The Thorndyke Trilogy 2: Dancing at Midnight (19 page)

She traced a line on his chest with the tip of her finger. “Does the president know?”

“It depends on the president,” he said. “Some do, some don’t. But I was working in an era when the president knew everything. We were set to work with mortals, and I had a female partner for a while. She knew I was a dragon. I fell heavily for her. I didn’t know her secret though. She was a terrorist. Nobody knew.” He didn’t even like saying her name, because it wasn’t her real name.

“They were Muslim fanatics, and they knew a blonde-haired siren wouldn’t be suspected. She used me to work her way inside the most covert organization the States has. Talents knew about the terrorist threat, and we were working undercover. Look at me.” He raised his hand, indicating his coloring. “Except for the eyes, I could work in an Arabic country. I wore contacts and went in as an eager recruit. I came across some information.” He closed his eyes, that moment returning to him in all its odiousness. “A massive attack on United States’ soil. I had details, enough to warn the government and stop it happening. She was my contact. I passed the information to her.” He swallowed. “She did nothing.”

She spread her hand over his heart, and he clutched it like it was a lifeline. Her warmth pulsed through him, giving him the courage to go on. “She abandoned me, claiming she’d lost contact before I passed the information along. I got out shortly after, furious that the government had the intel it needed but didn’t do anything about it. We had an ecstatic reunion. Her controllers had told her to stay in position, to string me along, in effect.”

He smiled wryly. “At the debriefing, she destroyed me. She claimed she’d never got the intel, although she was in contact with me all the time. It was her or me, you see. They were looking for scapegoats, and they found one.” He still remembered the event as if it were yesterday. He’d spent the intervening years forcing the memory back every day, although he swore never to forget the errors he’d made. How stupid he’d been to trust a mortal.

Except he didn’t feel that way anymore.

“What could I do? I ‘died.’ That is, I reinvented myself. I couldn’t use government sources to change my name and identity, so the Thorndykes helped me. Dalton and his family. We try to help Talents start a new life when they need to. We’re not invulnerable.” This was enough. “I got work at a small ballet theater as a stagehand. As far as anyone knew, I was twenty and wet behind the ears. I needed to find a sphere where nobody knew me, and I did. But I didn’t realize how cathartic dancing would be for me. I worked out all my frustrations.”

He gazed up at her. “So you see why I avoided close relationships. Until now. From the first moment I saw you, I was drawn to you.” When she cupped his cheek, he turned his head and kissed the palm.

“I’m sorry, Nathan. So sorry. It wasn’t your fault; it was hers.”

He smiled grimly. “Before I left, I made sure she couldn’t do it to anybody else. She’d claimed enough victims, and I’ve never regretted what I did.” An execution, done with deliberate intent, but when the call came for his arrest, he’d had to run. “But until I met you, I blamed myself. I should have seen, should have known. Except so many people didn’t see and didn’t know. It wasn’t all my fault, and yes, I was deceived. You’ve helped me remember the women I’ve known before, friends and lovers. Their humanity far outweighed the one bad apple. I should have remembered that. You opened my eyes.”

“When I was half-dead in the snow?”

“Yes. Something in me reached out to you, something instinctive. I’ve never felt that connection so instantly before.”

She cupped his cheek, and he leaned into her soft caress. “You know we’ve moved on?”

“Yes.” She stared at him wide-eyed, and he kissed her.

“Don’t look so worried. I mean that before, we were dancers who fucked. Now we’re lovers. I want you to stay here, and not just because of the way our relationship is going. I want you safe.” He
needed
her safe. It was essential to his well-being that he knew she was. And although he owned the apartment building and he vetted each tenant himself after his manager had done so, he didn’t trust any of them. Not with this woman.
His
woman. “Change with Dalton. He can take the place downstairs, and you move in here.”

“While I’m working at the club?”

“Fuck the club,” he said succinctly. “I want you with me.” And that was the truth. He could ensure her safety in a number of ways, not the least by appointing Smokey her personal bodyguard.

Anyone who spent more time with her than Nathan himself would be under scrutiny. He cupped her face in his hands. “You need to know that I never dance in public with my lovers. It doesn’t work. I prefer a working relationship with the people I dance with.”

