It was a relief to teleport out of the Council, away from Duncan’s sharp eyes, to her suite at the hacienda. The second they’d materialized, Jack toed off his dirty boots and his socks, leaving a dark pile on the white wool flokati area rug. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, he flung himself backward in an overtly male pose on her snowy duvet, his hands stacked beneath his head against the pile of pillows, looking for all the world like some pasha of old. If pashas lounged in art-deco boudoirs. She’d designed the white-on-white room to suit the tropical surroundings. Sara hadn’t envisioned Jackson Slater in it.
Jack defined sexy—his hooded gaze, his kissable mouth, the dark fall of hair over his forehead. She swallowed, unable to look away. He looked completely relaxed and ridiculously male.
“Go to your own room, Jack. I want to take a shower.”
She was hot and sticky and longing to immerse herself under cool jets with mounds of her favorite ginger-citron soap. Without him hovering nearby. Unfortunately, Jack seemed in no great hurry to leave.
He gave her a lazy grin. “Go ahead. I won’t look through your things while you’re in there.”
It wasn’t her things she was worried about. “You can look at whatever you like. There’s nothing in here I don’t want you to see.” Except me naked in the shower. She didn’t feel safe with him a mere door’s-width away when she was naked and vulnerable.
His lips twitched as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. “Really?”
“Yes.” She removed her shoes and opened the louvered closet doors to put them away, enjoying the coolness of the aged Brazilian walnut floor under her bare feet. “Rea—oh, hell. Harry.”
“Harry? Shit.” Jack pulled his feet onto the bed, suddenly wide-awake. He wasn’t smiling now. “You mean that damn monster snake is in here?”
The boa was stretched sinuously atop a row of Jimmy Choos. “He likes my shoes.” Harry’s forked tongue darted out and in, tasting the air as he turned his triangular head to look at her. Sometimes she swore Harry had a brain. She gave him a little stroke between his eyes.
“I’m guessing none of them are made out of any of his relatives.”
“He hasn’t said. Shoo, Harry.” Sara waved her hands. Harry blinked yellow eyes, and kept flicking his skinny black tongue at her. Sara turned her head, her gaze settling on Jack. “Will you—”
“Not just no,” Jack told her shortly, his attention focused like a laser level on Harry. “Hell no. I’m not touching it. Lock the damned thing in there and throw away the key.”
“I don’t like him watching me. Come on, Jack. Harry weighs almost seventy pounds. I’m not sure I can pull him out of there myself.”
Jack shuddered. “I wouldn’t touch him if he weighed seven ounces. Trust me, I’m not your snake go-to guy.”
“All right, buddy.” Sara bent and hefted Harry up with both hands, then gave a little grunt as his weight dropped onto her shoulder. He hung down almost to her feet, front and back, like a scarf. His smooth skin against her neck felt cool and dry and not in the least unpleasant. “You can’t stay in here, big boy, you know that’s a no-no.”
“Christ almighty. You talk to it like it’s a cute, fluffy puppy. Get that thing off your neck before he decides to start squeezing you to death.”
“He’s a sweetheart.” Sara stroked Harry’s head with her fingertip. “You’re just not giving him a chance.”
Jack made a rude noise behind her.
“I’m guessing you don’t like snakes,” she said with a smile. She’d noticed as much when they were in the jungle. It was odd knowing he had a little chink in his machismo. She carried the boa across the room. He curled his back half around her hips as she walked and raised his front half so he could flick at her face with his tongue. “See? He’s kissing me.”
“He’s tasting you to see if you need more salt.”
She huffed a laugh as she opened the door and stepped into the tiled hallway. Unwinding Harry from the complicated knot he’d made around her body, Sara set him on the floor. “Go look for a rat or something.” After a moment’s hesitation, Harry silently slithered away over the cool tiles.
Stepping back into the room, she closed the door. “He’s harmless.”
“He’s a wild animal. And a predator. Harmless, he’s not. Not only does he have freaking teeth, he could squeeze all the air out of your lungs in a second flat.”
Sara smiled. “That’s a slight exaggeration. But Harry’s really used to people. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’ve known him since he was a baby.”
“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
“He’s not looking at you now. Go away, Jack. I really want that shower.”
