Spell of the Highlander (10 page)

Still, he’d not gotten far with this woman. The moment he’d pressed at Ms. St. James, he’d encountered some sort of barrier.

Flipping open Roman’s file, which contained the dead assassin’s thorough evaluation of his targets, including photos, addresses—both real and cyber—vehicle registration, birth certificate, passport, lines of credit, available funds, and other pertinent facts, he studied Ms. St. James’s picture again.

Her driver’s license supplied her vital stats. Twenty-four. Height: five feet six inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: green. Hair: black. Organ donor: no.

She was a lovely woman.

He had no doubt Cian MacKeltar wanted her. The Highlander would be as fascinated by her resistance to probing as was Lucan. He and the Highlander weren’t quite as different as the condescending bastard liked to believe.

Closing the file, he punched in a series of numbers on his phone and conveyed a change in plans to Eve’s associate: The mirror was still the priority, but make every effort to bring Ms. St. James in alive.

He’d enjoy cracking her open and studying her. He’d not been intrigued by a woman for a very long time.

He would do it while the Keltar watched from his powerless perch high up on his study wall.

“Oh, now
that’s
just not going to work,” Jessi said flatly when Cian stalked out of the bathroom. She hopped off the bed and moved to regard him from a safer vantage, over near the window. Sitting on a bed with that man in the room just didn’t seem wise. “You go back in there and get dressed,” she ordered.

Funny thing was, she’d just been placing bets with herself about what condition the archaic Highlander would exit in: kilt-clad and modest, in a towel and semimodest, or in-your-face nude and on the predatory prowl.

She’d decided on in-your-face nude. She owed herself five bucks.

He placed his thigh sheath and jeweled blade on the writing desk, wearing two towels: one at his waist and the other wrapped turban-style around his head. It was barely better than nude. In fact, it only made her want to peel those offending towels away.

As if reading her mind, he ducked his head and unwound the first towel, sponging the excess water from his dark mane. Righting himself, he tossed his hair back over his shoulders, metallic beads
clink
ing. Tiny rivulets of water ran down over his magnificent tattooed chest, a thin channel of it slithered over that tattooed nipple. Muscles bunched and rippled in his tattooed biceps.

She moistened her lips, wondering what on earth was wrong with her. She’d never had such an intense reaction to a man before.

She had only to look at him to get all shaky-feeling inside. And it wasn’t as if she’d never dated a good-looking man before. She had. Kenny Dirisio had been a Grade-A-Italian-Stallion-Extraordinaire. Even brainy Ginger, who was every bit as focused and driven as she was, had said, “Jessi-chick, take my advice, drop a few courses this term and hop on that one. They don’t come along like that often.”

But she hadn’t—hopped on him, that was. In fact, she’d volunteered to teach another seminar and they’d broken up over it, and now she knew why. While her brain had appreciated Kenny’s incredible looks, her body had just never quite kicked in. It never really had with any of the guys she’d dated.

With Cian MacKeltar, however, despite the fact that her brain wanted nothing to do with him, her body wanted to do everything with him that was possible between a man and a woman. Her body had done more than kicked in; it was stoking up the oven for the baking of little MacKeltar buns.

With a man that called a mirror “home.” This was not good.

“Did you not send for food, Jessica?”

Jessi blinked again, trying to refocus her thoughts. “Yes, but it won’t be here for a little while yet. Look, I’ve been thinking, what’s your plan, anyway?”

“To bed you.”

“No, I mean, your plan that might actually
work
.” She bared her teeth in a cool masquerade of a smile.

“Ah,
that
plan. That would be to cross this room right now and kiss you until you start tearing off your clothing and begging me to f—”

“No, that’s not the one I meant, either,” she said hastily.

How in the world had he moved that fast?

One instant he was across the room, the space of two beds separating them; the next, one big hand was cupping her chin, tipping her head back, the other hot and possessive on her waist. The man was lethally fast. Which boded well for protection—from everyone but him.

He stared down at her with smoldering intensity. He lowered his mouth slowly, lazily, never breaking eye contact with her. Up close, he was beyond gorgeous. Those whisky eyes shimmered with golden depths and were framed by thick dark lashes. His skin was tawny-velvet, darkly stubbled. His lips were sensual, pink and firm, and curved in the hint of a smile.

