Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(19)

Gradually, she became aware of their bodies. They had come together, wrapping around each other. Michael bowed over her, his head resting on top of hers. She had one hand splayed at the back of his neck, the other arm locked tight around his waist.

He lifted his head, and her eyes slit open. He glowed with such a fierce, arcane light she could hardly look at him with her human eyes. He laid his cheek against hers. Either his face was wet or hers was, or perhaps both.

“Holy cow, Batman,” she whispered. She touched his face, ran her fingers over the planes and angles, reading him like Braille. “Talk about having so much to relearn. I had forgotten this. I had forgotten that I’d forgotten. How could I do that? How stupid, how wrong of me.”

“You were bent.” His voice was gruff. His presence felt steady again, and as powerful as ever. He kissed her fingers as they passed over his lips.

“You’re being charitable,” she told him. “I’ll never get cocky about what I think I know again. I don’t deserve it.”

“You deserve to have the world laid at your feet.” He hooked his arm around her neck. Her head fell back against his forearm as his head came down, and he kissed her. His hard mouth moved over hers with a gentle reverence that brought fresh tears to her eyes. She murmured and touched his lean cheek as she kissed him back.

He lifted his head, looking blinded. She gave him a tentative smile. Gradually the blind look left his eyes. Together they had banished Mister Enigmatic again. He looked like a different man from the hard-bitten, expressionless stranger she had first met.

He said vividly, “Well, that’s got to have pissed him off.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He grinned, a rakish, wicked sight on that dark, unshaven face. “Sweetheart, we were making about as much noise just now in the psychic realm as a couple having sex in a cheap motel.”

“Ooh-kay,” she said, her cheeks burning with heat. She laughed. “That’s certainly an image I didn’t have in my head before.”

He looked unrepentant. “I like it, but what we did was definitely an attention grabber, and the Deceiver will have heard it loud and clear. Now we’ve really got to haul ass.”

“I know.” She wiped at her face and saw that her hands were still emitting a silvery glow. She spread her fingers and turned them over, staring at them. She gave her hand an experimental shake. It still glowed.

He had started to tear off his bandages. He paused to look at her. “What on earth are you doing?”

“I can’t get it to stop,” she told him. She shook the other hand.

He started to laugh. “That isn’t going to help.”

She gave him a fierce frown, delighted with him, his laughter, the forest around them and the whole universe. “It might.”

He was still laughing. “You need to stop it the way you started it.”

“Right, but what did I do?” She thought back.

Michael tore off the rest of his bandages, tossed them on the floor of his old car, shrugged on his shirt and grabbed the bags of food. He gestured to her. She ran to collect the pillow and blanket and her purse from the Ford before clambering into the Jeep’s passenger seat.

He dug into his weapons bag and pulled out the nine-millimeter, which he set in the driver’s door pocket. When they had both snapped on their seat belts he turned the SUV around and inched past the Ford toward the main road.

Then she remembered. She had to will it to start. She flung out her hands and commanded, “Stop!”

Michael slammed on the brakes. He scanned the surrounding scene. “What?”

She waved her hands at him in triumph. “I did it!”

He looked at her from under lowered brows. “Try doing it silently next time.”

It was a look of such ordinary exasperation she grinned. “I will,” she told him. “Come on, lighten up. I just remembered how to do something else. This is a good thing.”

A corner of his well-made mouth lifted. Really, he was sexier than any man had a right to be.

“Yes,” he said, as he accelerated the Jeep again. “This is a very good thing.”

Chapter Six

AFTER ASTRA LEFT the dream with Mary, she cast her awareness through her house, checking on her uninvited guests.

Jerry lay in the bed of one of her guest rooms. He had been a big, strong man in his youth. Astra remembered his childhood well. Now his body looked shrunken under the covers, and his copper skin had an unhealthy pallor. His grandson Jamie had pulled his long, dark gray hair out of the ponytail, and it rippled over the pillow. She sighed. Jerry was a good man. It was hard to watch him die.

Jamie had dragged a chair in from the living room. He sat in it, slumped sideways in a dejected heap, resting his head on the crook of one arm on the bed beside Jerry’s right hand. Like his grandfather, he wore his hair long and pulled back in a ponytail. Leather and silver bracelets adorned his lean wrists.

He was a good-looking boy, Astra thought, as she studied him. He was tall and rangy, around twenty-two or twenty-three. His body had yet to finish filling out the promise of power in those wide shoulders. His hair gleamed black like a raven’s wing, and he had his grandfather’s strong, proud features, only Jamie’s were molded with more sensuality, with large, dark eyes and full, sensual lips.

There was a third person in the room, a ghost of a tall man.