Mac's Angels : Sinner and Saint. a Loveswept Classic Romance (9780345541659) (13 page)

While he was gone, Karen took off her boots, and with a smothered yawn slipped beneath the covers and laid her head on the pillow. “I wanted there to be a sandy beach,” she said softly. “But snow is romantic too.”

“Nothing is ever quite what we want, is it?” Niko replied tersely as he entered the room.

Niko blew out the remaining candle and threw one last log on the fire. The view through the window looked like a black and white photograph, a cold moon hanging low over bare tree limbs etched white with snow. Contrasting shades of gray fog hovered near the ground. He turned back to survey the dark room, watching as the new log caught fire in a series
of sputters. After he'd delayed as long as he could, he made his way to their adjoining beds.

“If it will make you uncomfortable to hold me, I'll understand.” Karen turned on her side away from him. “After all, it's been twenty years since anybody sang me to sleep.”

Niko dropped to his knees, removed his shoes, and arranged his long frame on the mattress. “What did your mother sing?”

“Not my mother. It was my dad. He sang Irish lullabies.”

“Where's your dad now?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “He died when I was eight. A combine turned over on him.”

“So he was a farmer?”

There was a catch in her voice when she answered. “I—I don't know. I think so.”

He didn't know if it was her muffled sniff or his own throat tightening, but he lay on his back and reached out, pulling her back to his side. “Come here, princess. I need someone to hold me too. Besides, it's too cold for us to sleep apart.”

She didn't fight him. But he was kidding himself. Sure, it was cold. It was also dark and Niko's mind was filled with other Irish lullabies and the woman who sang them to a thin, dark boy hiding from the angry father who refused to accept his son's fear of his heritage.

Niko didn't want to think about his father. It was this place. It brought it all back.

Karen tensed for a moment as she felt Niko's arms pull her close. Then she nestled her cheek against his forearm and let herself breathe in the smell of him, of sandalwood. Like the elusive melody of the lullaby, the male scent of her imaginary lover draped around her like a long-forgotten memory.

When he started to hum she smiled in the darkness. “I thought you didn't sing.”

“I don't,” he growled. “Go to sleep.”

Warm and safe, awash in a past that came back for just a moment, Karen Miller closed her eyes.

Holding her was all he'd been afraid it would be, sheer hell. Chinese water torture would have been a welcome exchange. From the moment she laid her head on his arm and pressed her bottom against his thigh, he knew he would get little rest.

There was no way he could curl his body around hers without her knowing that he wanted her. And if he didn't figure out a way to hold her still, she was likely to find out how much and then he'd be faced with temptation. Finally he turned on his side, pulling her against his chest while angling the lower part of his body away from her.

He could feel every breath she took, her breasts grazing his arm, her hand holding him tight. For a long time she lay stiffly, then slowly she began to relax her grip and he knew she'd fallen asleep.

To his surprise, so did he.

Karen's dream returned.

The woman's lover came riding back on his white horse. She saw him coming across the moors, his hair blown behind him by the storm, his red shirt plastered to his chest.

As he reached the spot where she stood, he swung down and swept her into his arms, devouring her with his mouth, pressing her against him with undisguised ardor that bordered on desperation.

“I thought you'd left me,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck, threading her fingers through hair damp from the rain.

“No. I could never do that. But I do have to go away for a while. I came to tell you good-bye, to tell you I'll come back for you and to kiss you one last time.”

“No,” she cried out, holding fast to his strong neck. “I won't let you leave me. I won't.”

The tears coursed down her cheeks, and even as she cried she knew that she was dreaming. Still, the strong, hard body holding her didn't move away.

“Please?” she whispered, reaching for his mouth, tangling her fingers in his hair.

“You're dreaming, princess,” Niko said. “Wake up now. Karen, do you hear me? You have to wake up.”

She became still, then brushed away the tears on her cheek with the back of her hand. “I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

He couldn't hold back the question, “Who?”

“My—her Gypsy lover. I never used to dream.
But since I read the story, I've dreamed about him a lot.” Her heart was pounding.

“The Gypsy riding the white horse with the red ribbons in its mane?”

“Yes.”

Niko swore silently. She'd talked about her dream before. His aunt Lola, the one who'd taught him how to read palms and tea leaves, would have said that the die was cast. A woman's dream of her lover came before she met the man she would love. Karen Miller had conjured him up, the man about whom she was dreaming. If it was meant to be, he would come. There was no point in fighting fate.

“Niko, are you … have you ever been married?”

He laughed. “Me? Not in this lifetime.”

“Do you have a—a girlfriend?”

“Only you, princess.”

She moved her hand across his chest and rimmed the outline of his jaw. “But you're not really my lover, we both know that. Do you want to be?”

He sucked in a breath and held it, afraid to answer her.

Her fingertips trailed down his face and followed the cord in his neck past the band on his T-shirt to his waist, where, shyly, she nudged beneath the shirt and touched his bare skin.

“Don't do that, Karen.” He took her hand and held it against his lips. “I'll have to take another cold shower.”

She wondered how long his shower water remained
cold. It must certainly sizzle when it touched his body. Even his lips were hot. He turned toward her, capturing her hand between them. She closed her eyes and shuddered, then opened them to look up into the rugged face only inches from her own.

“You know that I want you,” he said. “I told you that from the beginning when you woke up. I wanted your body against mine, beneath mine. I wanted to hold you.”

