings always monitored. She was a computer hacker to the core: a rebel. “Even with your secret missions?”

“There are no black ops at the Collegium.” As much give in that statement as hitting a concrete slab from twenty stories up.

“I was thinking more about your personal life,” she countered.

No response, although he continued to stare at her. Something was going on in his brain.

She didn’t dare check her watch, although she suspected they’d gone over her allotted twenty minutes.

“Four or five trips to see your dragon, you said?”

Her breath caught. She almost choked. “Yes.” He was going to do the unexpected and agree!

“I’ll offer you a bargain.”

“Pardon?” She was presenting him with a chance to learn the Deeper Path, to possess what she’d almost sell her soul for, and he wanted to bargain. She couldn’t have heard him correctly.

“You want me to visit your dragon. If your dragon is real.” Well, that was blunt enough. “I want your word that as many visits as I make to your home to travel on to meet with the dragon, will be matched with the same number of private visits whereby it appears that I am staying with you, but actually I could be anywhere.”

“And anywhere would be…? How long would you be gone?” Visions of Collegium guardians descending on her cottage in pursuit of their lost president danced through her mind.

“A day, perhaps. And my whereabouts would be my business.”

Private business. The president of the Collegium wanted the freedom to pursue his own agenda.
Why?

She studied his face, but there were no answers there.

Lewis had long ago learned how to shut away his thoughts and emotions. By reputation, he had no emotions. People said he was cold. He served the Collegium and beyond that…nothing.

So why did he want a secret route out, and what would she risk by providing it?

Suddenly, from offering Lewis a chance to learn the Deeper Path, both she and he would have to take each other on trust.

“If I agree, you’ll meet with Morag?”

“Yes.”

Lewis watched Gina’s thoughts and feelings flicker across her face. Her green eyes were remarkably expressive, perhaps more so than she guessed.

She’d walked into his office broadcasting casual confidence and a normal level of curiosity, such as most people exhibited towards him in his new role as president.

He couldn’t fault his bodyguard PA Chad for not looking beyond the obvious: the moderate house witchery magic Gina confessed to and her sexy appearance.

Lewis couldn’t see magic any more, but he wasn’t blind to her physical attractions. He’d noted them even as he took in the tightness of her mouth that the red lipstick couldn’t disguise. It betrayed that she was far tenser than she wanted to appear.

She lacked a guardian’s fight-fit physique, but she had a healthy, athletic look that said she enjoyed exercising, and she walked with the ease of someone who took for granted their agility, strength and fast reflexes. Her figure was an old-fashioned, sexy-as-hell hourglass shape, and she’d evidently chosen her outfit to emphasize it.

He could appreciate the appeal without being influenced by it—or so he’d thought, before he clasped her hand.

Only the knowledge that the meticulously installed protection spells and Chad’s guardian training would have detected siren magic prevented him from suspecting an ensorcelment. But no, the flash of heat, the tightening of his muscles in lust, and the need to lean closer and inhale her peach and spice scent were natural, if unwanted, signs of attraction.

Just as disconcerting was to see her arousal as she stood near him. The pupils of her eyes had widened and her skin had flushed. Make-up might have hidden the color on her face, but the faint blush of the tender skin at the hollow of her throat, where her pulse beat fast, gave her away.

He wanted to kiss her there, in that tender hollow, before trailing kisses down to the full breasts. He’d had to rein in his masculine instincts to concentrate on what she said, and what she unconsciously revealed.

Burning out his magic had opened his eyes to some of the Collegium members’ unthinking biases. He’d been guilty of them himself, concentrating so hard on the magic swirling and patterning around every encounter that he’d failed to catalogue other, mundanely human aspects of an interaction. Body language could lie, but mages generally didn’t bother to mask their nervous tics, or even to realize how their subconsciouses betrayed them.

He’d have to suggest body language classes for guardian trainees and invite serving guardians to attend.

With Gina, her eyes had been the biggest giveaway. She was wary of him, nervous, and trying to hide something. Was it resentment? It seemed she wanted this Deeper Path she’d mentioned but not adequately described.

A dragon who was really an alien. It sounded improbable, but so was his personal quest. If there actually was a dragon…but he refused to believe that his power could be restored. It was gone, and he felt its absence as acutely as if he’d lost a limb. It unbalanced him. Even now, months later, he still reached for his magic only to come up against that soul-howling nothingness.

