Fourteen
Baran groaned as Jane settled into the kiss, her mouth hot, wet, and silken. Her slim body came to rest against his, all velvet curves and gentle heat. He went still like a man approached by something small and wild, instinctively afraid to do something to scare her off. Before, he’d always been the one to seduce her. To have her reach out to him now struck him as a sweet, dark gift.
Her long hands cupped the sides of his face, fingers threaded through his wet hair as she kissed him, drinking from his mouth, tasting him, filling him with the taste of her. She drew back, just slightly, and his arms tightened in protest around her slim back. He hadn’t even been aware of wrapping them around her.
Against his lips she murmured, “Come to bed. I refuse to make love to you sitting on a toilet.”
She stepped back, her eyes sultry with invitation. He rose as if hypnotized to follow her as she turned with a roll of her slim hips and sauntered for the bedroom. His erect cock pointed longingly at her sweetly curving backside as he strode after her.
When Jane peeled her top off over her head, Baran felt the breath catch in his throat at the long, sensual line of her torso stretching upward. She tossed the shirt aside with a careless flip of her wrist, then bent to pull off her jeans. His cock jerked in lust. He squelched the impulse to stride to her and snatch her off her feet. Normally it wasn’t in his nature to let a woman take the lead, but he wanted to feel the quiet acceptance in Jane’s touch.
He hungered for it.
For a moment he started to wonder why, then pushed the thought away. He didn’t want the distraction.
She stepped from her jeans and reached behind her back to open the catch of her bra, her elegant spine twisting with the movement.
When she turned toward him, lust stabbed him at the sight of her bare breasts, perfect pale hemispheres topped by long pink nipples drawn hard with need. Saliva flooded his mouth. He swallowed hard.
She stepped up to him dressed only in tiny silken pink panties he was seriously tempted to rip away. Before he could yield to temptation, she touched him, raking her nails delicately across the arch of his chest. He inhaled sharply as she swirled her fingers through the wiry curls covering his chest, then traced the muscled ridges of his rib cage.
Closing his eyes, Baran let his head drop back, savoring the sensation. Then she stepped closer until the head of his erection nudged her flat stomach, and his eyes popped open again. Her breasts were temptingly close to his eager hands. He managed not to reach for them, wanting, needing, to see what she’d do next.
She bent forward as her hands moved to curve around his hips. Slowly, delicately, she pressed a kiss to the center of his chest, right over his heart. The heat of that delicate touch seemed to spear through him. He gasped.
Jane made a purring sound and began kissing her way to one tight male nipple. He shuddered as her hot, swirling tongue danced over his skin.
Then long fingers closed gently around his balls, and his body jerked. She stroked. He moaned. She raked her teeth softly down the ridges of his ribs, stopping only to flick his skin with her tongue. He resisted the impulse to grab her, knowing where that soft, teasing mouth was headed, inch by delicious, maddening inch.
Then she was there, her soft little hand wrapped around his shaft, holding the head of his throbbing cock steady for her mouth.
She used just her tongue at first, swirling it over the velvet flesh until he had to battle the need to force his entire greedy length between her lips. The battle grew fiercer as she gave him more by slow degrees, sucking the very tip first, then a fraction more, then a fraction more.
“God, Jane, you’re playing with fire!” he groaned as she nibbled delicately.
He felt her smile around his cockhead. “I know.”
Suddenly she swooped her head forward and engulfed half his straining shaft, ripping a started gasp from him. Shuddering, he wondered how much of this he could take.
God, it was intoxicating, playing with him like this, taking the lead for once, feeling the tension in his big, male body as she toyed with him.
Jane worked him in deeper and felt him quiver. Savoring the taste and feel of his broad cock, she decided it was like teasing a tiger.
Sooner or later, you’d get eaten.
The thought sent wicked heat blooming through her as she remembered just what it was like to be at the mercy of this particular big cat. Smiling, she drew her mouth completely off his cock to swirl her tongue lazily over its velvet head.
Sometimes it was fun to live dangerously.
“God, Jane, deeper!” The low male growl held a faint note of threat.
She smiled and gave him a teasing lick. A powerful hand came to rest in her hair, capturing a handful of curls in silent warning.
“Jane…” The growl was deeper now, rumbling as if his control was straining to the breaking point.
She nibbled, feeling herself cream. Finally drawing back, she purred, “Is there something you want?”