“Tell me not to kiss you, Jessica. Tell me right now. And best you make me believe you mean it,” he warned softly, a breath from her lips.

“Don’t kiss me.” She wet her lips.

“Try again,” he said flatly.

“Don’t kiss me.” She swayed toward his body, a magnet to steel.

“Try again,” he hissed. “And best ’ware, woman, ’tis your last chance.”

Jessi took a deep breath. “Don’t.” Another deep breath. “Kiss me?”

He laughed, a cocky, rich purr of a sound.

Crimeny, she thought dismally, as he lowered his sexy dark head toward hers, even
she’d
heard the wrong punctuation there.

10

Even though she knew it was coming, Jessi wasn’t prepared for Cian MacKeltar’s kiss.
Nothing
could have prepared her for the mind-blowing, sizzling intensity of it.

This was no gentle brush of a kiss like the one he’d given her in the lobby. This was the real deal. Intense and demanding, it was every bit as raw and unapologetically carnal as it was seductive.

Gripping a fistful of her short dark curls, the ninth-century Highlander slanted his mouth over hers. He cupped her cheek with one big hand and pressured the corner of her lips with his thumb, nudging them apart. The moment she yielded, he sealed his lips over hers, opening wider, deepening the kiss, taking complete possession of her mouth, obliterating any lingering protest she might have thought to make.

It was a dominant kiss, an expert kiss, the kiss of a man who knew he was a man, liked being one, and knew exactly what he was doing. This was no college boy kissing her, no young grad student toeing the lukewarm line between desire and political correctness. This was a man who was one-hundred-percent okay with lust, who suffered no hesitation or inhibitions.

It was exactly the kind of kiss, she realized dimly, for which she’d always been waiting. But until now, she’d not been able to define exactly what it was she’d been missing, what she’d been holding out for. She was struck by the sudden realization that the problem with her boyfriends was that they’d been just that—boyfriends, with the emphasis on “boy.”

Cian MacKeltar was a man—and a formidable force to be reckoned with sexually. She was, quite simply, out of her league with him.

She was struck by another sudden realization then: that she was going to be very, very lucky if she managed to walk out of that hotel room, at whatever point in the future they departed, the same way she’d walked in. A virgin, though she’d never admit it to any of her friends. Nobody was a virgin anymore, and peer pressure could get intense if people thought you were.

Personally, she’d never thought it was anyone else’s business whether or not she was. Only her own, and whatever man she chose to share it with. Her mom might liberally encourage baby-having, but she’d also encouraged a healthy degree of self-respect.
Pick carefully, girls,
Lilly St. James had advised her daughters.
There are a lot of duds out there.
As her mom was currently between husbands number four and five, Jessi figured she should know.

“Christ, lass, you taste sweet,” he purred.

She shivered with pleasure as he sucked her lower lip into his mouth, nipped it, then closed his mouth hard over hers, plunging deep. He kissed like a man who hadn’t had the luxury in—oh, maybe a thousand years or so—exploiting it for all it was worth, savoring all the subtle, sensual variations. Luring one moment, assaulting the next, and it made her crazy. He kissed like he wanted to devour her, maybe crawl inside her skin. He kissed like he was fucking her mouth, this sinfully gorgeous Highlander with his hot wet tongue and his hard, tattooed body. He kissed so thoroughly and possessively that she wasn’t Jessi anymore, she was a woman and he was a man, and she existed because he was kissing her and if he stopped, she might stop being.

She had no idea how they ended up on the floor.

One moment she was in his arms, being kissed senseless—literally, apparently—and the next she was flat on her back beneath his still shower-damp, big, powerful body, her nipples so hard they were poking through both her bra and sweater against his bare chest, with the steely bar of his erection jammed against her stomach.

And she wasn’t entirely certain, but she didn’t think she was feeling a towel between them anymore. And holy cow, the man was huge.

Dazedly, she wondered what in the world she thought she was doing—even as she buried her fingers in the wet tangle of his hair.

More kisses, soft and slow, hot and hard. She was drowning in man, in the taste and scent and feel of him. Her hands slipped of their own accord down the thick column of his neck, over the muscled ridges of his shoulders.

She barely noticed when he shifted position so that his legs were straddling hers, until he fit himself snugly in the vee of her thighs, and his thick ridge nudged the inseam of her jeans against her clitoris with delicious friction. She jerked at the raw intimacy of it.

