Edge of Danger (47 page)

 
“You bet. Come on. You can do it. If you can beat the pants off the most powerful wizard on the planet you can heft my weight up a few hundred stai—” She laughed delightedly as he swung her up in his arms and started striding toward the door.

 
The men parted to let them through. Ignoring them, Eden looped her arms about his neck and snuggled her head against his chest as if she’d done it all her life.

 
They met MacBain halfway across the trashed room. “Och! This mess is unconscionable,” the old man muttered, seeing the destruction for the first time. He kicked aside a chunk of mahogany paneling in the middle of the carpet with his highly polished black shoe.

 
Tsking, he picked up Gabriel’s whiskey glass from the floor, and placed it, just so, on the heat-buckled silver tray where the drink listed to the side when he lifted it. “This will take me at least a m—Oh, aye. Now
that
is a neat trick. Is it here to stay?”

 
He’d thought it, and the room was completely back to normal. Nothing broken, nothing awry. No sign that Jason Verdine had ever been there. It was as if nothing had transpired. If only.

 
Surprised himself, he glanced from MacBain to his brother, and then at Eden, and shrugged. “I have no freaking idea. MacBain? Politely escort our guests to the front door. Then remove the bell. I’m not at home.”

 
As soon as the door shut behind them, Eden touched his jaw with a tenderness that made him ache. “You’re going to send me back to Tempe, aren’t you?”

 
Christ. This would be a hell of a fucking lot easier if she weren’t so attuned to him. How had this happened so fast? Now that he’d found her, how could he let her go?

 
Step away from the table.

 
He stopped walking halfway across the vast entry hall that echoed his footsteps in a way that made him conscious of how lonely one pair of footsteps could sound. He wondered why he’d never noticed that before. “Would you prefer I sent you from here?”

 
“No. I don’t want to leave you until I absolutely have to.”

 
“A farewell fuck?” he asked, going for mocking. Going for insulting. Going for her slapping his face and demanding to be sent anywhere but his arms. He was proud of the cool, matter-of-factness of his tone. Give him a swarm of fire ants any day.

 
She searched his face, her eyes shadowed. “Call it whatever the hell you like, Gabriel Edge,” she told him with asperity. “
I
know what it is. Don’t make a mockery of all that we feel, all that we are, because you feel trapped and not in control.”

 
He started up the sweeping staircase. “This has nothing to do with control.” He was lying. Of course it did. Because it took every atom, every particle of control in him not to fall to his knees, Eden in his arms, and beg her to stay.

 
“Not here,” she told him firmly when he hesitated halfway up. “If this is our last time I want to make love in your bed.” His jaw tightened, and she ran her fingers through his hair as he climbed. Sunlight streamed through the arched windows at the top of the stairs. “I’ll miss you terribly, you know.”

 
“Do you want sex or not? I can send you home in time for dinner.”

 
“Hmm.” Head on his chest she listened to the staccato beat of his heart. “A lonely dinner. Boxed mac and cheese. Nasty.”

 
His jaw hurt from grinding his teeth. “Order in.”

 
“I won’t have a job.”

 
“You’re a genius,” he told her shortly, and very unlover-like. “You’ll find another job.”

 
She ran a finger around the inside neck seam of his T-shirt as he walked and his body reacted as it always did to her touch. The jasmine scent of her hair as it brushed his chin filled him with a longing he knew was just the tip of the iceberg. This one-tenth of yearning was already almost incapacitating.

 
“Will you get Jason’s powers?”

 
“Yes.” He suspected he didn’t have a choice in the matter one way or the other. Duncan was the one who gave a shit about accruing magical powers; Gabriel didn’t give a damn, as long as he could do his job. With or without magic.

 
“Really?” She was silent for a few more steps, then said musingly, “I have a fascinating research project I’d like to sink my teeth into. Private, of course. Not something I’d ever publish. But really, it would take a lifetime to—”

 
Gabriel stopped dead, letting her body slip down his as if she were contaminated.

 
Ah, geez. Here we go again.
Eden looked up at him with narrowed eyes as they stood halfway up the staircase. Neither all the way at the bottom, not having reached the top. Another handy metaphor, she thought.

 
The man could teach a mule stubborn, damn it. She almost asked for intervention from his great-great-great-whatever-grandmother, who was glaring out of her portrait at them from the wall at his back. Eden felt about as unhappy as Finola Edridge looked.

 
She crossed her arms over her chest, and leaned against the banister. “Now what’s your problem?”

 
She knew what his problem was. She just didn’t know how to fix it. If he was a computer program she could fix him. But he was a flesh and blood man, and she had no idea how his programming worked. Too bad there wasn’t a manual. She noticed a glint of silver as he ran a frustrated hand through his hair.

