Blood In Fire (Celtic Elementals Book 2) (10 page)

It was four, no—five men. Her stomach went cold.

They were of varying heights and sizes, thick and skinny, heavy and short, clad in the cast-off hodgepodge of clothes and miasma that spoke ruffian in every language. All eyed Aidan appraisingly, and snuck glances her way that lingered like an oily touch. Heather was frozen, unable to decide whether to run or scream, her throat dry with terror. And that was before she saw the flash of knives in more than one filthy hand.

“Aye, what have we here?” Aidan’s tone wasn’t exactly calm, but it definitely was not frightened. His body language was loose and relaxed. There was an undercurrent there, though.

Was the son of a bitch actually eager?

The men facing him seemed as confused as Heather. They cocked their heads almost as one, which would have looked comical if the whole situation wasn’t so goddamn terrifying. A grunting agreement passed through the group and they fanned out in a semicircle, no more than an arm’s length from one man to the other as they approached Aidan.

He only rolled his shoulders in what might have been a shrug.

“If yer bloody sure then…
Come on.
”

He beckoned them forward, a grin on his face. Heather heard him laugh as they moved in.

There was no moonlight, but the yellow street lights made the stones of the pavement glow as two men rushed Aidan at once. The others held back, tightening their ranks so as not to allow him any chance of slipping through them and escaping.

Escape was obviously not on Aidan's mind. He reached out and actually
pulled
the first man to him, impatient to begin.

Heads cracked together, curly blond and matted dark, with a sound like a gunshot. That man went to his knees at once. Stunned and swaying, blood running down his dazed face, he toppled over onto the stones. The second flew at Aidan from the other side, but Aidan’s leg came up with careless ease. His boot heel caught the would-be assailant where upper thigh met groin. The man went instantly from a dead run to a dead stop. Before he could do more than blink in pain, Aidan had punched him twice in the head, then yanked said-head down to meet his up-thrusting knee. That man joined the other on the stones.  By now the remaining three had woken to the fact that this was no ordinary tourist. They fell on Aidan en masse.

Heather whirled, freed from her first frozen grip of fear and looked around wildly for something…
anything
that could help.

A knife lay gleaming against the stones next to the two fallen men, neither of whom were moving, though she thought she heard faint groans under the sounds and screams of the main fight, which had moved several paces away.

Hesitantly, knowing this might be a
very
bad idea, but not seeing another choice, Heather moved to the beckoning wink of the blade. The knife had a wickedly long curve with a deep gut hook along the spine.

She was familiar with knives. Growing up in a restaurant among cooks and chefs was part of that, growing up along Minnesota’s North Shore was more of it. Hunting, fishing…. She could clean a fish in a finger snap and while she had never cleaned a deer by herself, she had helped. She had also taken hours of self-defense classes and even some hand-to-hand combat sessions for one of her more interesting film roles.

All that hardly made her competent at using a knife to defend herself.

Heather was well aware of this, but the primal desire for a weapon was so fierce that she couldn’t help herself. She heard a muffled grunt and gasp that sounded like it came from Aidan, but she didn’t dare turn away from her goal to look and see how he was doing. She used her foot to gingerly ease the knife away from the crumpled man nearest it and let out a breath when he didn’t move at the clink of steel over stone.

Heather leaned down to grasp the handle, her fingers curling over the yellowed ivory still warm from the touch of the man who had held it last. She had started to straighten when the world went sideways with a sickening whoosh.

Her hip hit the cobblestone in a flash of pain that was quickly forgotten as the man who had yanked her ankle out from under her pinned her to ground in seconds. Heavy and sickening, his weight pushed down on her, forcing all the air from her body.

The knife she had been so desperate for now gleamed at her throat. A full set of surprisingly white and even teeth grinned at her from a swarthy face as the man babbled something Turkish at her in gleeful triumph.

Triumph that went to terror in a fingersnap as the man’s beady eyes lifted to look at something behind her head. Twisting despite the prick of the knife against her skin, Heather’s eyes traveled up a pair of dusty, black boots splashed with darker drops of what had to be blood, up over the very long pair of legs encased in black denim and into crystal eyes that burned both cold and hot into her own.

“What the fuck have ye gotten yerself into, ye bloody eejit woman?” The man pinning her gibbered something and spittle flecked her face. The knife pressed deeper into her throat. Aidan's jaw clenched.

Ridiculously enough, even a second away from having her jugular sliced open, Heather found herself more worried about what Aidan would do to her than the man holding her life in his hands.

Without even thinking about it, she drew her fingers into the tight ‘knife hand’ her self-defense instructor had patiently schooled her on for hours. While both her attacker’s eyes and her own remained on Aidan, Heather whipped her stiffened fingers into the Turkish man’s throat. His head had been twisted up and to the side to keep Aidan in sight. She caught him unawares full on the Adam’s apple.

The man gurgled once in shock.

Aidan moved and the man's weight left her. Heather curled on her side retching, only vaguely aware of rhythmic, crunching sound as she regained her breath.

When she calmed her shaking body enough to look for the source of the odd sound, it was to find Aidan slamming the man into the outer wall of the bazaar. Over and over again. He didn’t appear to have any intention of stopping either. The man in his hands was rapidly beginning to resemble a heap of bloody meat.

Heather got to her feet, wobbling a little as she forced herself to approach Aidan step by step.

Crunch…splatter…the man wasn’t groaning any longer, but heavy, wet gasps fell from the split lips.

“Don’t you think you should stop now?” Heather’s voice sounded weirdly empty to her own ears, echoing against the wall and into the street.

