KICK ASS: A Boxed Set (45 page)

“I see no problem,” Rafe insisted, ignoring how his nostrils flared in search of her scent. “Your world already contains flying machines and nameless torches. The magic imposed on me may bring fleeting comfort, but the price is steep. You need not this evil thing that lives within me.”

“How do you know it’s evil?”

He pulled himself into a sitting position, which she did as well. With the firelight dancing across her skin and dappling her burnished brown hair with sparks of ruby fire, he was nearly too overwhelmed by her easy sensuality to form a response. She’d folded herself into a position that shielded her naked body, but her modesty did little to slake his desire. Her curves evoked fantasies he had no business entertaining when they’d just indulged in such sweet reality. He wanted Mariah again. Not because of unbidden lust brought on by Rogan’s curse, but for himself.

“Lord Rogan was evil,” he explained, denying his selfish instincts. “This magic that brought us together is his.”

“Maybe,” she said, somewhat doubtfully. “But the magic is in you now. You aren’t evil. Or were you? Back then? When Rogan trapped you?”

Rafe possessed a fair amount of shortcomings, but wickedness had not been his sin. Not until tonight.

“I was but a simple Romani man hoping to find happiness and peace for my family.”

“Tell me about them. Tell me about her.” She laid her cheek against her knee, and Rafe was struck by the gentility of her voice.

He stood, and though he risked reawakening the intense consequences of utilizing Rogan’s magic, he conjured clean, dry clothes. She
tsk
ed in disappointment.

“The past no longer matters,” he said, unwilling to dredge up the memories. He’d been plagued by flashes of bloody images from his last night among the living since his reawakening. To share the details of his previous life now would result in more darkness for his soul than Rogan could ever have forced on him.

Mariah frowned. “The past might be the key to freeing you from the stone.”

“I am free,” he insisted.

“Only during the night, right?” She patted the rug beside her. He considered the risk of sitting beside her while she remained unclothed and scented with their lovemaking and decided instead to sit upon the couch.

“Yes,” he concurred. “During the daylight hours, I am naught but a spirit.”

“A phantom,” she decided.

“A what?”

She sat up and twisted so that her bare breasts taunted him mercilessly. “A phantom. It’s a being…”

Rafe closed his eyes and wished Mariah did not torture him so. When she yelped, he opened his eyes. She was now swathed in a pale silk robe.

“Hey!” she protested.

“You could catch your death,” he warned.

She smirked, but thrust herself to her feet and joined him on the sofa. “Is it safe for me to sit beside you now that I’m not naked?”

“Safe enough,” he replied, though he wondered. The storm within him had abated just as the squall had outside, and yet, the sexual connection he shared with Mariah had strengthened. Now that he knew the intensity of making love to her, he could not imagine denying himself the experience again, should the chance arise. He supposed he’d simply have to ensure that the opportunity did not present itself.

He scooted a few inches to the side.

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. “Back to phantoms. Thanks to my mother, I know a great deal about the legends and lore of the magical and paranormal.”

“Your mother?”

Mariah leaned forward, eyeing the wine Rafe had conjured earlier. Rafe took the hint and poured a goblet for each of them, and delivered the bowl of fruit, which she cradled in her lap. “She’s a curator at a museum.”

“A curator?. Of a…?”

She pressed her lips together, thinking hard before she explained. “A curator is someone who catalogs and researches the items that museums put in their collections for the public to see. That rock, for instance.”

She nodded toward her dilly bag. “A museum that specializes in Romani history would probably pay a lot of money to have that stone. If museums that specialized in Romani history had a lot of money, which they generally don’t.”

He nodded, but he had no idea what she was talking about. She seemed to intuit this, because she patted his knee encouragingly. “Don’t worry. You’ll catch on soon enough. Suffice it to say that in her line of work, my mother encounters many items of mysterious, even magical origin. She reads and hears lots, too. When I was a teenager, I went to live with her, so I heard the stories, as well.”

“You did not live with your mother previously?”

“I don’t want to spit the dummy,” she said, taking a long sip of wine.

