At least that’s the excuse she gave herself as she coded out onto the terrace.
The night air was bursting with scent. Sharp grasses and pine dominated, but the broader fragrance of undergrowth underscored each breath. Stars glittered piteously above. Segue’s paltry lights offered feeble competition. The contrast suggested another hard truth, comforting in its own way: No matter what havoc wraiths or humankind wreaked on earth, those stars would keep on shining. Everything good or evil would eventually be scorched from the earth by the inexorable domination of the universe.
“For someone with such an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation, it was damn foolish of you to come out here after me. Go to bed, Talia.” Adam angled his face toward her, his expression unguarded. He probably thought the darkness would obscure the pain in his eyes, but Talia could see just fine. Too well, in fact. The man was confused and exhausted with his ongoing burden. His already busted-up soul had taken yet another beating today.
“You wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, stepping up beside him. She sounded more certain than she felt.
“Honestly, I don’t know if that’s true,” he sighed. “Right now I feel just as monstrous as what is locked up beneath us.”
“I’ll risk it.” She looked across the roll of the fields toward the mountains, willing her rapid heartbeat to peace. But standing beside him, the organ only doubled its rhythm. She babbled, “Besides, I can see better in the dark than you can. The world fairly throbs with details, color, and sensation. It’s too intense for me really, so much to take in, but I’m pretty sure I have the advantage over you out here.”
A corner of his mouth tugged upward, though his eyes remained dull and heavy, trained through the dark on her. “You see so much, but you can’t see what I see. Only an artist could capture you.”
Relief flooded her as a deep ache coiled gorgeously in her abdomen. He didn’t think her a joke. After everything she’d revealed, he still desired her. The knowledge rooted her to her spot, in the path of certain danger.
Besides, she needed something, anything, to escape her own discovery today. Death was her father. No one would want her if that bitter truth became known.
She saw him move in her peripheral vision, was expecting it. A small rush of air brushed by her body just before his arms came around her waist, one shifting upward to the space between her shoulders.
He’d warned her. She’d had every opportunity to run back inside.
Instead, she tilted her head up to meet his.
His mouth came down hard. Pressed more deeply than she imagined. Raw heat coursed through her, demanding without thought or reason. Just need, his knotting with hers. Her mind fragmented. A strange, tight pressure set her blood thudding in her head.
The kiss burned, his tongue parting her lips to taste her. He smelled good: masculine, sharp, and dark. The combination was potent, his touch, a catalyst to change her. Like a drug once tested, she knew she’d crave it for the rest of her life.
His body shifted, taking more of her weight. She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulder so that she wouldn’t fall. He was tall, all firm planes and unyielding strength, wonderfully painful in his embrace.
She gripped his shirt and arched her back so her breasts pressed more firmly against him. Felt the drum of his heart against hers, the flex of his muscle, and needed more.
He groaned low against her lips, and when she broke the kiss to gasp for air, he settled his blistering mouth into the bend of her neck.
“Oh, God,” she breathed. Never in the many sleepless nights she’d spent fantasizing about a man like Adam had she imagined this.
“There is no God,” he answered, voice ragged. His teeth worried her shirt at her collar to find her skin. Where his hot mouth branded, her nerves sang, her body begging
He dragged up her shirt and thrust a hand up her bare back to twist the band of her bra around his grasp. He scorched his other palm around her hip, to the juncture of her legs, where he pinned her hard against him.
Talia squeezed her eyes shut against the pulse of shadow across the valley, against the gathering darkness that her blood and bone summoned. She reached out to him from her core.
A great wave of
But…not for her. Not really.
She felt a twisted self-pity ruling his actions. Loneliness, pain, and hatred combined with his considerable will to bind her to him, to use her to mute the myriad hurts in his spirit. There was nothing of her there at all, only Adam and his personal demons.
The knowledge tore at her, made her hate her gift and regret the impulse to indulge in the moment.
She twisted in his arms, pushing him away with her hands. She sought the protection of darkness. Brought a knee up to break his hold.
He grunted, but grasped her closer still, fighting the onslaught of shadow.
She bucked harder. Grabbed his hair to pull his head back. “You’re hurting me,” she said.
Adam stilled, his chest heaving with effort. One, two breaths…she felt him collect himself. Felt his control steel around his contemptible actions and bring himself to heel, his need condensed into a tight ball of frightening, devastating potency. He released her abruptly, catching hold of her arms so that she wouldn’t fall to the flagstones of the terrace.
Talia wrenched herself free, stumbled back, and fell anyway.
He held out a hand to help her up.
“Stay away from me,” she said. Her gaze flicked up to his face. She wished it hadn’t. If the man had been burdened before, now he looked utterly tortured and ashamed.
Talia scrambled to stand, vision blurring the way his jaw clenched, the way his eyes narrowed to sharpen his own sight in the dark. To see her.
She ran to the doors, fumbled with the code, and yanked them open to get inside and away from him.
Damn him for touching her. Damn Philip for finding that rite. Damn Jacob for his horrible choice in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said.
And damn her shadow-bred senses for being able to hear his whisper across the stretch of dark.
NINE
ADAM gripped the marble barrier overlooking the gardens. If Jacob had brought him to the brink of insanity, Talia was going to push him over the edge. She was supposed to be bookish—to take to her offices and use her amazing mind to develop a well-reasoned theory backed up by hundreds of pages of blindingly dense text.
Instead, she exposed Jacob’s damned choice, the one that ripped Adam’s family away from him again. Then, not two hours later, she revealed a strange connection some people have to Shadowman.
And she gave him images. What images! Hadn’t he been dutifully and honorably blocking visions of her naked body from his mind from the moment he cut her dripping clothes off her in Arizona? Okay, mostly blocking them.
What was the daily Segue grind when Talia looked back at him with longing, glowing in vibrant color from an artist’s canvas? Naturally, he had an offer in on the piece already.
Talia. Sleeping Beauty. Aurora. She was a lightning bolt. Sudden, unpredictable, dazzling. She brilliantly illuminated in the dark, yet was capable of setting things on fire.
And then he had to be a dumb prick and maul her—hell, he’d wanted to use her sweet body to shut Jacob
