Colin: Her Warlock Protector Book 4 (5 page)

“You're kidding me,” she whispered. “This is the art museum?”
 

“It is,” Colin agreed. “Do you want to do a quick wander?”

SELENE COULDN'T ANSWER. She could only walk with wide eyes through the enormous galleries lined with precious works of art.

“This is amazing,” she said quietly. “I never thought that I would be able to see this place without a mob.”

“Well, at this time of day, the great works of art only belong to the night guardsmen and those who can teleport,” Colin said with a smile.

She knew that logically, she was still in Chicago. There was a hum to the city that never quite went away, but in the halls of the art museum, it felt like there was nothing more to the universe than the endless halls filled with some of the most beautiful works that humans had ever created.
 

“Am I boring you?” she said, glancing back at him. “I imagine this has got to be an old trick for you.”

Colin's laugh was deep and sweet.

“Not at all. One of the most interesting benefits about my power is that I can go almost anywhere I like. I just have to have a good idea of where that might be.”

“So you don't necessarily have to have been there before?” she asked curiously.

“No, but I get in trouble if I haven't been there before.” Colin shook his head wryly. “A friend needed me to come and join him in the catacombs of Paris. I had seen photos and maps. I thought I knew what I was doing.”

“And I take it you didn't?”
 

“I didn't realize that there were two types of Parisian catacombs. There are the amazingly beautiful cathedral spaces where the tourists go, and there are centuries-old subterranean tunnels where a wide variety of lost, homeless and downright unsocial people go. I appeared in this room that only had an exit that was two feet high. Someone threw a smoke bomb at me.”

Selene gasped, and Colin laughed.

“As you can see, I am fine. It was just a harrowing few moments before I remembered the past seven hundred years of my history, and got out of there.”

“So much life lived,” she murmured, and he shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable.

“You'd be surprised at how little I learned. Though I will say that it's nice to see her again.”

They had wandered into a tall open room filled with marble statues. There was something eerily lifelike about them, frozen in their steps while the world changed around them. Selene looked over to where Colin was gazing fondly at the statue of a little girl. She was dressed in Roman robes, and her round nose and cloud of hair marked her as unmistakably of African descent. She could not have been more than seven, and she looked up with a gaze that was both curious and unafraid. There was a little doll carried in one plump arm, and the other hand reached up as if to touch something amazing.

“She's very beautiful,” Selene said softly. The sculptor had copied something essential in his work. The statue seemed to breathe.

“That she was. She was a little girl who used to run around in the plaza where I lived for a little while. She ran errands for her mother. The sculptor, a Venetian by the name of Verrone, paid her every day to come pose. She liked his monkey and his parrot, but she didn't care much for the robe he made her wear. He did sketches of her in her play clothes too, and her mother treasured them forever.”

There was a silence between them, heavy and thoughtful but not painful. She realized now that she was in the presence of someone who had lived for almost a thousand years, and there was a weight to it. She started to say something, but then they both looked up to hear footsteps approaching. The echoes of the place were so loud that they could not tell what direction the guard was coming from, and with a muffled curse, Colin jumped up into a narrow alcove.

Selene was just starting to panic when he reached down for her.

“Come on,” he whispered, and with no other option, she allowed him to pull her up with him.

A second later, a beam of light cut across the gallery, and a night watchman strode slowly through the shadows, whistling a tune.

Selene went as still as one of the marble statues that dotted the gallery. The watchman seemed to look over each one. Though she appreciated the fact that he seemed to love good art as much as she or Colin, he was certainly taking his time.
 

 
Colin's hand around her waist prevented her from tumbling to the floor, and when that stopped being her primary concern, she could feel other things as well. She could feel how hard his body was pressed against hers in the tiny alcove. She could feel his warm breath rustling her coppery hair. She could feel his thumb trace small circles into the tender skin of her flank. She couldn't tell whether he was doing it because he was deliberately trying to tease her or whether he was merely restless because the night watchman had such a serious interest in the marbles, but it was driving her crazy. She tilted her head back a little, and she found that she could feel his breath on her cheek. The thought sent a shiver of pure pleasure through her body. She had seen how beautiful his lips were. Giving in to the tiniest bit of temptation, she moved her face forward a little. She wasn't looking for a kiss, but she felt a deep and wonderful sense of pleasure when her lips just barely brushed his chin. There was just the smallest amount of stubble. She could smell his cologne, she could feel the way his body tightened. His breath came slightly heavier, and for a moment, Selene stood poised on the edge of something that she didn't understand. She wondered if she was going to kiss him. She wondered if he was going to kiss her. Then Colin exhaled.

“He's gone.”
 

For a moment, Selene didn't understand. But when she turned, she could see that they were alone with marble statues. One of a woman rising out of sea foam seemed to be staring right at her. The woman's smile, slight, humorous and knowing, made her blush. To hide her embarrassment, Selene jumped down on the tile. After a moment, she looked back up at Colin, who was standing in the alcove, for all the world like another statue himself.
 

 
“Well? Are you coming down?”

“What were you thinking just a moment ago?”

There was a tease laced through his voice, something that lit a warmth inside Selene that made her blush again.

“That I didn't want to get taken to jail because we broke into the art museum?”

“You know I wouldn't have let that happen,” he said airily. “And I don't think you were thinking about prison at all, not for a little bit there.”

Sometimes, Selene's sharp tongue ran away with her. It would likely get her into trouble one of these days. Apparently it had decided that she was not handling this all that well on her own.

“Well, why don't you show me what you think I was thinking about?” she asked.

