ClosertoFire Page 2

  I’m in a hotel room? It certainly looked that way—generic furnishings, bland wallpaper, and she could see a sprinkler in the ceiling above her head. She tried to examine her surroundings further, but every time she moved her head too quickly, she saw double.

  “I’m Bane,” he said softly, laying his hand on her forehead, then her cheek. He gestured to her left.

  Lily turned her head gingerly. The man who had been with him earlier was stretched out on a king-sized bed next to her chair. Her vision blurred again. That paisley bedspread is awful, she thought. Then her gaze connected with eyes so dark they were almost black. The crackling mix of emotions playing across his expression was perplexing.

  “That,” Bane said, his voice still soft, “is my partner Darek.” Lily tilted her head, wondering what the protocol was here. How did one greet one’s kidnappers? Nice to meet you? The absurdity of it struck her and she fought the insane urge to giggle. Bane grasped her chin and turned her head slowly until her gaze was level with his own.

  “I know you feel terrible right now, but I need to ask you something.” He paused, as though waiting for the words to sink in. “Do you know what we are?”

  Lily gaped, not sure she’d heard the question right. Did she know what theywere? Was there a wrong answer here?

  Bane shook his head. “No, you heard correctly. Do you know what we are?”

  Lily blinked. She must be more out of it than she thought. Is he reading my mind?

  Bane nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. “Just answer the question, Lily. Do you know what we are?”

  A dozen possible answers flitted through her mind, not a one of them making any sense. They were…military? Police? Private investigators? Why would those people have any interest in her, anyway?

  Bane chuckled. “No, Lily. Do you know what we are?” he asked, enunciating each word clearly. He leaned closer, and…and…

  This is a dream, she realized with a rush of relief. It must be. His eyes were glowing—freaking glowing—blue.

  She laughed hoarsely, which made her throat hurt like hell. Dreams didn’t hurt, did they?

  Bane sat back on his feet, turning to his partner. “She has no idea,” he said flatly.

  A growl issued from the bed to her right. “She’s lying. They all lie.”

  Lily shook her head violently, clenching her teeth against the disorientation the motion caused. Am not! she thought indignantly, glaring at the man on the bed. Darek. That was his name. How her subconscious had come up with him, she didn’t know.

  “Dammit,” Darek muttered. The bed creaked as he stood. “You’re getting soft in your old age, Bane. The inquiry is tomorrow night. Let Anthony and the others decide.” Bane didn’t look away but his eyes grew a shade colder.

  Inquiry? That didn’t sound good at all. But then, this wasn’t real, right? Right? Lily’s heart raced.

  Darek strode past her and walked into an adjoining room. She tried once more to speak.

  Bane shook his head. “He’ll come around. Give him time.”

  Inquiry? she mouthed.

  He stroked her cheek with his thumb, his expression kind. “It’s okay,” he said.

  She frowned. That was much too nonspecific.

  He opened his mouth to speak again, then paused, looking conflicted. He leaned forward and whispered to her, his breath warm on her ear. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

  She shivered. Please, just let me wake up. She closed her eyes, feeling a tear run down her cheek. To think that this morning, her worst fear was running out of gas on the way to work.

  When she opened her eyes again, Bane’s jaw was tight, his expression conflicted. He leaned forward, his mouth slanting over hers just as her brain formed the thought, He’s going to kiss me. His lips were soft, lingering warmly against hers for just a second before he sat back on his heels.

  When he did, Lily could have sworn she saw blue and gold light flicker over his skin—no, through his skin—traveling down his neck, over his biceps and down his hands. She shivered, blinking rapidly. Beautiful,she thought. He was beautiful. Her lips were damp from his kiss. She stared at him.

  His eyes were full of disbelief. “No, no, no,” he murmured. “This can’t be.”

