The Dark-Hunters (175 page)

Kat vanished only to return a few minutes later with a Sprite. Cassandra thanked her, then went back to work while Kat left her alone.

Cassandra sipped her drink leisurely as she surfed. About an hour later, she was so tired, she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer.

Yawning, she checked the time. It was barely five-thirty. Even so, her eyelids were so heavy that she couldn’t stay awake no matter how hard she tried.

She shut down her computer, then headed for bed to take a short nap.

She fell asleep the instant her head touched the pillow. Normally, Cassandra didn’t dream much whenever she took an afternoon nap.

Today was completely different.

Today her dreams started almost as soon as she closed her eyes.

How strange …

But the oddest part of all was that her fantasy realm bore no resemblance to anything she’d ever dreamt before. Instead of her normal dreams of glamour or horror, this one was peaceful. Gentle. And it filled her with warm security.

She was dressed in a soft dark green gown like some medieval lady. Frowning, she ran her hand over the material, which was softer than chamois.

Alone inside a stone cottage where a warm fire blazed in a large hearth, she stood off to the side of an old wooden table. The winds howled outside a window that was covered by a wooden shutter that clattered noisily as it tried to keep the winter winds out.

She heard someone at the door behind her.

Cassandra turned around just in time to see Wulf shoulder it open. Her heart stopped as she caught sight of him dressed in a chain-mail vest of sorts. His massive arms were bare with his torso and mail covered by a leather vest that had Nordic designs burned into it. The designs matched the tattoo on his right shoulder and biceps.

His conical helm covered his head and had more mail attached to it that covered his face, virtually obscuring it. But for those intense, heated eyes, she would never have known it was Wulf under there. He held a small battle-axe in one hand, resting it over his shoulder. He looked primitive and wild. The kind of man who had once owned the world. One who was afraid of nothing.

His dark gaze swept the room, then stopped on her. She watched a slow, seductive smile break across the lower half of his face, showing off his fangs.

“Cassandra, my love,” he greeted, his voice warm and enchanting. “What are you doing here?”

“I have no idea,” she answered honestly. “I’m not even sure where
here
is.”

He laughed at that, a deep, rumbling sound, then shut the door and bolted it. “You’re in my home,
villkat.
At least what was once my home long ago.”

She looked about the spartan place, which was furnished with a table, chairs, and one very large fur-covered bed. “Strange, I would have thought Wulf Tryggvason had a better place than this to call his own.”

He set the axe down on the table, then removed his helm and placed it over the axe.

Cassandra was floored by the masculine beauty of the man before her. He oozed a raw, sexual appeal that no one could ever rival.

“Compared to the small farm where I grew up, this is a mansion, my lady.”

“Really?”

He nodded as he pulled her up against him. His eyes scorched her and filled her with a deep, aching need. She knew exactly what he wanted, and though she barely knew him at all, she was more than willing to give it to him.

“My father was once a warring raider who took a vow of poverty years before I was born,” Wulf said huskily.

His confession surprised her. “What made him do that?”

His grip on her tightened. “The downfall of all men, I’m afraid … Love. My mother was a captured Christian slave who had been given to him by his father after one of their raids. She beguiled him, and in the end she tamed him and turned a once-proud warrior into a docile farmer who refused to lift his sword lest he offend his newfound God.”

She could hear the raw emotions in his voice. The contempt he felt for anyone who would choose peace over war. “You disagreed with his choice?”

“Aye, what good is a man who cannot protect himself and those he loves?” His eyes turned dark, deadly. The rage inside them made her shiver. “When the Jutes came to our village to loot and take slaves, I am told he held his hands out and let them run him through. Everyone who survived mocked him for his cowardice. He who had once made his enemies quake in terror at the mention of his name died at the slaughter like a defenseless calf. I have never understood how he could just stand there and take a killing blow without trying to defend himself.”

She reached up to smooth his brow with her fingers as his pain reached out to her. But it wasn’t hatred or condescension she heard in his voice. It was guilt. “I’m so sorry.”