He instinctively mistrusted anything that appeared to home in on his vulnerability—as Gina’s story did. And yet, the mix of resentment and determination in her attitude had convinced him she was genuine. Or genuine enough in her delusion for him to hear her out. He owed her uncle Asey, after all.

And then, she’d offered him a way out of the Collegium, a way to pursue his quest unobserved.

It was nearly a year since he’d burned out his magic in the North West Passage. A year in which he’d struggled not to voice his suspicions—because who would listen? and on his own, without magic, he couldn’t prove anything. But that ice storm hadn’t been a random weather event. It had struck with ferocity and intent.

A weather mage. The Group of Five had hired a weather mage to challenge him, and he, arrogant idiot, had fallen for their misdirection, and fallen into the trap. Good men had lost their lives because of him. Everyone remembered the cruise ship he’d saved. No one mentioned the helicopter with five scientists onboard. They’d been out that day, undertaking research, only to be caught in the suddenly raging blizzard. The helicopter had crashed with no survivors.

He’d been at their base camp when the news came in. He’d seen the devastation of the team members left behind.

“Do we have a deal?” he demanded.

Determination in Gina’s green eyes as she held his gaze. She extended her hand across the table. “We do.”

A handshake sealed their contract.

He braced for the tug of sexual attraction this time, and controlled the thunder in his blood.

Not so Gina. She actually gasped, the softest puff of air that parted her lips and snagged his attention. Her head tipped back just a fraction, her whole body shifting and realigning infinitesimally; unconsciously inviting him to think of sex.

He released her hand.

She blinked at him in a moment’s bewilderment as if she couldn’t work out why he had let her go rather than pull her closer. Then her gaze flicked away from him and she visibly gathered her composure. “Good. Great. Morag will be pleased.”

“When will I meet her?”

“How about now?”

Gina had flung out the challenge to meet Morag immediately as a way of re-establishing her control of the situation. It was humiliating to realize that Lewis had recognized her attraction to him; recognized and not returned it. She would keep tighter control over her wayward body in future. No more swaying towards him.

At least she hadn’t licked her lips. So clichéd. And she’d been tempted! So that told her where the cliché came from. She’d wanted to taste him on her lips.

She could imagine how he’d taste, like cool fire.

“Now would suit me,” Lewis said, shocking her.

“You can leave? Now? Won’t anyone question you?”

He stood and looked down at her. “Why would they question me leaving with my girlfriend?”

And demons blister her butt, she blushed at the word
girlfriend
as if she was sixteen instead of twenty seven and a strong, independent, kick-ass woman. She didn’t blame herself completely though. Who wouldn’t blush to hear Lewis’s low voice turn to dark treacle as he spoke of his girlfriend?

“Good point.” She stood. “How do you want to play this? Are you a tactile kind of boyfriend, a cuddler and a smoocher.” She stared, shocked and delighted, as for the first time color crept into his face.

“I don’t do public affection.”

“Gotcha.” Okay, even she knew she was smirking, but it was fantastic to finally see the austere president of the Collegium disconcerted. “Unfortunately, I
do
do public affection, so at a minimum, I expect hand-holding.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

She paused in the act of slinging her handbag over her shoulder. “What’s so dangerous about holding hands?” The challenge was out before she remembered her combustible response to him. Nothing to do but outstare him. She added an eyebrow quirk, as if he was being unreasonable, just to emphasize that holding his hand meant nothing to her.

Some other woman had had that instant and over-powering, insane rush of lust for him. Not Gina.

“Fine. Let me grab my jacket.” He did more than that. He shut down his computer, signed a couple of sheets of paper before tossing them into his outbox, and picked up his phone, sliding it into a pocket. Then he unrolled his shirt sleeves, took off his tie and threw it into a drawer, and shrugged on his jacket. He walked towards her still adjusting his shirt collar.

Good grief
. His shoulders looked even broader in a suit.

“Here.” She stepped forward and tucked his shirt collar neatly. Standing close, she smelled his subtle cologne. It had a warm sandalwood base with a hint of citrus. Lickable.

She stepped back fast enough to bump her legs against the low armchair behind her.

He caught her elbow, steadying her. “All right?” The quiet tone of the question sounded intimate.

“Yes. Of course. I’m okay. I’m good.”

The faintest glimmer of a smile stirred and vanished in his dark eyes. He slid his hand from her elbow to her hand, curling his fingers around hers.

What had she been thinking, challenging him to hold her hand? He seemed completely unaffected, but her pulse was jumping.

Breathe
. That’s all she had to remember.
Just
breathe
.

