The Dark-Hunters (8 page)

Julian followed her up the stairs, amazed that she had understood him without his speaking. That she would consider his need not to be alone while she had her own concerns.

It made him feel strange toward her. Put an odd feeling in his stomach.

Was it tenderness?

He didn’t know for sure.

She led him into an enormous bedchamber with a large four-poster bed set before the middle of the far wall. A medium-sized chest of drawers was set opposite the bed and on top of it was, what had she called it, a TV?

Grace watched as Julian walked around her room, looking at the pictures on her walls and dresser—pictures of her parents and grandparents, of Selena and her in college, and the one of the dog she’d owned as a child.

“You live alone?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, moving to her Jenny Lind rocking chair by the bed where her nightgown was draped over the back. She picked it up and looked at him, and the green towel still wrapped around his lean hips. She couldn’t very well let him join her in bed like that.

Sure you could.

No I can’t.

Please?

Hush, self, let me think.

She still had her father’s pajamas in her parents’ bedroom where she kept all their possessions enshrined. Given the breadth of Julian’s shoulders, she was sure the tops would never fit, but the bottoms had drawstrings and even if they didn’t fit in length, they would at least stay up.

“Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

After she darted out the door, Julian walked over to the large windows and pulled back the white lace curtains. He watched strange boxlike things that must be automobiles move past her house, making strange droning noises that ebbed and flowed like a tide. Lights lit up the street and other buildings all over, much like torches had once done in his own homeland.

How strange this world was. So oddly similar to his and yet so very different.

He tried to associate the sights with all the words he’d heard over the decades, words he didn’t understand. Words like
TV
and
lightbulb.

And for the first time since his childhood, he was afraid. He didn’t like the changes he saw, the swiftness with which they had come to this world.

What would it be like the next time he was summoned?

How much more different
could
things become?

Or even more terrifying, what if he was never summoned again?

He swallowed at the thought. What would it be like to be trapped for eternity? Alone and alert. To feel the oppressive darkness closing in on him, squelching the breath from his lungs as it lacerated his body with pain.

To never again walk as a man? Never to speak or to touch?

These people had things now that were called computers. He’d heard the shop owner talk about them with a lot of customers. And one of those customers had said that they would one day, probably soon, completely replace books.

What would happen to him then?

*   *   *

Dressed in her pink dorm shirt, Grace paused in her parents’ bedroom by the crystal dish on the dresser where she’d placed her mother’s wedding rings the day after the funeral. She could see the faint sparkle of the half-carat marquis diamond.

Her throat constricting with pain, she fought against the tears that welled in her eyes.

Barely twenty-four at the time, she’d been arrogant enough to think she was grown, and capable of standing strong against anything life hurled at her. She had thought herself invincible. And in one split second, her life had come crumbling down around her.

Their deaths had robbed her of everything she’d ever had. Her security, her faith, her sense of justice, but most of all, she had lost their devoted love and emotional support.

In spite of her youthful vanity, she hadn’t been prepared to be cast completely adrift without any family whatsoever.

And even though five years had passed, she still mourned them. Deeply. The old saying that it was better to have known love and lost it was a big fat crock. There was nothing worse than having someone to love and care for you, then losing them to a needless accident.

Unable to face their deaths, she’d sealed this room off the day after their funeral, and left everything in it just as it was.

Opening the drawer where her father had kept his pajamas, Grace swallowed. No one had touched these since the afternoon her mother had folded them, and they had brought the clothes up here and put them away.

Even now, she could remember her mother’s laughter. The way her mother joked about her father’s conservative taste in flannel PJs.

Worse, she remembered their love for each other.

What she wouldn’t give to find a perfect partner like her parents had done. They’d been married twenty-five years before they died and they were every bit as in love then as they’d been the day they met.

She couldn’t remember a time in her life when her mother hadn’t been smiling, her father gently teasing. Everywhere they went, they held hands like teenagers and stole quick kisses when they thought no one was looking.

But she had seen.

She remembered.

She’d wanted that kind of love, too. But for some reason, she’d never found a man who made her breathless. One who made her heart pound and her senses reel.

A man she couldn’t live without.

“Oh, Mama,” she breathed, wishing her parents hadn’t died that night.

Wishing for …

She didn’t know. She just wanted something in her life that made her look forward to the future. Something that made her happy the way her father had always made her mother so happy.

Biting her lip, Grace balled her father’s dark blue and white plaid pajama pants in her arms and ran from the room.

“Here,” she said, tossing them to Julian before she left him and ran to the bathroom in the middle of the hallway. She didn’t want him to see her tears. She would never again show her vulnerability to a man.

Julian exchanged the cloth around his hips for the pants, then followed after Grace. She’d rushed to the next door down the hall and slammed it shut.

“Grace,” he said, gently nudging the door open.

He froze as he saw her weeping. She stood in a lavatory of some sort with two built-in sinks, and a white counter in front of her while she held a cloth to her mouth in an effort to muffle her wracking sobs.

In spite of his severe upbringing and aeons of control, a wave of pity washed over him. She cried as if her heart had been broken.

It made him uncomfortable. Uncertain.

Clenching his teeth, Julian forced his strange feelings away. One thing he’d learned early in his childhood, it didn’t do any good to learn about people. To care for them. Every time he had made that mistake, he’d paid dearly for it.

Besides, his time here was short—way too short.

The less he entangled himself with her emotions and life, the easier it would be to tolerate his next confinement.

It was then that her earlier words hit him square in the chest. She’d pegged him perfectly. He was nothing more than a tomcat who took his pleasure and left.

Julian clenched the cold doorknob at the thought. He wasn’t an animal. He had feelings, too.

