Edge of Oblivion

She was a traitor! She was... beautiful. Mysterious. Strong.

He closed his eyes, stretched his neck back, and hissed a long, quiet breath through clenched teeth. Then he retreated to the safety of a leather armchair, set diagonally across from the bed in a corner of the room, removed his knives from their sheaths at the small of his back, and settled back with one gripped in each hand, to wait.

10

When Morgan opened her eyes in the morning, Xander was standing at the edge of the bed, staring down at her with searing, molten eyes. Clutched in his hands was a pair of wicked-looking knives.

She sat up so abruptly the goose-down pillows slid off the bed. Even as she looked around wildly for something to stab him with—the pen on the night table, yes!—he was backing away, lowering his hands to his sides.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He seemed to mean it because he retreated as far as the bedroom door before he put his hands behind his back and sheathed the knives at his waist. Then he stood there looking at her silently with his hands loose at his sides.

“Excellent plan,” she said, heart thundering, “because standing over a sleeping person while holding knives is very non scary.”

No response. The way he looked at her, searching and burningly intent, brought the blood to her cheeks. She pulled the sheets up to her chin and stared defiantly back.

“You came back.” His voice was different than yesterday. Just as grave, but softer somehow.

“I never left,” she answered, cross. “I just...I just...”

He cocked his head in a sharp, birdlike movement that brought to mind a raptor she’d once seen hunting a white rabbit in the New Forest. It hadn’t ended well.

She stood, pulled the sheet from the mattress, and wrapped it around her body. She wore a camisole and panties and nothing else and suddenly felt very exposed. “I’m starving. I think breakfast is in order before we get started.”

He frowned at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language and let his searing gaze drift over the sheet, puckered to folds in her fist. “Started,” he repeated, his voice gone husky.

The blood in her cheeks flamed hotter. He looked starving, too, but perhaps not in quite the same way she was. The thought unnerved her. “With our little mission here.”

He blinked. His gaze traveled back to her face.

“Finding the Expurgari,” she articulated when he still didn’t speak.

One of his eyebrows lifted and, surprisingly, so did one corner of his mouth. “Oh. That. I thought you might have meant get started with gloating.”

Her lips quirked. “I think I had my fill of that last night, while I was...” getting my tattoo, she almost said, but thought better of it. Her free hand drifted down to trace the sore flesh on her hip, and his eyes followed the movement, avid. “Sightseeing,” she finished.

They stared silently at one another. Outside in the pink flush of dawn, church bells began to toll, beautiful and melancholy. Sunlight streamed pale gold and glittering through the slit in the silk curtains to pool on the carpet between them, so bright it almost hurt her eyes.

“Are you going to run away again?” His voice was oddly courteous. It made her suspicious.

Perhaps he was having a laugh at her expense.

“Only if you leave any more rude notes,” she shot back, then swept around the end of the bed, headed for the bathroom. She paused at the door and looked back at him over her shoulder.

“No,” he said, quite serious. “I won’t.”

“Well, good then.” She still wasn’t sure if he was mocking her. But the way he looked at her was not mocking at all. His expression was at once grave and faintly confused, ineffably curious.

And...hungry.

A surge of heat passed between them, bright as danger. It made her take a step back, beyond the bathroom door. The marble was a cold shock beneath her feet.

“Ah, do you mind if I...?” She gestured to the shower, being careful not to allow her hand to shake.

“Of course,” he said, inclining his head. He stepped back, too, into the living room. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

That, she thought, firmly closing the bathroom door, is exactly what I’m worried about.

Morgan was under much better control by the time breakfast was served.

The cafe was quaint and sunny, situated directly across from the Keats-Shelley Memorial House at the base of the Spanish Steps. It boasted an excellent view of the terraced garden staircase with its fuchsia riot of ruffled azalea beds, the imposing Renaissance bulk of the Trinita dei Monti church perched at the top, and the tourists that flocked past on the Piazza di Spagna like so many chattering, exotic birds. It was Xander’s choice; he had guided her to it with one hand held lightly under her elbow the entire four-block walk from their hotel.

They sat now in silence in the shade of a white umbrella, looking at everything but one another.

The aproned cameriere came with their demitasse cups of espresso and departed with a bow.

“So. What is your plan?” Xander took a sip from the tiny porcelain cup. In his big hand it looked like a child’s thing, small and easily breakable.

“I rather hoped you had one.”

Morgan shifted in her chair, settling better against its cushioned back, and lifted her own cup to her lips. She swallowed and tasted heaven: a tiny dose of coffee so fine and strong and sweet it was nearly dessert, topped with a creamy fluff of foam. “God, that’s good,” she said. She finished it in one long draught and sighed in pleasure.

Beside her, Xander smiled. “You don’t have espresso in England?”

“Tea,” she said. “Very fine tea, but nothing at all like this. This is—” She struggled for a moment until he supplied the perfect word.

“Decadent.”

He turned his head to look at her, and the sunlight behind his head caught in his dark hair and haloed it with blue flame. It struck her again how beautiful he was, how savagely graceful, at once mythic and menacing. There was something oddly doomed about him, too, an air of weary sorrow like the memory of too much sin.

Like a fallen angel, she thought, and had to glance away.

“It’s better than what we have in Brazil also.”

She glanced back at him, watching as he drained his cup and set it down, every movement elegant and spare. He looked up at her, rested his elbow on the arm of his chair, then rubbed one finger across his full lips in a slow and thoughtful gesture that also managed to look profoundly erotic.

“Our espresso is grown at lower altitudes, in nonvolcanic soils. Italian blends are more refined.”

“Why does the altitude make a difference?”

“Like wine grapes, only coffee beans grown at high altitudes in rocky, inhospitable soil produce the best fruit.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s the struggle that refines them,” he explained, “the challenge. Give them too much water, sunshine, and fertile soil and they grow fat and tasteless, like a Concord grape, appetizing only when saturated with sugar and made into jelly. Or they wither and die of boredom. Like people. The best ones are survivors. Stripped of chaff, refined by struggle and hardship, they’re rendered complex and potent by their very endurance and ability to thrive in spite of deprivation.”

Poetic, she thought. My assassin is poetic.