Smoke and Mirrors (20 page)

“What’s that?” she panted.

“To reach a bed before I start fucking you. You reduce me to a randy teenager.”

She wrapped her legs around him under the coat and wriggled. “It doesn’t seem much of a reduction to me.”

“I’m going to think about that very carefully and work out if it’s an insult or not.” He pulled back and pushed hard inside her. “Right after this…”

Chapter Fourteen

He’d been desperate enough for her before she came so quickly. He’d barely entered her when she convulsed around him, and quite aside from the exquisite physical pleasures of that, her urgent passion enchanted him. That she was so turned on by him sent what was left of the blood in his brain surging to join the rest in his cock. There was no way he could make it last after that, and he didn’t. Not the first time, which was quick and frantic and explosive.

He was almost there before he even threw off his coat, and his shirt only got unfastened because Nell did it in order to run her wonderful, sensitive hands over his torso and rub her beautiful breasts against his chest. It was all too much for Rodion. The master of control lost it utterly. Somehow, at the last moment, he managed to drag her with him, sealing his joy with a deeper satisfaction.

He rolled onto his back, gathering her up in one arm so that her head lay on his chest. “God, I’ve wanted to do that so much. Ever since the last time we did it.”

He felt her smile against his chest. “You always say what I want to hear. About sex, I mean. You’re very—open.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not so far.” She dropped a kiss on his chest, licked up a drop of sweat that trickled there. “I’m just not used to it.”

“You mean no one else has ever told you how delectable your body is, and how much they want to do very wicked things to it?”

She shook her head.

“You haven’t been with many men, have you?” he said. He liked that about her too. She was picky. And for whatever reason, she’d picked him. “Or at least many of the right men.”

She raised her head and gazed at him quizzically, her hair falling forward over his chest and shoulders. “Like a thief wanted in several countries by both police and crime lords?”

“And the Guardian,” he pointed out in the interests of truth. “I didn’t say I was right for everyone.”

She didn’t laugh, just stared at him for a long moment. “I thought about you all the time,” she whispered. “I’ve never known anyone like you.”

There were a few funny, self-deprecating rejoinders to that, but they stuck in his throat, because he realised how difficult a thing it was for her to admit. And when she kissed him with slow, aching tenderness, her lips trembled on his, and he felt the dampness of salt tears.

A woman who wept when he made love to her had never been high on Rodion’s list of wants. And yet Nell’s tears moved him because he recognised instinctively that they didn’t betoken misery of any kind. The opposite, in fact. He’d aroused profound emotion as well as passion in this woman, and it scared the shit out of him.

A man like him couldn’t do commitment or long-term. He certainly couldn’t do forever. He shouldn’t even be thinking the word, and yet when he saw her tears, for some reason he thought of it with a stab of yearning as well as fear. If he ever did imagine it, it would be with a woman like her.

Who’s hiding, now, Kosar?
Tell it as it is.
Not a woman
like
her. It would be with
her
. Nell Black.

But that was fantasy. There was no forever beyond rescuing his treasure and ensuring their safety. That didn’t mean he couldn’t give her a night of happiness and take a little for himself. So he kissed her back, kissed her tears and made her laugh, while he shrugged off the rest of his annoyingly clinging clothes and lay naked with her at last, skin to skin. He loved her softness, the way his slightest touch induced a quivering response.

She said, “I went to your village and spoke to an old lady there who tried to help me focus my dreams.”

“Raissa Ivanova,” he said. His defences were down. He wasn’t prepared for the rush of ridiculous homesickness. He couldn’t go home. Probably not ever. “Did it work?” he managed.

She touched his forehead, smoothing out the frown, as if she knew. Which maybe she did. “I need practice,” she said ruefully. With both hands, she smoothed his hair back from his face. “I saw two children asleep in an attic. I think it’s an old building. But there’s always music. Like club music. That’s why I talked my cousin into going to the nightclub.”

“Do you know how many nightclubs there are in all of Russia and the republics?”

“But you’re here. When your lecherous Jesus friend told me to wait for you in Zavrek, I knew you’d come here for a reason.”

“I might have wanted to fuck you senseless,” he said, sweeping his hand down the silken skin of her back and hips and sliding it between her thighs. Her breath caught. So did his. She was deliciously wet down there. He paused. “Lecherous Jesus? Nikolai? Did that bastard try to seduce you? In that place?”

