From This Day Forward (5 page)

“
Right now you are playing the role of the Half Couple.”

“
Half couple?” April felt like she was missing something; Morgana’s phrasing slightly off-kilter.

“
Sorry. My family is big into fox hunting. The hounds are coupled for training. On the hunt, though, there is always an odd number. One half of a couple paired with all the other couples.”

Sounded appropriate for her situation. She often felt that way among her friends and family. Half a couple even though she was married.

Morgana continued, “But soon you will be rejoined. He is rare. Take care of him.” The woman looked beyond her, as if seeing something April couldn’t yet see. That crazy shiver coursed the full length of her spine this time.

Not sure what Morgana saw or intended with that remark, April let it go, because, really, she didn’t know this woman from Eve.
Magick was funny. And, in this town, it came in all shapes and sizes, from all kinds of messengers. She understood that fact and worked hard to never take out her frustration on the messenger. No matter how much she disagreed or how confused it all left her feeling.

Everything
would be revealed soon enough.

All in good time. Whether she liked it or not.

“Looks like you’ve got company next door.” Morgana directed April’s attention to the Humvee that pulled into the alley next to her shop.

Ice blanc
hed through April’s veins. She stood rooted to the spot. Frozen. Time slowed. Her vision blurred, then cleared.

The
vehicle door opened and out stepped an official military colonel type. April knew his rank by the way the man carried himself more than the dress uniform he wore; he was a colonel. Another man came around the back of the vehicle. He carried an old fashioned leather doctor’s bag. A third man joined them. There was no mistaking this man’s profession. He wore the white collar of a military chaplain.

They only sent a
chaplain if a military man died during assignment and the doctor in case the widow needed sedation.

God. No.

The three men walked to the door of The Tea Cozy and knocked. They didn’t fidget. They didn’t talk. Their faces remained stoic. They were on duty and fully at attention.

No. No. This couldn’t be happening.

April shook from head to toe. Her teeth chattered.

She barely registered that Morgana pressed something into her hand and squeezed.
“Go. It will be okay,” Morgana said.

April yanked the door open and ran across the street
, her world crashing down around her.

Chapter Four: Fractured

Noah came to chained and naked in a dank, dimly lit cave somewhere far underground. Blood oozed from cuts and scrapes all along his left side. He must have taken the brunt of the explosion on that side. He’d like to say he’d been in far worse situations, but the truth was, this is as bad as it got.

Captured, detained, and wounded.

Only torture would make it worse. And he had no doubt that would come next if he didn’t find a way out of here now.

Magick glittered and sparkled in the cave. Causing an otherworldly glow, it also served to outline the caged perimeter of his confines, of which he was the nexus. Someone wasn’t sure the metal clamps at his wrists would hold him. They’d be right. When, or if, he shifted.

But he needed a plan. He didn’t know what his captors wanted. And that was a problem. Because they’d keep coming, no matter where he went if he didn’t know what they were after.

Clearly, they wanted him.

Yet
the goal was never that easy.

They could want just about anything really. National secrets. Details about the current mission. Leverage to get one of their own
imprisoned operators back from the U.S. government.

He didn’t plan to give them anything. Nothing at all.

They had no way of coercing him that would work.

His captors didn’t know that, but Noah did. Yes, he was a pawn. But they’d miscalculated. He wouldn’t be worth much to them because he was one tough bastard. Honed and hammered on the plateaus of Syria and born again on Baltoro Glacier in Karakoram, Balistan, in Northern Pakistan.

His enemies could batter his human body, beat him up pretty bad. Try to break him. But a dragon mage was almost impossible to kill, unless the death blow came from another dragon—and not just death by any means, your enemy had to know your weakness. Know what it was that could kill you.

That was the one
bit of knowledge mages shared with no one. Ever. Not even April knew this secret. He’d buried the knowledge so deep that it would never be found, not even by the elusive hoard thief—the bastard who’d been stealing hoards and killing dragons all over the world for the past year to gain their power and steal their hoards.

There was no doubt in Noah’s mind that the hoard thief was dragon mage. And a powerful one at that. His friend David Pearson, the leader of the North American Consortium of Dragons didn’t think so. He thought the culprit might be another magickal using dragons to kill other dragons.