When he cupped a hand beneath her bottom, tilted her hips, and began a slow, erotic bump-and-grind that was as old as Mankind itself, a distant part of her mind began sounding a clamorous alarm. But with each slow, powerful thrust of his cock, that inner alarm grew fainter and fainter, as Jessi slipped irresistibly deeper beneath Cian MacKeltar’s seductive spell.

When he rucked her sweater up to her ribs and began tracing a path from her bottom to her breasts, slowly, lingeringly, as if committing the subtle shape of each dip and turn to memory, she whimpered into his mouth, hungry to feel those big hands all over her bare body. Everywhere he was touching her, she felt as if a low-voltage electrical current was pulsing beneath her skin, jolting each nerve ending to delicious, tingling awareness. When he closed a hand over one of her breasts, heat shot straight down to her belly and lower still, and she dug her nails into his shoulders, arching hungrily up to meet his next thrust.

He sucked in a shallow hiss of a breath, and suddenly he was working at the fly of her jeans, and then the air was cool on her bare skin as he pushed her jeans and panties down. That faint alarm was sounding again, more loudly, but he was kissing her so heatedly, so passionately and—

—abruptly she was sucking air like a fish out of water.

Alone on the floor.

She blinked. Heavens, but the man could move fast! She sat up, looking dazedly around. “Where did you go?” she said breathlessly.

“Behind you, woman,” came the tight, furious reply.

She glanced over her shoulder. He was inside the mirror, propped in the corner, breathing hard, like he’d been running a race. She was panting herself, she realized. Her lips were swollen, she had the sting of a rug burn beginning on her spine, and her nipples throbbed.

Why was he in the mirror? For that matter,
how
had he gotten in the mirror? She gaped at him, bewildered.

“It reclaims me after a time,” he said flatly.

She continued gaping. “W-without preamble?” she stammered. “Just like that?”

“Aye. ’Twas not my choice to leave you in such a fashion.” His gaze dropped sharply and fixed there. “Och, Jessica, you’ve a beautiful ass. Nigh worth living a thousand years to see.”

His words drew her awareness to the fact that she was sitting on the floor, between the TV armoire and the bed, facing the entry door, her bare bottom pointed at the mirror, glancing over her shoulder at him, her sweater rucked up, jeans and panties down around her knees.

The cold reality of reason returned.

Oh, God, what had she almost just
done?
She gaped at the mirror, stunned.

In a matter of mere minutes, she’d been down on the floor, with her jeans and panties around her knees! A few heated kisses—and she’d been about to have sex with a man she barely knew. An arrogant, throwback of a man, at that. Who lived in a mirror. And in the midst of such dire straits, to boot!

This wasn’t like her at all. Was she freaking
nuts
?

Shocked and appalled at herself, Jessi stumbled to her feet, tugging at her jeans. Her panties got twisted and her jeans got stuck partway up, just beneath her butt. She yanked but they didn’t yield. Only her butt did— she felt it jiggle.

He made a choking sound. “Sweet Christ, woman, you’re killing me!”

Cheeks flaming, she shot a scowl over her shoulder at him as she bunny-hopped, bare-bottomed, into the bathroom.

A groan followed her.

“Stop looking at my butt,” she hissed fiercely.

She could hear his laughter, even through the closed door.

Hours later, Jessi awakened so hungry that her stomach was cramping.

Rolling over on the miserably lumpy hotel bed, she glanced at the clock. No wonder she was hungry—she hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours!

The room service she’d ordered earlier hadn’t come, for whatever reason: Either they’d tried to deliver it while she’d been stretched beneath Cian MacKeltar’s rock-hard body, deaf, dumb, and blind to all but his erotic assault on her senses; or they’d lost her order; or it had arrived so late that she’d been sleeping. Since she rarely got a full night’s sleep, she tended to drop off the moment her head touched the pillow, and slept like the proverbial dead, sprawled flat on her back, arms outflung.

After the near-sex-on-the-floor debacle, Jessi had gone in the bathroom and stayed in there awhile, cooling down and trying to think things through. But mostly cooling down—the man threw off serious sexual heat—because by then she’d simply been too exhausted to make much sense of anything.