The sound he made was closer to a snarl than anything else. Big hands closed around her shoulders, jerked her off the floor, and tossed her lightly on the bed behind her.
Jane shrieked out a giggle as he loomed over her, grabbed the waistband of her little pink panties in both hands, and ripped the silk in two. Without pausing, he snatched her up so only her head and shoulders rested on the bed as he braced a knee on the mattress.
Then it was her turn to gasp as his massive shaft speared between her swollen, cream-slicked lips. He lifted her into his thrust as if she were a doll, nothing more than stuffing and air. Yelping at the depth of his entry, she fisted the bedspread in both hands and held on for dear life.
Standing beside the bed, he held her thighs draped over his powerful forearms as he cradled her butt, pulling her body into an arch while he fucked her in long, deep strokes.
Wide-eyed, she looked up at him from the mattress and writhed with every delicious entry. He felt so damn big, so damn merciless as he took her. And he looked so triumphantly feral as he stared down at her, his eyes blazing red fire, a dark smile on his handsome mouth.
Just the sight of him made her hot. She twisted as he impaled her. “God, Baran, you’re so deep!”
“That’s what you get for cockteasing a Warlord,” he said with a low, wicked laugh.
The orgasm caught her by surprise, swamping her in heat so intense, it dragged a scream from her throat.
He came a heartbeat later, hauling her against his hips as he spilled himself into her, roaring.
Much later they shared cartons of Chinese in the living room, watching television and feeding Freika bites of sweet and sour chicken. Jane’s scanner sat crackling on top of the set, but though they looked up every time the dispatcher’s voice came on, the police did not get called out on another murder.
Later, Jane carried the scanner into the bedroom with them and set it up beside the bed. She fell asleep to its constant chatter, curled in the warm, muscular shelter of Baran’s big body.
She jerked awake from a blood-drenched, confused dream when she felt him jolt against her. “No!” he groaned in her ear. “No…”
Blinking, Jane looked over her shoulder at him. She could see nothing but his broad silhouette against the moonlit window behind him. “Baran?”
“Get away from me!” he roared, bolting upright in bed, one powerful fist drawn back, ready to take somebody’s head off.
She rolled over quickly and started to grab his shoulders, then thought better of it and turned on the bedside lamp instead. “Baran, you’re dreaming!”
He glared at her, fear and rage on his face. She knew from the look in his eyes he didn’t recognize her.
“Baran, it’s me,” she said carefully, clearly. “Jane. You’re all right. You were just dreaming.”
Slowly recognition flooded his eyes, followed by chagrin. He slumped and raked a big hand through his tangled mane. “Jane. I’m sorry, I just…”
“Must have been a pretty bad nightmare,” Jane observed carefully, taking in the faint quiver in his hands. What could have been bad enough to make Baran Arvid shake?
He swallowed. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.” He lay down again and turned his back.
Jane eyed its muscled width and frowned, then turned off the lamp and curled into a ball, back to back with him. For a long moment she listened to him breathe in the soft darkness.
Then abruptly he turned over, encircled her waist with a massive arm, and hauled her tight into the spooning curve of his body. She tensed, waiting for another of his delicious sensual assaults.
Instead he sighed in her ear, settled her more fully against him, and relaxed. Something about the way he did it reminded Jane of a small boy cuddling a teddy bear—an incongruous association to make in connection to a man who could bench-press a Buick.
Almost as incongruous as the wave of tenderness she felt.
She settled against the warm width of his body as his breathing deepened and the scanner crackled and droned. It wasn’t long before she joined him in sleep.
After the terrorized pace of the previous day, Sunday was al- most ridiculously quiet. Jane carried her scanner and cell phone around the house with her, but there were no calls on either.
“Wonder if the creep’s taking the day off?” she said to Baran as she fixed lunch for them and their furry companions.
“Maybe,” he said grimly, watching Octopussy lunge headfirst into a bowl of tuna. “Or maybe they just haven’t found the bodies yet.”
Jane gave him a sour look. “You’re such a cheery soul, you know that?” She took a ferocious bite of her ham sandwich and stalked into her office to call the Highway Patrol about the previous day’s fatal accident. She spent the rest of Sunday harassing Tom and writing copy, in between listening to the scanner and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But it didn’t.
Normally, she’d have been relieved, but unfortunately she knew a little too much about the way Druas operated.
What was the bastard planning now?