He lay back, hands under his head again. “Take your time. We need to talk about that whiteout.”
He wasn’t leaving. Sara straightened her brush on her mirrored art-deco dressing table, then pushed a silver dish holding hairpins a few inches over. She debated telling him something she couldn’t stop thinking about. At least if she said it out loud, she could hear how ridiculous it sounded; then she could stop wondering if it could even be a possibility.
“I think you know that I’m responsible for the whiteout,” Sara said flatly, removing the diamond-studded gold hoops from her ears and placing them in a crystal bowl. “I was too embarrassed to admit my deficiency to Duncan Edge.”
Jack took up a great deal of space. The room was predominantly white, making him appear larger and darker and a lot more dangerous to her peace of mind. Oh, hell. He’d be dangerous to her peace of mind if he were in the middle of the Grand Canyon.
“It’s not a deficiency, Sara. It’s lack of practice or the willingness to try.” He lifted his head an inch so he could peer at her over the well-defined muscles of his chest and abs.
Sara closed her eyes briefly, regretting her confession. “I can’t risk trying. When I’m—” Damn. She shouldn’t have brought this up. It had nothing to do with their assignment, and she’d promised herself to keep things impersonal.
“Because when you’re … ?”
She sat down on her padded dressing-table stool facing him. “When my emotions are high, my powers tend to go on the fritz,” she reminded him. “I’ve told you about this, Jack. Don’t you remember?”
The unpredictability of her powers was just one of the reasons she didn’t like to use magic for anything other than fun, simple things, like changing clothes with a thought, or shimmering short distances for expediency. She tried never to teleport, the longer version of shimmering. Too much could go wrong.
His eyes kindled. “Practice would certainly help with that. But this wasn’t your doing. None of the examples you gave me bore out the theory that your powers are affected by strong emotion.” He sat up on one elbow. “However, I do believe that something, or someone, caused that whiteout. It’s the why of it we need to figure out. And, like Edge said, we need to determine whether that has any relevance to what we’re looking for.”
Sara rose from the stool. “I don’t see how it could possibly be related to dead wizards, or rainbows, for that matter,” she told him, walking to the window. She held the filmy white sheers out of the way. The ever-present sunshine bathed the garden in the incredible hues of Technicolor. Backed by the lush green of the jungle only a few hundred yards away, the manicured garden filled with almost fluorescent-hued flowers was a view she never tired of.
A small flock of scarlet macaws swooped in, their rainbow-colored wing and tail feathers spectacular in the sunlight.
She turned away. Rainbow-colored snakes. Rainbow-colored birds. Myth and reality. “The one incident alone is enough evidence to support my theory.”
He pushed himself up, shoving several pillows into the small of his back. “Hell, sweetheart. You can’t still believe you caused the fire that killed your parents? We got copies of all the police and insurance reports. Pored over every page, every notation, every photograph for days. And you and Baltzer had done it before me. I thought we proved to you conclusively that it was an accident. Nobody caused the fire. Especially not you.”
Sara hadn’t forgotten that day. It had turned from shit to sunshine because Jack had been with her. He’d obtained every report he could get his hands on. They’d read and reread them one rainy day at home in Tahoe. He was right. They hadn’t found anything any of the investigators had missed. They’d ended up naked in front of the living room fire, making love as though their lives depended on it.
He’d proposed to her the next day. Sara hadn’t believed her own capacity for love until she’d fallen for this scruffy geologist who’d claimed to love her more than he’d ever loved another human being. Six months later, they’d hated each other’s guts. Thank God they hadn’t gone through with the wedding; the divorce would have been brutal.
“It was due to faulty wiring,” Jack insisted. “An accident—a hideous, life-changing accident. Nothing more nefarious than that.”
Still, she knew there was something missing from those official reports. Something that none of the investigators could have seen or known: her attempt to teleport her parents to Timbuktu because she—at that moment in her life—hated them as only a teenage girl could.
“I could read ten times as much paperwork, and I’m telling you—I had a monster of a fight with my mother before school that day. I refused to speak to her all afternoon, refused to eat dinner with them, and sulked in my room until I went to bed. If it wasn’t for Grant, I would have died in the fire with them.”
