KICK ASS: A Boxed Set (43 page)

She’d retrieved a valuable national resource and given it to a man who would, at the very least, appreciate the value. At least, that was how she’d justified the job at the time. For the past three years, Mariah had worked almost exclusively as a private pilot and flight instructor. For the first time in her life, she had a relatively normal job, a home and a group of friends. But she also had a schedule, bills and stress headaches. She’d become domestic and ordinary and had craved the excitement of her past. She couldn’t have turned down Velez’s offer without huge regrets.

Now she was up to her eyeballs in regrets that could get her killed.

She flew three more hours in silence, considering how she was going to pay for the next load of fuel. She made an inventory of the items of value she had with her and decided she was going to have to make a few calls. At the next stop in Amarillo, she charmed an old acquaintance in order to use his cell phone and called her home base—an airstrip outside of Austin run by the Barketts, a friendly couple who’d taken a liking to Mariah since she’d first berthed her plane in their hangar.

“Jan, I need a favor,” Mariah said.

“Where’ve you been, girl?” the Texas native drawled. “People been looking for you.”

“People?” Mariah asked, trying to keep her voice steady and casual. “What people?”

“Some guys. Rough types.”

Mariah realized her decision to take her chopper out instead of the Cessna had been a wise one. She’d figured that if Velez were looking for her, he’d stake out the hangar where she kept her plane, leaving her free to escape via other means. “Were they Hispanic?”

“Who isn’t around here?” Jan said with a laugh. “They wanted to know where you lived, where you kept your gear or if Ken and I had heard from you.”

Mariah silently cursed. She didn’t want to bring any trouble down on Ken and Jan. They were good people. Ken was a former army pilot who’d avoided being shot down during Vietnam, and his wife, a more than adequate pilot who’d bucked the Texas old-boys network to start her own successful airstrip, had opened her heart to Mariah, even when they knew damned well that the Aussie transplant was usually up to no good.

“What did you tell them?” she asked.

The older woman snorted derisively. “Nothin’ true, what do you think? Said you’d cleared out two weeks ago and we hadn’t heard from you since. Told ‘em we’d confiscated everything to pay your bills, including your plane.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not entirely fiction,” Mariah muttered.

“We know you’re good for the money. Besides, we do have your Cessna as collateral.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Mariah started, then explained her dilemma in the vaguest terms possible. She didn’t need her friends dragged into her drama, but she needed money. Less than an hour after the call, the Barketts had sent her enough cash to get her to her cabin in Colorado.

She’d bought the place only a year ago and had visited only once. Accessible only by helo, since the one and only road had washed out from a landslide two years before she bought it, the place had been extraordinarily cheap. Two hours outside Denver, the cabin on Butler’s Mountain was the perfect hideout. She’d registered the property in the name of an old pilot friend who’d since died, but had left her as executor of his will. Velez wouldn’t be able to track her to the cabin. At least, not easily.

Mariah made one last stop in Colorado Springs for fuel, and then finished the ride up to the cabin, which had just enough land in a northwest clearing for her to put the bird down. Dark clouds hovered just above her as she made her approach, forcing her to fight through turbulence to set down easy.

Sunset wasn’t the glorious event she’d craved. The clouds and mist muted the oranges and reds until they were shadows that faded into night. She’d had just enough time to secure her gear when the blackness of the mountain night swallowed her whole and the rumbling of thunder echoed nearby.

She took out a flashlight and directed the beam at the cabin. It looked untouched since her last visit, when she’d stocked the freezer and pantry for emergencies just like this. If only she could remember precisely where she’d tucked the spare key.

“Do you need assistance?”

Mariah screamed. The sound ricocheted off the cliff and bounced down into the valley below. Instinctively, she spun and kicked toward the voice. Rafe caught her foot just seconds before it connected with his chin.

“You can’t just jump out at me like that!” she insisted, tugging her foot from his grasp and losing her balance for her trouble. The flashlight tumbled a few feet away, but Rafe retrieved it, eyeing it with interest even as he held out his other hand to her.

