Tormented by Darkness (12 page)

“You ungrateful little bitch.” Drandar stalked her, matching his advance with her retreat. “
I
created you.
I
gave you the gift of unending life. And yet you would seek to harm your own father.”

Rhiannon’s back hit the rough bark of an elm sapling. Blood trickled through her fingertips where she held them to her face. Her heart hammered in triple time. If ever there was a time for her twin to sense her emotions, it was now. She couldn’t stop Drandar alone, and if she failed to damage him enough so he’d flee, the ritual would forever be lost. Which meant one of the eight would never know freedom from Drandar’s wicked curse.

Where are you, Dáire?

Drandar’s hand shot out, his fingers grazing her hair. She ducked beneath his arm, gaining a few sacred spaces between them. But as she swiveled to keep her sire in her direct line of sight, her right foot hit a large protruding rock at a sideways angle. She stumbled.

As the ground rose up to meet her braced palms, her father’s knee thumped into her gut. Air rushed from her lungs, choking off her agonized cry. Her face hit the barren earth, where she lay still and gasping.

A hand wound painfully into her long hair. With a jerk, Drandar pulled her torso off the ground and bent his foul head close to hers. Cold, fetid breath washed across her cheek. “I will bathe in your blood—and his—if you go through with this, daughter.”

“We’ll…destroy you…first,” she wheezed.

Laughter rasped near her ear. “Not as long as Taran lives.”

Before Rhiannon could remind her father he would be reduced to an insignificant shell of himself if Taran was the only one who refused to accept mortality, a gunshot ricocheted through the clearing. Drandar’s soulless brown eyes widened, and his fingers released their painful hold on her hair. He tripped backward, his palm on his chest, partially covering a crimson stain just beneath his right shoulder.

Her father’s gaze flashed with rage. “He is mine!” he whispered as he turned from her.

Then, as Mick appeared in the corner of her peripheral vision, Drandar bolted into the heavy cover of trees.

“Rhiannon!” Leaves crunched as Mick raced across the clearing. The toes of his boots stopped near her cheek, and he crouched at her shoulder. One warm, heavy palm tentatively touched her back. “Rhiannon? Are you okay?”

The vise around her diaphragm let go, allowing her to answer with a hoarse, “Yes.”

“Oh, hell, baby.” Relief flooded his exhaled words. Slowly, gently, he slid an arm around her and aided her into a sitting position.

His dark eyes roamed her face, concern etched deeply into his handsome features. Rhiannon was quite certain he hadn’t meant to utter the endearment, but as he traced a fingertip over the cut on her cheek, she took comfort in the tenderness of his touch, the quiet utterance that revealed he cared for her in some fashion. She wasn’t just a means of forgetting his sorrow.

An oath whispered past Mick’s lips as he wound his arms around her and drew her into the sheltering warmth of his embrace. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner. I thought…” A tremor vibrated through him into her, cutting off his whispered words.

****

He’d thought she was dead. Mick tightened his hold on Rhiannon and tucked his face into her silken hair. He had cleared the trees, saw her lying on the ground motionless, and thought she was dead.

In twelve years of police work, he had never known such paralyzing fear.

A heartbeat was all the time it took to shatter all the barricades he’d erected, connect that fear with the trembling in his hands, and realize he loved her. A truth that made the tremors inside his gut seem like an earthquake in comparison to his shaking fingers. He didn’t want to love her, didn’t know how it had even happened. But it had, and she was wounded, and he’d been too far away to keep her safe.

He eased her out of his embrace with a tempered exhale. “I need to check the perimeter. See if I can find him. I’ll take you back to the tent and call the authorities.”

Rhiannon tangled her fingers into his shirt and gave a weak shake of her head. “No.”

The tension building inside Mick released in an unsteady chuckle. “Sweetheart, that’s my job.”

But as he gazed into her watery blue eyes, the blood trickling down her cheek hit him like a heavy fist to the sternum. A plea registered behind her gaze, one he instinctively knew she wouldn’t voice that begged him to stay with her. Very well, he wouldn’t leave her alone. He’d call the authorities, see what he could learn from her, and even though it completely contradicted every instinct he possessed, he’d sit with her until they told them they could leave.

