Inked Magic (41 page)

“Duh. That’s because the fucking Dunnes have been under investigation for years. Christ, Etaín. If you let them pull you into their world—”

His jaw clamped on whatever he intended to say. He reached into his pocket and tossed her cell phone into her lap.

She stilled, knowing it had been in the jacket she’d slung over a chair when she’d first entered her apartment. Had he been there all along? Tucked away in a dark sedan as they manhandled her into the back of the police cruiser?

Had he been watching a video feed of her in the small interrogation room? Advising them when to approach her. Finally suggesting they cut her loose for a little while and let him work a different angle.

She didn’t ask him. Ignorance might be deadly but it could also be
aless painful, and the evidence she held was already enough to convict him.

He scrubbed his hands over his face then attacked. “Goddamn it, Etaín. Why can’t you just fucking toe the line like the rest of us do?”

The familiarity of the words didn’t lessen their impact. The refrain with its message of denied acceptance only caused the ache in her chest to grow so it equaled the anger.

“Maybe because I’m not a Chevenier. Not even a pretend one.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re my sister despite some fuck-all paternity test.” Parker slammed his hands on the steering wheel again. “This stunt is going to get you killed if you don’t cooperate. Tell me what happened with the Dunnes.”

His outburst should have made her heart sing. Instead his pressing her to confide right after claiming she was family only deepened her suspicions.

But if he wanted to know what had happened with the Dunnes, she wanted it more, for a different reason. She’d let Cathal get too close and now she needed the truth, so she could put him behind her.

“Just drop me off at Saoirse.”

“Goddamn, Etaín. If you go to the Dunnes now I’ll—”

“What? Stop calling me? Oh, that’s right, we only see each other when a case warrants it.”

Exposing the vulnerability, that it bothered her to be called only when he needed her to touch a victim, pissed her off. She reached for the door handle. “You know what, Parker, forget the ride. I’ll call a cab.”

She was out of the car before he could stop her. And then he was out, standing next to the driver’s side. “You can’t fucking run away this time, Etaín.”

Watch me
, she said, hearing the hollowness in that internal voice.

E
taín pushed through the crowded club, using her shoulder and the force of her anger to cut a path toward Cathal’s office. They must have told him she’d arrived, or he’d seen it on a security camera because steps away from his door, he opened it to allow her inside.

Wild emotion surged through her with the sight of him. A tumultuous mix stripping away personal rules and leaving her as defenseless as she’d been in the shrinking confines of the interrogation room. The urge to get this over with dominated, her magic and gift shattering what little control she had left, taking over with ruthless purpose when he reached for her.

She captured his hands. The eyes on her palms pressed to his skin, her will poised to cut directly to the answer. “Why me? Why did you come to Stylin’ Ink and ask me out?”

Pain sliced into her with an unfolding scene, Cathal sitting in the backseat of a car with his father. Niall saying, “Show her a little love so she’ll
want
to help out here, and be willing to keep quiet about it afterwards. If you set your mind to it, you can get it done.”

Cathal jerked out of her grasp before more of it played out, but she’d seen enough, though she understood that where it’d always been an excising before, with him it was a shared viewing.

She didn’t care.

“Now we both know where things stand,” she said, voice tight with
a refusal to cry. “The cops came to my apartment tonight. They took me to the floor and handcuffed me, then hauled me in for sweating because they saw me visiting your uncle’s place. They told me the Dunnes are cold-blooded killers. For the record, I’ll tell you what I think about rapists. A quick death is too good for them, but I have no objection to it. I’ve
seen
what their victims saw. And because I’ve seen it, I’ve
lived
it.”

She whirled away from Cathal and bolted from the office, determined to put distance between them, Parker’s words chasing her again.
You can’t fucking run away this time, Etaín.
Only she knew she could. She would. Not the run and hide of her mother’s life, but a return to the way she’d been before meeting Cathal and . . .

Eamon
.

He waited for her outside the club, and despite thinking he might have viewed her time in custody as the opportunity to teach her a lesson, she couldn’t handle a fight with him. Not after the loss of control in Cathal’s office and the reliving of Brianna’s rape at the Hall of Justice. She felt too raw, too on edge.

“I won’t ask how you knew I was here.” She willed herself to believe that exhaustion, the lingering aftereffects of trauma and terror, the freefall of surviving on adrenaline accounted for the tears sliding down her cheeks.

He closed the distance between them as if approaching a wild, trapped animal. “Let me help you,” he murmured, and the gentleness of his voice, the depth of caring in his eyes affected her, stripping away her resistance to him so she allowed him to take her into his arms.

He touched his mouth to hers. Not a kiss, but a gift she finally understood enough to recognize.

Magic. He’d done it before, in front of Aesirs, when she’d been ill and weak after visiting Brianna the first time. He’d said her gift and magic were inextricably entwined, that where the one took the other protected her against what was taken, and now he demonstrated the truth of it. Magic flowed into her like a cool stream, turning Brianna’s
escaped memories into leaves that were carried out of sight and once again sealed behind mental barriers.

Her arms wrapped around him, the heat from his body warming her. He rubbed his cheek against hers, brushed his lips over her earlobe. “Liam came to me as soon as you were taken. I did what I could to send you aid, but some tasks take time to accomplish, even for me, Etaín. Despite what you might think, I’m not
known
to the people who come to Aesirs. I’ve made it a point not to be, though that will change so I can take better care of you.”

