A sob broke through the morbid vision, and she dropped her head onto her folded forearms and gave in to tears. A tap on the window snapped her head up. Kenna gasped. Marshall stared at her through the paned glass of the back door’s upper half. What the—what was he doing here?
“Kenna?” His deep voice penetrated the glass.
She stared, unable to move. She couldn’t open the door, couldn’t talk to this man who knew her better than anyone—
except Jared
. Her heart beat faster. She hadn’t considered how many people her
situation
was going to affect. How would she hide from her brother what had happened?
“Kenna, what’s wrong?” Marshall demanded.
The knob turned. She leaped to her feet, then froze when the door opened and he filled the doorway, tall, dark, and ruggedly handsome. Just as she remembered. At forty-five years old, he was as fit as most men her age, his broad shoulders and angled features mature, dark eyes penetrating…knowing. He’d been the father she lost at fourteen, taking on the surrogate role, but she wasn’t naive enough not to understand why women chased him halfway around the world.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded again.
“What are you doing here? The show isn’t for a few weeks.” She extended a hand as if to touch him, recalled the play of color beneath her skin, then yanked it back before the fire phenomena could reemerge.
“I decided to surprise you by coming early,” Marshall said. “I want to bask in the excitement with you.”
“More like stress.”
He took a step toward her. “This is your moment, but sweetheart, you look like hell. What’s happened? Jared?”
Her heart wrenched at the concern in his voice. She shook her head. “No, no, Jared’s fine. I—” Her mind worked double time for an answer. “I had a break-in, lost everything.”
Marshall dropped the leather duffel she hadn’t noticed him carrying and stepped up to her. He enfolded her in his arms. She stiffened, recollection of bursting into flames while in Erion’s embrace still too real to call mere memory.
Marshall leaned back and looked into her face. “I know I pissed you off, but are you going to hold a grudge for two years?” He lifted a corner of his mouth just as she’d seen him do a million times before, and the dam burst. Tears rolled down her cheeks. He pulled her close, and she buried her face in his chest. He stroked her hair. “It’ll be all right.”
She wanted to shout that it wouldn’t be all right, could never again be all right, that he should run as far and as fast as he could, but she cried until the tears ran dry, then allowed him to gently push her back into the chair. He lowered himself onto the seat to her left.
“What happened?”
“Someone torched my garage. The glass is destroyed. Everything I still had here is gone.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes, but he said in a level voice, “What did the police say?”
“They aren’t hopeful. They’ll do what they can and follow up with any leads.” Kenna held her breath, praying he wouldn’t demand to see a report or an officer who had taken the imaginary report.
“Any idea who would do something like this?”
She shook her head.
“A competitor maybe?”
Kenna stared. “I…I can’t believe such a thing. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
He shrugged. “You know how competitive the art world is. You’re up and coming. Stranger things have happened.”
He didn’t know the half of it. “They hinted it was probably just some kids. Vandalism, at its best.”
Marshall rose. “Let’s take a look.”
Kenna shot to her feet. “No—I mean, I don’t want to deal with this right now. You just arrived, and—”
“The show is in two weeks. You have to replace the lost pieces. There’s no time to fool around.” He started for the door.
Kenna shoved past him and whirled. “Not now, Marshall.”
“It can’t be that bad. Let me take a look at what we’re up against.” He grasped her shoulders and gently moved her aside.
Her heart pounded as if running a race against greyhounds, yet she remained frozen as he opened the door. How would she explain the melted glass to a man who had glass instead of blood flowing through his veins? He wouldn’t be fooled by the
someone took a torch to the glass
line as Mrs. Patrick had been. Kenna broke from the trance and lunged after him. He reached the garage door a second before her and stepped inside.
“Christ.”
She halted at his side, her gaze transfixed on the glass pieces that rippled around the room from shelves nearest the marver to the outer corners of the garage in a wave that transitioned melted globs to barely marred edges. Aiden’s fire
and
her fire had destroyed her art, had created this mess. She startled at the realization that neither the shelves nor the walls were burned.
Kenna jerked her eyes to the ovens. Not a hint of damage. She swung her gaze to the curtains, and tears sprang to the surface. The short, sheer apple print looked as new as the day she’d put it up.
