My Dangerous Pleasure (25 page)

She stuck out a hand and braced herself against the dash as Iskander gunned the pickup down the hill. He took the first corner and they fishtailed hard. He slowed, took a few more turns, and ended up on a shaded residential street. He parked underneath a tree. “Are you all right?”

“Of course.” A lie, but Iskander didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t all right. Not even close. She hurt wherever Rasmus had touched her, and her head felt like someone had set her brain on fire.

“Let’s see your arm.” Blisters covered her arm wherever Rasmus’s fingers had come into direct contact with her skin. He pushed up her sleeve. There were red welts everywhere. “Where else did he touch you?”

“Shoulders. I don’t know. It was hard to keep track.”

“Shit, Paisley.” He yanked at the shoulder of her shirt.

“Ouch.” She sucked in a breath when he touched her shoulder.

“Not as bad as the marks on your arm. You’re already healing.”

“I tried to take back his magic.” Now that she wasn’t running for her life, she was feeling sick and shaky.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“Like you should talk.” Inside, she was a void. Empty. His eyebrows drew together, and he touched her forehead. He didn’t use any magic, but the contact rocked her all the same.

“Good trick with the truck.”

She could still hear and feel the thud of the truck hitting Rasmus. Maybe later she’d worry about not caring that she’d wanted him to die. “I wish I’d killed him,” she said.

He cupped her head between his hands. “You were amazing back there.”

She put her hands around his wrists, figuring she’d disengage from their embrace in a minute. Her stomach went all loopy from remembering what he was like in bed.
Better than chocolate.
Her mind turned to mush when he lowered his head.

God, it was a mind-blowing kiss. Slow and tender but wild around the edges. Then he had his tongue in her mouth and she was doing the same right back, and she had a hard time thinking at all, even once she realized his hand was underneath her shirt and halfway up her back and that her bra was unfastened.

She watched his eyes get dark, and he moved his hand, and she didn’t budge; then his hand was cupping her breast and her mind just slipped away entirely, and she didn’t even care. He unfastened his seat belt and leaned down, and his mouth opened over hers, and it was hard to think much at all because his fingers were on her bare breast and it felt good, so good. She returned the kiss—with all the heat racing through her, how could she not? Iskander was lovely and she liked him more than was safe. Besides, he made her laugh, and he was never mean about anything. Oh, Lord, could they do it in the truck?

His other hand got underneath her shirt, too, and he pushed her down onto the seat, or maybe she lay down and he just followed; it didn’t matter to her which it was. Her belly exploded into shivers when he pushed up her shirt, and his mouth was on her breast, on her nipple, and his other hand was just as gloriously busy. She wound her fingers into his hair and kissed him hard. She got her hands busy, too. He was warm and his body was so amazingly male, all that delicious bare skin right next to hers. She wanted more. Much, much more.

They were both breathing like racers at the finish line when he pulled back, and his eyes were doing that flickering thing again. “Hell,” he said on a whisper. He pulled her shirt down.

“No.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Don’t you leave me like this.”

“Paisley, I am absolutely not going to do you in the truck where anyone could come out of their house and see my naked ass.”

She closed her eyes. He was right. Of course.

“Because I do not want to explain to Harsh why he has to bail us out of jail and then stand in front of Nikodemus and explain the same damn thing.”

She wriggled around and got her bra fastened, and he reached over and pulled down her shirt again. They got their seat belts on, and then he stretched an arm along the back of the truck’s seat, almost but not quite touching her. “Later,” he said, and he sounded determined. “We’ll pick up where we left off later.”

C
HAPTER 22

About 11:30
P.M.
,
Rasmus Kessler’s house on Wildcat Canyon Road, the Berkeley Hills

R
asmus Kessler sat in his office, a room that overlooked Wildcat Canyon Road and acres of open space. There wasn’t much traffic at this time of night. Through the open window, he could hear owls and the ever-present dull roar of distant traffic from down the hillside where there was never any quiet. For these few minutes, he had his sanity, and he could pretend his life belonged to him. His body was sore and he had a bruise on the side of his head. Most nonmagical wounds healed quickly. The cut on his head and the surrounding bruise remained tender enough that he wondered how he’d gotten it.

Footsteps echoed on the steps that led to his refuge. His heart thumped. Maybe she would turn right at the top of the stairs instead of left, and yet, at the same time, Rasmus hoped she would come to him and that things would be as they had before. Like him, she had her moments of sanity.

At this moment, he was lucid, and that was a rare mercy. He knew he didn’t have much time to enjoy his solitude. Fen had roused herself from her sulk over the debacle of her confrontation with Iskander, and if he was lucky, she would fail to recall that he had advised her against contacting him in any fashion just yet—for more reasons than just the plain fact that few men cared to have their current lovers thinking of past ones.

“Rasmus!”

Her voice carried up the stairs. He knew from the light tone that she was at least marginally in control of herself and that, thank God, he had a moment or two longer of solitude before he had to deal with whatever she was right now.

