Touch If You Dare (27 page)

Reina powdered the nearly copulating duo and they both passed out, the Godfather facedown on Natalie’s half-exposed breast, her hands frozen in his hair.

“Damn, girl, I’m so glad you have your mojo back.” Trinity shoved the Godfather aside and dragged Natalie across the pavement. “Hurry! The flames are getting lower. Blaine’s running out of steam.”

Jarvis hooked Reina under his arm, raised his sword, and charged Augustus. Jarvis’s skin was burning, sizzling, crackling with fire, and he hadn’t appeared to notice that Augustus no longer had Reina or that the assassin was sitting on his butt, trying to heal the sword wound. He was going for the kill anyway, and that would deprive Reina of the chance to cleave Augustus’s soul properly.

“Stop, you crazy fuck!” Nigel jumped in Jarvis’s path and braced himself for the charge. “We’re not letting you die, you bastard!”

“I’m ready. Bring him over here.” Trinity was at the geranium with Natalie.

Um, yeah, sort of hard to do when she was being carted along like arm candy on a murder mission. She punched his ribs. “Jarvis! Stop!”

But he didn’t. Couldn’t. He was too far gone.

Blaine leapt over the wall of the flames and landed beside Nigel just as Jarvis plowed into them. The two warriors held their ground and threw Jarvis off them, somehow managing to avoid being plunged to death by the sword. Jarvis careened backwards. He regained his balance and prepared to launch himself at them again.

“Mother of hell.” Nigel fisted his blades. “He’s gonna go. Fuck!”

“No! He’s not going to explode!” Reina shoved her hand into his face and blasted him with her most deadly powder.

He swore, then dropped to the sidewalk. Unconscious, and still intact. Holy crap. It worked on him? Wow. When a girl got her mojo back, she really got it back. Nothing like fearing the loss of the one man who’d made her come alive in the last twenty years to make a girl step up.

“Nice work, Reina.” Blaine and Nigel hauled him toward Trinity and the geranium. “Get him out of here.”

Reina rushed over as his friends dumped him next to Trinity. “I’ve got him.” God only knew how long the dust would hold him. She needed to be there when he woke up. “Go help Cam,” she told them. “He can’t die. And please, detain Augustus for me. I need to kill him.”

“Both Jarvis and Natalie need my healing.” Nigel took up residence next to Natalie. “I’m going with you.”

But Blaine looked right at Reina. “Can you really take care of him?” His question was loaded with threat of what he would do if she was wrong. Loyalty to his friend that would be enforced at all costs, no matter how much his fiancée loved her.

She met his gaze. “Yes.”

He nodded once, accepting her words as truth. “We stay behind.” He jerked his chin at Nigel. “We need to clean up this mess.”

Blaine turned and headed off after Cam, but Nigel didn’t move. He just stood there, staring, his face wretched as his gaze flicked between Natalie and Jarvis.

Reina was shocked by the anguish on his face. Where was the cool, collected artist who was never rattled by anything? Was it all a facade? Because right now, Nigel looked like a warrior haunted by hells that had no words.

Reina touched his arm. “I swear I can do more for him than you can. The best thing you can do for him is to save Cameron, right?”

Nigel swore under his breath. “Yeah, yeah.” But he didn’t move. He just stood there.

“Touch Jarvis,” Trinity ordered Reina. “We need to all be connected when my mom transports us.”

Reina grabbed his hand and reached for her friend. The women touched fingers. “Now, Mom,” Trinity said.

Reina had a split second to see Augustus racing toward her, and she went sick with the thought that she didn’t have her sickle anymore.

And then they were gone.

***

Reina hurried down the stairs to the basement cells the Fleming family had erected years ago to contain family members racing toward their deedub high.

She peeked in at Natalie, who was still safely asleep in the first cell. Two hits by death powder in less than five minutes was taking its toll, and Reina was okay with that. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Keep Natalie asleep and she couldn’t escape, right?

It was Jarvis she was worried about.

Reina slipped down the hall to the farthest enclosure. Jarvis’s arms were chained above his head, and he was still unconscious. Trinity had insisted that he go under lockdown until the men got back, because the two women alone would never be able to contain him once he woke up.

Reina didn’t like it. Not after his years of imprisonment. And she didn’t think the chains or cell would hold anyway. As soon as they’d gotten him locked up, Trinity had gone upstairs to track down Blaine and Nigel and find out what had happened after the women had left.

Jarvis’s hands were a dark purple, and his body was twitching even in its comatose state. “You do not have permission to die yet,” she commanded.

He twitched again, and the purple crept up his wrists in sheer defiance of her orders.

That was it.

She was going in.

She grabbed the handle of the heavy steel door, braced her left foot on the wall, and hauled as hard as she could. Her muscles strained and sweat trickled down her brow, but it finally creaked open.

She stepped inside the cell, into a sauna that was at least twenty degrees hotter than the hallway. The hot emotion of hate was changing his environment, bleeding off him. She could feel it pricking her skin, like millions of invisible thumbtacks. “Jarvis?”

His body began to twitch and his eyes flew open, blind and unseeing. His eyes rolled back in his head and his body began to convulse.

“Jarvis! It’s me! Reina—”

An inhuman shriek of such horror, such suffering, and such
fury
ripped out of Jarvis’s throat. He fought the chains, screaming as if he were being skinned alive. Blood streamed from Jarvis’s wrists and ankles as he yanked at the chains. He charged and was jerked off his feet by the chains. His head slammed back against the steel with a brutal crack.

“Stop it! This is not the way for you to go!” She bolted across the cell and threw her arms around his neck, pinning herself to his writhing body as he staggered to his feet again. “You’re not hate!” she shouted over his screams, nearly losing her grip in all the blood. “You’re still in there! I know it!” She wrapped her legs around his waist, clinging to him as he bellowed again, clearly not listening to her sage and loving advice.

