Darkangel, Christine Pope [ebook reader screen .txt] 📗

mint and nothing else. It was just the violation, the feel of this man I had come to despise forcing himself on me in such an intimate way. Nothing compared to what he had planned, I knew, but still….

He pressed his hands against the edge of the table and thrust himself upward, then whirled on the woman who had spoken a few moments earlier. “It’s not working!” he snarled. “You said on the night of the solstice she would be mine!”

Face calm, she stared up at him, meeting his angry gaze as if it were nothing. With a shrug she replied, “I said the signs told me that she would be the consort of a Wilcox. They did not tell me which Wilcox. You just assumed it would be you.”

“Fuck!” Damon Wilcox ran an angry hand through his hair, and glared into the watching crowd. “Connor, come here.”

The watching clan members shifted, and a tall man moved forward, but slowly, as if he was reluctant to do as Damon had asked. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing the dark robes, but what looked like jeans and a sweater.

Even in the dim lighting it seemed as if there was something familiar about him, although I couldn’t quite figure it out. Probably my eyes playing tricks on me. After all, how could there be anything familiar about any of the Wilcoxes? I’d never seen any of them before, except that one time in Phoenix when Damon tried to grab me at the Nordstrom Rack.

But then the strange man bent over me, and I stared up into his eyes.

Green eyes. Cloudy jade, just as I’d dreamed a hundred times.

I sucked in a breath, and then looked beyond those eyes to the face of the man who gazed down at me, and that was familiar as well.

“Chris?” I asked, my voice cracking on that one syllable. It couldn’t be. Maybe I’d gotten knocked in the head during the kidnapping, and I was hallucinating things that weren’t there. No way could Chris Wilson be here, of all places.

Those green eyes didn’t seem to want to meet mine. Finally he said, “It’s Connor, actually. Connor Wilcox.”

No. The room seemed to tilt around me, and I wished I could sit up, wished I could push myself off this table and run, run far away. I shut my eyes, but when I opened them again, he was still standing there.

We might have been the only two people in the room. “You lied to me,” I whispered finally.

He pressed his lips together, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite manage it. Not with his brother and so many of his clan members looking on.

“Do it,” Damon said, his voice harsh with anger and frustration. “You have to bind her to us. Now.”

Again Connor hesitated. His hands were shoved in his jeans pockets, and I could practically feel the tension radiating from him as he stood there. At last he took his hands from his pockets, leaned over me, and murmured, “I’m sorry.”

His face was very close to mine. I’d dreamed of him kissing me, had wondered what it would be like, but never had I ever thought that we would come to it like this.

Then his mouth pressed against mine.

Heat flooded through me, seeming to set off every nerve ending in my body, as if all my veins no longer ran with blood but molten lava, bright and terrible and alive. That same warmth traveled to my core, making me ache with need. In that moment I wanted him so badly that I think I would have let him take me right there on that table, in front of everyone. Even in front of Damon Wilcox.

He felt it, too, I could tell. His eyes widened, and those same hands that had been clutching the table reached up as if of their own volition to cup my face, to hold me tenderly while he kissed me again and again, lips matching perfectly, tongues reaching out to touch one another, the feel and the taste of him better than anything I’d ever experienced. I fought against those invisible bonds, and then it seemed as they melted away, because I was able to reach up and wrap my arms around him.

My consort. The one I’d been waiting for all these years.

A Wilcox.

I gasped then, pushing him away, trying to recover something of my sanity, something of my will, even as my body cried out for him. He seemed to understand, and stepped back, although I could hear his rough breathing and knew he wanted me just as badly.

“It’s done,” the woman said. “She has bonded to him.”

Damon Wilcox made a gesture with one hand, and someone turned on the overhead lights. I could see now that it looked as if we were in someone’s basement rec room. There was a wet bar in one corner, and a large flat-screen television on the far wall, fronted by a leather couch and a recliner. As I put my hand out and felt the lip of the surface on which I lay, I realized their makeshift “altar” had to be a pool table.

Incongruously, I wanted to laugh. But even beneath my amusement I could still feel those ripples of arousal. Connor Wilcox was so very close. It would be so easy to reach out and pull him against me, taste his mouth again, let his hands explore my body, push me back down against the table….

No. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but somehow I managed to shove those thoughts away, force myself to think of what the Wilcoxes had done — stolen me from my home, from my clan. And again I saw Adam’s lifeless body lying on the Navajo rug beside the bed, and that was enough to flood my veins with ice to replace the heat of a moment ago.

Without thinking, I launched myself off the pool table and at Damon Wilcox, hand raised to deliver the sort of blow I’d dealt Perry in the parking lot of Main Stage, only this time so much more powerful, as I had the strength of a prima and the hate and sorrow of a thousand avenging angels to bolster it.

But then he raised his own hand, and it was as if I’d crashed into a stone wall. The breath was knocked out of me, and I staggered. At once Connor was beside me, reaching out to take my arm. I wrenched it away.

“Don’t touch me!”

He stopped immediately, fist clenching at his side.

Damon watched me, an odd mixture of anger, frustration, and amusement twisting his features. Now that I saw them together, I thought I could glimpse a slight resemblance to Connor, but Damon’s face was harsher, more hawk-like. He smiled, a mere curling of his lip. “Well, she can’t stay here now. I’m afraid she’s your problem, brother.” Then he added over his shoulder, to two of the burlier-looking members of his clan, “Help Connor get his new package home, would you?”

They converged on me. I lifted a hand again, thinking that even if I couldn’t attack Damon I could surely take out a few of his supporters. But whatever magic he’d used to subdue me before seemed to be active again, because I found I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything except stand there as one bound my hands in front of me, even as the second man fastened a dark cloth over my eyes. I tried to cry out, but my mouth was blocked as well, and I choked on the words I had been about to say.

Rough hands lifted me up and slung me over a shoulder. I could feel the man going up a flight of stairs, and crossing what sounded like a wood floor. The sound of a door opening, and then a blast of freezing wind against me, colder than anything I’d ever felt before. It made sense, I supposed, if we were now in Flagstaff, several thousand feet higher than my home in Jerome and at least twenty degrees colder.

He carried me what seemed to be several yards, and then I was tossed on the back seat of a car or some other vehicle. The man settled himself beside me, even as I heard an engine rumble to life. It sounded powerful. Maybe not a car, then, but an SUV or a truck with an extended cab. We began to move.

It was hard to tell how long that trip lasted. I thought I heard the sound of another vehicle following us, but it was hard for me to know for certain. The tires were noisy, the road beneath them sounding slushy, rough. Neither the man in the seat beside me nor the person driving the SUV/truck spoke, making it that much more difficult to gauge the passing of time. It didn’t feel that long, though, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Not much more. At least, I didn’t think so.

Eventually the vehicle came to a stop. The driver got out, as did the man next to me. He grabbed me and threw me over his shoulder again, but I felt him slip a little, as if the surface he stood on was slick. Again that freezing air hit me, and I wondered if the street or sidewalk was icy. The sound of another door slamming, and we walked a little way before we entered a building and went up a flight of stairs. A pause, and then I was deposited on the floor, still not able to move except for a slight shivering caused by the chill wind outside.

It was warmer here, at least, although I couldn’t begin to guess where I’d been brought. The man who’d been carrying me said, “He’ll contact you tomorrow.”

“All right.” Connor’s voice, sounding resigned.

The door opened and shut again. A second or two later, I felt hands untying the knot in the cloth at the back of my head. The dark fabric was lifted away, and I blinked.

I stood in the entry area of what appeared to be a house or apartment. The space was open, with heavy dark wood framing the doorways and windows. One wall seemed to be all brick. The