When she’d finally come out, she’d stiffly informed the mirror to
go away and let me sleep and don’t you dare wake me unless my life is in danger. And I do
not
want to talk about what just happened. Not now. Maybe never.

He’d laughed softly.
As you wish, Jessica,
he’d replied.

Her stomach sounded a long, growling, painful protest.

Fumbling for the light switch on the wall sconce above the bed table, she turned it on, picked up the phone, and pressed the button for room service. As she was placing her order for a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke, the mirror rumbled:

“Quadruple all of that. And if there’s naught sweet, add something.”

Shrugging, she did so, assuming he’d eat it whenever he was able to come out of the mirror again.

Until the mirror had reclaimed him, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why he’d gone back in once she’d let him out that first night he’d killed the assassin. In her own defense, she’d had a lot of other things on her mind. Now she knew the answer. Apparently, he had no choice. Though he could be released from the mirror by the chanting of a spell, he couldn’t stay out long.

That was a problem. Exactly how did he plan to protect her from behind a pane of silvered glass?

Replacing the phone in the cradle, she scowled at him. God, the man was beautiful. Every time she looked at him, he took her breath away. Made her forget all the important things she should be thinking about. She shook her head, striving for levelheadedness. It was time for more answers. “How often and for how long can you be released from that glass?”

He leaned back against something in the mirror that she couldn’t see, folded his arms over his chest, and crossed his booted feet at the ankles. She narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute, how did you get your clothes back in there?”

“I’ve had centuries to test the glass. Though the elements comprising it are beyond my fathoming, I’ve learned to exploit it after a fashion. ’Twas designed to hold humans, not inanimate objects, and I’ve learned to summon in inert items that reside in my field of vision.”

She blinked, glancing around. Kilt—gone. Boots—gone. Even his thigh sheath and knife were gone. Apparently he’d drawn those items back in while she’d slept. Oh, she had a million questions about the nature of that artifact! But first things first: her continued survival. “So?” she prodded. “How often?”

He shrugged. “Try again now.”

Jessi drew a deep breath. She really didn’t want him out of the mirror at the moment. She wasn’t prepared to deal with him in the flesh—all that rippling, sexy, horny male flesh, at that—just yet. Still, she needed to understand the parameters of their situation. She recited the chant to release him.

Nothing happened.

He inclined his head. “I didn’t think so. I cannot answer your question precisely. I can tell you only what has occurred in the past. On occasion, when Lucan wished something of me, he afforded me a temporary freedom. Once, several centuries ago, he released me on four consecutive days. Each day I was allotted a different interval by the glass. One day I had but a few hours, another five or six, the fourth day I had the entirety of a day and a night. There is no predicting it.”

“So, you can come out every day, for at least a while,” she clarified.

“Aye.”

“Which means you probably can’t come out again until tomorrow morning?”

Another shrug. “I doona ken. You should continue trying at frequent intervals.”

“How do you intend to protect me if you can’t stay out of that glass?” she said peevishly.

“Lass, we need only evade Lucan for a number of days. Twenty more, to be exact. Scarce any time at all. I assure you, I will keep you safe and well until then.”

“‘Twenty days’? Why only twenty?” That didn’t sound so bad. She hadn’t known there was a time limit to how long her life was going to be screwed up, and it was a relatively short one. Surely she could get her life back on track after only twenty out-of-control days, if things really would be resolved by then. She was grateful that she’d had the foresight not to call in sick. Her odds for survival and a return to normalcy were suddenly looking considerably brighter. One whopper of a good story might take care of things. It might not even have to be half as inventive as some of those her students tried to feed her.

“Because the Compact that holds me bound to the Dark Glass requires that a tithe of purest gold be passed through the mirror every century to reaffirm the Unseelie indenture. The next tithe is due this Hallows’ Eve, on the thirty-first day of October, at midnight.”

Crimeny.
Tithes, Compacts, indentures: Anytime she began thinking about resuming a normal life, she was reminded that she was currently up to her eyebrows in a fairy-tale world of spells and curses.

And the scary part was that it was all beginning to sound somewhat reasonable to her. The longer she interacted with a man who lived inside a mirror, the more inured she became to the strangeness of subsequent oddities. His existence was so inexplicable in and of itself that it seemed pointless to squabble over further inexplicabilities. Though she never would have believed it, magic existed. There was proof of it right in front of her eyes. Arguments over, case closed.