“Why?” Aidan didn’t turn his head, but there was something in his voice, something dark, sinuous and cruel that reminded her of when he had taken her the night before.

Heather was surprised how little it shocked her that he’d find pleasure in this brutality. The fact that what he was doing didn’t
bother
her at all should have made more of an impression, but she was too distracted to think clearly at the moment.

“I don’t know, but killing him seems like more trouble than it’s worth…right?”

There was a second’s quiet as Aidan paused in his rhythm and looked at her. Just looked.

A look made her cold right down to the center of her bones.

“Do ye really think so, love? Do ye think I couldna fill this one's pockets with stones and drop him into tha' river there with anyone giving a goddamn when his fish-eaten, bloated corpse pops up in a day or two? No one would know, no one would care.” His voice was soft and deadly sure.

He was right. She
couldn’t
stop him from doing whatever the hell he wanted and honestly, begging for the life of the man who would have been happy to kill them both a minute ago didn’t interest her.

Heather shrugged and turned away. One step was as far as she got.

In a sickening rush, it hit her.

She had almost
died
. Right here, right now. She swayed as shivers ran through her body in waves and her teeth started to chatter. With a curse, Aidan dropped the man to the stones and grabbed her before she went over.

“Steady now.” He shook her once, looking more exasperated than anything. When she giggled in response, his eyebrows raised in confusion. She giggled harder.

Neither Aidan or Heather noticed the man’s buddies, their anatomies exhibiting various degrees of trauma as they skirted the pair of them cautiously, scooping up their fallen comrade and scurrying out of the bazaar as fast as their injuries would allow.

Aidan shook her again. So hard this time that Heather felt her hair, already lopsided from the evening activities, slide free and down her back in tumbling waves.

“Have ye gone mad then?” For the first time since everything had begun, he sounded honestly concerned.

Heather gasped past the laughter and shook her head. More from self-defense than anything else, she slapped her hand into Aidan’s chest to get him to stop shaking her. The effect was immediate. Before she could catch her breath, she was up against the wall, only a few feet from the great, dark stain marking where Aidan had beat her attacker.

Aidan was staring at her, a look on his face she was beginning to recognize even without the benefit of his cock throbbing into her hip and belly.

“Here?” she whispered once, even as a hot ribbon of desire wrapped itself around her. Everything had happened so brutally fast. Life and death, only a knife's edge between one and the other.

Her heart was racing. She could feel the beat pulsing; in her temples, in her wrists…and between her legs.

She could smell the blood staining the stones, feel it on Aidan’s shirt. The gorgeous blue was streaked with crimson that looked black in the dim light. The rich fabric had been torn repeatedly, exposing his chest, gaping over the ripples of his hard stomach. She sucked in a breath even as his hands wrenched up her long skirt inch by inch, his eyes boring into hers.

“Here.” Aidan’s voice was flat, as if he didn’t give a damn what her own wishes were in the matter. But she felt the shudder that went through him when his fingers brushed between her legs and found her slick and wet for him already.

He took her up against that cold wall.

Fast and a little cruel, as if daring her to make him stop. His hands rough on her body, his mouth ruthless on her lips, her throat, her breasts.

God help her, she had no intention of asking him to stop.

Heather scratched and clawed as Aidan slammed into her again and again, both of them breathless with need. It should have been frightening, even disturbing, and maybe it all would be. Later. But not then, not even when she sunk her teeth in his shoulder as her release struck in a hot wave.

She bit him so hard she tasted blood, felt him flinch and then shudder as his own orgasm surged through that taut, muscular body. It left her crushed up against the wall, pinned under his dead weight. Her vision rippled and her heart slammed against her ribs fit to burst.

“Breathe,
please
.” Her fists pounded ineffectually on his shoulders, but Aidan shifted back without speaking, a kind of low moan escaping his mouth that would've made her start giggling again, If she’d had the energy.

It was a long while later, when they were picking their way back to the hotel, trying to avoid the curious stares of the occasional passerby, that he said to her in a puzzled sort of voice, “Yer a quare different sort of woman, ye know tha'?”

Heather stopped and stared at him for a moment.

“And you’re normal, are you?”

It was Aidan’s turn to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to stop in the middle of the street, one arm clutched around his middle.

“Gods, no.” He said when he finally caught his breath and pulled her against him. His hand slid under her hair, strong fingers deftly rubbing away the small knot of anger that had sprung up there. “I didna mean it as an insult, love. Only tha'…well, I’ve known a fair number of women, but I donna think I have ever met one like ye.”

Heather shook herself free of Aidan’s hand, even though his ministrations had felt delicious and glared at him.

“No one woman is exactly like another, you stupid Irish prick, though—come to think of it—I do think most
men
are exactly the same. I have met
plenty
of men like you.”

“Oy, ye’ll be taking tha' one back, ye little liar.” Aidan’s tone was amused, but his eyes were less so.

“I won’t.” She said it even as a hitch caught her voice as he stepped toward her.

“Yes, ye
will
and ye damme well know it. Just like ye know ye’ve never met anyone like
me,
little miss nobody.”

Had he been telling her what he was, even then? Or trying to?

Heather sighed. Her eyelids were getting heavy, despite the wrenching memories and the sound of Lacey’s snores behind her.

Waking up two mornings after that and finding Aidan gone had…it had felt like someone had sucked all the oxygen from the air and left her drowning far from any sea. She hadn’t wanted to admit he meant a damn thing to her, had convinced herself he
hadn’t
…that he couldn’t possibly….

They'd known each other less than seventy-two hours at that point, in which time they'd had a few amazing fucks and one near-death experience. What kind of ‘bond’ was that anyway?