Colin grinned. Like a hunting tiger, he leapt down from the alcove to land mere inches in front of her, and she was confronted with the delicious size and shape of him all over again. She was a petite woman, and he overwhelmed her. The grin on his face was frankly predatory, and she found herself sliding backwards

“Where are you going, Selene?” he purred. “I thought you wanted me to show you.”

“Hmm, I'm thinking about it.”
 

She backed up, and he followed her. In just a moment, she knew that she was going to let him catch up with her. But then a loud alarm started to wail. Selene nearly jumped out of her skin. Only too late did she realize that she must have crossed some kind of laser tripwire.

Colin cursed, and she instantly wrapped herself around him again. They appeared in the middle of a tropical jungle.

“Did…did you take us to South America?”

Above them, a bird twittered a happy song, and Colin grinned.
 

“Nope, it's a glassed-in garden. Pretty though, huh?”

 
“It's beautiful.”

The lighting of the greenhouse was kept low, and as she ventured closer to a tree that was surely too large to be part of a mere greenhouse, she realized it was meant to evoke twilight. She turned to look at Colin, who stayed where he was, watching her with a certain smug look.

“What?” she asked, suddenly feeling exposed and naked.

“You,” he said simply.

“Me what?”

“I can take you anywhere, and it wouldn't phase you for more than a moment, would it?”
 

She laughed lightly.

“I'm sure you could. There are places I don't want to go. Wouldn't want to go to jail, I guess. I wasn't really fond of southern Illinois for some reason.”

“But, say, Death Valley?”

“Hell, if you could promise to bring me back, I would give you a tip.” She paused for a moment.
 
“Can you?”

“Take you to Death Valley? I'd rather not. You might be of an adventurous spirit, but I almost died there a few centuries ago, and I prefer greener spots.”

“An adventurous spirit. I think I like the sound of that.”

Colin eyed her with something like wariness.

“You have a look in your eye I think I am beginning to mistrust,” he said, and she grinned.

The adrenaline from the near miss at the museum and the utterly strange night she was having made her a little giddy. That was the only explanation for why she stepped closer to him—and then closer again. The humidity of the greenhouse after the chill of the museum made her feel languorous. She reached out a slender finger towards the pin on his collar.

“This means that your a colonel, yes?” she asked, and there was a huskiness in her voice that made his eyes widen briefly.

“So I'm told,” he allowed. “At least everyone of a lower rank listens to me. So it counts for something.”

“Does that mean I have to listen to you too?” she asked, her voice as innocent as a baby bird's cheep.
 

He raised an eyebrow at her, but she could see the bead of sweat that ran down the side of his face. She liked to think that it was more than just the heat. He slouched back on one leg, crossing his arms across his broad chest, and looked at her with a faint smile.

“I would prefer it. I'm always working in your best interests.”

“You sound like a cop.”
 

The silence that fell between them was fraught, and for a moment she wondered what it would be like to kiss him, just to lean him against that big unlikely looking tree and give him the kiss that she had been thinking about since she met him in that alley.

“Whatever you're thinking, don't,” he said warningly.
 

She grinned, and she was about to speak when another alarm went off. Their eyes flew to the camera that had spotted them, and Colin grabbed her around the waist again.

 
When she opened her eyes, she saw an endless indigo night around them, and below her, the ground was cracked hard. The heat hit her with a furnace blast, and when she looked up, there were more stars in the deep sky than she had ever seen before.

“Don't get comfortable, but you wanted to see it.”

“This is Death Valley?” she cried, staring around, and in the next moment, his arm was around her again, and they were gone.

This time they appeared in the penthouse that she had commandeered. Colin dropped to the couch with a deep breath. She settled into his lap as if she had been doing it for years.

“THAT WAS AMAZING,” Selene breathed, and to his delight, her eyes shone like new gold coins. “I can't believe you can do that!”

“Believe me when I say that I couldn't believe it either at first,” he said with a chuckle. “Imagine me as a lanky kid who suddenly found himself half a county away with no pants at all, and you have a close idea of what that was like.”

Selene laughed in surprise at his story, and he found himself wishing she would never stop. She had a soft and husky laugh, and some part of him warmed to it in a way that he had warmed to nothing else in the past few decades.

“You poor thing,” she said with a soft teasing smile. “Who knew that that lanky pantsless kid would be so powerful? I can't believe that you can actually talk after all of that.”

“Frankly I'm surprised too,” he admitted.

A silence fell over them. He continued tentatively.

“You should be exhausted as well, but you're not. We're helping each other.”

Selene made a noise of disbelief, but when she made to stand, he took her hand gently in his and kept her in his lap.

“You can feel it too, can't you?” he asked softly. “You know that we're making each other stronger. It's something that witches and warlocks can do for one another.”

“That's an old wives tale.”

“Well, you'd be surprised how often the old wives are right. We're connected, Selene, we're–”

Her lips came down over his, stopping his words. Though he knew that he shouldn't let her distract him, the kiss was one he had been aching for what felt like his whole life.
 

Colin closed his eyes and drank in the passion that poured from her.

SELENE DIDN'T KNOW what she was doing.

That's what she told herself, but if she were being more honest, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was kissing a man who felt like water in the desert. She was touching a man who left trails of fire along her bare skin.

Outside the sky was lightening minute by minute, and she knew suddenly that she couldn't bear the light. The light meant that there was a new day dawning, a day when she had to decide once and for all what she was going to do about this troublesome man. A lifetime of hiding and dodging caught up with her. In that moment, she knew she did not want to be seen.
 

She broke the kiss, drawing a frustrated sound from Colin, but then she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom. The drapes held out the light, and the soft glow of the lamp gave everything a rich and luxurious glow. The bed seemed to go on for miles, and when she pressed him to lie down on it, he looked up at her solemnly.

“What do you think you're doing?” he whispered.