  What? The question burned in her mind and she willed him to hear it. If he did, he ignored her. He glanced toward the door where Darek had disappeared, then began untying her bonds with deft fingers. Lily sighed with relief as the hateful rope fell away.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” he told her. “I’m going to move you to the bed so you can rest, but I can’t have you running off. Darek would have my hide for a rug.” He finished unbinding her. Lily smiled, rubbing her arms. She gave the door a calculating glance. Could she make it?

  With a wry smile, Bane reached up for the IV bag and gathered her easily into his arms. “You could try,” he said, lifting her, “but you wouldn’t get far. Worse, you might hurt yourself. You’re heavily medicated—your thinking processes are a mess.” He set her on the bed and hung her IV from the lamp, checking the drip.

  She looked thoughtfully at the tube, then at her hand, trying not to think the words. I could fix that little problem.

  Bane sighed, picked up the rope and sat down next to her. “It’s just saline,” he said, pointing to the clear bag. “No more drugs. I promise. You need fluids, so leave it alone. Okay?”

  His gaze was penetrating and she shifted uncomfortably. “Give me your hands, Lily.” Though the command was soft, it was firm. No wiggle room there.

  Her mouth tightened at the sight of the rope in his hands. Like hell.

  “Lily, I’m trying to do you a favor—”

  She bolted.

  Sort of.

  She made it all the way to the other side of the king mattress before he caught her, murmuring curses under his breath.

  “Need help, Florence?” Darek called from the adjoining room.

  “No!” Bane answered, straddling Lily and securing both her hands in one of his. She kicked and twisted but it did her no good. His grip was like iron as he secured her arms from the elbows, rapidly winding the nasty silver stuff up and in between her forearms in an intricate—and positively unbreakable—pattern, leaving her hands free. Free—but useless. When he was finished, she felt like a calf at a rodeo.

  Lily stared up at him, panting and reeling from the exertion. He wasn’t even breathing hard. She bucked once, more out of frustration than a sincere attempt to escape again. That, at least for now, wasn’t going to happen.

  “You’re right—it’s not,” he said. In a single movement, he pinned her with his upper body, trapping her bound arms between them. She grunted, startled, her heart pounding. His blue eyes were blazing with anger.

  Lily did her best to glare back, but in truth she was scared. Even back at the library, when he’d caught her and covered her mouth with that foul-smelling cloth, he hadn’t been angry. Not like this.

  “I didn’t want to do that, dammit,” he said, his breath warm on her ear. “You’re lucky you didn’t rip out your IV,” he growled, checking her hand.

  Her head slightly clearer now, Lily splayed her fingertips against the hard wall of his chest, pushing at first, then cautiously exploring. She’d never been this close to a man without disaster striking. Her face was against his neck and his scent—pine, cedar and wood smoke—made her wildly aware of every point of contact between them. For a surreal moment, she wondered if he tasted as good as he smelled.

  His eyes widened then drifted shut as he groaned through clenched teeth. It was a lost, aching sound, and it cracked something inside her.

  I’m sorry, she thought, willing him to hear the apology.

  “No, don’t be,” he grated, shifting his hips so that she felt the firm ridge of his erection pressing into her belly. Her body responded, a needy warmth awakening low in her belly. She arched against him, needing to feel his weight on her. Not knowing why she did so, she turned her head, baring
her neck to him. He accepted the invitation, trailing kisses and nips up her throat, along her jawline and finally claiming her mouth with his own. He did taste as good as he smelled. She wanted… She searched for the words…

  “What do you want, Lily?” he whispered.

  More, she thought urgently. Her skin felt hot and prickly and she wanted out of her clothes. She wanted his hands on her. Everywhere. His scent on her skin, his body in hers—she craved these things with a depth that frightened her.

  He rose to his knees, breathing heavily, dragging a hand through his hair. “Not now,” he said, swiping his hand down his face. “I’m sorry, but not like this.”

  Lily stared at him, open-mouthed. Not now? He sounded so casual. Her whole world had just shifted on its axis.

  He took in a deep breath as if to steady himself, moved off her and stood. She lay still, feeling miserably abandoned and confused. What the hell had just happened?

