She resisted. “I already cleaned and bandaged it.”
He exploded. “Goddammit, woman! I said let me have a fucking look!”
Her eyes went wide and she froze. The force of his anger was palpable. It beat against her skin. Thunder rolled, this time closer. It was almost overhead.
She had heard the stories about Tiago. The thunder and lightning came when he really lost it. Cautiously she uncurled. She made herself lie passive as she stared up at him. Sometimes with dominant Wyr warriors the best thing you could do was stay quiet and get out of their way—or in this case, acquiesce. Sooner or later their rampaging always ground to a halt, and then they could listen to reason again.
He put one knee on the bed and leaned his weight on it as he lifted up her T-shirt. The bandage covered her ribs under her left breast. She winced as he peeled back the bandage to look at what was underneath.
“Do you know how irritating you are?” she said. “Because if you don’t, I’ve got time.”
“This looks deep,” he said in a quiet voice. Lightning flashed outside. Thunder exploded with a boom. She jumped and shivered. He put his hand briefly against her narrow waist. “Shh now, be easy. The dressing is soaked. I’ll change the bandage.”
She knuckled her eyes. Damn it. She hadn’t slept in two days. She was starting to come down from the singing part of the drunk. He was acting far too serious and concerned, a storm was brewing outside, and all the fun was packing its bags and ditching the party. She tried to hold on to it.
“You know, technology in the twenty-first century is pretty cool,” she told him. “I’m going to DVR my own meltdown and email it to my therapist.”
He didn’t so much as crack a smile.
She drooped. She uncurled as he urged her to lie flat. He removed the soiled bandage, and with a careful, velvet-light touch he cleaned the wound and covered it with cotton padding again. At one point he bent down close to her skin and sniffed the wound. Okay, so that looked a little weird, but she knew what he was doing; he was checking with his Wyr sense of smell to see if he could detect poison. He caught her eye afterward and gave her a tight, quick smile that was probably meant to be reassuring, but he didn’t speak. He seemed busy with his own internal issues. Lightning struck the parking lot. Her shivering deepened. That was just downright sexy. No, spooky. No, sexy. DAMN IT!
“All right, I’m all done for now,” he said. His soft, even voice was somehow so much worse than his yelling voice. He taped the bandage in place. Then he looked at her, and the fury in his dark eyes stabbed her. “We know everything that matters.”
She rubbed the pointed tip of one ear, which was burning in embarrassment. “Apparently the whole world does,” she muttered. “I never even saw the guy with the cell phone.”
“That asshole is going to be lucky to live out the week if I have anything to say about it. I can’t fucking believe he didn’t call 911 soon as he realized someone was being attacked.” He took her hand and held it. “Now I want you to tell me, why didn’t you call, and why do you want me to go home?”
She pulled her hand away and tucked it against her chest. “Don’t be nice to me.”
“I’ll be whatever the hell I want to be,” he snapped. “Why didn’t you call?”
She muttered, “I’m supposed to do this on my own. No Wyr allowed.”
“That’s old news,” Tiago said. “Plans have changed.”
Just like that? Plans have changed? She scowled at him. “Hey, cowboy, remember what I said. I’m gonna be Queen. I don’t think you get to boss me around like that.”
He rubbed the back of his head and raised his eyebrows at her. “How are you going to stop me?”
“Screw you,” she said.
“You’ve said that already,” he pointed out. “I’m getting bored now.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the only thing I can think of at the moment,” she muttered. With a Herculean effort she managed to keep from looking at his crotch again.
“The game’s changed. Deal with it.”
Her gaze bounced around his dark saturnine features. The force of his presence was such that the tiny hairs on her arms rose. It cremated the numb state she had managed to achieve with the alcohol. He had the extreme physicality of an apex predator, his body tempered by years of fighting, the thick muscles corded with sinew and veins. His Power was a heavy, sulfurous force that pressed her into the mattress.
She struggled to sit up. Suddenly he was bending over her. He eased one huge arm underneath her shoulders to help her upright. She scowled and glared at him. “Look, you can’t stay, and that’s all there is to it. I’m all right. I handled everything.”
He snapped, “You have a knife wound between your ribs!”
“You should have a look at the other guys,” she told him.
Her words hit a stone wall. “We’re done discussing this,” he said. He walked over to the other bed. “What do you want to take with you?”
She pressed a hand to her side. “Get back over here so I can smack you.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”
“I mean it. Get your ass over here.” There she was, back to what was fast becoming her favorite subject.
“I’m so motivated to do that since it’s clearly in my best interest. I’m just going to assume you want all of this.” He stuffed things back into the bags.
His back was turned to her. She stared at his ass again. Really, it was the sexiest ass she had ever seen. First she got a close-up of his front, and now she got treated to the back view. Tight, taut and clothed in black like it had been gift wrapped just for her.
She patted him on the butt and told him, “Nice buns, cowboy.”
She started to pull his wallet out of the back pocket, and he grabbed her hand. Spoilsport. She sighed, opening her fingers, and he patted her as he let her go. “I’m taking the bags out to the car,” he told her. “Be right back.”