“As was I,” he whispered, his eyes turning even stormier. “It wasn’t bad enough that I left him there to die, but I took my brother as well. There was no one there to protect him in our absence.”

“Where were you?”

He dropped his gaze to the floor, but still she could see his self-recrimination. He wanted to go back and change that moment, just as she wished she could take back the night the Spathi Daimons had killed her mother and sisters.

“I had left the summer before in search of war and riches.” He released her and looked about his modest home. “After word of his death reached me, riches no longer seemed important to me. Disagreements aside, I should have been there with him.”

She touched his bare arm. “You must have loved your father greatly.”

He let out a tired breath. “At times. At others I hated him. Hated him for not being the man he should have been. His father was a respected jarl and yet we lived like starving beggars. Mocked and spat upon by our own kin. My mother took pride in the insults, saying it was God’s will that we suffer. It was somehow making us better people, but I never believed her. My father’s blind devotion to her beliefs only angered me more. We fought, he and I, constantly. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps and to take their abuse and say nothing.”

The torment in his eyes touched her even more than the gentleness of his hand on hers. “He wanted me to be something I wasn’t. But I couldn’t turn the other cheek. ’Twas never in my nature to not answer insult with insult. Blow with blow.”

He turned and looked at her with a scowl. “Why am I telling you this?”

Cassandra thought about it for a second. “The dream, I’m sure. It’s probably on your mind.” Though why it would be in
her
dream, she couldn’t imagine.

In fact, this dream was getting odder by the minute and she couldn’t figure out why her subconscious would come here.

Why was she conjuring up this fantasy about her mysterious Dark-Hunter…?

He nodded. “Aye, no doubt. I fear I am doing to Christopher what was once done to me. I should let him live his life as his own and not interfere with his choices so often.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Honestly?”

She smiled. “I certainly prefer honesty to lies.”

He gave a light laugh, then his face turned brooding again. “I don’t want to lose him too.” His voice was so deep and aching that it made her heart clench. “And yet I know I have no choice except to lose him.”

“Why?”

“Everyone dies, my lady. At least in the mortal realm. Yet I go on as everyone around me perishes over and over again.” He lifted his gaze to hers. The agony on his face reached deep inside her. “Have you any idea what it is like to hold a loved one in your arms while they die?”

Cassandra’s chest drew tight as she thought of her mother’s and sisters’ deaths. She had wanted to go to them after the explosion, but her bodyguard had pulled her away while she howled in grief for their loss.

“It’s too late to help them, Cassie. We have to run.”

Her soul had screamed that day.

Sometimes it screamed even now at the injustice of her life.

“Yes, I do,” she whispered. “I, too, have seen everyone I love die. My father is all I have left.”

His gaze sharpened. “Then imagine doing it thousands of times, century after century. Imagine watching them be born, live, and then die while you carry on and start over with each new generation. Every time I see a member of my family die, it is like watching my brother Erik die all over again. And Chris…” He winced as if the very mention of Chris’s name caused him pain. “He is my brother made over in face and form.” One corner of his mouth lifted in wry amusement. “And mouth as well as temperament. Of all the family I have lost, his death will be the hardest to bear, I think.”

She saw the vulnerability in his eyes and it affected her deeply that this fierce man would have so human a fault. “He’s still young. His whole life is ahead of him.”

“Perhaps … but my brother was only twenty-four when he was slain by our enemies. I will never forget the look on his son Bironulf’s young face when he saw his father fall in battle. All I could think of was saving the boy.”

“Obviously you did.”

“Aye. I swore I would never let Bironulf die as his father had. All his life, I kept him safe and he died an old man, in his sleep. Peacefully.” He paused for a moment. “I guess in the end I do follow my mother’s beliefs more than those of my father. The Norse believed in dying young in battle so that we could enter the halls of Valhalla, but like my mother, I wanted a different fate for those I loved. ’Tis a pity I came to understand her feelings far too late.”

