“Which,” she said, forcing her voice to remain steady in her throat and her hand to remain steady on his leg, “is how you know all about the price it exacts for patching you up.” She shook her head. “That explains what I found last night when I cleaned you up.” She said it so casually—and then suddenly realized the implications of that moment, the liberties she’d taken to touch and care. A flash of memory, gleaming flesh and small tattoo, the exact pattern of hair across chest and down defined muscle, denim waistband resting loosely over hip and—
She flushed and made herself continue. “How some of the bruises were both new and old.”
He was watching her. Closely. Really closely.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Did that blade just tattle on me?” And then she couldn’t believe it when her heart beat a little faster because there in the middle of this story of his, he gave her that little half-lift grin at the corner of that mouth made for it.
It didn’t last. Maybe that damned evil-possessed impossibility of a knife felt his distraction. Maybe it knew more than she ever expected. But it got him, all the same. He gave a sharp, sudden grunt, twisting against it—jerking his wrists mercilessly in the handcuffs, his expression turning dark and wild—and this time the blade didn’t let him go.
Gwen instantly pushed herself away to safety, out of reach but not untouched. Not to see his wrists stream blood, not to see his mind and body so ill-used.
Her hand throbbed; she looked down to realize she’d again taken hold of the pendant. And looked back again at Mac, still raging against captivity, still less than sane.
I think I know, he’d said to her. How she’d brought him back at the warehouse. And he’d been looking at her chest, which she’d taken to mean he was looking at her chest, but now she glanced down and saw for the first time what he’d seen.
The clean spot.
And she remembered gripping the thing outside the warehouse, and she remembered her father’s reaction to it—how he’d coveted it, how he’d feared it...how he’d given it to her. Not as a gift, but because he didn’t have the strength to hold it—and he didn’t have the strength to use it.
Amazing thing, adult hindsight. And hurtful. The thing she’d found comfort in all these years, and he had only just been using her, after all. Right before he’d tried to kill her.
Her father, with a knife. Her father, a changed man. Her father, dead in mysterious circumstances.
Demon blade.
She wondered when Mac had figured it out.
She pulled the pendant over her head, staring at the heavy, blunt metal features, trying to understand—
He made an animal noise, one that spoke of rage and revenge and death and no respect at all for the human body breaking under the strain—chest heaving, sweat glimmering at his temples, face gone pale...blood soaking into the carpet.
Gwen muttered self-imprecation. Who needed understanding? Just do it.
She hesitated a moment, on the edge of it.
And then, when what drove Mac allowed a lull in the fury, a chance for the body to breathe and recover, she threw herself at him. On him. The pendant in one hand, the other yanking open the unbuttoned placket of his shirt—thrusting the pendant upon him and hoping so very damned hard that it was the right thing to do and then not able to think much about anything at all as his face blazed fury and his body bucked wildly beneath her.
He collapsed, trapping one foot under his thigh and throwing her completely off balance over him. Chest heaving, eyes closed, face turned from hers. She wasn’t even sure he was still conscious—not until she saw the moisture at the corner of his eye. Not sweat, but the involuntary tears of a body driven beyond what it could endure.
She still had one hand free. She thumbed the dampness away. “There,” she said. “Shh. We’ll figure this out.” But sudden fear gripped her when he didn’t respond. Had she been too slow, too late? “Hey,” she said, and the uncertainty trickled in. “We will. We have to. I’m part of this now, I can see that—”
His eyes flickered open, lashes dark and wet. Fully sane. Fully clear. “Gwen,” he said, his voice abused and ragged. “It’s not... It just...” He shook his head. “It’s clear. My head is clear. It’s just me. Whatever you’re doing...”
“The pendant,” she murmured, certain of it.
“I’m free, do you get that? My feelings are just...” That was wonder in his eyes, she was sure of it. “They’re just mine.” He lifted one hand, a foreshortened motion—one that had, she was also suddenly certain, been intended for a caress.
She felt the heat of him beneath her then—damp with sweat, soaking his own shirt, radiating through his jeans. And realized, too, the intimacy of how they twined together, her leg still trapped and her hands on his body. The awareness of it flushed through her, and then she winced, realizing he’d know that—
Except he didn’t seem to. Still caught up in the wonder of freedom, still catching his breath. She said, “You didn’t feel that, did you?”
Puzzlement crossed his features, as much of a question as anything.
“Me,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “I feel you, all right.”
She made an impatient gesture with her free hand, indicating the tangle of their bodies; the other still pressed the pendant to his skin. “Not this. That voice inside. Tattling.”
He shook his head. “No tattling. Unless you want to tattle on yourself.”
She looked down at them, at their intersecting bodies, and then back to him. “I’ll just let you guess.”
He laughed, a mere sharp huff of air. “Guessing. Now there’s a concept.” But his movement had jostled the cuffs, and a wince flickered over his face.
Gwen could have slapped herself. She pried her foot free—no matter that it had been very pleasantly cradled just where his thigh met his butt—and pushed herself up, pressing the pendant down in emphasis before she gingerly lifted her hand. “Okay? That do you?”
She hadn’t expected his reaction to be moderately cross. “Hell. Now everything sounds like an innuendo.”
“Take it how you like,” she said, realizing suddenly that she meant it. So much emotional intimacy in this past day, beyond what any two strangers could expect of one another and twining with the fleeting moments of mutual want and response and no little amount of aching.
No coincidence that they were here together, this place, this time. No doubt what they’d so suddenly come to mean to one another—or the trust they’d each earned. The only question was how long it would all last.
Gwen found herself not caring.
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
And she shoulda been in Vegas.
“Stay there,” she said. “I’ll get a washcloth for us, and we’ll see what we can figure out about those cuffs. I happen to have the key.”
Chapter 10
“I told you to stay there.”
Gwen’s voice came insistent in his ear, sounding both irritated and worried. Her hands worked gently at his arm—patting, wrapping. The sound of ripping tape. The snatch of something at the hair on his forearm.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “But that’s not going to happen again.”
He remembered it then. The blade, whispering so subtly in his mind, barely filtering through the effect of the pendant. Urging him, nudging him...pushing him to remove the pendant.