“So I’m still stuck with Steve?”

“Is that so bad?”

“No. He’s good.” He was relieved to hear her lack of enthusiasm or heat when she talked about Steve. Was he getting jealous now? Oh yes, yes he was.

“I want to be with you,” he said, all he could say for the moment.

Flushing an adorable shade of pink, Kristen nodded. “I want to be with you too. Nathan—” She broke off and hastily shielded her thoughts.

Apart from being proud of her that she’d learned to shield by herself, he had to suppress a smile. She’d been about to tell him about her family. The truth. Then the thought flashed over her about her job and the dancing. She still didn’t trust him enough to confess her lie, and that hurt. Nathan wanted her to tell him everything. It would come, in time. Meanwhile, he’d wait and enjoy the hell out of her. Because he was lost, and he knew he’d happily stay lost for a long time.

He kissed her, letting his lips linger over hers, taking the sweet taste of her and giving her his own. He finished with a touch of his tongue to her upper lip, a playful caress that made her laugh.

“So I’m here, with you?”

“And we’re not hiding it,” he said. “I thought we should, to keep you safe, but that bastard De’Ath knows we’re together, so what’s the point?”

“What will you do about that? The club, I mean?” She gazed at him breathlessly.

To gain time to think, he climbed out of bed and held a hand to her, silently reminding her of the promised shower.

His bathroom contained a large tub and a step-in shower enclosure, the floor sloping toward the drain at the back, obviating the need for a shower curtain. He hated those things. And, he’d add, screens too, but most of all curtains.

“Why don’t you like shower curtains?”

He laughed. “I might have guessed you’d pick that up. I went to the movies to see
Psycho
, expecting one of Hitchcock’s sophisticated thrillers. Instead I got something so raw it scared the hell out of me. I’ve never liked shower curtains since.”

“You went to the cinema to see it?”

He flicked on the overhead spray. It was already set to his preferred temperature. Hot water streamed over them. “Yes.”
Shit
. He’d betrayed something else. His age. “And yes, it was when it first came out.” She’d accepted that he could change his form. Surely she could deal with this. Talk about introducing her to the concepts gradually, he thought sarcastically with disgust at himself for relaxing so much that he’d let it slide. “How do you feel about dating an older man?”

“How much older?” The dating part had passed her unfazed, but the age… She was too intelligent, or he was too old.

“I was born in 1793,” he said quietly, keeping out of her head, afraid of what he might find there.

“So you dressed like Mozart?”

She startled another laugh out of him. How the fuck did she do that? “No. More like Beau Brummel. Heard of him?”

“Yes. I read Regency romances sometimes.”

He’d bet she didn’t realize how far away many were from the real Regency era. But he’d read a few too, out of curiosity to see how close they got. Some of them startlingly so. “Well, like him. And in case you were wondering, he was a big handsome pain in the ass. I didn’t like him. He was an obsessive. Today they’d send him to a psychologist for a social disorder. They wouldn’t hang on to his every word and follow his edicts. The idiot wouldn’t wear a pair of white gloves twice, however well laundered they were.” The women had crawled all over him, but Brummel, while indulging a few, had also enjoyed the company of men in bed.

A little like Nathan, except he’d never bothered with the whole dandy shit. He dropped his American accent. He used it naturally these days, but he could still call on the clipped British version of English when he wanted to. “I was Sir George Beaumont. Wealthy as a nabob and as arrogant. I was born a shape-shifter, but I tried to ignore it. It didn’t suit my vision of myself. We
have
to shape-shift at least three days every month when the moon is at its fullest, and I used to do that for the briefest time possible. I learned to love my dragon later. I was a gentleman about town, a buck, up to all the rigs and rows, as we used to say.”

He watched her, and then, unable to meet the frankness in her eyes, reached for the shampoo and busied himself washing her hair while he talked. “But I had to age and die. Not exactly, but we Talents move on to another life. Otherwise, it would be strange if we never aged. We can appear to age, but what happens when you’re ninety? Nothing stays the same. That’s the first thing you learn when you live for more than a hundred years. If you don’t move with it, you might as well be dead.”