Erion
. Heat had melted the glass, but he had contained the flames, saved the ovens and the building…her life.
“What the hell happened?” Marshall’s hard voice yanked her back to him.
She met his gaze. “I told you, vandals.”
As expected, he stared, the gears in his head clearly churning, looking for some reasonable explanation for the strange apparition that surrounded them. She kept her eyes locked with his. No matter how much he might wonder, he couldn’t know. After returning to human form, she’d seen the garage as being in shambles. Shock of morphing into flames had skewed her perception. The damage was bad—she’d lost at least a year’s work—but the fact the fire hadn’t touched anything but the glass made it more unexplainable.
“No one could possibly cause this much damage without the fire being visible from outside,” he said. “Someone had to see something.” His tone said he wasn’t ignoring the oddity, but simply hadn’t put his finger on it—yet. She would make sure he was gone before he had the chance to get any closer to the truth.
Kenna shook her head. “My neighbors know I’m a glassblower. They wouldn’t know the difference. They could easily mistake a blowtorch glow for the ovens.”
His gaze bore into her, and the sliver of relief she’d allowed herself to feel drowned in the apprehension that burrowed into the pit of her stomach.
“What’s going on, Kenna? Your workshop looks like an atom bomb leveled the glass, you—” He lifted a lock of her copper-streaked hair. “It’s gorgeous, but what vat did you dip your head in? And that tan. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She shoved his hand aside. “It’s been two years, Marshall. People change.”
He studied her. “Change, or have been changed?”
She stared. He knew.
Impossible
. The garage, her appearance, was odd, but not odd enough for him to know,
really know
. Fear strained her nerves. It wasn’t the strangeness of the things around her. It was her—and he knew her.
She opened her mouth to weave another lie into her story, but Marshall halted her lie with another question. “How much did you lose?”
****
Kenna sat across the kitchen table from Marshall, a list of the glass pieces she’d lost in front of him. One more hour of her life had passed, and the dream was now
not
the last few hours, but the twenty-seven years that had preceded them. Reality now encompassed the hours since she’d met Erion. Life changed, reality changed. Who she was, what she was, had changed beyond recognition.
Marshall looked up from the paper. “Get a clean-up crew in here tomorrow, and you’ll be back in business day after tomorrow.”
Kenna nodded, numb with acceptance. She would replenish her stock, live as she had the last five years in quiet solitude, just another local artist whose work was sold in local shops. No Michael Laird show, no shows at all. She swallowed back a lump in her throat. A void, like a black hole, deepened in her gut. She’d lost the life she knew. And ached in ways she never had before for an existence she couldn’t understand. Not without Erion. She would find him, make him understand he couldn’t live without her, any more than Airiana could live without him.
Since Erion left, the female Air Element had remained silent. That frightened Kenna. But she also couldn’t deny the relief at being able to sit across from her mentor and not fear that he would somehow sense the voice she heard.
Kenna shifted her gaze to Marshall. He scribbled on the paper where he’d listed the ruined pieces. In his typical take-charge manner, he planned on getting her up and running and back in the game…back with other people. A tremor radiated through her. There wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to let that happen.
“I’m canceling the show.”
His head snapped up. “You’re overreacting. It’s a loss, but you can create pieces to replace the ones you lost.”
Kenna shook her head. “It’s too much, too soon. I can’t risk putting Michael in that position. If I don’t deliver the rest of the pieces, he’ll be in trouble. I won’t put his reputation on the line.”
Marshall set his pencil down. “You can do plenty in two weeks. What’s the real problem?”
“Did you see my workshop?” She froze, realizing the door she’d opened with the statement.
“It’s a mess, all right.”
“I can’t work in there,” she cut in. “And what clean-up crew can get hardened glass off concrete?”
“I’ll take a sledgehammer to it myself if I have to.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. He would do just that. Despite it all, the oddity, her attitude, he would put himself on the line for her. His fatherly concern was coming to the fore. Kenna clamped down on the sentimentality. Better to hurt Marshall than to burn him to a crisp.
