Touch of Darkness (2 page)

A half hour later, he stopped at a motel outside Poltava. He had an understanding with the innkeeper

there—the innkeeper kept one cottage available for Konstantine, and Konstantine let the innkeeper live.

The girl was limp now, shivering with cold, and breathless from being knocked against Konstantine's shoulder. He shoved his way through the door and into the warmth of the room. He let her slide down his body and held her while she regained her balance, and waited while she examined him.

She didn't bother with the head-to-toe trick; she zeroed right in on his genitals and indifferently inspected them.

Most women either fainted or made cooing noises. Then she scanned the rest of his body. Her gaze lingered on the bloody evidence of her spindle attack. She said, "So you can be hurt," and smiled.

She wasn't afraid. She was furious, and ready to attack. She was only five feet tall, containing eight feet's worth of defiance. She couldn't be slapped into submission; that would never work. So he did something out of character. He kissed her.

He didn't know why. He'd never kissed a woman before. Coitus didn't require that kind of intimacy. But something about this girl made him want to touch her lips with his, and he wasn't a man who deprived himself of his desires. It was a lousy kiss.

He mashed his mouth on hers.

She puckered her lips tightly to repel him and, at the same time, pinched his arms with her fingers.

Yet. . . when her breath touched his face, sensation swept him. He didn't recognize it; it felt like a fire kindling in a stove that had never known flame. He slipped his arms around her back, seeking the source of the feeling.

She stopped pinching him and stood motionless. Then, oh God, then her lips softened and opened. She was like a ripe plum waiting for him to take a bite— which he did, the most gentle nip on her lush lower lip.

She jumped, and when he licked the place, she jumped again.

Her tongue touched his, and as swiftly as a forest fire, heat roared out of control. Their kiss became an exchange of tastes, touches, passions, souls. Their kiss consumed him, blinding him to danger and taking him to madness.

Never again would he take another woman. He wanted her, the Gypsy girl. No other woman would do.

When at last they pulled apart, breathless and amazed, he looked into her dark brown eyes, and he saw his destiny. That was why he had to have her.

That was why the devil had forbidden it.

When she spoke, her voice was husky and passion-filled. "My name is Zorana."

"Zorana," he repeated. He knew very well the magic held within a name, knew, too, that she had gifted him with a piece of her soul. He, like a wild beast giving its trust for the- first time, answered, "My name is Konstantine."

"Konstantine." She nodded. Taking his hand, she led him toward the bed,

To him it seemed as if the universe had shifted, become a place where the old rules no longer applied and fresh bright hope, long snuffed, now sprang to life.

He was right.

But no mere man flouted the devil's authority without fearsome consequences. . . .

Chapter 1

"I've got the plane," Rurik shouted as he grabbed the controls.

A stark mountain face loomed before them.

The missile was almost on them.

He drove the plane up and to the side.

They weren't going to make it.

They weren't going to
—

"Excuse me, sir, we'll be landing in a few minutes. You need to return your seat back to its full upright position."

Rurik Wilder jerked awake, heart racing, sweat sheening his body.

The stewardess stood in the aisle, giving him that phony half smile that said she didn't care whether she woke him up, that the seven-hour trip from Newark to Edinburgh had kept her on her feet the whole time, and had he even
heard
the kids rampaging up and down the aisle while their parents snoozed and everyone else complained?

He stared at her, bewildered, trying to orient himself.

"Excuse
me, sir, we'll be landing in a few minutes. You need to—"

"Right!" He tried to look normal, grinned apologetically, and brought his seat back forward.

She walked off with that snap in her step that said she was not appeased.

The old woman on his left glared at him through eyes so dark brown they were almost black.

On his right, he felt someone's stare, and when he glanced over, the American girl averted her gaze.

Panic hit him, and he ran his hands over his face.

No, he might be a little wide-eyed, but his heartbeat was slowing and more important, his features were human.

He tried a smile. "Was I snoring?"

"You were sort of thrashing around. That must have been quite a nightmare." The girl was probably nineteen, with wide, soft brown eyes, a natural tan, and breasts that would win her fans around the world.

Too bad the only breasts that appealed to him were attached to a woman with big blue eyes, short, black, curly hair, a Nikon SLR digital camera always around her neck, and an ego-bruising way of disappearing when he least expected it.

Damn Tasya Hunnicutt. Damn the fascination she had exerted over him from the first moment they'd met. Damn her for being oblivious, and damn him for wanting her more, now that he'd had her, than he did before.

Tasya was his fate—and she didn't even know it. "I always get that nightmare when I fly. Usually I won't sleep, but I left Seattle twenty-three hours ago and between layovers and a late plane going into Chicago . . ." He shrugged, playing it casual, pretending the dream was nothing but a nightmare concocted of jet lag and exhaustion.

The girl bought it, too, nodding sympathetically. "Is this your first trip to Scotland?"

He expertly interpreted every sound the jet engines made. "What? No. No, actually I've lived here for the past ten months."

At once she grew animated. "Cool! I've always wanted to live in a foreign country. I feel like it would broaden my horizons, you know?"

"Yeah, I've got very broad horizons." And a dead ass from sitting so long. "What do you do there?"