He knew a few people like that, Canutes trying to hold back the tide. “I enjoy it.” Or he did, before Kristen exploded into his life. Now, fuck, he wanted to take her with him. He’d enjoyed the thrill of moving on and discovering new lives, new ways of living. Not now.

She stared at him, eyes wide, but he didn’t dare read her. She might find this too much for her to take. But with the change in her relationship, she needed to know what he was telling her now.

He reached for the hand spray and moved it over her hair, concentrating on washing it out, rather than meeting her eyes.

“I came to the States in the mid-nineteenth century. I’ve been American ever since. I love it here, and although I’ve taken a few different names, I’ve stayed American. I was a soldier until the thirties, and then I joined the air force. After the war, I went into civilian life, made some money, and then I joined the covert forces when the war moved to the world of spies.” He glanced at her face and restored the hand spray to its holder.

Her mouth formed an O, and he kissed her before reverting to his everyday accent, the nondescript Midwestern one he generally used. He could manage broad Texan and sharp New York, even the old New Jersey version, but he’d never felt comfortable with broader Californian or lazy Louisiana. The British English of the upper class had remained with him like an echo of things he’d rather forget.

“What happened to your parents?”

“They’re still alive somewhere as far as I know.” He hadn’t thought about them for years. “They moved on when I inherited their estate. I haven’t seen much of them since. They’re restless souls, always moving from one place to another because they enjoy it.”

“That’s so sad.” The way she looked at him told him she had the support of parents and family. She was probably feeling sorry for him, but he’d never had experience of people treating him with sympathy. He’d never allowed it before. Opening himself up so much to her, and feeling her empathy made him uncomfortable.

“I’m fine. We’re talking a long time ago here. A
very
long time.”

She took the shower gel and squirted some into her hand, filling the atmosphere with the scent of vanilla. “Do Talents need therapy?”

The question startled him. He’d been born in an age where therapy was unknown. “Catharsis” was an old word, so were “ego” and “id,” but they had completely different meanings these days. Of course he’d never undergone therapy, and after all, what would they do? “Some Talents have received it for specific problems like PTSD and rape recovery, but I don’t know anyone who had it because of childhood trauma.” He smiled, trying to lighten the conversation, racking his brains for something else to say to take her off track.

When his parents left, he’d felt desolate, but being full-grown, he’d shrugged his shoulders and got on with living. The fact that he’d then joined the army and gone off to Afghanistan to fight was neither here nor there, nor was the fact that he’d taken the opportunity to stage his first “death.”

A clean sheet had worked for him, or so he’d thought at the time. “I’m fine,” he said now.

“Do you ever think about looking for them?”

“Fuck, no!” Even the thought repulsed him. “If they want to find me they’re welcome to do it, but when my parents left, they made it clear that we were done. I wasn’t exactly a child at the time.” 1825 when he was thirty-two. He’d been plenty old enough. Men were supposed to brace themselves and be uncaring, but he’d found it hard to accomplish. Not that he’d dream of telling anyone else.

To stop her talking, or thinking for that matter, he kissed her, taking her with the abandon that sent him into another place—one only they occupied. That was the way he wanted it, but when she caught him off balance and pushed him against the shower wall, he broke the kiss and gazed at her, delighted.

“If I didn’t know you were a dancer before, I would now,” he said. She’d used a typical trick, tipping him, pausing, and then pushing while he was trying to regain his equilibrium to get him where she wanted him. “I’m told martial arts practitioners do it too.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t know.”

He’d rarely seen a more beautiful sight. With the lingering sorrows of his youth disappearing to the back of his mind where they belonged, she brought him solace. And more. He ruefully contemplated his cock, which had risen when she moved. He hadn’t told it to. It was a Pavlov’s dog response to her presence. If she was in his vicinity, he got hard. Simple as that.

Telling her everything raised his spirits unaccountably. Perhaps finally telling someone everything had helped, or perhaps her not rejecting him came as such a relief he grew light at heart. “Let’s celebrate.”

She gazed at him quizzically. “What are we celebrating?”