Mick folded her close and eased to his feet, cradling her in his arms. Her head rested against his shoulder as he carried her through the dense foliage back to the campsite and the sagging tent he’d left behind. At the doorway, he eased her to her feet. She wobbled, winced as she pressed a hand to her cheek, but remained standing without his help.

He plucked his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, only to discover the weak signal he’d had before was now nonexistent. “Damn.” He tossed the useless gadget back onto the pile of their belongings. “We’ve got to go into town. I’ve lost service.”

“Mick?”

Her voice rang distantly, tolling the telltale vibration of shock. He swore again, all the more determined to get her out of the campsite and into town. Maybe even a hospital, though the injury to her cheek didn’t look as bad as it had on first glance.

“Mick, I need to sit down.”

Aw, shit. That dazed look on her pretty face couldn’t be anything
but
shock. He hurried to support her elbow and eased her to the ground, where she leaned against the thick peeling bark of a white birch. Her gaze scanned the overhanging limbs, touching the green-brown leaves that had refused to yield to approaching winter.

“Let me pack this up, Rhiannon. You need a doctor.”

She shook her head as her gaze drifted back to his. “I’m fine. We can’t leave here with my brothers coming. They’ll wonder and worry, and no one has signal up here.”

“We’ll leave them a damn note.” He raked a hand through his hair, his worry finally breaking through the surface, driving home what had just occurred. The reality of Rhiannon’s attack. The man he’d injured, but who was still out there.

“No,” she argued more forcefully. “I’ll be fine. I’m not leaving this tree.”

Like hell she wasn’t. He’d
put
her in that SUV if he had to. Mick jerked a tent stake out of the ground.

“I’m in love with you.”

Her quiet utterance froze his hands. Warmth coursed through his blood, pleasant, but stifling all the same. Silence hung between them as his throat inched into a narrow straw.

“I’m in love with you, and I need you to touch me. I don’t need a doctor, I don’t give a damn about that tent. Just…”

She trailed away, drawing his gaze over his shoulder to rest on her liquid blue stare. Something moved inside him then, something so deeply buried that the heavy shift stole the air from his lungs and left him feeling as if he’d plunged headlong into a bottomless chasm. He sank at a freefall, scared and exhilarated all at once. The unearthed stake in his grasp rolled off his fingers, rustling as it tumbled into dried grass.

“Just you, Mick,” she whispered.

Mick didn’t know who crawled between the short distance separating them, but Rhiannon’s mouth settled over his, grounding his fall. His hands fisted into her hair in a hold he knew was painful, but the urge to cling to all she was, all she offered, overruled the ability to soften his grasp. He couldn’t say he had ever been needed. Not like this. Not in a way he could taste, a way he felt in the urgent play of her hands and the tangle of her tongue. In her hands, he wasn’t a cop, wasn’t a false shell of himself, but he existed, flesh, bone, and blood. And needing her touch as much as she needed his.

He had thought she was dead. Thought for one unending span of time he would stand at her grave, as he had stood at Steve’s this morning.

He would have, but laying Rhiannon to rest would have killed him as well.

Mick dragged his mouth down the side of her throat at the same time he dropped his hands to her sweatshirt. His lips worked lower, as his hands pushed the heavy cotton up, until fingers and mouth met at the swell of creamy skin above the satin edge of her bra. He trailed the tip of his tongue across the high rise of her breasts, sliding his hands around to unclasp the strap that barred him from what he most desired. When the fabric gave, he nudged it aside to draw one pert nipple into his mouth.

Rhiannon’s nails pinched into his shoulders. “Mick,” she whispered. Her head fell back, long red hair dusting the ground, a pleasured moan sliding past her parted lips.

Chapter Fourteen

Mick’s mouth seared across Rhiannon’s skin, his tongue drawing a trail of fire as he worked his way toward her opposite breast. Warm lips closed around her nipple. When he sucked, she felt the pull all the way down to her womb. The teasing of his tongue left her squirming to get closer, to feel the solid weight of his body against hers. Within hers.

Strong hands spanned across her back, holding her upright. Without them, she would topple over. She hung on to his shoulders, already putty beneath his masterful mouth.