She wriggled, and he began to move his fingers around her soft, damp folds, gently caressing.

“Hardly. He was going through the motions—just to see what I would do, I suspect. Weirdly enough, I liked him. Probably because he was the least scary person in the place.”

“Actually he isn’t,” Rodion told her, circling the swollen nub at her centre. She arched into his hand with a gasp of pleasure, and he couldn’t help smiling. He wanted to make her come again. He loved to see her come. “But you were quite safe with him. I wouldn’t have let you go otherwise.”

“
Let
me!” she all but spluttered in outrage. “Do you imagine you can stop me going where I want to?”

But her hips were off the bed, circling to the rhythm of his stroking fingers, and he smiled as he reached with his free hand for another condom. “We’ve talked about distraction before,” he reminded her, and she made a funny moaning sound somewhere between laughter and pleasure.

Entering her this time was like coming home. And this time, he made it last.

****

Musty, airless attic room; sleeping children; music, distant but relentless. It was all familiar. Except that the children whimpered in their sleep. The boy’s eyes kept flying open, blinking hard as if he were trying to stay awake and couldn’t. His eyes closed again as he drifted back into uneasy sleep. Beside him, the girl threw off her dirty blanket, shaking her head from side to side, making heartbreaking noises of distress.

Nell was dreaming. She couldn’t put her arms around them and comfort them.

I’ll tell him,
she tried to say, although no sound came out.
I’ll tell Rodion
.

The girl’s eyes flew open, staring right into hers. Then her eyelids fluttered shut.

Concentrate. The window.
Covered with a nailed-down black blind, several feet too high for a human to reach. She concentrated on it, hard, until it came closer and she could make out the tiny gaps where daylight could come through. Only it was night. She focused on the biggest gap, pushed hard until it was as if her eye were pressed up to the space. Dark navy sky, and stars. Down to roofs across the city. A tiny glimpse, unrecognizable. She tried to look directly down, fighting, straining—and suddenly, the reflection of a woman’s face gazed back at her from the window.

She tried to spin around and found she couldn’t move. But the woman’s smile wasn’t unkind. She was beautiful, ageless, and hauntingly familiar.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the reflection said gently. “We’ve met before. I’m your guardian, the Guardian of all the gifted. I was too angry with Rodion at the time to see your gift.”

Don’t think about Rodion.
Even dreaming, she was terrified of giving him away. Hopefully, the Guardian would attribute the screaming of her nerves to her own sudden appearance.

“I’m looking for his brother and sister,” Nell blurted. “Can you help me? They’re gifted too.”

“When it’s time, I’ll help them.”

“When will that be?” Nell demanded.

“When it can be accomplished in secret.”

“They’re alone and frightened!”

“I know, and I grieve for them.” She did. There was profound sadness in the Guardian’s voice, in her large, fathomless eyes. “But my burden is to care for all the gifted. I can’t risk them all by spiriting away two who could always be found again. The secret would spread beyond the evil one.”

“The evil one? The Bear?”

“He’s the biggest threat to all of you. Holding the children keeps him quiet because he thinks it makes him safe.”

Apparently, it does.
She didn’t speak the words aloud, but the Guardian may have picked up some of her anger, because her smile was sad.

“I comfort them when I can…” The Guardian sighed. “I carry a heavy burden.”

Don’t think of Rodion.

“Then help
me
,” Nell pleaded. “My gift would be useless in breaking them out of here. But I could do it by human means, if I could just
find
them.”

“You’re impatient. Like
him
. I’ll deal with it, when the time is right. Be at peace, child. Sleep.”

She wasn’t ready to leave yet, but she couldn’t hold on to the dream, and as the window and the Guardian’s quiet, sad face faded before her eyes, she woke up next to Rodion.

He was asleep, his hand thrown up on the pillow beside his head. Distracted from the dangers and wonders of the dream, she smiled at the sight of him bathed in the glow of the tatty lamp they’d never got around to switching off. If a man could be beautiful, he was that man. And with his curved eyelids and long, pale lashes hiding the hardness of his eyes, he looked as he might without the constant calculations and anxieties that drove his strange, dangerous life.

