Beast of Fire -- a Demon Hunting Sexy Romance (24 page)

“Lucan?"

That soft, angelic voice of Kresley’s seeped through his nerve endings and delivered a jolt, a nice little zap of reality. This kind of irrational, negative thinking crap is what had started him down the path to hell in the first place. He could kick his own ass. If he were back at the ranch, one of the Knights would gladly kick it for him. Yes, he wanted that. To be back at the ranch, and get into a scrap with another Knight and talk dirt about it later. He loved that shit. Loved the Knights. The brotherhood. Loved it as much, or more, than he did a lab with equations and problems to solve. Loved the safety of that bond between Knights and a common goal of fighting evil. Which is exactly why Kresley and he should be at the ranch and should never have left. He wasn’t leaving her this time. Nor was she leaving him. Nor was he going to let anything happen to her.
 

“Lucan,” she whispered again, her hand stroked the back of his hair, tickling his scalp, sending a shudder of awareness through his body. Down boy, he murmured in his head. Later. Much later. A lifetime of making love waited in the future. Important matters to attend to first.
 

He lifted his head, fixed her in a steady stare, deciding to get the bad news out of the way. Say it, get the panic over, move on. He went for it,
 
“We’ll need to run by the apartment and get your shots.”

Her eyes went wide, and he could see the pulse in her throat leap. "Oh my God!” She tried to get up, and he held her easily. She shoved on his arms. “I have to go now. I have to make sure I have that shot before time runs out. I –”

 
He kissed her, a long, deep, passionate kiss. She stiffened, unyielding, for all of two seconds, before she sighed into his mouth and kissed him back. He loved the way she melted for him, loved those sweet, little sighs.
 

The beast within him flared to life, but Lucan embraced the darkness, fed it with the taste of this sweet, delicate woman. After a night of making love to Kresley, a night of struggling with his beast, he had learned something important. He now knew that his fear of the beast is what fed its power, gave it control he did not wish it to have. The instant Lucan had decided that the man was stronger than the beast, he had claimed control.
 

When finally he managed to drag his lips from hers, he peered down at her, confident, secure in his words. “We’ll get the shots, and everything will be fine.”
 

“But—"

“No buts.” He kissed her again. And he’d kiss her until she simply agreed with him, until she had no arguments left. His tongue swept over hers in gentle caresses full of promise. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“What if they’re missing?”

“They won’t be,” he said with confidence. “They will be right where you left them.” His voice thickened with promise. “We’re going to get through this. You and me. Together.”

“Don’t,” she hissed. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Confidence flared within him. “I never make a promise I don’t keep,” he said. “We will make it through this.”
 

“My fire—"

“Is a gift.”

“A gift does not cause destruction.”

“Using it to kill Demons stops destruction. It saves lives. To say otherwise is like saying the Knights of White are evil because we carry swords.”

“It’s not the same,” she argued.

“Of course it is.”

Her brows furrowed, a cute little dimple forming between them. “You were recruited by angels,” she argued right when he was about to kiss that spot.
 

“As my mate, you are a descendant of angels,” he countered. “That should pretty much put to rest any question of origins. You were created for good, not evil.”
 

“Then why does evil always seem to follow me?”

“To stop you from stopping it.”

She stared hard. Moved abruptly and pounded on his arms. Lightly, but forcefully.
 
“Let me up. I can’t argue with you on top of me.”
 

He laughed. “Then don’t argue.”
 

That earned him a reprimand. “Don’t give me reason to.” She pursed her lips. “Let me up. I need to think.”
 

Lucan rolled off of her and snagged her robe from the end of the bed. The hotel had selected well;
 
the green silk matched her eyes perfectly.
 

“Better put that on,” he told her, his hot stare brushing her ripe, rosy nipples as they puckered in the cool air. His mouth watered and he snapped his gaze back to hers. “I can’t argue when I want to kiss you.” Pause. “Every damn inch of you.”
 

Her eyes flared with shock, her cheeks flushing. She snatched the robe. “You do not argue fairly.”

He slid to the headboard. “I try not to argue.” He yanked the covers low over his hips, which offered more decorum than a thin pair of boxers, considering his aroused state. He patted the bed. “Arguing makes for bad bedside manners. A doctor can’t have bad bedside manners.”
 

She looked at the spot where he wanted her and sat back on her heels, her chin tipped defiantly. “Why give me a power that’s supposed to help people and give me no control over it.”
 

Lucan’s mood shifted as quickly as a gust of hard wind. That question hit a nerve. The "why’s" could destroy you. They almost had him.
 

“Why,” he said softly, thoughtfully. He lifted his leg, restless, his arm draped over his knee. “When I first became a Knight I didn’t understand ‘why’ either. Why my family had died. Why I had lived and they had died.”
 

“You watched them die.”

“Yes,” he said, the burgundy swirl of the bedspread twisting in his mind's eye as memories revealed themselves. He didn’t normally talk about the past. Tried not to think about it. But this was Kresley, he told himself. She had to deal with her past, had to get past the questions, as he had–past the "whys" that tormented a soul – that could destroy it.
 

He drew a thick breath, barely managed to fill his lungs. Helifted his gaze to hers. “I found my parents dead.” His throat thickened.
 
Damn it. He paused and swallowed. “My sister was still alive.”

“Oh God, Lucan.” She seemed to measure her words. “Were you already a doctor at that point? Able to help?” He nodded. Would have said something if he could have found his voice. It was gone, like his family. Finally, “I was a doctor in a Boston settlement. The only doctor. It was 1707. A long time ago.” Yet his chest hurt as if it were yesterday. He continued, “We didn’t have the resources of today. I tried to stop the bleeding but . . . she bled to death. There was nothing I could do. I can still see her face. I try not to. She was young like you. Her life ahead of her.” He made a disgusted sound. “Ironically, I was attacked while burying them. It was as if the Beasts had waited for me to endure the torture of grieving before coming back for me.”