Though she hadn’t intended for it to, his energy melded with hers, fueling the healing spell she had whispered when he set her down. The frizzle of activity as her cells mended back together added another layer to the restlessness building inside her.

As if Mick felt the same relentless pulsations that tripped through her veins, he released her nipple, letting it slide from between his lips with a subtle, wet pop. The breeze danced across her damp flesh, and she shivered as his intensely dark eyes lifted to hers.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into, Rhiannon,” he murmured huskily. “I’m not good like you.” His hands dropped to the button of her jeans even as he tried to point out her faulty logic. “I don’t know how to let things go that belong to me.”

His words, the feeling they revealed, sent goose bumps rolling across her skin. She shimmied her hips, allowing him to ease the denim down to her knees. “You gave me the journal.”

He tugged, and her jeans slid off her legs. His hands framed her thighs, inching upward, his gaze following the path of his palms. “I knew I’d get it back.”

Rhiannon leaned backward, slowly lowering herself to the ground and parting her legs. She swallowed hard, searching for words between the pleasant friction of his palms and the anxiousness of knowing what came next. Boldly, she challenged, “Because you knew
I
would be yours.”

“Yes,” he murmured as he arched over her body and dusted a kiss on the inside of her thigh. “And I’ll kill anyone foolish enough to try and take you from me.”

Before she could fully process the magnanimity of that promise, his tongue swirled across her central spot of pleasure, arcing her hips off the ground. A gasp tore from her throat. For an instant, she lay paralyzed by sensation. Then, as shocking pleasure ebbed into sweet languor, she speared her fingers through his thick short hair and relaxed, surrendering to the gentle invasion of his mouth.

Mick’s strong hands slipped beneath her buttocks to angle her pelvis into the steady lapping rhythm. He teased her aroused flesh, stoking slow-burning coals of desire into a budding inferno. Her legs fell apart, her fingers dug into his scalp. When he edged the tip of his tongue inside her, ecstasy sent another cry springing from her throat. Pleasure pulsed, and the need for climax built to painful limits.

He tormented her, refusing to give her that release and trailed his mouth over her thighs, across her belly button, working a slow path of torment away from her aching flesh. As sensation subsided, Rhiannon floated back to earth, dimly recognizing his hands had left her body as well. When full awareness returned, his hard body pressed into hers, the tip of his cock nestled against her wet folds.

She lifted heavy eyelashes to gaze at the harshly angled lines of his face. Her arms wound around his thickly muscled neck.

His onyx stare burned into her soul. “I mean that, Rhiannon. I won’t let you go. Ever.” The sharp edge of warning gave way to a raspy pull of breath as he pushed forward and slid inside her feminine depths. He closed his eyes, his body straining under some pressure she couldn’t see, but felt in the tightness of his muscles. “I…can’t.”

Mick’s mouth fastened on hers, claiming her in a kiss that connected with her soul. In centuries of existence, Rhiannon had known the love of family, of friends, but never the love of a man. She felt it now. It burned through the stroke of his tongue, saturated into her with each deep thrust of his hips.

And that feeling consumed her beyond reason. It turned desire into something priceless, and ecstasy into a treasure.

Words ceased their meaning, and Rhiannon yielded to the deeper language of their bodies. As she met his demanding thrusts that sought to connect them beyond all physical means, her chest constricted in time with the clenching of her womb. Pleasure spiraled her beyond mortal limits, into the realm of her ancestors, where life became timeless and existence was eternal. Where Mick and she existed together and the darkness in her soul could never tear them apart.

Climax stole over her, not in one storm of breathless sensation, but as a pinpoint of light that became brighter and brighter until it engulfed her completely. She cried out against splendor, the intensity of feeling too much. Too overwhelming.

Dimly, she heard Mick’s hoarse shout, recognized the slowing of his body. His comfortable weight sank into her, pulling her from that otherworldly place. Bringing her back into the sheltering envelope of his arms.

His mouth feathered across hers. “Fuck,” he exhaled as he braced his weight on his arms. He closed his eyes, head bent, breath falling across her breasts. “I don’t want to scare you.”