“It’s not open for debate. I’m canceling the show. I’ll get somebody to clean up, but there’s no need for you to hang around. I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing.”
His brow rose. “You’re kicking me out?”
“Nothing’s changed, Marshall.” Her heart jumped into overdrive. Would he buy it?
“Plenty’s changed, and don’t try telling me it’s because of our last conversation. I let you be, Kenna. You’re a big girl, and you have to find your own way, but we both know my warning wasn’t anything you hadn’t already considered.”
“It was an accusation,” she shot back with genuine feeling. “You accused me of stealing, of not having enough imagination to come up with something on my own.”
His face softened. “What I said was, people would think you didn’t have enough imagination. You wouldn’t be the first to be called a Gudentrath copycat.”
Kenna lifted her chin, memory of his words as real as they had been two years ago. “You said
people
, but you meant
me
.”
“You’ve clearly proven me wrong.”
Kenna blinked. She’d only half believed her own words. To hear him confirm her fears—her head whirled. Had everything been a lie, his belief in her, her ability as an artist…her very humanity?
“What’s going on, Kenna?”
His demand yanked her focus back to him. “I…I told you.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I’ve lost a year’s worth of work, and there has to be something else wrong?”
“Doesn’t have to be,” he replied. “But there is.”
Fear shot through her, but this time, she was ready for his suspicion. Kenna gave a harsh laugh. “Problem is, Marshall, you were expecting the same doe-eyed girl you knew.”
“Two years couldn’t change you into the cynical woman of the world you’re trying to sell me.”
He rose and strode to where his duffel sat near the door. He picked up the bag and faced her. Her heart pounded. He was leaving just like that. Just as her mother and father had, just as Jared had…just like Erion.
She was truly alone.
Chapter Eleven
Filmy blue flitted across the darkness of Kenna’s dream world. She shifted fitfully in her sleep. Air shimmered into a translucent shadow against black, circled once, and covered her. She resisted the comforting warmth. The covering grew heavy and the masculine weight of muscled shoulders and thighs pressed her into the mattress. A moist mouth nuzzled her ear.
“Erion,” she murmured in drowsy awareness.
Sudden tears burned the corners of her eyes. Her mind fought for the reason behind the tears even as she arched her naked breasts against his chest. He gave a low laugh.
Kenna snapped open her eyes. She fought the pressure weighting her down and fumbled for the lamp on the nightstand and jabbed at the switch. Light flooded the room. She jammed her eyes shut against the blinding intrusion, but not before discerning Aiden’s blue eyes staring down at her.
“You’re dead.” Emotions choked her. “You can’t be here.” She bucked but instantly stopped, feeling his erection hard against her thigh. “You’re dead!”
“I’m not that easy to kill,” he said.
She opened her eyes, grimaced against the still-too-bright light. “You son of a bitch. Get off me!”
He ground his cock against her.
She bit back the fear and seized his shoulders. “
Get,
” she shoved, grunting with the force of each word, “
off
.”
His weight pinned her to the bed. Kenna started to yank a knee up, then realized doing so would settle his hips between her legs. Her stomach roiled at the thought of him inside her. Her head spun.
“This is what Erion gave you.” Aiden slid his cock against her flesh again.
Kenna froze. Fury lit his eyes like fireworks. Wyvern and Ormond had been right. Why hadn’t she listened? Because she’d believed she’d killed Aiden…and so had Erion. Had she known Aiden was still alive, she would have listened to the Drakaura. Now they were gone.
Erion was gone.
Her blood froze. But Marshall wasn’t gone. He slept across the hall in the spare bedroom.
Fear tightened her chest and lungs to near choking. If he heard her struggle, he would charge into the room, and Aiden would snuff him out without a second thought. Why hadn’t she forced him to leave when he’d faced her, duffel in hand, and asked where he was supposed to sleep? Though she hadn’t wanted to admit it, she’d nearly given into tears when she realized she misread the fact he’d simply picked up his duffel in readiness to take it to the room where he would sleep. That was quintessential Marshal. He said little and did much. But she’d been right in telling him to go. Now, he was in danger, and if anything happened to him, it would be her fault.