Right up until the moment he slipped both her hands into the grip of his one and turned his other hand loose on her body.
It turned out that he was a fast learner, too.
Gwen woke an hour later and eased from the bed to leave him there. Sleeping—the normal way. Healing—the normal way. Exhausted and worshipped and sated.
And then she dressed and went out to the hotel’s back lot to cry while sitting on a curb beside desultory bushes that a thousand dogs had no doubt used for a toilet and pretending it was private.
“Do you cry for him or for yourself?”
So much for privacy.
But no sense of intent. No warning. Just the hard-to-define trickle that she often felt around Mac, when it came to that—a thing independent of the pendant. So, no panic, either.
Gwen lifted her head to look through tears at the new intruder, not much helped by the glaring streetlight. “Having a moment, here,” she said, squinting at a tidy and petite woman with a wash of natural blond highlights and a face of striking if not beautiful features, angled Slavic cheeks on a narrow face and eyes to match. “Having a freaking day.”
“I can see that.”
Gwen squinted harder, bringing that tidiness into focus. All of it—clothes, hair, even posture. Slender and curvy and tastefully dressed to show it. And Gwen—too moderate in all ways to be lush and curvy or beguilingly petite, dressed again in horrible wrinkled sports shorts and a bloody T-shirt—scowled. “Go to hell.”
The woman smiled. “Trying really hard to avoid that.”
She experienced that hard-to-define trickle that she often felt around Mac. Gwen’s head came up all the way. Fear washed down her spine. “You have a blade.”
And so had that man.
The woman opened her hand, displaying a small knife with a stunted, curved blade, just big enough to fill her palm. No mistaking the eerie play of light on metal, no matter how subtle. “Baitlia,” she said. “Just showing off now. So very eclectic.” She tipped it to the light. “Yes, Baitlia, we see. Spanish skinning blade. Very nice. Now behave.” At Gwen’s trepidation, she added, “We’re in a truce.”
Yeah, right. She had the feeling that man would have said he had a truce with his blade, too. A truce of evil, that’s what.
“They’re not very subtle,” Gwen said. “Glowing like that. Are we supposed to not notice?”
That, of all things, took the woman back some; she closed her hand over the blade, extinguishing its faint gleam, and didn’t exactly answer. She tipped her head at the hotel. “He’s on the edge, isn’t he?”
Gwen only frowned, her gaze darting to where the van had been and not at all surprised to find it missing. That man knew where to find them if he really wanted them—he’d made that perfectly clear. That he’d give Mac some time to turn on his own...that, too, had been clear.
But she knew nothing about this woman. “What are you doing here? Were you following us? Did you—”
Did you know we were kidnapped this afternoon? Were you part of that? Or did you see it and not help?
But the woman shook her head. “My name is Natalie,” she said. “And I’ve been waiting. We figured you were staying here. Hoped it, anyway.” She hesitated, taking a step closer and then holding off when Gwen raised her chin in warning. “He is, isn’t he? On the edge. You need to know...we can help.”
She should have caught it the first time. “We? You and that very friendly man who threatened us last night?”
Natalie whoever-she-was bit her lip. “Warned, not threatened. And not you. Your friend.”
Gwen was startled at her own scowl—at her instant reaction. Same thing.
It must have told Natalie something; understanding crossed her face. “That’s why you’re out here. You’re crying for him.”
“For both of us,” Gwen snapped, but it sounded more ragged than she wanted.
“We can help.”
Gwen just stared at her. So self-possessed, so neatly self-contained. Unlike Gwen and her fast-moving mouth, her ability to skim the surface of life without really living it.
Until, she realized, this past day. In which she’d laughed more, lived more, loved more...
“You shouldn’t be going through this on your own,” Natalie said, trying again. “You have no idea what’s going on—”
“And you do?” Gwen tipped her head. “I’m guessing not. Because if you had, you’d have been going after the right man last night. And today. You know, the one who tortures and kills people and likes it? Unless, of course, you’re on his side. So you see? You’re either no good at this, or you’re on the wrong side.”
This time Natalie did come closer, and Gwen scrambled to her feet, putting the distance back between them. Knives could be thrown, and she couldn’t do anything about that. But she wasn’t putting herself within sword-length of anyone who held a blade that glowed.
Natalie got the message. She threw her hands up in brief frustration. “Ah, Devin. I told you—” And then stopped herself. “I’m going to leave a card on the curb. Phone, address, the usual. In case you change your mind. But you need to know—there’s a way for him to fight this. Devin has been there. He’s done it.”
Gwen thought of the pendant taped to Mac’s arm. Of the relief it gave him, the price the knife exacted when it returned. The fierce freedom in his lovemaking, in his care for her—and the knowledge of exactly how much they’d lose when the pendant gave way, or lost its contact, or Mac just plain took it off, ready to face a battle he was already so clearly losing. She said with bitter certainty, “You don’t know anything.”
Another woman might have backed away, faced with such emotion from a stranger. This one stood her ground. “I know that Baitlia and I will never reach that point. I make my own decisions, keep my own control.”
Baitlia. The name Natalie had used before. It has a name.
Did Mac’s blade have a name? Did he know it?
Natalie didn’t give her any room to think about it. “You should know—your friend should know—that it works. That it can work. The blades yearn for redemption...and they can’t help but sabotage it in any way possible. Read about the scorpion and the frog.”
She didn’t have to. Orphaned daughter of an insane blade wielder, she might be. Foster daughter of an aunt who had cared for her without nurturing her, she might be...an indifferent scholar, she might be.
But in spite of it all—because of it all—she knew that cautionary tale about the scorpion and the frog.
Natalie crossed her arms. “There’s something big and bad going on in this city. We know it, and we know your friend is involved. You can help him, or you can watch while events overtake him. Events, by the way, will include us.”
Scorpion, riding across the river on frog’s back. Killing them both halfway across, unable to stop himself from stinging frog. True to his nature in spite of himself.
Natalie asked, “What’s your name?”
Am I scorpion, too? So deeply, so suddenly tangled with a man who carried death in his pocket and clung to his own persistently heroic nature with nothing more than thinning tenacity? She’d seen it coming. She’d seen what there was to fear. And she’d given herself to him anyway. “Gwen,” she said, seeing little harm in it against all that.
“And your friend?”
But Gwen shook her head, offering only a knowing smile. “Not my name to give you.”