Authors: Christine Warren
“Sorry about that.” His boyish grin flashed again.
“No problem.” Ella smiled. “You had more questions for me?”
“No, we’re finished, but I wanted to give you this.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “This is where I officially tell you that if you think of anything else, you should call me at the station.”
Ella stood and took the card between her fingers, but the detective didn’t let go. Surprised, she glanced up at him.
His smile widened, and his eyes warmed. “Unofficially, I’m also going to tell you that if you ever find yourself without that possessive boyfriend, you should also call. I’d love the chance to take you to dinner sometime.”
Shock made her do a double take. The police officer was flirting with her? That meant he’d believed her story and she wasn’t a suspect, right?
“I—um—I mean, thank you.”
McQuaid released the card and reached around her to open the door to the small office. “Thank you, Ella. If you wouldn’t mind, ask Dr. Lefavreau to come up next. I want to clarify a few things about the statue with him.”
She agreed and stepped outside, trying not to appear to hurry. On a normal day, she would have wanted to dash to Bea’s side for a little girl talk about the attractive cop who’d asked her to call him. Personally. But today, the only thing on her mind was getting back to Kees to share the information she’d found in the file.
What in heaven had the gargoyle done to her?
Chapter Five
Ella hated to drive. She actually hated even riding in cars, which was one of the reasons she chose to live in the city, where walking and buses and trains could get her wherever she needed to go. Unfortunately, the address in Kees’s file couldn’t be reached by bus, and walking there would take approximately a day and a half, along with superior wilderness survival skills. A car was the only option, and Ella didn’t own a car.
The rental made her grit her teeth and wince. Not only was she not comfortable driving anything bigger than the compact little Ford she’d used to test for her license years ago, but the idea of all the paperwork and insurance claim forms she would have to fill out if she damaged the hulking SUV during their trip did little to improve her mood either.
Nor did the way her mind kept straying back to
The Kiss.
She italicized it in her head, as if it were the painting by Klimt. How something as simple as a kiss could have rocked her world on its axis astounded her. And unnerved her. Especially since the man who laid it on her hadn’t so much as mentioned it since she rejoined him in the museum ballroom post-interview. No, he’d been too focused on the information she had to give him. She might as well have become a computerized information kiosk, for all the attention he paid her. It was like he had no emotions at all.
Maybe she should remind herself that he was made out of stone, after all.
Too bad his lips hadn’t felt like rock. They had felt like sex, all smooth and hot and hard as they moved over hers, urging them apart, urging her to feel things she’d never felt before with a man, let alone a monster.
Yeah, she’d used the
M
-word again. She had to; it was becoming her only self-defense mechanism. The things she felt when Kees kissed her, or touched her, or, you know, so much as looked at her had her hormones and her brain chemicals spinning little stories about lust and passion and all sorts of other things it was completely inappropriate to associate with a member of another species. She needed to remember that.
And she needed to keep her legs crossed, which wasn’t really possible while she was driving north out of Vancouver toward the small village of Lions Bay.
Kees sat beside her in the passenger seat, his huge form taking up every inch of space even inside the behemoth SUV that had been the only available rental on short notice. He had his arms crossed over his chest, and his gaze slid constantly back and forth between Ella and the road ahead of them. She didn’t mistake his intense scrutiny for personal interest, though. She knew very well what he was up to—studying her every move so that when it was time to head back to the city, he could make a case for getting behind the wheel.
The gargoyle wanted to drive.
“Forget it,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road. “I already told you, you have to have a special license in order to drive a car.”
She’d also had to repeat it—loudly—several times before they had left the rental lot. She understood how a man as take charge and dominant as Kees would prefer to be in control of a vehicle, but there was no way she was going to let him operate one. Especially not when he admitted this was as close as he’d ever been to one. Her nightmares traumatized her enough already.
“It does not appear complicated.” Kees tilted his head to the side and gestured toward her feet. “Already I have deduced that the objects beneath your feet control this vehicle’s momentum. Your right foot moves to the right when you wish to move faster, and to the left when you wish to slow down. Simple enough for a child to master.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t let children drive, either. You need a license.”
“No one has asked to see this license of yours since we took the machine away from the people at the desk. I don’t see how anyone would know whether or not I possess one of those plastic cards.”
If they hadn’t been moving, Ella would have banged her head against the steering wheel. Damn, he was persistent.
“They’ll know if we get pulled over.” She glanced at him and sighed before explaining. “The authorities have the right to make us stop if we disobey any traffic laws, of which there are thousands that you aren’t familiar with, or if we appear suspicious. When they do that, the first thing they will ask is to see the license of the driver. If you were driving, the fact that you don’t have one could get both of us in serious trouble.”
Kees frowned. “I would not wish to cause trouble for you with your human authorities, but perhaps later we could see about obtaining one of these licenses for me. I would like to operate this machine for myself. It appears … very interesting.”
“It’s not that simple. There are tests you have to take about the laws I mentioned, so you’d have to study. It’s not a simple process. Trust me. Now, can we change the subject? I’m kind of over this one.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Ella felt the temperature in the interior of the SUV go up about ten degrees. She could sense Kees’s gaze on her. Hell, she could almost feel it, like hands against her skin.
“And what should we talk about, little human?” His low, rumbling question sounded disturbingly close to a feline purr, full of arrogance and satisfaction. “Perhaps we could discuss the moment we shared inside the museum earlier, hm?”
Ella gritted her teeth and tried to pretend that her cheeks weren’t glowing hot enough to cook an egg.
“Or we could not.” She shot him a glare. “Unless you want to talk about what the hell you were thinking back there. What was that lover boy act all about? Do you just get your jollies from embarrassing me?”