Before him on the desk sat a black notebook. It was his habit at such times to make quick notes of whatever snatches of memory remained to him. He closed the notebook, the pages of which were filled with Danish. His native language was not one that Fen had troubled herself to learn to read. He slid it underneath the desk, back into the corner where even the housekeeper wouldn’t find it.

His right hand still didn’t work correctly, not since the day his daughter Alexandrine Marit had managed to injure him. Badly. That should never have happened. She was magekind, yes, but with so little power as to make her insignificant. Since that day, his slow recovery from the damage had forced him to write left-handed.

Once, he had loved Fen so deeply he would have done anything for her. Anything. Even offer his life to her. He’d done so, and she had accepted. There had been a time when he wanted nothing more than to see Alexandrine dead along with every fiend who’d ever helped her. Tonight, all he had left were memories of the woman he’d loved. Tonight, he knew that if he was to survive this, he might need to beg for his life. An unlikely outcome.

“Here,” he called, because if he did not, Fen might misinterpret the reason for his failure to respond. They both knew she could find him no matter where he was, but that wasn’t the point. He used the toe of his shoe to make sure the notebook was out of sight. He’d been speaking English for three hundred years, the last fifty here in America. It was his hope that if somehow Fen happened across the journal, she would not recognize the language as something relevant to the present. His entries were, of course, undated. They might have been written anytime during the last seventy or so years.

Fen made it to the top of the stairs. She had yet to traverse the length of the hallway to reach his office. A few moments more, then.

On this night, when he had awakened, sore and stiff, to find himself in rare possession of his wits, he’d slipped out of bed and come here to write what he could recall of the events since the last time he’d been in his right mind. His memories were ragged and incomplete, but when he’d finished writing what he could call to mind, he had, as usual, scanned back through the entries, looking for patterns, anything that would help him guess what was going on during his blackouts. Anything that would help him save his life. Or Fen’s, if such a thing were possible.

The pages held names he recognized. Harsh was one; translated literally from English to Danish. Harsh Marit had been Fen’s gift to him, or so he had thought. Rasmus now believed Harsh had been Fen’s first attempt to stabilize her deterioration by bringing in someone from her old life. The decay in her mind had likely begun before he ever encountered her. Her deterioration had accelerated the moment she’d betrayed Iskander for him and found herself cut off from her blood-twin.

The knowledge that Harsh had regained his freedom remained clear in his memories, since those events predated the point at which his recollections became fractured or missing altogether.

He’d translated
Iskander
as the Danish equivalent of Alexander. Oh, he recognized that name. Like Fen and unlike Harsh, Iskander was a full demon. He was a former lover to Fen, bonded to her, in fact.
Blood-twin
Fen called it. Had been bonded. But no longer.

There was a time when Rasmus had been as in love with Fen as Iskander must once have been in love with his blood-twin. Desperately in love. Without subterfuge or reservation. Without coercion. Fen was beautiful and carefree and breathtaking in bed. When she had still been in possession of her sanity, she had been the delight of his life. Despite what she was. Despite what he was.

He would willingly have died for her. To have watched her descent into madness and now to bear witness to the wreckage she had become… that was agony, a kind of living death.

She was walking down the hallway now, her steps light, and he could no longer pretend that she would ever be all right. The damage to her was not something she could recover from. Not now. She was humming to herself, some melody without any real tune. Rasmus had learned the humming was a precursor to a cycle of madness, each worse than the one before. Each more heartbreaking than the last. And with each, his loss of memory extended from hours, then days, and now, sometimes, weeks as he learned from the calendar on his phone.

Rasmus turned on his chair so that he faced the door. The ruby beads worked into his braids clicked softly. He needed the power that could be drawn from the gems. He suspected that during his blackouts, Fen was entirely in control. She allowed him to keep the gems because the additional focus the rubies gave him helped when she controlled his power.

She was here.

After all this time, after all that had happened to them and between them and no matter how much he hated her now, his pulse still raced when he saw her. She was mad and dangerous and as beautiful as ever. Every time he saw her, he remembered the days when he had loved her beyond anything. He still did.

She carried a tray on which sat a French press, two cups, and two plates, each with a brioche. “Good morning.”

“Fen.” He knew better than to tell her it wasn’t morning. He’d left their bed and come here. For her, that meant morning. He cleared a place on the desk for her tray. “You’ve brought us breakfast.” He watched her face as he took the tray from her and set it down. Her blue eyes were normal right now. A smile curved her mouth and even reflected in her gaze. His heart turned over in his chest to think she was, if only momentarily, in possession of some corner of the sanity left to her.

It wouldn’t last. The word
mercurial
could have been defined with her in mind. While he had the time, he shoved all thoughts of his journal into a deep corner of his mind. And locked it away.

“I bought the brioche from that girl’s bakery.” She sat sideways on his lap and picked up one of the brioche from the tray. She held it while she looped an arm around his neck, underneath his braids.

“Did you?” He wasn’t sure what bakery she meant, and he didn’t dare think about anything he’d written down. If she indwelled again, those memories would be close enough for her to examine.

“She wasn’t there. The girl.”