He arched an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve lived in the States for a decade, but I forget sometimes and revert to Aussie slang. Means I don’t want to lose my temper, so let’s pick another topic—unless you have another two hundred years for me to adequately explain the weirdness that was my childhood.”

Rafe suspected he did not have another two centuries for discourse, but he found that he wanted to know more about Mariah and what circumstances had pushed her to the life she now led. She was, at the core, a thief—one who cared little for ownership and more for survival. He’d known her for only a few days, but he’d gathered that she followed a nomadic existence not unlike that of his people, and not unlike the life he might have lived if not for the accident of his paternity.

He loved his father, but they’d had nothing in common. As much as the earl claimed to love the Gypsies, he had done little to plead for his people’s release from the king’s banishment. His father had argued that colonization was the best solution and that the Gypsies in Valoren were honest artisans with always enough to eat, but Rafe never could abide his imperialist attitude.

He shifted so that his back leaned against the armrest. “And a phantom?”

She mirrored his position, but pulled her legs onto the cushions, crossing them as one might when sitting around the village fire. He was thankful when she adjusted her robe modestly. “Well, there are lots of stories about them, but there’s no definitive definition. Some cultures equate phantoms with ghosts. Others view them as spirits of people sent to the other realms before their time, but who long to return to the earthly plane.”

Rafe nodded. “Sounds accurate.”

“But it doesn’t really matter what you’re called,” Mariah said, popping a grape into her mouth, chewing and then chasing the fruit with the wine. “The facts are thus: You possess magic, and I need some if I’m going to find those missing coins and get my arse out of Hector Velez’s sling.”

Rafe remained silent. Without Mariah, he would not have found freedom from Rogan’s marker, even if only during the night. Despite his aversion to the idea of utilizing the dark magic again, he could not help but consider her situation. Mariah had proved herself clever and resourceful. He had no doubt that if anyone could figure out how to free him entirely from the stone, it was her.

“I am listening,” he said.

Her grin could have lit up the entire room. She wiggled in her seat as she laid out the details of her situation, unable to contain her enthusiasm. “After I stole the coins for Velez, I had to fly over the jungle in Chiapas to rendezvous with him at Villahermosa. I got word the Mexican authorities were waiting for me there, tipped off that I’d taken the coins from a dusty basement in Chajul, which I had. I put the coins in a padded bag, equipped it with a locating device called a GPS monitor, flew low over the jungle and dropped it. After I landed, I was boarded and searched, but the police found nothing, so they had to let me go, warning me to get the hell out of their country and not come back.”

“But you defied their orders,” Rafe guessed.

“Of course,” she said with a quirk of a smile. “I waited a bit, then trekked back into the jungle on foot, thinking I’d be able to retrieve the coins and get out before anyone noticed me. But the coins dropped in a remote area and the signals from the locator were imprecise. I heard the authorities were coming after me again, so I lit out. Now I’m in debt to Velez, and he’s on my trail.”

“Those men in the hotel room?” he asked.

She frowned. “I don’t know; it really doesn’t fit that those men worked for Velez. Whoever attacked me in the hotel definitely knew I’d taken Rogan’s stone. Velez wouldn’t know anything about Rogan.”

“What about the man who chased you in Valoren?”

“Ben?” She shook her head. “He’d never hire anyone to retrieve the stone from me. He’d do it himself.”

Rafe crossed his arms. He’d never met a woman who could get herself in more trouble with more dangerous men—except, perhaps, his sister.

She scooted closer. “Look, let’s deal with one problem at a time. No matter who is after your stone, I have to retrieve the coins before Velez has me killed. And trust me, that’s what he’ll do. If you could use your magic to give the GPS a boost, find those coins for me, then I can stop looking over my shoulder and concentrate on freeing you—permanently—before someone tries to steal the stone again, too. And you, since you’re a package deal.”

As he took a long draft of wine, Rafe considered her proposal. He did not have to comprehend all of the details to find the simplest thread—she needed his help and he needed hers. The only thing holding him back from immediately agreeing to her plan was the fact that utilizing Rogan’s magic on such a scale was dangerous. Two women he’d loved deeply, Sarina and Irika, had died because of Rogan’s insatiable lust for power. And as wondrous as the sorcerer’s magic might have been when wielded by its master, it had not saved his sister from becoming a casualty to the man’s inherent evil. Nor, despite Rogan’s claims to want to protect the Gypsies, had it saved Irika from a mercenary’s knife.