He walked out, and just like that she lost what little control she’d had over her life. She tobogganed right out of the fun bit of the drunk and plunged into the snowdrift labeled the sorry stage.
He came back and scooped her into his arms. He was such a mean barbarian, and he was being so careful with her, so gentle and nice. And she couldn’t let herself rely on him. She couldn’t let herself totally rely on anyone ever again.
THREE
Tiago tried to figure out how he could have wrecked his life so completely in just a day. One day. Twenty-four hours. Yesterday he had been merely irritated with cooling his heels in New York and doing unimportant stuff that could have been handled by someone—almost anyone—else.
Tonight in Chicago, he had lost all sense of irritation and had become downright desperate.
He paced in the parking lot of another motel, a Red Roof Inn, as he called Dragos, who answered on the first ring. Tiago said, “Got her.”
The dragon let loose a long exhale. “Good.”
“She was wounded. She’s okay, but she needs to see a doctor soon.” He explained what happened, or at least what he had found and what he had surmised, while his long stride ate up the distance of the parking lot.
Glowing streetlamps were surrounded with blurred yellow halos. A light rain had started to fall, miniscule silver meteors streaking through the illumination. Tendrils of fog rose from the sun-warmed asphalt. The tendrils twisted and curled around his steel-toed boots as though he stood in a Gorgon’s nest of transparent snakes.
He stood several feet away from the building and scanned it and the surrounding area with a hypervigilant gaze. The motel building had a couple of floors, rows of identical doors stacked on top of each other. He had secured a ground-floor room that opened directly onto the parking lot, so they could leave in a hurry if they had to. It was late enough that the motel was quiet, and the cars that dotted the parking lot were cool to the touch. He pivoted at the curb to start another lap.
“What do you need?” Dragos asked.
“You should send a
cleanup crew to the Motel 6 where she was hiding. Oh, and she said she left a stolen car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. She said she wiped her prints off the steering wheel and car door handle, but she admits she’s been pretty rattled since the attack and hasn’t been thinking very clearly. The car needs to be cleaned and returned to its owner.”
“I’ll get Tucker on it. Hold on.”
He waited while Dragos relayed orders. Then Tiago said, “Dragos, you’ve got to help me get a handle on her before there’s a murder-suicide here. She’s bawling her eyes out. I’m here to tell you, there’s nothing worse to be around than a forlorn faerie.”
Dragos coughed. “Oh-kay. Hold on.”
Tiago’s sharp ears caught Pia in the background, saying, “You’re all Neanderthals, what else did you expect? What, me talk to him? Oh no—” The phone must have exchanged hands. Pia sighed, “Hello, Tiago. I’m so glad you found her. What’s going on?”
Another female. He nodded. Smart. Speaking in rapid sentences, he filled her in. “You’ve got to help me get her to stop crying,” he demanded.
“You just told me she’s drunk,” Pia said. “Don’t you think she’ll stop as she sobers up?”
“That’s not soon enough,” he growled.
“Have you tried talking to her?” Pia asked.
He pulled the phone away from his ear to give it a quick glare. Was that sarcasm in her voice? He said, “Of course I have. I came all this way to help her, and she keeps insisting I go away. She didn’t even want me to look at her wound. What the fuck is that about?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Pia said, “You want me to deal with this in a five-minute conversation.”
He told her in a grim voice, “Does it have to take that long? I’m just looking for a way to survive the night.”
He glanced at the door to their motel room, which he had left cracked open a few inches. He could still hear her crying. The worst of it was how quiet she tried to be, sneaking sobs into her pillow. She probably thought she was hiding it from him. Argh. He wanted to stab something in his ears.
“Alrighty,” Pia said. “Gray and I have been discussing Niniane today since she’s been on all our minds. Did you know she barely escaped with her life when Urien led the coup that slaughtered her family?”
Tiago stopped pacing. His hand tightened on the cell phone. “I knew Urien had killed her family and she had escaped, but I don’t know the details.”
“She was seventeen years old,” Pia said. “Seventeen. Did you know she saw the bodies of her twin brothers, and she watched Urien’s men as they gutted her mother?”
His stomach clenched. Her mother, gutted before her eyes. He wondered how old her brothers had been. How they had been killed. He had to clear the gravel out of his throat before he could reply. “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“So, here’s my five minute fix,” Pia said, her voice soft. “Niniane is under a lot of stress. When she was just a child, a family member, maybe even someone she had cared about and trusted once, slaughtered everyone she loved. Now she’s survived an assassination attempt from yet another family member, and somehow she’s got to find the courage to go back into that palace where she lost everything in the world that mattered to her. So if you tried talking to her in the tone of voice you just used with me, Tiago, I suggest you come back to New York. Any one of the other sentinels would be glad to come take your place. They love her.”
He sucked in a sharp breath. Way to stick a knife in when he wasn’t looking. He stopped pacing and stood rigid. He listened to the roar of denial that had erupted inside when Pia mentioned him being replaced. Fuck if he was going to let that happen.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here. Hold on,” he growled. He fought his temper, won the struggle for self-control and kept his voice as soft and even as hers. “Nobody else is coming out. I’ve got her, and I will look after her.”