Write the dream
. Hastily, she slipped out of bed and tiptoed among her strewn clothes until she found her handbag. Finding notebook and pen, she grabbed up Rodion’s shirt for warmth and pushed her arms into it before sitting on the floor with her legs drawn under her and scribbling down everything she could recall from the latest dream. She liked sitting in the same room as him, writing, remembering, listening to the sound of his breath, inhaling the elusive scent of him that clung to the shirt around her body.

The door opened without warning, and a woman in pyjamas stuck her head round the door. “Rodya?” she said low.

Anna? In a
brothel
? What the hell was this place?

Nell didn’t move, but inevitably Anna’s gaze fell on her where she sprawled on the floor, pen poised over the page. Nell suspected she looked guilty as well as stunned, although she had no reason.

Anna’s expression was unreadable. “You’re back,” she observed.

“I bumped into him last night.”

“I know. I heard you.”

Nell flushed, and Anna gave a slightly twisted smile. She glanced at Rodion on the bed, then closed the door and came in. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Writing down my dreams.”

“Nikolai said you’d dreamed of our treasure.”

Nell hesitated, then pushed the book toward her. Anna knelt and picked it up.

“This is good,” she said in surprise.

“Just not good enough,” Nell said ruefully. “But I feel I’m getting there. Only…”

“Only what?” Anna prompted her when she hesitated.

“I’ve got no clue how far in the future these images are. They could be years ahead, or tonight, for all I know.”

“Or now,” Anna pointed out. “Dreams can be of the present too.”

“And the past?” Nell asked curiously.

“Sometimes.”

“Then I’ve no idea what I’m dreaming.” Nell dragged one frustrated hand through her hair. “I’m sorry. I never meant to give you false hope.”

Anna sat back, leaning against the bed, with her knees up under her chin. “I don’t think you are. You seem to have remarkable focus. I think you’re dreaming of what you want to. Of
when
you want to.”

“I hope so,” Nell said doubtfully. She found herself gazing at the other woman, who lifted her eyebrows quizzically. “Do you have a gift?” Nell blurted.

“I have one. Though it’s not as spectacular as Rodion’s. I can see the dead. What happened last night?”

Nell, slightly flummoxed, allowed the change of subject and told Anna about the club and the attack outside and how they’d come in to the bar downstairs to wait and see if they were still being followed.

“At least that’s why I
thought
we came into the bar,” she added. “But I see you’re both living here. Rodion made out it was some kind of brothel.”

“It is,” Anna said mildly. “Great hiding place full of monkeys seeing no evil and speaking no evil. Still, I don’t like that this mugger recognised Rodion. Word always gets out in this cesspit, and we need to keep the secret that he’s alive until he’s completely recovered.”

Nell frowned. “Recovered from what?”

“He didn’t tell you, did he? I suppose that’s good. If you didn’t notice, he’s probably healed.”

“Notice what?” Nell demanded.

“Burns. A stiffness that comes from internal and external pain.”

Nell closed her mouth. So obvious and yet it never entered her head. He’d told her he could protect himself from fire, that he’d used the Guardian’s own power to survive. He just hadn’t mentioned what it had cost him.

“Was it very bad?” Nell whispered.

Anna nodded. “I thought he’d die. We all did.” Anna looked her in the eye, as if to see what she could stand. “When it all went tits-up, we drove off looking for him. He was easy to spot, lit up like a bonfire. It took the last of his strength to throw himself in the car. Ilya and Boris wrapped him in a blanket, and the fire went out. But the damage was done. He was burned from the inside out. I can only imagine the agony he endured for days on end… He could heal the worst of his external injuries himself because of his fire gift, but we had to get to Nikolai to heal the rest of him. It took time to get to him.”

Nell closed her eyes. She felt as if everything inside her was shaking for Rodion’s agony. The agony he’d never even mentioned. Even his skin had borne no scars. As if the fire could never really damage him, just make him suffer…

“Nikolai,” she managed to say. “Lecherous Jesus?”

Anna laughed, and she found she could open her eyes after all.

From the bed, Rodion loomed up bare-chested, and, in spite of the company and the horror of what she’d just heard, Nell’s heart lurched with fresh desire.

“Can’t you two go and party somewhere else?” he growled.