Jane opened the door on blackness. Her heart gave a single hard thump, and she fumbled quickly for the light switch. Harsh white illumination flooded the attic, but still she hesitated.
“Jane?” Baran asked behind her, sounding puzzled. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She swallowed and stepped onto the rough plywood floor, picking her way past boxes of Christmas ornaments and the thick white box that held her artificial tree.
Off in one corner, isolated from the Rubbermaid tubs of winter clothing, stood a pile of cardboard boxes.
Somewhere in one of those boxes was her father’s gun, Jane told herself. And it was past time she got it out. They might need it. After all, they had a living killer to worry about. That should outweigh the lingering presence of a dead one.
She forced her feet to carry her closer to the stack. Looking down at them, she felt her stomach clench.
Coward, her father’s voice whispered in her mind.
Jane took a deep breath and knelt, aware of Baran’s puzzled gaze as he stood watching.
“You’re afraid,” he said suddenly. “Your heart is pounding. What’s got you so frightened?”
She swallowed past the stale taste in her mouth. “Memories.” She reached out and grabbed a box at random, popped apart the folded cardboard flaps to open it. Looked inside.
Notebooks. Piles and piles of old reporter’s notebooks, jumbled together with ancient floppy disks. She picked one up at random. Her father’s spidery scrawl sprawled over the pad’s narrow cardboard cover: “County Council, January 30, 1986.” Notes from an old meeting.
“Reporters aren’t supposed to keep these,” she told Baran, tossing the notebook back in the box, feeling subtly contaminated. “If you get sued, they subpoena them.”
“I didn’t know that.” There was compassion in his voice.
Jane reached for another box, opening it as she began to talk, trying to drown out the voice of her fear. “I really should have thrown all this stuff away, but I kept hoping I might find answers here sometime.” She pried the flaps apart. “When I could stand to look.”
“What answers are you looking for?” Baran asked, moving to kneel beside her.
She didn’t even hear the question. The box was filled with neat stacks of her father’s clothing. And on the very top lay a leather belt.
Jane felt the blood drain from her face. She could remember the slap that belt made, the bite of the metal cutting into her skin. “He used to wrap the leather end around his fist and hit me with the buckle.”
“What?” Baran sounded startled.
Her stomach churned at the memory. When she’d cried, he’d beat her even harder. If she dared look as if she disapproved of anything he did or said, that bought another beating. He had taught her a perfect doll-like poker face, complete with plastic smile.
And somewhere in these piles of boxes was his gun. The gun he had probably used to murder her mother.
She jumped to her feet and ran from the attic.
“Jane?” Baran said, startled. She didn’t stop.
“I thought we were going to look for that gun.” He descended the attic stairs, sounding puzzled.
She found she couldn’t look at him. “There’s really no point. You said he was bulletproof anyway.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I did.”
Dogged by a nagging sense of shame at her own cowardice, Jane settled in front of the television to brood. Baran joined her, shooting a look at Freika.
The wolf turned and silently trotted out.
A moment later they heard crashing overlaid by an offended feline yowl. “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” Frieka called, sounding remarkably like Jack Nicholson playing a psychotic.
“Leave her alone, Cujo!” Jane roared, leaping from the couch. She shot Baran a fulminating look. “Dammit, help me get him before he turns my cat into Octopussy pâté.”
She plunged from the room at a dead run, never even noticing the Warlord’s satisfied smile.
Panting, her body still quivering with the aftermath of a savage orgasm, Jane slowly came to the realization that her hand was planted squarely in the middle of a slice of pepperoni pizza. Luckily, it had cooled. Baran had bent her over the kitchen table about five minutes after the delivery boy left.
“The thrill is gone,” she wheezed as he slowly withdrew his softened shaft from the swollen grip of her sex. “You only fucked my brains out once today.”
“The night is young,” he said, leaning down to nip her ear. “There’s still time to get in my quota.”
She whimpered softly.
Baran grinned. “At least you’re not brooding anymore.”
On the table, the scanner crackled.
The Tayanita Tribune offices were housed in a former National Guard armory building Jane’s father had bought and renovated years before. The staff worked in the warren of postage-stamp–sized offices, while the big three-color press reigned over what had once been the main hall.
Most of the employees had at least ten years with the paper, hired in the days when Jane’s father had run the operation like a combination good ol’ boy and despot. Most of them had known Jane since before she was even tall enough to see over his desk.