“The right way,” Pia said.
“The right way,” he replied. He sent a grim smile into the halogen-lamp-lit night. “Pia, you’re a bitch. Thank you.”
In the background, Dragos said, “Hey.”
“Ease off, big guy,” Pia said, half muffled. “It was a compliment. At least I think it was.” Her voice came back fully. “Anything else, Tiago?”
He turned to look at the motel door again. “No.”
“Please call if there’s anything we can do.”
“You know I will.” He hung up and pocketed the cell.
Moments later he eased into the room, and shut and locked the door. It was silent inside. Too silent. Was she holding her breath? He stretched his neck to ease tense muscles. Way to screw things up, Dr. Death.
His predator Wyr eyes adjusted quickly to the more intense darkness inside. The room had a king-sized bed, a bland beige decor echoed in motel rooms across the country and no smoking. He had requested that specifically. Niniane was curled under the covers of the bed, her small form scooted to the side closest to the wall, as near to the edge of the bed as she could be without falling off. It was almost like she was wishing she could get as far away from him as possible.
He shook his head and indulged in a little mental ass-kicking. Then he walked over to the bed. He removed his most obtrusive weapons, put them on the bedside table and made sure his Glock was close at hand. All the while he listened.
Yeah, shit. She was definitely holding her breath.
He sighed and eased onto the bed on top of the covers. She was lying on her good side, favoring her left with the knife wound.
She asked, “Did you call ho—New York?”
“Yeah. I talked briefly to Dragos and Pia.”
Her head turned slightly toward him. “I like Pia. We didn’t have very long to get to know each other, but I’m already going to miss her.”
“She likes you too,” he said. He carefully curled around her small, tense body and wrapped an arm around her. She started breathing again. It sounded choppy and uneven. He laid his head on his bent arm and hugged her back against him.
She whispered, “Don’t be nice to me.”
“Why not?” he asked, confused. Didn’t Pia just tell him to be nicer? He tucked his nose in her hair. She had taken out those ridiculous pigtails, and her hair was downy soft and loose. She smelled like cigarettes, herbal shampoo and the unique feminine scent that was all hers, all Tricks. Niniane. Whatever. Niniane was a pretty name, he realized. It suited her.
“When you’re nice, it makes it harder.”
He thought of her tearful good-bye several days ago and the round of fierce hugs she had given everybody, himself included, before she left for the airport. He thought of the seventeen-year-old who had lost everything in the world that had mattered to her, and of the many obstacles in 1809 that one small, hunted Fae girl must have faced in getting safely from Adriyel to sanctuary in the Wyr demesne in New York.
He thought of the recent assassination attempt and how she still intended to go live with the Dark Fae, some of whom might still want to kill her, and all because it was far better to have a good person in power than to risk having another Urien take the throne.
He wanted to rip Urien to pieces all over again.
Her hand kept jerking. He raised his head. After a moment he realized she was plucking at the edges of the bedspread. He wrapped his hand with care around hers, stilling the nervous movement. Her fingers felt small, delicate and cold. She tried to pull away from his touch, but he wouldn’t let go.
“How drunk are you now?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She sniffed. “I can feel my feet again. My side hurts. Not very, I think.”
She had to be exhausted. He hated that she was in pain. He wanted to offer her medication, but he wasn’t sure what might be safe after she’d downed so much vodka. He told her, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Her head moved slightly. “’Course it will.”
He didn’t know how she managed to make the perky state
ment sound so awful. He sighed. “You get some rest now.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“We can talk more on the way to New York,” he told her.
She lifted her head. “What?”
“I said I’m taking you back to New York.” He kept his voice patient since she was obviously still inebriated. “And we can talk more on the way.”
She sighed. “Tiago, I’m not going back.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “Your apartment in the Tower is secure, and we can set up a reliable security detail for you while the attack on you is investigated. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
He tried to think if there was something else he should say, but he wasn’t Dr. Phil. He was Dr. Death, and he thought he had covered all the important bits. He held her a long time. Funny. He was doing it for her, but it felt pretty damn good to him too. She was curvy and soft, and no bigger than a minute. She fit perfectly in the curl of his body as he spooned with her.
Finally her stiff body went lax and her breathing deepened. She was asleep. He eased away from her, one careful move at a time. She never stirred when he stood.
He picked up the duffle he had set against one wall earlier. It held a toiletry kit and a couple changes of clothing in his size, along with a lightweight laptop in a protective case and extra weapons. He slipped into the bathroom and eased the door shut before he turned on the light.
He stripped and showered. After washing and rinsing, he braced his hands on the shower wall and leaned on them. He stood with his head down as hot water cascaded over his neck and shoulders. The wet heat felt good after his flight from New York, and it soaked into well-used muscles. Water dripped off his nose and chin. What a day.
He should do the smart thing. He should listen to what Pia had said, and call New York to have one of the other sentinels come take his place.
He should go with his troops to their next assignment.
He wasn’t going to do the smart thing.
He was going to do the only thing he could. He was going to stay and make everything okay for Niniane. Because he had promised her that it would be okay. And because he didn’t seem to be able to make any other choice.