But Noah believed otherwise. What stronger motivation could someone have than absolute power? The one dragon who possessed all the stolen hoards and hoard stones grew stronger with every one he acquired. The hoard stone embodied the power and energy of a dragon’s hoard, once obtained, the thief could ascertain the means of killing that dragon mage, thus completing the transfer of power from the current mage to the new possessor of the hoard stone.

Footsteps sounded in a tunnel. Noah nudged his dragon. The dragon tattoo on his arm started its standard waking ritual. A slow stretch and shakedown.

Noah listened. A lone person approached, not a full gang.

He could handle a solitary person.

The dragon raised his nose and sniffed the air. The woman. The Fox. She was back.

Noah could certainly handle her. Although the last time he’d confronted her, she’d blasted him with some kind of magickal fire that had set him on his ass and knocked him out. It wouldn’t happen again.

This time, he knew she packed an iron-fisted magickal punch. She wouldn’t get another change. Surprise attacks like that only happened once.

The woman emerged from the tunnel and waved her hand in front of her at the opening. The magick that had glittered in a protective cage around him popped then fizzled away.

“Well, it’s about time you woke up, sleepy head. You’ve been out for three days.” The dark-haired woman stood with her hands on her hips surveying him in all his naked glory. Noah had always been comfortable in his own skin. He was not a modest man. Before he’d met, fell in love, and married April, he’d done his share of gallivanting. He knew women were attracted to his human form.

“
Yeah, that was quite a powerful sedative you used. Try not to do that again, okay?”

Alpha dragon energy was an instant turn on for some women, whether they knew he was magickal or not. Mundanes didn’t always know why they were attracted to him, but that didn’t stop them. And magickals were even more aroused at the possibility of sex with a dragon mage.
Dragons were the top of the food chain in every way possible. Sex with dragon mage was the ultimate.

So, yeah, h
e’d had a varied and active sex life before April. He wasn’t proud of it, but he wasn’t ashamed of it, either.

O
nce he’d met April, he’d become a one-woman man. Always and forever. No looking back and no regrets.

He’d traded the one-night stands and the meaningless mating rituals for a profound existence where his legacy was a soul mate and the three beautiful, talented daughters they’d produced together.

He wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“
Well, where’s the fun in a subdued attack?” the woman asked. “If you wield magick, use it powerfully, I always say.”

“
You find it fun to blow someone to hell and back?”

“
You think this is hell?” She looked around the cave. “No. This is nothing in comparison.” Again the cadence of her words struck him. Slow. Measured. Precise.

This woman knew hell. He heard it ring in the cold edge of her voice. Saw it in the hard glitter of her eyes. Watched it live and breathe inside her. She’d experienced hell and hell had settled into the way she carried herself. It’d be a bitch for some poor bastard to root out one day. Not his worry.

“No. I’ve been to hell. And you’re not the gatekeeper.” The woman tilted her chin, studying him. He felt her eyes travel him from head to toe, taking her sweet time to catalogue him everywhere in between, too.

She walked a slow circle around him, tightening the concentric circuits with each turn until she stood next to him.

Her pale eyes were large in her face and a little battle-weary. Noah had seen it a million times in recruits and veterans alike. He understood the ravages of war. The way hardship and depravation sucked at your soul and pounded your body, one crisis at a time.

She touched him, stroking the dragon on his arm.

The bastard arched under her fingers.

She smiled.
“I could promise you a little heaven, mon cher.”

“
Not in this lifetime.”

He grabbed her hand and held it away from his skin. His thumb brushed raised scar tissue on the underside of her
left wrist. He flipped it to look. A Celtic tribal tattoo of a fox—two heads facing one another in a circle of intricate Celtic swirls and line art. But, underneath, the skin had been branded. Somehow the black inked skin was thickened scar tissue.

Applied by magick? By hot iron poker? He had no clue. Either way, it had to have been a painful application.

“What do you want? Why am I here?” he asked.

The Fox yanked her hand out of his, and raised a single eyebrow in silent question. Then she opened her palms against his chest and brushed them against his skin. Noah stood still. Didn’t flinch at her touch, no matter how much he despised it. The dragon on his bicep itched to be free, walked in its own concentric circles around his arm, its movements dancing against the skin, in the slow methodical way the beast had of pacing like the predatory animal it was.

Noah’s skin tingled. Not because this woman aroused him, because really she didn’t. Yes, he was a man, but he had total control over himself. No, what bothered him most was the magick that leaked from her fingers when she touched him. This was a woman on the edge, one who was about to self-combust, or go Chernobyl on their asses if he didn’t do something to stop her.