  It wasn’t until he threaded the rope that bound her forearms through the headboard slats that she began to protest. “Please, no.” The pain in her throat brought tears to her eyes.

  He gave her a sympathetic look but shook his head. He bound her ankles to the footboard. “I’m sorry, love,” he said, adjusting the slack in the rope so that her hands lay on the pillow beside her. Just his proximity made her body burn. He sat down beside her on the bed, his expression pensive, and laid his hand on her jaw. Unable to stop herself, she turned her face into his palm, placing a kiss in the warm center.

  He inhaled sharply. “Dammit, Lily.” He stroked her face with trembling fingers. “Look, give me a few hours. Let’s talk in the morning.”

  She’d never been this aroused before. And it sure wasn’t like any encounter she’d ever had with a man before. Skin-to-skin contact usually brought on a man-pocalypse. What is happening to me?

  “I’ll just be in the next room. Get some rest,” he said. He dimmed the room lights and left, drawing the door not quite closed behind himself.

  No, don’t go, Lily thought sadly. I need you here. She lay for a long time in the silence, trying to slow her breathing. She felt strange. She swore she could feel every cell in her body, right down to the blood cells moving through her veins. She could still smell him on her hands and her lips tingled oddly. She brought her hands to her face on the pillow, touching her mouth to see if it felt any different. She felt…marked. It was a long time before she slept.

  Darek rounded on Bane the second he stepped through the door to the adjoining room.

  “For fuck’s sake, Bane,” he growled, his eyes flashing red. “You have her scent all over you.”

  Bane raised an eyebrow, studying his friend. He was used to Darek’s preference for shooting first and asking questions later. When Bane spoke, he did so in careful, measured tones. “Perhaps so,” he said quietly. “I take it you object?”

  Darek snarled, his hands clenching into fists. “To you fucking around with a target? You’re damn right I object!” He stormed across the room, red light flickering over and through his skin in lightning-like flashes, signaling that a shift was imminent.

  Bane’s mouth twitched in spite of his friend’s ire. “Shifting in here would be…ill-advised. If you want to tear me limb from limb, let’s at least adjourn to the balcony.”

  Usually, humor calmed Darek. Usually. So it surprised Bane when his friend grabbed him by the front of the shirt, lengthening talons piercing the fabric and cutting his chest.

  “All right,” Darek grated, his eyes glowing bright red now.

  A cold anger spread in Bane’s gut and he clenched Darek’s wrists in his hands. “We can do this if you want, but it’s not going to change the way you feel about her.”

  Darek stopped mid-snarl, shock registering on his features. “Is that what you think?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice.

  Bane regarded him with narrowed eyes, gauging his chances of being hurled through the glass door and off the balcony. “I think,” he began. He paused, inhaling deeply. “I think that you’re so bloody tired of losing people you care about that when you feel something—anything—you paint it over with rage.” Darek’s grip loosened, the red lightning in his eyes fading. “And I think you owe me a shirt.”

  The last vestiges of red left Darek’s eyes as he let go of Bane, his expression a mixture of anger and sorrow. “Fuck you, Sigmund.” He took a step back, clenching and unclenching his fists. “At least I’m not the one getting suckered by one of those bitches.” Bane raised an eyebrow but said nothing in reply. “I need to look at the sky for a while,” Darek growled. He shoved his now-human hands in his pockets and walked toward the glass door to the balcony.

  Those bitches, Bane thought, would be the idani.

  Bane had been working with Darek for more than a decade. Like everyone, he had his issues, but he was a good partner. Loyal. Raised in war-torn Britain in the fifteenth century, Darek was a skilled warrior. He preferred being in the thick of battle to watching it from a strategist’s post. Bane was a superb fighter, but he preferred not to fight until he’d analyzed a problem from every possible angle. He supposed that made sense. After all, he’d spent his fledgling years watching people die of plague in the once-thriving city of London. Disease wasn’t something you could tear apart with your bare hands.