“Maybe you’re mistaking regret that you and your mother didn’t make up for guilt. Do you even remember what the fight was about?”
Sara rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I think I’ve just blocked it out because that day was so horrendous.”
“It was a terrible thing to happen, but it’s totally changed who and what you are.” He was sitting up now, completely focused on her, his voice the gentle, comforting sound she’d come to depend on, the voice she still missed.
“Of course it did! I was barely thirteen. My entire life was turned around by their deaths.”
“And because of that, because you think that emotion adversely affects your magic, you ignore half of who you are.”
She glared at him. This part, she didn’t miss. At all. “I’m one-hundred percent who I am. I just choose not to use magic.”
“Even though half of you is Aequitas?”
“The other half of me isn’t.” Her father had been a wizard, but he wasn’t Aequitas. She pressed her temples with her fingers again as a sharp, insistent pain made her bite her lower lip.
“Come over here. Let me see what I can do about that headache.”
She hesitated. In the old days, his hands were all that could stop the hideous headaches that developed whenever she thought about her past. Torn between wanting to safeguard her heart and wanting Jack to work his magic, she walked over to the bed, sat down, and presented her back to him. Dropping her head, she closed her eyes as Jack moved behind her, his hard thighs bracketing her hips. The brush of his fingers against her nape made her tense her shoulders in anticipation. “Relax,” he murmured, stroking his palm soothingly around her nape. A deep shiver traveled down her spine as he brushed her hair aside.
“This is what always happens when you try too hard to think about it and make sense of what happened.” His thumbs moved with firm, gentle pressure up the sides of her neck.
Sara wanted to hum with pleasure as his strong fingers kneaded the tight tendons. The delicious sensation shivered all the way to her bare toes. “It’s frustrating not to have all the … pieces.” God, that felt good. She allowed herself to sink into the sensation of Jack’s hands on her for just a few more moments.
She smelled him. The starch in his shirt, and a subtle male smell that was all Jack. Her toes curled against the fluffy texture of the flokati. She found the smell of Jack’s perspiration an aphrodisiac. His pheromones didn’t just call softly to her pheromones; they stood on a mountaintop and yelled her name.
And even now, when she least wanted to be attracted to him, she was turned on by the familiar scent of his skin and the arousing slide of his hands on her bare nape. “Yeah,” he murmured, his fingers moving to her shoulders, manipulating the trapezius muscles, searching for and destroying knots of tension, gently but firmly. He knew her body so well, Sara thought, taking a deep, shaky breath. “It must be frustrating,” he told her, his breath warm on her neck. She imagined his lips following his fingers, warm and tender, trailing soft kisses across her throat. He’d turn her face up to his—
“But fighting to remember something you’ve obviously blocked out is counterproductive. Baltzer was there, right? Maybe there’s something he knows that he might feel you’re ready to hear now. It’s been twenty years.” He shifted her head to one side and drew long, deep strokes along the length of her neck.
“He says not,” Sara murmured, eyes closed. In a moment she’d get up and walk away. Both mentally and physically. What had happened last night was an aberration. She knew it, he knew it. As long as they didn’t both think of the same highly charged sexual moment in their shared past, they wouldn’t find themselves unwilling participants in duplicating the experience now.
They were no longer lovers. They weren’t even friends.
She felt the pull of his touch deep inside her womb. Her nipples ached for his touch. It would be so easy to turn in his arms. To push him onto his back. To imagine them naked, and to position herself over him …
“I asked him about it a couple of weeks ago,” she said too quickly. Think about the wallpaper for the lobby of the Cali property. Think rainbow snakes. Think Jack’s skin rubbing against hers …
Think of my dead parents. That was an effective bucket of ice water on her lusty thoughts. “He just repeated what I already know.” She lifted her head and looked toward the window, trying to focus on the blurs of greens and crimson through the sheers and not on the tactile torture and bliss of his hands. “My parents had a dinner party. Grant and his girlfriend were just back from Paris and spent the night. The fire started in the living room. The gas jet beside the fireplace malfunctioned and exploded. Grant managed to get his friend and me out. His girlfriend had third-degree burns. My parents died. My dog died. The house was a total loss. Everything I loved was gone in the blink of an eye. End of story.”