At least he used to.

Before he could reconsider his actions, he stepped into the room and drew her into a hug. Her arms encircled his waist and she held on to him like a lifeline as she buried her face into his bare chest and wept. Her entire body shook against his.

Something strange inside him unfurled. A deep longing for something he couldn’t name.

Never in his life had he comforted a weeping woman. He’d had sex more times than he could count, but never once had he just held a woman like this. Not even after sex. Once he wore out his partner, he would get up and clean himself off, then go find something to occupy himself with until he was called again.

Even before the curse, he’d never shown anyone tenderness. Not even his wife.

As a soldier, he’d been trained from his first memory to be fierce, cold. Harsh.

“Return with your shield, or upon it.”
That was what his stepmother had told him as she grabbed him by his hair and slung him out of her home to begin training for war at the tender age of seven.

His father had been even worse. A legendary Spartan commander, his father had tolerated no weakness. No emotion. The man had doled out Julian’s childhood at the end of a braided leather whip, teaching him to hide his pain. To let no one see him suffer.

To this day Julian could feel the bite of the whip against his bare back, hear the sound it made as it cut through the air toward his skin. See the mocking sneer of contempt on his father’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Grace whispered against his shoulder, dragging his thoughts back to the present.

She tilted her head to look up at him. Her gray eyes were bright and shiny, and they chipped at the edges of a heart frozen centuries before by necessity and by design.

Uncomfortable, he moved away from her. “Feeling better?”

Grace wiped her tears away and cleared her throat. She didn’t know what had made Julian come after her, but it had been a long time since anyone had comforted her when she cried. “Yes,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

He said nothing.

Instead of the tender man who had held her just an instant ago, he was back to being Mr. Statue, his entire body rigid and cold.

Drawing a ragged breath, she moved past him. “I wouldn’t have done that if I weren’t
so
tired and still a little tipsy. I really do need to go to sleep.”

She knew he would follow, so she dutifully headed back to her room and climbed aboard her tall pineapple plantation bed where she snuggled beneath her thick comforter.

Sure enough, she felt the mattress dip under his weight an instant later.

Her heart quickened at the sudden warmth of his body next to hers. Worse, he instantly curled himself against her back, and draped one long, muscular arm over her waist.

“Julian!” she said with a warning note in her voice as she felt his erection against her hip. “I think it might be best if you stay on your side of the bed, and I stay on mine.”

He didn’t listen as he leaned his head down to hers and nibbled a small path along her hairline. “I thought you wanted me to come ease your aching loins,” he whispered in her ear.

Her body on fire from his nearness and the scent of sandalwood that filled her head, Grace blushed as she remembered her words to Selena. “My loins are just fine, and are quite happy as they are.”

“I promise you, I could make them much, much happier.”

Ooo, she didn’t doubt it in the least. “If you don’t behave, I’m going to make you leave the room.”

She looked up at him and caught the disbelief in his eyes.

“I don’t understand why you would send me away,” he said.

“Because I’m not going to use you like some nameless boy-toy who has no purpose except to serve me. Okay? I don’t want to be intimate with a man I don’t know.”

His blue eyes troubled, he finally withdrew from her and settled down beside her.

Grace took a deep breath as she tried to calm her racing heart and tame the fire in her blood. Goodness, he was a hard man to say no to.

Do you really think you’re going to be able to sleep with this guy lying next to you? What, do you have rocks for brains?

Closing her eyes, she recited her boring litany. She
had
to go to sleep. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Or even gorgeous Julians.

Julian propped the pillows up behind his back and looked over at Grace. This would be the first time in his exceptionally long life that he spent a night with a woman without making love to her.

It was inconceivable. No woman had ever pushed him away before.

She rolled over with another handset like the one she’d shown him downstairs. She pressed a button and turned on the TV, then lowered the sound of people talking.

“This is for the lights,” she said, pressing another button. Immediately, the lights turned off, leaving the TV to cast shadows on the wall behind him. “I’m a pretty sound sleeper, so I don’t think you’ll wake me.”

She handed him the handset. “Good night, Julian of Macedon.”

“Good night, Grace,” he whispered, watching the way her soft hair fanned out over the pillow as she snuggled down to sleep.

He put the handset aside and watched her for a long while as the light from the TV flickered across the relaxed planes of her face.

He could tell when she finally fell asleep by the evenness of her breathing. It was only then that he finally dared to touch her. Dared to trace the gentle outline of her soft cheek with the pad of his forefinger.

His body reacted with such violence that he bit his lip to keep from cursing. Fire streamed through his blood.

He’d known stabbing desires all his life—first a hunger in his belly for food, then a burning thirst for love and respect, and finally the demanding one in his loins for the wet sleekness of a woman’s body. But never, never, had he experienced anything like this.

It was a hunger so strong, so raw, that it threatened his very sanity.

And all he could think of was spreading her creamy, silken thighs and planting himself deep inside her. Of sliding in and out of her body over and over until they both screamed out their release in unison.

Only that would never happen.

Julian moved farther away from her. To a safe distance in the bed where he could no longer smell her sweet feminine scent, feel the heat of her body beneath the covers.

He could give her pleasure for days on end without stopping, but for him there would never be peace.

“Damn you, Priapus,” he snarled, speaking the name of the god who had cursed him to this fate. “I hope Hades is giving you your full due.”

His anger dulling, he sighed and realized that the Fates and Furies were certainly giving him his.

*   *   *

Grace came awake with a strange sense of warmth and security. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years.

Suddenly, she felt a tender kiss against her eyelids as if someone were brushing lips against her lashes. Warm, strong hands stroked her hair.