Part 11 (1/2)

The darkness prowled in Kaleb's eyes, a living ent.i.ty. ”I'll make sure to visit her every three or four months. That should even out the field.”

KALEB saw the torment in Sahara's expression and knew that whatever Tatiana had ordered done to her during the years she'd spent in captivity, it hadn't destroyed her conscience. It was not unexpected. That had always been the difference that kept them on opposite sides of the line that separated dark from light, good from evil-his ability to feel empathy, feel anything, had been eradicated before it could ever take root, with a single, limited exception.

”I,” he murmured, ”can never permit her freedom. She would find a way to harm you.”

Sahara's eyes were haunted when they met his. ”Am I so important to you?”

”Yes,” he said. ”You're everything.” The entire reason for his existence.

A single tear trailed down Sahara's cheek. ”Why can't I remember you?”

”You're not strong enough yet.” For the horror, the pain, the realization of the betrayal that had splattered blood around a cheap hotel room when she'd been a girl on the brink of womanhood.

Stroking her fingers along his jaw, she said, ”Come back, Kaleb,” and stepped closer, moving her hands to his lapels to push the unb.u.t.toned suit jacket off his shoulders. ”Walk out of the dark.”

He could crack the earth's crust for her if she wanted, cause the Ring of Fire to ignite and the world to tremble, but he could not give her this one thing she asked. The darkness was inside him now, part of the very cells of his body, as indelible as the life that had shaped him.

She heard his silence but didn't put distance between them, didn't cry. Instead, she brushed away the remnants of her earlier tears and, undoing the silk of his tie, slid it out from around his neck to drop it to the floor with his jacket. When her fingers began to work on the b.u.t.tons of his s.h.i.+rt, he removed his cuff links and threw them on a nearby table.

The clinking sound as they landed had her lashes rising, the incredible midnight blue of her eyes drenched with emotion. But she held her words still, lowering her gaze to pull his s.h.i.+rt out from his pants and finish unb.u.t.toning it. He stood motionless, each flicker of contact a shock to his senses, but it was a pain he craved-until her, he had believed himself immune to the need for skin-to-skin contact, contact that defined intimacy for the humans and changelings.

Now he knew his need was more vicious than theirs could ever be.

Shrugging off his s.h.i.+rt at the push of her fingers, he hissed out a breath when she wrapped her arms around his waist to lay her cheek against his chest. When she would've pulled back, he put a hand to the back of her head and said, ”No. I've disabled the dissonance.”

Thanks to Santano's ego and arrogance, Kaleb, a deadly dual cardinal, had never been fully indoctrinated with the programming that dealt out painful punishment for any hint of emotion. Designed not only to bolster the individual's Silence, but to suppress any response that might trigger a catastrophic lack of psychic control, the brutality of the punishment was tied to the intensity of the breach. Given the experiences Kaleb had undergone as a boy, the resulting dissonance would've killed him. So Santano had leashed his abilities through the application of another kind of pain.

Now the only restraint on his abilities was the one he'd put in place.

a.s.sessing the risks, he spread his fingers in the heavy silk of Sahara's hair, wrapping his other arm around her shoulders to hold her to him. Her breath was soft over his skin, her body thin but no longer so fragile as to be easily breakable, her warmth a reminder that she was alive and with him.

It wasn't enough, the bond between them nascent at best. She might wear his bracelet, but she remained wary, her eyes watchful-he needed her committed to him before she remembered the ugly truth that connected them.

Tugging back her head with the hand he had in her hair, he wrapped his other one gently around her throat and, looking into her eyes, leaned down to brush his lips across her own. It was a calculated act, his every sense concentrated on Sahara, on judging her responses in order to offer the correct feedback.

”Kaleb.” A gasp, her fingernails biting into the flesh of his back.

SAHARA ached deep inside, and it wasn't an ache that had in any way abated since she'd walked out of the labyrinth. No, it had only grown deeper, day by day. Today, she'd touched Kaleb in a last-ditch attempt to bring him back from the dark place where he'd gone, but now that his skin brushed against her own, she hungered for more. This, in spite of the fact that the darkness remained in his gaze, the inhuman intelligence of him watching her with eyes of obsidian.

It was madness to permit this to continue, to make herself ever more vulnerable to a man she might never understand, but reason had long slipped out of her grasp. Pressing her hand to his cheek, she closed her eyes and parted her lips under his in an instinctive invitation that he accepted without hesitation, one hand gentle at her throat, the other tight in her hair as the taste of him-hot, male, inexorably dark-infiltrated her every sense.

The caress felt raw, unpracticed, but no less addicting for it. The realization that he'd done this act with no other, that it was as new a pleasure to him as it was to her, was heroin in her bloodstream, a shocking punch of sensation, the world a study in pa.s.sionate red. Stretching her body upward, her weight balanced on her toes, she kissed him with a wild desperation that lacked any sense of finesse.