She didn’t want to think about it anymore. Fire was her power to call. Fire had taken away everything she cared about. The guilt she felt was staggering to this day. Not only did thinking about it always give her a hellish headache, but thinking and not remembering was frustrating. And scary.
“Grant thinks my powers go crazy because I didn’t go to wizard school and didn’t learn how to control them.” Jack’s fingers traveled down either side of her spine with exactly the right pressure. “Instead, he sent me to boarding school in London.”
“He doesn’t like that you have powers.”
“He knows I’m not properly trained and that sometimes when I use my powers, things don’t go exactly as planned. And, yes, I know he feels uncomfortable when I use them. Big difference.”
His breath was soft on the back of her neck. Goose bumps rose on her skin. She jumped to her feet. “That felt great,” she told him brightly, striding to the open closet. “Thanks.” She unhooked a baby-pink toweling robe from behind the door and bundled it in her arms to conceal that her nipples were hard and erect. Her knees felt like overcooked spaghetti. “I’m going in to take my shower. When I come out, you’d better be gone.”
He leaned back again and quirked a dark eyebrow. “Why don’t we talk about what just happened instead?”
He saw too much. “Why don’t we—not.”
Her cell rang.
“Ignore it.”
She skewered him with a look, then picked up her phone from the dressing table. The mirrored surface showed that her hand was shaking. “I have regular business hours, Jack.”
“They’ll leave a message.”
Sara ignored his high-handed order. “Hi, Carmelita, how are y—”
Jack rose from the rumpled bed and stalked toward her, barefoot. Beneath his khaki pants, his erection was unmistakable. “Tell her you’ll call her back,” he instructed thickly.
Sara backed into the table and braced a hand on the shiny surface for balance. She looked away from the heat in Jack’s eyes so she could concentrate on Carmelita’s hysterical words. “When? … Teleport. … Yes, right now! Get out of the house. I’ll be right there. I’ll find you. Go!”
Jack’s voice changed as he halted a few feet away. “What is it?”
“There’s an earthquake in the village. My God, I don’t feel a thing—do you?”
“Localized.” He grabbed her hand. “Stay here. I’ll find her.”
“She and Inez won’t teleport and leave their friends behind.”
“Shoes.”
image
THE SECOND SARA SHIMMERED hiking boots onto her feet, Jack teleported them directly to the center of the village. A great rumbling, like a subway train shooting past beneath their feet, shook the ground just before they were flung against each other as the earth buckled and heaved. Towering jungle trees swayed, monkeys screamed and chattered, and, with a cacophony of shrill cries, birds shot into the air like buckshot. Then, just as suddenly, there was a moment of eerie silence, as if every animal had at the same moment been wiped out of existence.
Jack grabbed Sara’s arms to steady her as he tried to assess the situation in a sweeping glance. Blocking out the shrieks of animals and people, the grind of falling rocks, the creak of trees ripped from their moorings, he concentrated on the visual of the disaster.
Without a Mercalli intensity scale, he guesstimated the intensity of this second shock as close to six on the Richter scale. “Brace yourself,” he told Sara, releasing her arm. “Earthquakes come in clusters. The main shock was probably a six-point-five or a seven, so the aftershocks are going to be strong. And the animals just went quiet, so an aftershock is coming. Stay the hell away from the buildings.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when another roll of the ground sent them to their knees. A wall of the mud brick house closest to them began to waver, then buckled, sending down a shower of mud bricks. He moved to cover Sara, casting a shield over them both. The bricks bounced off with dull thuds, but he sensed every one of them as they tried to punch through the shield.
The earth roared and bucked like a living animal fighting to get something off its back as it shot upward, sending Jack flying backward and knocking the breath from him. Sara piled into him, landing an elbow square in his gut.
Screams pierced the air, drowned out by the deafening grind of rock against rock and falling debris. But loudest by far was Sara’s scream of terror in his ear, making his heart nearly stop.
He held on to her as though his entire existence depended on it. “Stay with me! Just stay with me. It’s almost over,” he yelled over the noise.
Sara burrowed closer to him. Jack strengthened the shield. Goddamn. Why couldn’t she be thinking about Switzerland right now? Or Tahoe? Even Greece? Anywhere but the epicenter of an earthquake.