Kees’s expression went from teasing back to stony. He shrugged. “It seemed a logical way to explain why I had accompanied you to your work this morning. It also explained why I would not leave when requested. A male does not leave his mate in a situation in which she could be vulnerable or in which she feels unsettled.”
“Yeah, well, the only thing unsettling about this morning was you, and you put me in an awkward situation. Now Bea is going to keep asking me about you like we’re in some kind of relationship. And I had to tell the police you were at my apartment all night.”
“We are in a relationship of sorts, at least until I locate my Warden and you are placed with an appropriate Guild mentor.” He shifted to look toward the road. “And from what I understand of this age, a young woman spending the night alone with a man she is attached to will make no one think twice, not even the police.”
He was right, but Ella was still unsettled. “What do you know of this age? You’ve been asleep for, like, a few hundred years, right? You think you understand modern relationship paradigms?”
“I slumbered,” he agreed, but Ella could hear the caveat in his tone. “However, we Guardians require little enough sleep when we are awake and active. After the first few years of dormancy, we actually spend very little time in sleep. We might refer to it that way, but it’s more a sort of meditative state. A trance, you might say. We are still aware of the world around us. We can still hear what is going on, and sometimes we can catch glimpses of it as well. Not only does it ensure we will wake if a threat reemerges to menace the world, but it allows us to keep track of changes in humanity so that we understand our surroundings when we do wake. When faced with a threat from the Darkness, we cannot waste time in finding ways to communicate with our Wardens or the rest of the world.”
“Right. So you always wake up savvy and horny. Got it.”
Silence filled the car for a long minute.
“That is not entirely accurate,” he rumbled, the gravel of his voice abrading against the tension between them. “We wake with much knowledge, but it does take time to associate what we know in our minds with the reality of the physical world. Like this vehicle, for instance. I knew of them, even caught glimpses of them, but this is the first time I have experienced one in this manner. It makes my knowledge much more complete.”
He didn’t mention anything about being horny. Ella couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. On the one hand, she should be grateful not to ease on down that particular road, since all it was likely to accomplish was acute embarrassment and almost certain regret. On the other, it would have been nice to hear that he had a reaction to her even a tenth as strong as her inexplicable reaction to him. At least then, her misery would have some company to love.
Opting for the better part of valor, she cleared her throat and watched the road. “So, um, when was the last time you … woke up? You made it sound like you were, er, summoned for a particular battle. Have you been asleep since you won that one?”
“No, I have woken a few times since. We were summoned to battle at first when the Seven last attempted to join together, and to prevent that is our ultimate calling, but whenever any force of the Darkness gains sufficient power to threaten mankind, one or more of us will wake to fight it. The last time I fought was in your year 1703.”
Ella paused. It took a second for that to sink in. “Really? Um, my knowledge of history is limited to knowing that was the transitional period between Baroque and Rococo, but I don’t remember learning anything special about that year in school. What happened?”
“One of the Seven escaped its prison. It emerged in the south of England and attempted to bring the sea in to devour the land. My brother and I stopped it, but the battle lasted for days near the close of the year. Many human lives were lost to the sea before we prevailed, but we vanquished the demon and banished him again from this plane.”
He spoke clinically, no emotion wrapped through the words, as if he recited some sort of multiplication table. Ella found herself wanting more. She wanted to know how the experience had felt to him. Had he been frightened? Exhilarated? Did the accomplishment leave him feeling proud and satisfied? Or angry and exhausted?
He so rarely showed anything resembling emotion. Those rare glimpses of humor when he teased her, or the glint of possessiveness and hunger when they had kissed. Those were the only times she felt she understood this man-creature. The rest of the time, he might as well have been truly carved from stone.
She just wished her hormones would remember that. It was becoming harder for her to remind them that in spite of the suit of gorgeous Kees wore in order to fit into a vehicle designed for human physical dimensions, he wasn’t really an ordinary man.
He wasn’t really ordinary at all.
Her brows drew closer together, and she bit back another question. She didn’t need to know what made Kees the gargoyle tick. Better to focus on the task at hand. Find out where his Warden was hiding, put the two of them back together, then go back to living her sane, boring life. With hopefully a new trick or two up her sleeve to keep the magic inside her from harming anyone else ever again.
With her hands on the steering wheel, she jerked her chin toward the road in front of them. “That’s Lions Bay up ahead. Once we’re through, we continue a little bit north and a fair bit east and we should run into the address from the file. We’ll be there soon.”
And be that much closer to the end of this crazy internal turmoil.
Or so she could only hope.
* * *
Kees felt the confines of the automobile pressing in on him. Despite all the windows letting in light and the view of the forest and land around them, he felt trapped. It was not a feeling he was accustomed to, nor one for which he felt any fondness. He did not believe he would ever be a fan of this human mode of transportation. He would much rather have flown.
That desire could also account for a bit of his claustrophobia. He’d remained in his human form since changing last night to reassure Ella, and his skin felt too tight, stretched and itchy and confining. He needed to switch back to his natural shape, stand at his full height, and stretch his wings. With Fortune’s blessing, they would find Gregory in this remote location, and Kees would get the chance to do so soon.
Of course, the small car and the small shape could not entirely explain away the tension eating at Kees. No, a portion of the blame for that lay just a foot away to his left. Ella Harrow had him tied into knots he simply didn’t understand.
Kees could never claim to be an expert on human beings. Despite his many centuries of life in their world, he had spent most of it separate and apart from the race he protected. Most of the humans he had had contact with over the years had been Wardens, and they, too, lived somewhat separated from their non-magical counterparts. The talent to feel, harness, and shape magical power set the Wardens apart. Most of them were born to magical families and lived their entire lives knowing that there was more to the universe than met the human eye.