“
Isn’t it obvious what I want, Captain?” Her thigh brushed his, her hipbone pressed against him and she moved her hips in a slow rocking motion trying to move him to some kind of concrete action.

Wasn’t gonna happen.

“I could guess,” Noah said. “But I won’t. Tell me why I’m really here.”

“
You are a hard man, Noah Easton.”

He ignored the double entendre.
“So, you know who I am.” It was more a statement, because there really was no question. His had been no random capture. And, now, since the explosion, since he’d shifted, she also knew exactly what he was as well.

Shit. Fucked didn’t begin to sum up his
current situation.

Certain factions within the magickal community had been at war for centuries. Depending on what she wanted, she could make his life a living hell.

She’d seen his dragon, knew the power that he hid.

If she could counter his power with an equal magick, she could control him
, or worse.

“
And I know you are a strong dragon mage.” Her voice had taken on a sexy, suggestive purr. Her fingers trailed to the tribal tattoo cage on his arm that encased the dragon. “And, damn, if that is not the sexiest thing I have ever witnessed. A powerful dragon mage makes me hot.”

Nothing he hadn’t already heard over the years. It was the magick. Women couldn’t resist. Especially someone as amped on magick as this woman; it almost seeped out of her pores. But she had to want something else, something more than sex. The setup was too intense, too dramatic
—involving Sammy and ambushing him in Dubai. No, something was at play here that he didn’t quite get yet. Something bigger and more elemental.

“
It’s you.” She swayed, her belly brushing him. If she got any closer, she’d be under his skin. “It’s almost like I can’t help myself.”

“
You’re drawn to the magick. Magick attracts magick.”

“
No, it’s something more. There’s something about you.”

“
I’m an ordinary man. Like any man.”

“
Would your wife consider you ordinary or your daughters?”

He stilled. What did she know about his wife? His daughters. He’d been so careful over the years. Kept the details of his life as concealed as humanly possible in this hyper-information age. Yet there were ways for magickals who crossed the line between normal and paranormal to find that information.

Operators and terrorists, as in any field, defied the magickal constraints. One man’s terrorist was another man’s freedom fighter. And no one knew that better than an operator in Delta Forces. He never knew which side of the bed he’d wake up on. Today he could be a hero, tomorrow he might be vilified for his service to his country. And it didn’t matter a damn what he did. It would be out of his hands. The reality of doing business. Just another day in Delta.

The woman brushed her lips against his collarbone.
“I bet you are extraordinary in every way,” she whispered against his skin.

Thoughts rolled off of her like steam rising from Lake Lucerne at dawn. This woman’s energy felt erratic against him, somehow amplified and just a bit unstable. If he could just get inside her head for a few minutes, he’d understand why.

He intended to get her to spill her secrets.

“
I think you’d find me just ordinary.”

“
I doubt that, Captain. There’s nothing ordinary about you.” She rocked her pelvis against him, still trying to get a rise out of him. But a terrorist having you by the balls did nothing to arouse or stir a guy to anything but I-gotta-get-the-shit-outa-here mode.

And he didn’t know if this woman was the real terrorist, or if someone else pulled the puppet strings. It didn’t matter. Not really. One bad guy was the same as the next in his book. She’d coerced Sammy, taken him hostage, and blew his ass to smithereens. Not the act of an ally.

No. The Fox was the enemy. Pure and simple.

In Noah’s book, once you’d violated a trust, the situation was pretty black and white. You were fighting with him or you were fighting against him. No gray area.

Not matter what role this woman played in the bigger picture, she was a terrorist. She’d apprehended an official member of the United States military. It didn’t matter her intent. As far as he was concerned, she was a terrorist.

“
Tell me why I’m here.”

“
To satisfy my curiosity.” She walked her fingers up his bare shoulder over his neck muscles. “I’m curious how a dragon can survive the blast I threw at you. I am no weakling when it comes to magick. I tap into centuries of magick.” She hooked both hands behind his neck and pulled his head toward hers, her pale blue-green eyes flicked to his then riveted on his mouth.

“
No, I certainly wouldn’t consider you a magickal lightweight. Yet you won’t find me an easy mark.”

“
Enough chit chat. I want less talk and more action.” She leaned in to kiss him.

“
Not happening—” He forced his head back.