done.”
“I didn’t mean to . . . you didn’t want to be woken up?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He gestured around us. “If you had the opportunity of slipping into unawareness of this torment, would you not choose to do so?”
“No. I’d choose to leave.”
The look he gave me was filled with scorn. “There is no way out.”
“Of course there is. If there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Am I going to be a female vampire now because of your mark?”
He just stared at me for a couple of seconds, then took me by the wrist and pulled me after him as he headed to what I thought was the north. “If your sister is a Beloved, you must know that it doesn’t work like that. The marking I referred to is the mental connection we have. It is one of the seven steps of Joining, which is wholly impossible given that my Beloved died six hundred years ago, but understandable given the amount of blood you gave me.”
“Well, I don’t know about this marking business,” I said, carefully locking away the thought that reincarnation might very well mean his Beloved was alive and kicking, and damned close to jumping his bones again despite her desperate attempt to stay away from him, “but as for the other, I don’t know that much about you guys. Jas went off to live with Avery, and . . . well, I’m not very comfortable around him. Or his brothers. Plus there’s the fact that Jas has been trying to fix me up with Avery’s youngest brother, Daniel, and I—”
The word Alec snarled wasn’t at all polite, nor was the face he turned on me as he gripped me with both hands. But what was most intriguing was the hot spurt of jealousy that I could feel rip through him.
He was jealous? Of me? Why did that delight me so much?
His tongue was there in my mouth again, his thigh shoved between mine, his fingers working my zipper down again.
Another shout from the distance, somewhat louder, brought sanity back to us. Alec removed his hand from my underwear, his eyes burning with passion as he rezipped my jeans.
“That ‘mine!’ crap? It’s so not happening. I don’t like possessive men,” I told him.
“At this moment, love, I don’t particularly care what you like,” he snapped, grabbing me by the hand and hauling me after him.
Chapter Five
“Where, exactly, do you think you’re taking me?”
“Away.”
“Away where?”
“Just away. You didn’t wish to be left behind, so you’re coming with me.”
“Why?”
Alec stopped and shot me a look that probably should have warned me he was at the end of his patience, but I decided that was less important than knowing where he was hauling me. “Do you ever stop asking questions? ”
“Not really, no,” I said after some thought. “There are so many things to be answered.”
He grinned. My inner devil squealed and swooned at the sight of it. I told her to buck up, that he may be sexy as hell, but he was not for us. “I happen to agree with that philosophy, but now is not the time to discuss it. What did you do to get tossed in here?”
“Wrong place at the wrong time, as best I can figure it out,” I said, following when he tugged on my wrist. Although the screaming in the distance had stopped, I had an uneasy feeling that something was back there that I’d rather not meet.
I sighed. “You’re really persistent, aren’t you?”
“No more so than you. Why are you glowing?”
I looked down at myself. “I didn’t know I was until Ulfur told me—”
He jerked me forward, spinning around. “Ulfur? You know Ulfur? A ghost about my height, with brown hair?”
“He has brown hair, yes, but he wasn’t a ghost. He said he was a . . .” I bit my lower lip, trying to dig the word out of my memory.
Alec’s gaze flickered to my mouth.
A little warm kernel of feminine pleasure glowed inside me at his mental growl. “I hardly think a bad habit like biting my lip is deliberately flaunting, but if it amuses you to think that, knock yourself out. Lich. That’s the word. Ulfur is a lich.”
“That’s right.” Alec looked beyond me, his eyes unfocused. He rubbed his chin with his thumb as he thought, the rasping noise sending little shivers down my back. “Pia said something about them trying to bring him back, but the Ilargi had him by that time.”
I couldn’t stop looking at him. I tried to look at his shoulder, or the rocks beyond him. I reminded myself that he was a man who didn’t think twice about murdering people, not that I didn’t feel sympathy with the fact that the ox lady had decapitated me with her cart and left him without his only salvation, but still, he admitted he’d murdered other people. He was bad to the bone, and I didn’t give a damn what my swoony inner bad girl thought—I was going to tolerate him only until he got Diamond and me out of this hellhole.
Dear god, I wanted him again. He just stood there, his brain whirling away with some thought, all smoldering sensuality and raw male attraction that made my body hum with happiness.
“Stop that,” I said, unable to stand it one minute longer.
He looked startled. “Stop what?”
I stared at his thumb. “Stop tempting me with your manly stubble. And chin. And jaw. But mostly your chin. Did I mention stubble?”
A little frown pulled his eyebrows together. Merciful heaven, even his eyebrows were sexy. I wanted to lick them. “What in the name of the saints are you going on about now?”
It was too much. It was all suddenly too much. “You’re too damned handsome, OK? I don’t like handsome men! They’re always halfway in love with themselves, and they use their looks and their seductive bodies to sway women into doing whatever they want, and I won’t have it, do you understand me! I will not have it! Stop being handsome!”
“Corazon—”
“Garrgh!” I yelled, and with both hands, mussed up his hair until it stood up in clumps.
He looked deliciously tousled, like he’d just been engaged in a wonderfully energetic romp between the sheets.
“I hate you!” I yelled, and stomped off, muttering to myself that I would not let him affect me. Sex, I told