So when she walked in with Baran Arvid and his wolf in tow, all three of them became the instant center of attention. And it wasn’t approving.
Jane took Baran around and conducted the introductions anyway, ignoring the speculative glances he collected.
“I thought you said we couldn’t afford a photographer,” said Jeff Low, director of the paper’s three-man advertising team.
Baran, expressionless behind his Ray-Bans, said in a cold, deadpan tone, “I work cheap.”
“You bring your dog to work?” Lillian Russell asked him later, eyeing Freika dubiously.
“He gets lonely by himself,” Jane said hastily, half afraid the wolf would tell the obituary clerk he, too, worked cheap.
“What is he, some kind of faggot?” one of the pressmen demanded of another, sotto voce, as Jane showed Baran the press. “No straight guy wears beads in his hair.”
She winced, and was deeply relieved when she, Baran, and the wolf finally escaped back to her office and closed the door.
“Well, that went every bit as badly as I thought,” she said, pulling a floppy disk out of her purse and booting her Mac. Pulling the scanner out next, she plugged it into its wall charger.
“Your employees are stupid,” Freika informed her over the pop and crackle. “Two of them called me a dog! Do I look like a dog?”
“No, you look like a loudmouthed timber wolf.” She turned up the scanner, hoping to confuse any eavesdroppers who might wonder who was talking. “Hold it down, Rin Tin Tin. We’ve started enough rumors as it is.”
“Why is everyone so interested in my hair and sexual preferences?” Baran settled into one of the chairs Jane reserved for interviewees.
She sighed. “It’s a Southern thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
Visitors from the future or no visitors from the future, she had a paper to get out.
Jane went to work pulling stories up and positioning them on each page of layout, flicking periodic glances from her computer viewscreen to the clock on the wall. The paper needed to be in the mailboxes of Tayanita County before everybody got home from work and started flooding the office with irate phone calls. Fortunately, she’d already done most of the interior pages on Friday, so all she had to worry about were the obits and ensuring the breaking news fit on the front and the jump page.
She was toying with the placement of the photo Baran had taken of the firefighters clustered around the woman’s mangled car when there was a tap on the door. It opened a crack, and Billi Weaver stuck her bleached-blond head in. “Jane, may I have a word with you? Privately?”
Despite the formal tone, there was a gleam in her best friend’s eye that made Jane’s lips curl in a reluctant smile. She knew what was coming—and it would be just as well if Baran didn’t hear it. She glanced at him. “Excuse us a minute.”
He shot Freika a look. When Jane got up to walk out, her furry bodyguard trailed silently after her.
“Ooooh, what a beautiful…animal.” In the hall Billi dropped to her knees and started to reach out to pet the wolf. Hesitating, she lifted a brow at Jane. “Does he eat reporters?”
“Not so far.”
“Good. You’re a doll baby, you know that?” A seasoned canine-lover, Billi knew just the spot behind Freika’s ear to attack with her manicured nails until the wolf leaned into her hand with a low whine of pleasure. Her busy fingers slowed as she discovered the jeweled implants in his skin. “What an unusual collar.”
Jane winced and spoke quickly, hoping to divert her attention before she realized the gems were sunk directly into Freika’s skin. “I know what you’re going to say, and no, Baran is not gay.”
Billi looked up at her and stood, attention successfully diverted. “Honey, it never even crossed my mind. I see the way he looks at you. Where did you find him, anyway? And are there any more left?”
Jane shifted her feet. She hated lying to Billi, both on general principals and because she was so rotten at it. “Atlanta. I worked with him at the Times.”
“You never mentioned him.” Billi studied her, blue eyes sharp in her angular face. They’d been friends since grade school, and they’d hashed through every crisis in their respective lives for the past twenty-two years. Jane wished suddenly, violently, she could talk to her about this one. “And you really, really should have. Honey, he looks at you like you’re a bowl of homemade peach ice cream and he wishes he had a spoon.” She lifted a blond brow. “Does he have a spoon?”
Jane flicked a glance down at Freika, who stared up at her blandly. “Yeah,” she admitted.
The wicked gleam intensified. “Are we talking demitasse or soup spoon here?”
She couldn’t help it. She grinned. “We’re talking ladle.”
Billi’s eyes widened. “Do you mind if I lick the spoon?”
Jane laughed. “One, the implications of that are kind of disgusting, and two, don’t you think George would object?”