Learning he’d been working to get her released loosened the tight knot her heart had become. He’d said he would never lie to her and she believed him. Like to like, if he was a part of the world her mother ran from, then he knew the value of both promises and truths.

“Come home with me,” he said, stroking her back.

The intensity of her desire to say
yes
scared her into saying, “No.” After Cathal, she couldn’t handle the increased vulnerability that would come with spending the night with Eamon.

“No,” she repeated, pulling back, away from the comfort he offered.

Eamon easily guessed what lay at the root of her denial, and though a part of him wanted Cathal excluded from her life, seeing her lost and hurting, her spirit subdued, eradicated any satisfaction he might feel at Cathal’s letting her go.

“Cathal’s a fool,” he said, cupping her cheek.

He felt her tears against his palm. Preferred her fury to this.

She didn’t resist when he claimed her lips, silently promising them both that soon all separation would end. Another day, and then the fund-raiser. After that she would learn what her future held. She would become part of the world she was meant for.

His tongue slid into the wet heat of her mouth. Twined gently with hers, delivering pleasure and comfort even as the flames of lust flickered into existence, burning hot between them as the kiss extended from one moment into another, and then yet another.

“Let me drive you home,” he said against her mouth.

“No. I’ll take a cab.” Her smile was a shadow of what it once would have been as she pulled away again. “I won’t be able to stop myself from inviting you in.”

He didn’t press against her defenses but let her go, giving her the space she needed, Liam emerging from unlit night as she got into a taxi.

“The same exit though a different vehicle,” Liam said, though there was less mockery in his voice and far more concern for the woman he would one day kneel before and call Lady.

“Consider yourself freed of your task until morning. I’ll watch over Etaín tonight.”

C
athal didn’t look away from the security monitor until Eamon got into a sedan. She hadn’t arrived with him, and by the expression on her face, hadn’t expected to find him waiting outside the club.

Coward
, he called himself for not joining them. He’d wanted a confrontation with Etaín over Eamon but in those moments after she’d—

Even now his mind skittered away from acknowledging it, conscious, rational thought and instinctive fear battling against the radical shifting of reality. He forced himself to confront what had happened, though the shock and disbelief of it had glued him in place as she whirled and left his office.

She’d
seen
his memory. His pulse throbbed wildly in his throat with the admission. He made himself face it again, more fully.
She saw
my
memory
.

He understood then, how she’d been able to draw Brianna’s rapists. And what it had cost her to volunteer to help his family. She’d seen it. She’d
lived
it.

Guilt threatened to savage him as pain rippled through him. He closed his eyes as if doing it would block out the tears he’d seen on her face as she stood outside with Eamon.

He wanted to hate Eamon for being there, wanted to hate her for finding comfort in Eamon’s arms. Instead the conversation with Sean returned like a chisel opening his mind further to something he wouldn’t have considered days ago, that sharing a woman gave her someone to turn to, someone who might even hold the door of reconciliation open for a return to the relationship.

Cathal replayed the scene he’d witnessed in his mind, the melding of her body to Eamon’s, the kiss full of tenderness and passion. He began hardening as a result of it, his cock becoming fully engorged as he remembered the last time she’d been in his office. When he’d pressed into her personal space and she’d allowed him to maneuver her backward, everything about her daring him to make good on his threat to fuck her if she showed up at Saoirse.

I’m not a man to share when I’m serious about a woman.

Then don’t get serious about
me.

He had outs. She’d given them to him.

Eamon.

The freakiness of what had just happened.

The way she’d come here, carefully revealing what had happened and where she’d been without implicating either herself or Denis, then assuring him she had no problem with the justice meted out by his family.

Now we both know where things stand.

She wouldn’t come back. She wouldn’t contact him.

He knew it with certainty.

It should relieve him. Instead the prospect of it twisted his gut and made him curse.

His arm swept across the desk, sending papers flying. “Fuck!” he said, and his cock throbbed in agreement.

He wanted her, on more levels than the physical. He couldn’t let her walk away or end things between them. Somehow, he had to convince her that the reason for their meeting in the first place didn’t matter.

He turned away from the desk and the papers scattered on the floor. As he did it, he heard a reporter’s voice on the small television mention the Harlequin Rapist.

His stomach knotted at remembering his uncle’s warning with its multiple meanings. A chill swept into him at now having evidence she could be a real threat to the rapist, a target for more reasons than her appearance.

If she disappeared, he would never know the truth of who took her. He might never know what had happened to her.

By now his father and uncle would have heard she’d been taken in for questioning. They’d know she was no longer in custody.

He went to his childhood home, brushing a kiss against his mother’s cheek before following his father into the office. The layout was similar to the one in Denis’s home and, like his uncle’s, the only place considered safe to talk freely.

“Drink?” his father asked.

“No. This is a quick stop for me.”

“About?”

“Etaín.”

His father directed him to a grouping of furniture positioned next to a fireplace with kindling laid beneath an empty grate. They sat, a small table between them.

“Go on,” his father said.

“You know she was taken in for questioning.”

“Yes. You’ve seen her since they cut her loose?”

“She came by the club.”

“And?”

“She didn’t tell the authorities about the drawings.”

“You’re sure?”

“She has no sympathy for rapists. She has no problem with what you and Denis did.”

“She said that?”

“Carefully and in a way the authorities can’t use.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it. You believe her?”