“But that was the fantasy you created for me.”

“But a fantasy is created in the mind, my mind. So I shared it with you.”

For Niko it had come down to this night, this reality, this place. He'd tried to tell himself that he was helping Karen to repay Mac as some kind of tribute to his sister. But he'd been lying, almost from the beginning.

“It wasn't supposed to be real.”

“It isn't,” she argued. “You told me there is only the now, the reality we've created. There is no past, no tomorrow—only the dream.” She tugged her hand from between them and touched his face, sliding her fingers in his hair and pulling him down.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing?” he rasped. “You know they call me the devil of the ninth floor.”

“No, I'm not sure. But I want you to kiss me anyway.

He kissed her then, hot and wet, holding her tight with the arm beneath her head and his other hand knotted in her shirt.

Karen answered his kiss in kind, her emotions buffeted with such feelings that she felt as if she were about to explode. She wanted this man, wanted to feel him inside her, arched herself against the hard, throbbing part of him that pushed against the apex of her legs.

Niko moaned, and then she felt his hand beneath her shirt, seeking and finding her breast. Then the shirt was gone and Niko turned to his back, dragging her over him so that he could take that same breast into his mouth with sweet roughness. Then he returned to her lips.

Eagerly she pressed herself against him, moving her tongue in and out of his mouth as her body slid up and down the rough seam of his jeans in tormenting rhythm.

Driven by need beyond her comprehension, she pulled away, reached between them, and unbuttoned his jeans, sliding the zipper open and freeing the hardness beneath.

As Niko continued to bite and kiss her nipples, he caught her bottom and lifted her so that he could tug her sweatpants down her legs and flung them into the shadows.

There was a moan of anguish as he held her up again, then brought her down, impaling her body with his own. He groaned and started to turn over, making an obvious attempt to separate himself from her. She tightened her legs around him, forcing him even deeper.

Suddenly he stopped and opened his eyes. The
light of the fire exposed the raw emotion and need on his face. Need and a kind of wonder.

And then the rhythm changed, slowing as he murmured her name over and over, like some kind of mantra. He was adoring her with each touch and caress.

She responded greedily, unable to stay so controlled. She wanted to be absorbed by him totally. “Oh, Niko.” Her voice echoed through the cavernous room. “Oh, Niko, I want—”

“No,
we
want this. You'd better hang on, love, we're heading for a ride through the stars and we don't have a white horse.”

“We don't need one,” she murmured as firebursts, increasing in heat and intensity, exploded into a million fragments of flames. Then she lost all touch with reality, disappearing into the fantasy completely.

When it happened he didn't believe it. When she screamed he gave her more. When his own release joined hers he was stunned. Never in his life had he experienced such a climax.

The reverberations continued to ripple, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, finally leaving him slumped over her unable to move.

“Oh, my,” she finally whispered. “I don't think the author of the book described it very well. It was much better for me than for the woman in the story. I understand now why she'd risk everything.”

Niko came slowly back to the present, his mind still reeling from the emotion he'd unleashed, the release
she'd triggered. She was talking about her dream, or the book that fed the dream.

“The power of sex,” he said. “Kingdoms have been lost, lives have been changed because of it. There's nothing like it when it's good and nothing worse when it isn't.”

She cut her eyes toward him, confusion erasing the afterglow reflected there. He knew his words were too harsh, and he regretted it. But he was grasping for a measure of control at a time when he, too, was reeling.

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I refuse to let you make me feel guilty, and I can only speak for now. But I don't think making love will ever again be the same for me. Fantasy or reality, it doesn't matter. It was spectacular, and for that I thank you.”

He swore. “Don't thank me, princess. Do you realize that I just made love to you without protection? I didn't bring anything with me. I never even thought about it.”

“Then there's no point in closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, is there?” She tightened her muscles on the part of him still inside her.

“That's a convenient cliché,” he snapped, and tried to draw himself away. When her body came with him, he reached back to unwrap her legs from his back. That movement pushed him forward inside her and she held him close. “This isn't the same thing. I'm not a horse.”

“I don't know. It seems to me there is a certain similarity.”

Then he was filling her again, thrusting against her, setting off fresh waves of heat.

This time he was not creating a fantasy, he was living it. He was no longer a doctor trying to bring a patient to consciousness, he was a man making love to a woman, and God help him, he couldn't stop himself.

Afterward, as they lay tangled in the covers, the scent of their lovemaking permeating the air, Niko faced the reality of what he'd done. He was no dream lover; he was falling in love with this woman who was a stranger.

A woman named Karen.

When Karen opened her eyes, she was alone and sunlight was streaming through the windows beside the front door at the end of the room.

She'd never felt so good in her life. A smile curled her lips and she stretched like a cat in the sunshine. Why hadn't she known what it felt like to make love? There was a deep satisfied ache inside her, satisfied, yet the promise of need was still there.

Surely she'd had lovers before, but a nudging of her memory didn't produce any recollection. She sat up, trying to remember, to compare. Not a single face would come forward, but she felt sure that Niko hadn't been the first man she'd slept with. And she sensed that she could be in big trouble. But this morning she felt so good, she didn't care.

There were no men in her past. Except one.

Niko.

So, she still didn't remember everything. There'd been an accident, but she hadn't tried to kill herself. She was no coward. She couldn't leave her mother alone.