He shook his head. “There must be another way,” he concluded.

Mariah slid closer to him and pressed her hand directly over his heart. “If it’s the madness you’re afraid of,” she said, her voice low and husky, “we know the antidote.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she covered his lips with her fingers.

“Don’t say it. You’re not taking advantage of me any more than I’m taking advantage of you. I need your magic, and in return, you get hot sex with a willing woman. In this century, we call this a win-win proposition.”

* * *

They remained in the cabin until their supplies ran low three days late, and still, Rafe had neither agreed to nor denied her request. She’d stopped asking. The man might be a phantom, but he wasn’t stupid. He needed time to consider the ramifications of and advantages to using the magic to help her out of a jam.

During the nights, Mariah spent most of her time teaching Rafe Forsyth everything he’d need to know about the twenty-first century. Without a computer to check her facts, she focused mostly on the basics in areas such as world history, politics and religion. On the subjects she knew by rote—human nature, the sexual revolution and flying—they talked for hours, down to the most trivial detail.

Well, on flying, Rafe mostly listened, though the wonderment in his gaze never faltered, even when she knew he was utterly scandalized by her treasure-hunting exploits. She’d shared a few of her more exciting stories about operations she’d pulled off in Egypt, Eritrea and the Sudan. Only when the subject had turned to Ben Rousseau had she’d skimped on the particulars. She didn’t like the way Rafe’s eyes darkened when her former lover’s name came up.

On most topics, Rafe proved a serious student, listening intently, asking pointed questions and trying to draw comparisons with his Romani society, which wasn’t always easy to do. And yet, she couldn’t help admire how open-minded he was. He had had the advantage of having been tutored by his formally educated brothers, but he’d lived in such a remote part of the world, with no opportunity to see more than one tiny corner of the universe, which, even in two hundred and sixty years, hadn’t changed. At least, not from the little she’d seen of it.

Had she stayed with her father in the Northern Territory rather than moving to Sydney to thrust herself on her mother, her life might have been more like Rafe’s, only she didn’t have brothers who would have spared her the time to teach her anything beyond how to play a brutal game of rugby or the best way to skin a roo.

They had not made love again, something that vexed Mariah just as much as it relieved her. Rafe was sexy and sensitive, smart and mysterious, but she accepted that making love for him was something more than just surrendering to physical urges. She couldn’t remember being with a man who ascribed any real importance to the act beyond satisfying pent-up needs. Not at least since Ben—and even then, what she’d believed to be the seedlings of true commitment for Ben had turned out to be nothing more than the stupid weeds of youth.

During the day, Rafe slipped back into the stone to rest, not out of choice, but necessity. Mariah tried to sleep, but despite her cut-and-dried plan to exploit Rafe’s magic in order to solve her Velez problem, she tossed and turned until only sheer exhaustion overrode her whirling mind.

And then, dreams plagued her. She watched Rafe morph from a light-eyed Gypsy who quirked one eyebrow when a modern attitude or expression amused him to a shadowed, black-hooded figure whose eyes gleamed orange-red like the center of the fire opal that contained him. She ran from him, slicing through thick jungle vines, pursued, terrified, until the ground dropped from beneath her feet and she fell into the nothingness, screaming Rafe’s name.

Eleven

“Mariah ?”

She bolted upright. She took several seconds to realize she was lying on the plush couch in the cabin and not dead and broken at the bottom of some rocky cliff. She blinked, rubbing her eyes until the pink light from outside the window no longer blinded her.

“I’m awake,” she replied gratefully. “I’m awake now.”

A whisper of a touch smoothed her cheek. It was not yet sundown, but Rafe was awake and toying with the state between phantom and man. Exhausted and unnerved by her dream, she couldn’t resist leaning into the sensation. Degree by degree, Rafe’s warmth washed away the terrifying images of her nightmare.