And just as suddenly as it had begun, the aftershock stopped. Rolling Sara on top of him to protect her back from the hard ground, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her head down to his chest.
“Stay put.” He waited, counting off five minutes, then six, seven. Just to be sure.
Macaws began to squawk, monkeys whooped, and he heard the groans and hysterical chatter of dozens of people. At last Jack released her, and they got to their feet slowly. He glanced around. The houses—fortunately all one-story—on the left side of the dirt road were now fifteen feet down a crevasse where the ground had opened, a giant split seam in the earth, and swallowed them whole.
“Carmelitaaaaa!” Sara amplified her voice to be heard over the cracking of branches and the thuds of falling bricks. “Ineeez?”
“Sara! Gracias a Dios! Estás bien?” The two women came charging out of the jungle, flinging themselves at Sara in a flurry of arms and voices as they talked over one another.
“I’m going to do a void space search,” Jack told her when the women broke apart. “Look around and see what you can do to help.”
Sara spoke rapidly in Spanish to the two women, then turned back to him. “They think just about everyone ran for the jungle when the earth started moving.”
Jack had understood the conversation just fine. “Yeah, but there are some people down in that pit. I heard screams when the fault cracked open. Look, let’s teleport everyone we can off the fault line, then look for any injured. How far is the next village?” he asked Inez.
“Seven or eight miles. They will welcome us there.”
“All right.” Jack’s voice was grim. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of juice.” He took Sara’s hand. “Ready?”
Her hand felt small in his. He’d always thought of Sara as an Amazon, never vulnerable or weak. Never afraid of anything. For Christ’s sake, she manhandled a giant boa like it was an evening wrap. Her hand was clammy and cold in his. He squeezed her fingers.
Her eyes were huge and dark as she glanced up at him. “People, livestock, houses?”
“In that order.” His fingers tightened around hers. He imagined the villagers materializing in the larger village. He visualized everyone safe and whole. Then he poured all his power into combining his magic with hers. It was different this time from when they had spontaneously teleported Alberto. Maybe it was the conscious effort, but the fusion felt stronger, and he got a fleeting sense of untapped reserves of power in Sara. Then it was over.
“It worked.”
The sudden quiet made the remaining buildings seem like a jungle ghost town, except for the snort and squeal of a few pigs and the clucking of chickens.
“Great,” she said briskly, trying to tug free of his hold. Jack tightened his fingers around hers, making her frown at him. “Let’s get their livestock and homes to them, then go and check on everyone.”
“Whoa. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
She disengaged her fingers from his and stepped out of reach. Her agitation set off warning sirens in his head. “Nothing. I want to check on—”
“You think this happened because we had the hots for each other back at the hacienda?” Hots was like saying a plinian volcanic eruption was a freaking campfire.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Not maybe at all. This was purely scientific. The release of stored energy deep inside the earth radiates in seismic waves,” he explained calmly. He tilted her head up and waited until she looked at him, his gaze holding steady with hers. “The lithosphere—that’s the outer layer above the earth’s asthenosphere—is a patchwork of slow, constantly moving plates that push and rub against each other. That stress causes movement in the weaker, overlying crust. It’s as simple as that.”
“TMI, Jack. I don’t care what caused it right now. I just want to see that my friends are all right. Let me go.”
He wasn’t going to change her mind, at least not now. He released her. Watching her stride off and pick her way around the debris, he shook his head. Where the hell had she gotten this idea that her powers were (a) malfunctioning and, (b) responsible for a fire and an earthquake, plus whatever other natural disasters she ran up against?
Sara’s powers appeared to be fully operational. And she seemed to have control. He was somewhat surprised to realize that, once again, their magic worked better when they were physically connected than when they were apart. Granted, they were still on the leyline he’d discovered running through the hacienda and the village, but he felt it was more than that, something deeper.
Edge might be right about them being Lifemates. Might be. Jack wasn’t sold on the idea. They’d tried being together. It hadn’t worked. Hell, it had been a fucking disaster.
Jack wondered what happened to Lifemates who chose not to be together. And realized he hadn’t heard one single story about that. Not one. Then he wondered why not.