 
“Look,” he snarled, apparently at the end of his very short rope. “I don’t know how to make it any plainer to you than I have already. You’re a nice woman. I like you,” he bit out. “But we can’t have a fucking future, don’t you get it?”

 
He was dead serious and his expression made her heart ache in her chest. God. She was terrible at this man-woman stuff. Terrible, and inept, and so…God. She loved him so much. She was said to be a brilliant scientist. Tops in her field. And she didn’t have what it took to hold a man.

 
Not any man.
This
man, with his haunted eyes, and unshakable belief in a five-hundred-year-old curse. Her academic studies, her scientific background…
none
of it was going to make him change his mind. How could she counter what he believed?

 
She turned and started up the rest of the stairs, her brain going a mile a minute. “No sex in our future? That seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it?” she asked lightly. Too lightly? she wondered, watching his face as he came up alongside her. Not that his expression would give her a clue as to his thoughts. He was a hard man to read. No, Eden thought, heart pounding, mouth dry, he was an
impossible
man to read.

 
Could a heart break? Literally? Intellectually she knew that it couldn’t. But it certainly felt like it. They reached the landing and started walking toward his room. Sunlight streamed through the high arched windows, painting swirls in the gold, black, and red carpet in brilliant blocks of light and shadow, all the way down the ridiculously long corridor.

 
She stopped walking right beside dour Janet Edridge’s portrait. “Not talking about the elephant in the room doesn’t mean it’s not there, Gabriel.”

 
“Jesus, Eden!” His face was in shadow and his eyes burned as he looked at her. “Are you being particularly obtuse? Let me spell it out for you. We
have
no future together. We’ve had a highly dramatic few days. We’ve been caught up in the moment. Extreme reactions happen in extreme situations.”

 
“Are you going to insult my intelligence by suggesting what I feel for you is Stockholm syndrome?”

 
“Of course it is.” The finality in his voice ripped out her heart.

 
There was no point debating the subject, and she didn’t even try. It hurt to breathe. She didn’t know what to do with her hands because what she wanted to do was grab hold of him and never let go. Her wizard.
Hers,
damn it. He looked so forbidding standing there in a stripe of shadow, while she stood in a stripe of sunlight.

 
A man who shouldn’t exist, in a place that shouldn’t exist.

 
He loved her. She knew he loved her.

 
Didn’t he?

 
Could
he?

 
She wrapped her arms about her own waist. Her chest ached just looking at him. From his expression, the drawbridge was up and the battle stations armed. Maybe that was mixing her metaphors, but he looked shut down. Disinterested. Her eyes drifted to Janet’s stoic face beyond his left shoulder.

 
Help me, Janet.

 
She frowned. There was something different…She glanced back at Gabriel, who still looked surly.

 
“I think it would be better if I sent you back home now,” he told her with no inflection. “Why prolong our good-byes?”

 
She tilted her chin. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t at least try to get through his thick skull how she felt. “And
I
think it would be better if we tried starting with the truth and work from there.”

 
“What truth?”

 
“I love you, Gabriel Edge. I love you with all my heart and soul, from now until eternity. There. Now it’s your turn.”

 
He gave a half laugh. “Christ, I love that about you. You cut straight to the chase.”

 
Did he love more than her quick tongue though? “Forget the consequences for a minute. Do you care about me at all?”

 
“I
can’t
forget the consequences. Not even for a minute.”

 
“Answer the question.”

 
“Yes. Hell, yes. I care. With every breath in my body and every beat of my heart. Bu—”

 
She caught her breath, then stepped closer, and said shakily, “That’s all that matters.”

 
“But how we feel is immaterial,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t back up as she half expected him to do either. “I’d rather live the rest of my life without you, knowing that you’re safe, than risk your life.”

 
Eden’s throat closed. “Don’t I have a vote?”

 
“Don’t fight me on this. Don’t.”

 
“Your parents had eighteen years together.”

 
“They had eighteen years
apart
!”

 
“Then we have to figure out a way to
break
the damned curse!”

 
“Five centuries of Edge men have tried and failed. No,” he snapped as she reached out to touch his arm. “Don’t touch me. I’m about to go off like a fucking rocket as it is.”

 
“Step away from the wizard?”

 
“Step away from the man who wants to believe that there’s even the smallest, vaguest, tiniest hope of making this work, but knows that’s impossible.”

 
“What will happen if we try? God, Gabriel. Can’t we at least try?”

 
“You’ll die.”

 
“I’m willing to take that chance. Please. I’ll die without you if we don’t.” Eden would never have imagined those words coming out of her own mouth. She wasn’t that dramatic, or intense. But she believed them now. Without this man she would die.