  The glass door rattled in its frame as Darek shoved it open, stepping out onto the balcony. Bane let him go. If the night sky would bring Darek some solace, let it be. Bane needed to think. And he really needed a cold shower. He unbuttoned his ruined shirt and cast it aside, heading for the bathroom.

  The war—the dracambri’s struggle for survival, really—had fallen upon them in the dark of night, twenty years before the turn of the second millennium. Even their prince and sovrán, Anthony Ciruelo, had been unprepared. Darek had been a commander in Anthony’s army then, and his battalion was the first struck. The first reports to trickle in to the High Council and to Bane were of a powerful new species of demon—red eyes, black hides, translucent in the darkness. Halfway around the world, Darek’s men were caught off guard. The demons nearly wiped out the entire aerie in Melanesia.

  The loss stunned everyone. Anthony called their new enemy the náladon, a word meaning “out of night” in the old tongue. The next few years were spent doing little more than struggling to survive, hiding when they could, fighting the náladon when they had to. Until Bane and other scientists on the High Council were able to gather their resources and trace their new enemy’s origins through DNA analysis, the military had nothing to go on. What they found out would change the course of the war.

  Years later, Darek was at the home aerie in Norway when an exhausted Bane arrived to deliver the news to Anthony. The náladon were a hybrid species—half dracambri, half idani and stronger than either. He was skeptical—interspecies pairings had never before produced a viable pregnancy, let alone offspring—but the research was solid. Someone had engineered a way to make dracambri-idani hybrids that thrived. What was more, the sheer numbers of náladon suggested that a breeding program had been under way for some time.

  Anthony’s response was bleak. “We are at war with our children.” Who would do such a thing—and why?

  That night, Darek and Bane discussed that very question on the veranda over a bottle of one-hundred-year-old Scotch. It was there that their partnership was formed.

  Bane stood in front of the bathroom mirror and had a look at the three deep parallel cuts over his right pectoral muscle. They weren’t too bad. One shift would take care of them. If Darek had really meant to hurt him, he could have shifted further, added in the anticoagulant glands at the base of the dragon’s claws. Bane started the shower and stepped in.

  Once Anthony gave their plan the go-ahead, Darek transferred to intelligence work, with Bane as his handler and sometime partner. Whoever was behind the náladon breeding program had been careful. The idani knew the engineer by one name only, and it wasn’t exactly a revealing one. “La vedova”—“the widow”
in Anthony’s native Italian. According to the idani, she’d come to them one at a time, offering them a near-irresistible deal. If they signed her contract in blood and underwent a series of injections, they could have access to an unending stream of inexhaustible men—dragon-shifters. In exchange, any resulting offspring would be la vedova’s property.

  Most of the idani didn’t believe the fertility shots would work, which was all the more reason to take la vedova up on her offer. If the shots didn’t work, there would be no offspring. The idani would get all the men they wanted with no consequences. By the time they found out the injections did work, it was too late—for everyone.

  The water cooled Bane’s skin but did nothing for the heavy ache between his legs. He kept picturing Lily’s startled eyes after he’d kissed her, glazed with a hunger she obviously hadn’t expected. Eavesdropping on her thoughts, he’d felt each new sensation as she experienced it. The scent of her need had been intoxicating. It had taken every ounce of willpower he had to walk away.

  He wrapped his hand around the base of his cock, picturing those soft, soft lips of hers in its place. He reached climax with just a few good, hard strokes, leaning against the wall and groaning aloud as it overtook him with unexpected force.

  Afterward, he stood under the tepid spray for a long time, trying to calm the grumbling beast still flexing and sliding beneath his skin. It was futile, of course, trying to reason with it, but he couldn’t bring himself to trust its instincts. Not yet. The whole thing was just too bizarre.

  Wyrmate. Go to her, it whispered in their shared mental space.

  Yeah, Bane thought. Just two little problems with that. First, she’s an idana. What if she’s fertile?

  This thought didn’t seem to faze the creature, so Bane added, There’s something else. Darek thinks the same thing. He doesn’t like it, but he thinks it anyway. Can’t you hear him?