She grabbed his hair, forced his face down to hers, and kissed him.

He didn’t even notice. He wasn’t even holding onto her. He was still fighting his chains, battling for freedom, trying to rip the world apart. Hello? Where was the ego-inducing fall-on-his-knees response to her kiss?

He was being consumed by hate, but she knew that there was a good man inside that body. She’d seen it in the way he’d protected her, in his determination to find his brother. She was not going to let hate take this man. Not this way. He deserved better.

Hadn’t he told her that the opposite of hate was love? That the trick was to convert hate to love? That was his brother’s specialty?

Screw Cameron-the-unhelpful. She knew love. Yeah, Jarvis was too crazed to respond to poetry or candlelight, but he was a man, wasn’t he? Men were
never
too insane for sex. And since men and women always confused sex with love, it might just work.

It was time to bring out the girls.

She pulled back from him and ripped her shirt off. His eyes were unseeing, blindly staring past her at some demon she couldn’t see, the one coming for him. She tugged her jeans off, her hands shaking. More skin, more skin. He needed skin.

His sword was pulsating with purple and black smog. He screamed again, sweat streaming down his temples. The veins were standing out on his neck, and he was the epitome of power, of strength, of fury.

He was everything she needed right now, and she was keeping him. But first, she had to get him naked, and she had to do it before he accidentally killed one of them.

“Okay, nappy time, big guy.” She waggled her fingers at him, tapping him with just a wee bit of powder. Enough to give her two minutes.

He shuddered and sagged to the floor. The chains kept his heavily muscled arms stretched awkwardly above his head, tweaking his shoulders horribly.

The silence was deafening in the small room. She swallowed, suddenly nervous about what she was going to do. Did she really have that much faith in him, and in her?

She thought of the way he’d kissed her so desperately in the woods, how he’d come back to himself after their connection. It had happened again and again. Yes, he’d never been like this, but they’d never taken things as far as they could.

The connection between them was beyond the explainable, but she’d felt its strength and power in every fiber of her spirit. This would work. They could do it. He would never walk away from her, and she wasn’t going to abandon him.

She wiped her clammy hands on her bare thighs and then reached for the chain buckled around his wrist. “Don’t prove me wrong, Jarvis. I don’t want either of us to die.”

Then she unhooked his chains.

***

“It’s okay, Jarvis. Everything is okay.” Reina frantically stroked Jarvis’s chest as he struggled to regain consciousness. She expected him to leap to his feet in another rage, but his heart rate calmed and his breathing quieted. He was still out.

She still had time.

Desperate now, knowing she had only seconds, she tugged his shirt over his head. His muscles were bunched, and a light smattering of dark hair covered his chest. A few scars, probably from a time before he became immortal under Angelica’s care. The rest of him was flawless. A warrior who had healed every injustice done to him. No evidence, except those in his heart.

He shifted under her, and his face contorted as if he were fighting demons inside his head. Which, of course, he was.

The sands were falling too quickly through the hourglass.

She pulled off his boots and tossed them aside, then went for the button of his jeans. Unfastened, unzipped, disrobed. Not nearly as elegantly as the words implied, but hey, naked was naked.

She bit her lip as she studied his massive body strung out over the floor. Should she re-chain him before he woke up?

No. He’d been imprisoned his whole life, and she knew that taking choices away made everything worse.

She would have to trust that she could do it.

She let out her breath and straddled him. As her thighs wrapped around his hips, she shuddered at the feel of so much skin against hers. It felt right, so right. Despite the purplish discoloration spreading out from his palms to the rest of his body, of course. “Okay, Jarvis, let’s make this happen.”

His head flew back, his body convulsed, and a terrifying bellow ripped through the air.

“Yikes!” She threw her arms around his neck, anchored her legs around his hips, and hung on as he bucked and raged. “Hey! I’m naked, for heaven’s sake! You better start appreciating it, because I haven’t taken the time to get naked with a man since I watched my third sister die!”

She fisted his hair, yanked him close, and kissed him again.

He struggled to get free, but he didn’t have his full strength yet, and he couldn’t get away from her loving affections. She kissed him harder, and she shuddered when her nipples brushed over his bare chest.

In her dreams, her reentry into the world of sex was supposed to happen after her life was settled, with a lovely man who cherished her, in which the lovemaking was a candlelit, peaceful, nurturing experience that filled her bruised heart with joy and love.

Not a ride on a mechanical bull trying to buck her off.

His arms suddenly went around her, yanking her down, and then he was kissing her back. Desperate, frantic, but without the force she knew he wanted to inflict on her, because he was still too drugged for full engagement. Which meant she had time to break through before he was too strong for her.

“You’re in control, Jarvis.” She kissed his throat. “You’re not hate—”

He grabbed her hair and yanked her head back. He nipped her throat, edging that line between pain and pleasure. Well, on the plus side, at least sacrificing her body to save her sister and the world felt good, right?

He went still suddenly. She looked into his pitch black eyes, and she realized he had just returned to full consciousness, and only the beast was present.

But there was agony in his eyes, a deep-rooted terror of losing control. Her heart lurched for him, for that feeling of having everything that mattered spiraling out of control. She lived with that fear every day as she watched her family die, and she knew how much it sucked. She stopped pretending she’d gotten naked in some completely altruistic need to save him from himself.

She was doing it because she was the one who needed his touch. She needed to see his humanity return and know she’d done it, to know she’d made a difference to someone she cared about. She needed to save someone she loved at least once. She needed to succeed, and she needed it to be with him.