Lewis opened the door and they walked into the outer office.

At his desk, Chad looked up. It was a bodyguard’s response to any change in the environment, a simple glance. Until his gaze snagged on their clasped hands.

“Something’s come up,” Lewis said.

Gina wondered if he heard the innuendo in his own statement.

“I’ll be in a bit later tomorrow.”

“Uh.” Apparently the experienced guardian was too shocked to form actual words.

Gina bit her lip to stop from giggling. She slanted a glance up at Lewis, one that contained more than a hint of
told-you-so
.

A wry lift to the right corner of his mouth acknowledged the impact of their joined hands.

She walked beside him to the elevator, rode down in silence, and crossed the Collegium headquarters’ foyer in equal silence.

Well, she and Lewis might have been silent, but as they crossed the foyer, ripples of shock eddied out and broke in murmurs and comment among the people present.

Lewis looked neither right nor left, acknowledging no one, and she took her cue from him. As the sliding glass doors to the street closed behind them, he finally spoke. “There’ll be a mad scramble to discover who you are and how they can use you. I’d forgotten that you might get caught up in the political chaos around here. We can cancel our deal.”

They walked slowly down the building’s steps.

“It’s okay. I anticipated the curiosity when I made the offer to be your cover story for meeting with Morag. I’ll survive it.”

On the sidewalk, he kept hold of her hand. “If anyone causes you trouble, tell me.”

She shrugged.

“Not good enough,” he said. “I want your promise.”

His insistence annoyed her. “I initiated the situation. The consequences are on me.
You
—” she tapped a finger on his chest— “are not responsible for
me
.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She looked away from his dark eyes. “No.”

“Then I’ll ask your dragon to get your promise for me.”

She spun towards him, but he started walking, pulling her along. “You can’t do that,” she protested.

“Watch me.”

“Fine. I promise.” She was not having Morag extract the promise from her.

Lewis set a fast pace, and she was grateful for the ballroom dancing lessons her parents had insisted on her taking throughout her childhood. It meant she could keep up with him, even balancing on five inch heels.

It was a crack in the sidewalk that was her downfall—almost literally.

He caught her as she tripped and fell forward, swinging her around and up, into the security of his body, redirecting and absorbing her momentum.

“Thanks.” Her voice was dry. Her mouth drier. She was plastered against him on a busy New York street and couldn’t make herself move. He felt so good, all hard muscle and solid bones.

He stepped back. “The next building along is mine. My apartment is there. I’d like to stop in and change. It’s been a long day starting with a breakfast meeting. I’d like to have a shower and pick up an overnight bag, too.”

“Okay.” It made sense. Or it would if her brain hadn’t stalled at the vision of Lewis showering. “I can wait in the lobby.”

He glanced at her as the door to the apartment building opened. “A girlfriend wouldn’t.”

A girlfriend would be in the shower with him.

No, no, no.
She stamped on the thought and ground it underfoot as the elevator in his apartment building carried them up. Floor fourteen of twenty one.

His apartment was so appalling it knocked all thoughts of sex out her head. Her house witchery instincts were outraged. The place was clean, sterile actually, but boring to the point of impersonality. The walls were a soul-crushing beige, the other furnishings an odd shade of charcoal, almost with a hint of brown in. Living here would be torture.

“Pardon?” Lewis stared at her.

“Did I say something?”

More staring, as if she baffled him. “You made a noise.”

“Ah.” How he lived—where he lived—was none of her business.

She couldn’t help herself. “How long have you lived here?”

“I don’t know. Three years.”

“Three years!”

He looked around. “It came furnished.” So at least he was aware, to some extent, that the apartment needed excusing.

“Good grief. Surely in that time a girlfriend could have tried to cheer this place up, if you couldn’t.”

“It’s a place to sleep.”

“Good golly.” She collapsed onto the sofa in the open plan, if small, living area. “Go, shower, get dressed. I’ll sit here and shut my eyes against the horror.” She really did shut her eyes—too much beige—but she didn’t hear him moving away. She cracked one eye open.

He studied her musingly. “If fixing this place is something a girlfriend would do…”

“Don’t even think about it, buster.”

He grinned.

Her heart stuttered. She hadn’t thought the president of the Collegium could smile like that. It reminded her that for all his experience and responsibilities, he was only thirty four.

“Make yourself a coffee or something. I won’t be long.” He disappeared into the next room.

A couple of minutes later, she heard the shower run.

She exhaled a long, shaky breath. “Oh Morag, the things I do for you.”