"I run an archaeological dig in the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland." The girl's eyes got huge and round. "Isn't that a coincidence? I've always wanted to be an archaeologist!"

You and everybody who ever read about the discovery of gold in King Tut's tomb.
"That is a coincidence."

"What are you digging up?"

"Until we actually open it, we won't know for sure"—although he knew in his bones, and had always known—"but I believe it's the tomb of a Celtic warlord." He strained to hear the changes in the wing as they descended.

Man, he was pathetic. It had been five years since he'd sat in the pilot's seat, five years since he'd vowed never to fly again, and he still couldn't relax and trust the commercial pilots. If he could see out the window, he'd be better able to judge how the guy was doing, but Rurik was in the second seat in the middle section.

When he'd got the call from the dig, he'd grabbed the first flight out, and this was his punishment—a seat too narrow for his shoulders, knees up under his chin. But at least he was getting back in time to open the tomb.

"I know who you are!" The girl sat up straight, her eyes sparkling. "I saw you on CNN."

"Didn't everyone?" He'd seen the news coverage in the airport, too, and it had confirmed his worst fears.

"Mr. Hardwick was talking about you."

"Good old Hardwick." The foreman at the dig and, Rurik now realized, a grandstander with a thirst for publicity.

"You're the guy everyone thought was crazy who started digging around on the tiny little island and now they've found a huge stash of gold."

With the innate caution of an experienced archaeologist, he said, "Actually, I got funding from the National Antiquities Society, so I always had a team, and there's something that looks like gold, maybe, inside what looks like a tomb, maybe, but until I get there and we can finish opening it, we won't know what's really going on."

He needed to be there now, to see whether Hardwick had found the box Rurik had been searching for, the box containing a far greater treasure than gold.

"Wow. Just . . . wow." The girl's eyes were big and worshipful, and she offered her hand reverently. "I'm Sarah."

He shook it.

"Why do you have nightmares?" She smiled at him, and rubbed her fingertips over his white knuckles.

"Because I'm . . . afraid to fly?" Ridiculous, of course, but better than telling the truth. "You poor thing." She smiled at him again. It took that second smile before he realized—he had a nineteen-year-old making a pass at him. He jerked his hand out from under her touch. He glanced over to see if the dark-eyed grandmother had noticed.

Of course she had. She was glaring knives at him, her heavy black and gray eyebrows meeting over her narrow nose.

Sarah leaned toward him. "I could be a big help to you at your dig."

He averted his gaze, and mentally urged the pilot to put the damned plane on the ground. "I would love to have you, but we only hire experienced archaeologists. Besides, aren't you meeting someone?"

She shrugged. "Just my church group."

So she was nineteen, part of a church group, and trying to seduce him.

Great. Just great. He'd grown up knowing he was going to hell. He just hadn't realized the handcart would be doing 120 on the Road to Hell Autobahn.

"A church group is exciting."

"Exciting?" Her voice rose incredulously. "Have you ever
been
part of a church group?"

Why, no. No, he hadn't. Churches didn't exactly welcome a family like his.

The plane jolted as the wheels hit the runway—he was almost out of here. "Are you going to Paris? You'll love it. Grand cathedrals. Nice little churches."

Not that he'd ever been in any of them.

He got on his feet before the flight attendants

opened the door. "Some great choirs. Don't forget to go to Rome. The Vatican's there!"

Another place he'd taken care to stay far away from.

While Sarah struggled to get her bag out of the overhead, he grabbed his carry-on and muscled his way past her.

His mother would have killed him for being such a jerk, and his brother would have died of laughter. But my God. An underage kid making a pass at him—that officially made him a dirty old man at the ripe old age of thirty-three. He hurried toward baggage claim. A nineteen-year-old made a pass at him, and Tasya Hunnicutt couldn't get away from him fast enough. He'd gone home to his folks' place for the Fourth of July celebration that had started out great and ended in Swedish Hospital in Seattle, and at the same time, the tomb he'd been painstakingly excavating opened itself to reveal the glint of gold. What a bitch of a month it had been. Now it was going to take him a hard day of driving along increasingly narrow roads to get to the ferry at John O'Groat's and from there to the Outer Orkneys, and he'd be lucky if, when he made it, a gale hadn't kicked up, keeping the ferry in port.

Not that he hadn't been amazingly lucky since he started the dig. There'd been storms, of course—one didn't go through the winter in northern Scotland without some blistering cold winds and freezing-ass rain, but he'd had to knock off only a couple of days, and he would have had to stop work on Sundays, anyway. If he was a superstitious man, he would say that the dig served some higher purpose.

He hadn't
been
a superstitious man when he'd started working the site. He was now.

Grabbing his bag off the carousel, he headed toward the car-rental counter, got the keys to a MINI Cooper, then stepped outside and put on his sunglasses.

"A beautiful day."

He turned to find the old woman from the plane standing beside him. She was short and stooped; the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. "Yes, it is." Which in Scotland even in midsummer was pretty amazing.

"But there's a change coming." Her voice was husky, heavily accented . . . and not Scottish. She sounded almost like his father—Russian or Ukrainian.