“I’m afraid I have little control over the matter,” he replied, tugging her up with such force, she smacked flat against his chest.

The temperature on the mountain had been dropping until that moment. Ghost or not, Rafe Forsyth put off a kind of magnetic heat. Mariah allowed herself to lean against him. With the flashlight directed upward toward their faces, she caught sight of his full lips and wondered if he’d taste as spicy and elemental as he had in her dream.

Rafe, however, stepped away. “I awoke with the sunset, as if from a deep and powerful sleep. I wished to be with you again… and here I am.”

Her heart was beating the hell out of her insides. From the shock of his appearance, of course. And nothing more.

“You wished to be…”

She let the words die on her lips. Whom else would he want to be with? She did, after all, have the stone. He could have wished to be in the presence of the bloody queen of England, and still she was the best he’d get.

“Remarkable,” he said, turning the flashlight over in his hands, the beam shining around them like a beacon. Which, under the circumstances, wasn’t a good thing.

She threw out her hand to stop him. “We don’t need to broadcast that we’re up here, okay? It’s bad enough that the chopper is so noisy. I have no idea what neighbors I might have, but I’d prefer not to let anyone know where we are.”

He nodded, then followed her toward the cabin. “I understand, but tell me about this fireless torch. What’s it called?”

“In Australia, a torch,” she noted with a snicker. “In America, where we are, it’s a flashlight.”

“Australia?”

“My homeland. You might know it as…” she started, trying to remember the history of her native country, “New South Wales.”

He stared at her blankly.

“Aren’t you British?” she asked.

His lip curled and his nose twitched, as if a skunk had discharged a warning directly in their path. “I am Romani.”

“Half Romani,” she said, remembering that his father had been a British earl.

He merely sniffed in response. “In my world, the Romani half was all that mattered.”

“Probably not to your father,” she said.

“Especially to my father,” he replied curtly.

Mariah let the matter drop. She understood better than most how relations with parents could be complicated and contentious. She loved her own father deeply, but he’d been a bush pilot in the Northern Territory who considered rough living to be the ultimate test of his manliness. He’d raised two sons the same way. He’d never exactly been sure what to do with his daughter.

Her mother hadn’t been any more insightful. When she’d abandoned the family to move to Sydney, she’d left Mariah behind, taking her in only after Mariah had reached puberty and Bert Hunter had left his ex-wife no choice. When Mariah wasn’t rebelling against high expectations and responsibility, she’d gotten on pretty well with her mum once they were reunited. Unfortunately, the damage to their relationship had been done. Mariah was still fending off the demons born of a childhood of not fitting in, and she didn’t want to stir up those memories tonight.

“We should get inside,” she said, pointing the beam of the flashlight toward the door just as a cloud opened up and dumped a flood of rain on top of them.

Lightning followed. Mariah cursed as sheets of cold rain doused her, ruining her chances of remembering under which clay pot she’d buried the key. Suddenly, Rafe took her arm and pulled her inside, shutting the wide-open door firmly behind them.

“How’d you do that?” she asked, swiping water from her face. “Wasn’t it locked?”

He did not reply. Mariah lit the kerosene lantern she kept on the table beside the door, then darted to the supply closet, where she pulled out a couple of towels. She handed one to Rafe, then dried her face and hair so that water didn’t drip down her back. Still, she was shivering, and if there was one thing Mariah hated, it was being cold. She longed to strip out of her soaking wet clothes, but realized she’d left her only change of wardrobe back in the chopper.

She wrapped the towel around her shoulders and tried to keep her teeth from chattering by whistling. Under the dim golden glow, she scanned the room, frowning at the layer of mountain dust clinging to every surface, and especially at the empty wood box beside the fireplace.

The previous owners had sold the place fully furnished, if you could call an old, scarred table with four chairs, a bookshelf filled with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and a stack of
National Geographic
magazines, a tattered sofa that pulled out to a sleeper, and a butt-ugly but comfortable recliner “furnished.” Not that she needed much. Mariah had often lived with less. She could do rustic. What she preferred not to do was dirty.