Wulf shook his head as if to banish those thoughts. He frowned at her. “I can’t believe I’m thinking of this while I have such a beautiful maid with me. I am truly growing old when I would rather talk than take action,” he said with a deep laugh. “Enough of my morbid thoughts.”

He pulled her forcefully against him. “Now why are we wasting our time when we could be spending it much more productively?”

“Productively how?”

His smile was wicked, warm, and it devoured her. “I am thinking my tongue could be put to much better use. What say you?”

He ran said member up the column of her throat until he could nibble her ear. His warm breath scorched her neck, causing her to shiver.

“Oh yeah,” she breathed. “I’m thinking that is a much better use of your tongue.”

He laughed while he unlaced the back of her gown. Slowly, seductively, he pulled it from her shoulders and let it fall straight to the floor. The fabric slid sensuously against her flesh as it left her body and cold air caressed her.

Naked before him, she couldn’t suppress a deep tremble. It was so odd to be exposed while he stood before her wearing his armor. The firelight played in his dark eyes.

Wulf stared at the unadorned beauty of the woman before him. She was even more luscious than she had been the last time he’d dreamed of her. He ran his hand tenderly over her breast, letting the nipple tease his palm.

She reminded him of Saga, the Norse goddess of poetry. Elegant, refined. Gentle. Things he had spurned as a mortal man.

Now he was captivated by her.

He still didn’t know why he had confided in her. It wasn’t like him to speak so freely, and yet she had lured him.

But he didn’t want to make love to her here. Not in the past where his memories and guilt over those he had failed slashed at him.

She deserved better than this.

Closing his eyes, he conjured them into a facsimile of his modern bedroom. Only he made a few modifications …

Cassandra gasped as she pulled back slightly and looked around. The walls surrounding them were reflective black with white trim, except the wall to her right, which was made up of floor-to-ceiling windows. The open windows were framed by gauzy white curtains that fluttered in the wind, reaching out toward them and making the candlelight from dozens of candles in the room dance.

But the candles didn’t go out. They twinkled all around them like stars.

There was a large bed in the center of the room, up high on a raised platform. It had black silk sheets and a thick black silk duvet over a down comforter. The bed was made of ornate ironwork that formed an intricate square canopy between the four posts. More of the white gauzy material was wrapped around it and was left to twist in the wind.

Wulf was naked now. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her toward the huge, welcoming bed.

Cassandra sighed as she felt the soft mattress under her while Wulf’s weight pressed down on her from above. It was like being pressed into a cloud.

Looking up, she laughed as she realized there was a mirror on the ceiling, and she saw that Wulf was holding a long-stemmed rose behind his back.

The walls flashed, then they too became mirrors.

“Whose fantasy is this?” she asked as Wulf brought the rose forward and brushed its soft petals over the swollen nipple of her right breast.

“Ours,
blomster,
” Wulf said as he parted her thighs and laid his large body between her legs.

She moaned at the rich sensation of having all his lush power lying over her. The masculine hairs of his body teased hers into an overload of sensual ecstasy.

He moved over her sinuously, like some dark, forbidden beast who was out to consume her.

Cassandra watched him move in the mirror above her. How odd that she had created him in her dreams. She’d always been so cautious in her life. So careful of whom she let touch her. So she had conjured a glorious lover in her subconscious whereas she dared not allow one in real life.

Because of her death sentence, she didn’t want anyone to fall in love with her or care for her. She didn’t want to bear a child who would mourn her. A child who would be left alone, frightened.

Hunted.

The last thing she wanted was to leave someone like Wulf behind to grieve her death. Someone who would have to watch his child die in the full bloom of youth because of a curse that had nothing to do with any of his actions.

But in her dreams, she was free to love him with her body. There was no fear here. No promises. No hearts to be broken.

Just them and this one perfect moment.

Wulf groaned deep in his throat as he nibbled her hip. She hissed and cupped his head. He let the softness of her hands in his hair soothe him.