“And the Knights saved you?” she asked.

“Salvador.”

“I’ve heard that name,” she said. “Jag's mentor, right?”

“Yes,” Lucan said. “He is the one who creates us. The one who chooses who will become a Knight.” He thought back to that day, to the days directly following it. “I didn’t so much as think about medicine for a century after that.” He curled his fingers in his hands. “I took to the sword for penances. Lived for every time I killed one of those bastards.”
 

She studied him in silence, studied him with the intensity of an artist painting a picture. She slid to her hip, resting her weight on one hand. “Yet you found your way back to medicine.” It wasn’t a question.

Another short nod. More memories he didn’t block out. He let them flow. “I was struggling with the past. I couldn’t let it go. The battlefield wasn’t enough anymore. I was hungry for knowledge. For something other than war. It felt. .. important. As if I were supposed to learn more, do more. I went to medical school. Traveled after that. I studied with great scientists, doctors, explored alternative medicine, even spent some time with an Indian Shaman. I was a sponge. And then as suddenly as I had left the Knights, I knew I had to go back. But what I found wasn’t good. The Knights were aging – not in body, but soul – struggling with the beast within that I had yet to struggle with myself.”
 

“That happens at different ages depending on the Knights, right?” Kresley asked, obviously following every word he spoke.
 

“Yes. None of us know when it will hit us. Some are very young when the erosion hits. Rinehart was two hundred years younger than me and barely hanging on when he met Laura. At that age, I was fine.” He found himself surprisingly eager to continue his story, “I had the idea I’d find a suppression serum. There weren’t any mates back then, and we all needed hope. So I went to work, and I was driven at first. Confident. But Knights started falling to the darkness, turning into Beasts or intentionally dying in battle to avoid going to the other side. Our leader, Tezi, was furious. He blamed the Angels, said we were being used, that heaven was no better than hell. He went willingly to Adrian. My biggest fear is that the ring the Wolf wears will end up with Tezi. He wants the Knights dead. Destroying them is his vow of vengeance against the Knights' creators.”
 

“The Knights were the ones he was trying to protect.” Her words were laced with disbelief. “His friends. Moer than friends. I’ve heard the Knighs call eac other brothers. To avenge them would not e to kil them.”

“Revenge is what he is after and not for us. For himself. Tezi has no soul,” Lucan reminded her. “Without a soul, there is only evil. He knows no friends now. Only enemies.”

She let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it while he spoke. It took effort but he looked at her, let her see the pain in his eyes. When she spoke, her voice quavered. “I don’t know what to say. It’s all so...horrible. I don’t know what else to call it.” She twisted the sash to her robe around her hands; they were shaking.
 

It touched him that she felt his story so deeply. He didn’t want her upset, but it had been a lifetime since he had felt that someone understood his pain enough to be moved by those feelings. He wanted to go to her, to pull her close. But he’d shared his story to help her heal. This was about her reaching inside and learning about herself, about how his pain could, hopefully, help her recover from hers.
 

Silence thickened the air as time ticked by heavily. She dropped the sash, dug her fingers into the blankets, lifted a troubled expression to his. She hesitated as if she wasn’t sure she should say what was on her mind. And then, “Did you ever find the answer to any of the ‘whys’? Did you ever make sense of all that pain?”

These were the questions he’d hoped she would ask. The questions the Knights had all faced as they had tried to make sense of it all.
 

“I did,” he said with the confidence of hard lessons learned. “And unfortunately, last year, when faced with your pain, I allowed myself to forget again. I allowed myself to turn away from what I knew in my heart–that there is always hope. And that everything happens for a reason. Events build our character, teach us how to deal with what comes next in life. Had you been born with control over your fire, you wouldn’t have met Laura. And the events that brought Laura and Rinehart together as mates were complicated, but very much involved you. Would they have met if you didn’t exist in her life? And if you had always had control of your abilities, you would not know the value of that control while wielding such a powerful weapon.”

Her lashes swept downward, dark circles on pale cheeks. Lucan inched closer to her, caught her chin in his fingers and stared at her, let her see the pride in his eyes. “You are very brave. You were brave to come here. You are brave to stand and fight. But you do not have to be brave alone anymore. You have me. We can do this together.”
 

Her hand went to his face. He turned into the touch. God, she felt good. He covered it with his own.
 

“How?” she whispered. “How can we win when we cannot even talk about this without the Guardians reading your thoughts?”

Lucan held out his arms and showed Kresley how loose the bracelets on his wrists were. She frowned down at them and cast him a questioning look. “What does it mean?”
 

He captured her hand, settling it onto his lap, on top of the blanket. He really wanted her under the blanket with him. “It means their hold on me is slipping. They can’t contain me and my beast at the same time, and they’ve already freed my beast.”

She cast him a skeptical look. “Which you’re quite certain is under control.”

“I am.” The statement was simple, sure. Because that is what he felt. Remarkable under control. But then, the Guardian’s still retained a light hold on him and on his beast. In a remote corner of his mind, he still feared he would struggle with his beast without their presence, still worried about mating and hurting Kresley.

 
”So we can call for help without them knowing?” she asked cautiously, leaning back on her hands to study him.

That question brought more immediate concerns that his abilty to mate.“Maybe. I’m concerned about the hold they may have on you. Have you felt any connection to the Guardians at all?”