With a sigh, she started yanking the sheets off the furniture, coughing when the dust flew into her nose. Rafe, on the other hand, stood frozen near the door with his arms crossed over his chest, as if waiting for her to finish.

She tossed a sheet onto the floor. “You could help,” she suggested, shivering when an icy drop slid off her hair and down the front of her shirt.

“I suppose I should,” he said reluctantly.

“I know that men of your birth didn’t often do heavy lifting when it came to housework, but like it or not, you’re in the twenty-first century now. In our day and age, the men help.”

He arched a brow. “I’m not averse to assisting you, but what do you wish me to do?”

She smiled. She liked a man who could take direction. “Well, we need to make this place habitable. We’re stuck here for a few days while I figure out where to go next.”

He nodded, then rubbed his hands together as if about to lift something heavy. Then he closed his eyes.

She was about to comment that a standing nap wasn’t going to make the cabin any warmer when the pop and crackle of a fire caught her attention. She stared at the fireplace. Flames licked at a thick cord of wood cradled inside. The smell of smoke instantly reminded her that in closing up the cabin, she’d likely shut the flue.

Darting forward, she wrapped her hand in a kitchen towel and reached just above the flames to work the mechanism, She coughed and turned to ask Rafe how he’d lit the fire when what she saw nearly knocked her off her feet.

The entire interior had changed. Besides the warm fire, a dozen sconces magically placed throughout the cabin flickered with the light of thick candles. The walls, once rustic pine paneling, were now covered by draping tapestries that blocked out the windy cracks and made the space immediately warm and cozy. Even the furniture had been transformed. Dozens of tasseled cushions covered the couch, the bare floor was now hidden beneath a half dozen animal skins and the rickety table was now made of mahogany and burgeoning with fresh berries, steaming meat and a large carafe of wine.

“What…?” she said with a gasp. “What did you do? How did you—”

He held out his hand to silence her, his eyes still closed. The tension in his face, in his entire body, was palpable. She took a tentative step nearer and saw that he was shaking.

“Rafe, what’s wrong?”

His eyes flashed open. His pupils had expanded so that his irises were a slim silver circle around total blackness. His stare was unfocused, but penetrating.

The hair along the back of her neck, which had dried from her nearness to the fire, stood on chilled ends. Something was very, very wrong.

“Rafe?” she asked, taking a tentative step toward him.

He turned to her, stabbing her with his sharp gaze. “You must make love to me. Now.”

“Excuse me?”

She blinked, and he was standing directly in front of her. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers digging into them. “Make love to me, Mariah, or we shall both die.”

Nine

The demand ripped from a crack in Rafe’s soul he’d thought long sealed. Lust tore through the weakened fissure, hard and hot, tensing every muscle in his body, making his head rush as blood flooded to his loins. Never in his life had he made such a crass demand to a woman, not even to his own wife.

But the impulse to mate, to feel his hard sex buried deep within Mariah’s softness, overwhelmed him. The tips of his extremities prickled with fire. His eyes burned. The storm now raging outside mirrored the tempest brewing within his body. On impulse, he slammed out of the cabin and dashed into the rain. He threw out his arms and shouted at the wind, howling like a man who’d lost his mind, praying the water would cool this inexplicable heat.

He sensed rather than saw Mariah come out after him.

“Go!” he ordered, not daring to look at her.

“What’s happening?”

He wished he could tell her. He had no words to convey the madness crashing through him—a crazed blackness that burbled from deep within him like a foul and viscous sludge. He needed to purge the hot pitch from his insides, and he knew, somehow, that the only way to stem the flow of darkness was to make love with Mariah. To surround himself with her light. To bathe in her powerful strength and beauty.

He dropped to his knees. Icy water sluiced down his face, shirt and breeches, cooling only the outer layer of his skin and doing nothing to alleviate the burning deep inside. Lightning flashed above him, and with the thunder he wailed in anguish, the sound echoing against the tumult of the night.

“Rafe?”

Her voice was soft. Concerned. She’d come nearer. Too near. Had the woman no sense? He’d thought her so unlike Irika, yet here she was, looking for him in the dark night when she should be running in the opposite direction.