“We have an open marriage.”
“You do not.”
“Okay, we don’t, but I’m also not dead. And you’ve got this whole cat-in-a-cream-bowl smile when you look at the guy that’s driving me insane with curiosity.”
She grinned. “Suffer.”
“Bitch. Okay, I’ve got to ask—does he know what to do with his spoon?”
Jane thought back over the weekend. “Oh, yeah.”
“There it is again—that cat smile. So, as far as culinary skills, are we talking the guy at Bill’s Stop N’ Chow, or are we talking Emeril?”
Jane laughed. “Bam!”
Billi gave a mock shiver. “That’s what I thought.”
After listening to her friend segue into a complaint about her teenage son, Jane returned to her desk.
As she slipped past Baran, he purred in a deep velvet voice, “The best thing about cooking is eating.”
Jane’s eyes widened as color flooded her cheekbones. She stared at him, feeling her jaw drop.
“If you’ll close the door,” he continued wickedly, “I’d be delighted to whip something up.”
“Newspaper,” she squeaked. “I’ve got to get out the newspaper.”
Baran chuckled in a sensual rumble that made feminine things quiver low in her belly. “Ah, well. Maybe when you break for…lunch.”
“Warlords,” Freika observed, curling up by the desk, “have really good hearing.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jane said weakly.
It took her another ten minutes to get her mind back on the layout, but finally she sent the last page off through the system for output as a negative that would then be used to burn a flexible metal printing plate.
Jane was about to massage her temples in a vain effort to relieve her habitual post-deadline headache when the phone rang. She reached for it absently. “Jane Colby, Tayanita Tribune.”
A male voice said over a loud crackle she at first took for a bad connection, “Better get to 604 Parris Street, Janey. She’s starting to brown.”
And Jane recognized the crackle. It wasn’t static. It was fire.
In the background a woman screamed.
Jane banged the phone down and ran for the door, Freika and Baran lunging after her. They didn’t even ask for explanations; they must have overheard the conversation.
As the three sprinted into the parking lot, she reached into her purse, grabbed her cell, and dialed 911. “There’s a fire at 604 Parris Street. A woman’s trapped, and the guy who murdered those girls is inside with her.”
“What?” the startled dispatcher demanded. “Ma’am, slow down! What are you talking about? Who are you?”
“Jane Colby. The killer called me again. He’s set fire to a woman’s house, and she’s trapped in there with him. Send fire trucks and police to 604 Parris Street!” Jane hit End as she unlocked the SUV with her key fob. The three of them piled in. A moment later, she was burning rubber down Main Street.
She just hoped this encounter with Druas ended better than the last.
Fire flooded Baran’s mind as his computer pumped the synthetic hormones of riatt into his body until his muscles jumped and coiled under his skin. He knew the feeling from a thousand battles, but with it came an emotion that was new: a cold, sick doubt.
Was he going to fail this woman, too?
Never mind that succeeding when he wasn’t supposed to could theoretically cause a universe-destroying apocalypse. If he failed, she died. And for Warlords, failure was simply not acceptable.
Even less acceptable was the idea of failing Jane.
He glanced at her as she drove. Her delicate profile was set and grim, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. He remembered the pleading eyes of the woman who’d died in his arms. The fear of seeing Jane look at him with that same terrorized despair made his gut clench into a fist.
He had to kill the bastard.
“There’s the smoke,” Jane told him. There was fear in her eyes, but something told him it wasn’t for the woman they’d come to save, or even for herself.
It was for him.
That realization sent another sensation rolling through him—not fear or even anger, but warm pleasure that she cared.
And that, he knew, wasn’t good. A warrior could not afford to feel too much, care too much. That kind of emotion could cloud thought, make you prone to fatal mistakes. Shut it down, he thought.
Besides, it wasn’t as though they had a future. He thrust the thought aside.
The SUV rounded a corner. His eyes locked on a small wooden house off to the right, surrounded in a cloud of smoke pouring from under the eaves. The heat had not yet shattered the windows; he could see the leap of flames through the glass.
Baran unbuckled his seat belt and threw the door open before she’d even brought the truck to a halt. He didn’t allow himself to look back.
Is the Xeran inside? he demanded of his computer.
Yes. Along with a human. Sensors indicate she has been injured. Fire burning at multiple locations, indicating arson.
Guide me to them.