It didn't matter.

Kaleb took what she gave and demanded more, until her heart ricocheted in a hard drumbeat against her ribs and air was something she gasped in between indulging in the heated recklessness of the kiss. A kiss that had her pressed between the cool gla.s.s of the window and the hard ridges of Kaleb's body, one of his hands still at her throat.

The physical reminder of his deadly possessiveness did nothing to throw cold water on the conflagration that threatened to consume them both. Kaleb wasn't cold now, his skin hot enough to burn, the arm he'd braced over her head trapping her in a prison she had no desire to escape. Thrusting her hands into his hair, she held him to her, sinking her teeth into his lower lip in a feral act of pa.s.sion that should've shocked her.

It didn't. Not in the madness.

His hand tightened the barest fraction on her throat before he echoed the act, and she wanted to scream at the electric burn the primal caress ignited over her body. Too much, this was too much too soon, but she couldn't stop, couldn't bear to let him go. The sound of something cras.h.i.+ng to the kitchen tiles made her jerk back, chest heaving. ”Kaleb?”

”It's nothing.” His mouth was on hers again the next second, the muscled width of his shoulders hiding the rest of the room from her view . . . but she felt it when something hit the wall with enough violence to make the house vibrate.

Wrenching away her mouth, she shoved at his chest.

He didn't budge, the look on his face leaving her uncertain if he was rational in any way, his eyes gleaming a black so deep, she'd never seen it in nature. Only in the darkest, most twisted recesses of the labyrinth.

Chapter 18.

”KALEB, SOMETHING IS wrong.”

His expression didn't alter, the flush of pa.s.sion on his cheekbones and the perspiration that glimmered on his shoulders in the morning sunlight doing nothing to soften the hardness of him. Even the hair she'd mussed with her fingers only made him appear more dangerous, a predator who'd removed his mask to reveal the harsh truth.

Breath still short and shallow, she pressed her fingers to his lips when he would've claimed her mouth again, the addictive heat of him pressed up against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It took a level of self-control that was staggering in its intensity-this man, he could make her his slave, her body his to command. ”Kaleb.”

Stroking his thumb over her pulse once more, he finally released her and turned to face the room. Sahara looked around him, felt her eyes widen.

The room was trashed.

It had been the sofa smas.h.i.+ng into the opposite wall that had finally broken through the desire that had had them both in its grip. The piece of furniture had created a hole in that wall, but that wasn't the worst of it. Every single window in the room, aside from the one on which she'd leaned, was spiderwebbed with fractures so deep it felt as if a breath would cause the shards to fall, while the floor was rippled, and a large table lay in splinters near the wide doorway into the kitchen, as if it had been thrown at the doorway and not made it through.

”A kiss,” she whispered, staring at Kaleb's profile as he took in the damage done by his telekinetic strength with a clinical eye. ”One kiss.”

Kaleb, his upper body gilded by the sunlight, angled his face toward her. ”I'll have to refine my s.h.i.+elds-they failed against the intensity of the contact.”

Sahara released a shuddering breath, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s heavy and almost painful. ”Are you safe on the PsyNet?” If his s.h.i.+elds failed on the mental plane, his mind would become as vulnerable as hers had been before he'd extended his s.h.i.+elds to protect her. ”If any of what we're experiencing leaks-”

”There's been no breach.” A pause before he s.h.i.+fted to face her, one of his hands lightly cupping the side of her jaw, his eyes a black inferno. ”I want more.”

Caught off guard at the realization that his arousal hadn't been tempered by the interruption, Sahara's lips parted in a gasp. Kaleb took the silent invitation, his mouth on hers as he pressed her back to the gla.s.s, his erection pus.h.i.+ng into her abdomen in hard demand. Moaning, she sucked on his tongue as his hand came up to cover her breast . . . and the world turned to shards of gla.s.s, the windows exploding in a glittering shower of deadly snow.

KALEB had Sahara out on the terrace before she could be hit by a single splinter of gla.s.s. Her eyes huge, she watched the gla.s.s collide in the middle of the room before the shards fell to the floor in an oddly musical crash. Ignoring the sight, Kaleb found his gaze locked on the slick wetness of her lips.

A single thought and he could have them in the bedroom, could have her naked, the skin-to-skin contact total.

”You're bleeding.” Sahara's fingertips skated over his shoulders, where he'd been hit by a few stray splinters.

Blood. She had bled more than he'd thought possible.

The cold whisper of memory succeeded in doing what the gla.s.s hadn't, reminding him of the damage that could be done by an out- of-control Tk. Forcing his fingers to release her arms, he turned away to look out through the bars of the railing and into the gorge, the air cool against his skin, the sun not yet at full strength.