Ivy was still arguing with him two hours later. A quick hop across London was one thing, and it had still nearly given her a heart attack. No way was she willing to cross the English frickin’ Channel with nothing between her and the icy-cold-water-slash-certain-death thing but Mr. Grabbyhands’s overinflated ego. Uh-uh. No way. Not. Happening.
Ever.
As it turned out, Baen appeared to suffer from the same sort of situational deafness around the word “no” that the average basset hound suffered around the word “come.” Maybe she should try tossing kibble at him, see if that helped encourage the proper responses. They had hours to kill before dark, when the Guardian apparently planned to scoop her up in his arms and carry her like a sack of potatoes across the rough seas and rocky shores separating England from France. Plenty of time to run down to the market and pick up a few Milk-Bones for the occasion.
At the moment, Baen was looking entirely too at home sprawled across seven-eighths of her sofa while she paced back and forth around the flat, ostensibly packing a few essentials for their trip, but really trying to figure out if there was anything here in Cousin Jamie’s home that qualified as large and heavy enough to knock some sense into that supernaturally thick skull.
She doubted it. Personally, she was coming to the conclusion that nuclear weaponry might not be sufficient. And she had always thought she was stubborn to a fault.
Ha!
“You have to be reasonable about this,” she tried again as she shoved a couple of pairs of panties into a backpack, wishing for a second they were made of lead and aimed at the back of his head. “Ash and Drum took a plane back to Ireland, so it’s not like you can claim you can’t fit on a commercial airline. It’s clearly possible.”
“It carries too much risk. My way is simpler. We need not worry about the hu—the authorities, nor the arbitrary schedules of corporations. We leave when we want, we arrive when we want. No delays, no hassles, and no chance we will miss this arranged meeting with your contact. It is a much more sensible plan.”
“Except for the whole increased chance of death and dismemberment, sure.”
He nodded. “Good. Then it is settled.”
She bit back a frustrated scream. “It is not settled. Baen—” She cut herself off and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The argument was giving her a headache of massive proportions.
Ivy never heard the huge Guardian move, but before she had time to haul in a deep breath and pray for strength, she felt his big hands land on her shoulders and press gently.
“What is wrong?” he demanded in that rough, tumbling-stones voice of his. “You were injured earlier, weren’t you? I knew we should have taken you to be examined by a doctor. You could have internal damage. Bleeding, or a brain injury.”
She lowered her hands and forced herself not to react to the hot tingling sensation that flooded through her at his lightest touch. She had to be imagining it. Not only was this about the least appropriate time to find herself ensnared in a helpless sexual attraction, but Baen was definitely the least appropriate object for her feelings. Wrong species, wrong temperament, wrong attitude, wrong everything.
Yeah. So I’ll just stand here in my wrongness and be wrong and get used to it, she told herself, quoting from one of her favorite old television shows. Maybe I’ll even change my middle name. Ivy Wrong Beckett is much better than Ivy Fitzroy Beckett. It’ll make for a snazzy new monogram, too. I can buy embroidered towels …
She took a step back, trying to put some distance between herself and the shockingly warm Guardian. Honestly, it would make things a lot easier if he would just be cold and stony and emotionless like she had expected a Guardian would be. This concerned, hot, sexy, protective-male thing was hell on her hormones.
Hey, maybe that was it. Maybe she could chalk this all up to some exotic hormonal imbalance, and get a doctor’s note to prove it: To whom it may concern—this memo is to certify that my patient, Ivy Wrong Beckett, suffers from a severe, congenital case of Excessive Gargoyle-atropin Hormone Syndrome (or EGHS disease) and cannot be held legally or morally accountable for her own actions. She is not really a giant slut.
Yeah. That would be awesome.
Unfortunately, for every inch she tried to put between herself and Baen, he seemed determined to take away two. He refused to release her shoulders and drew her to a stop before she could slide out from under his grip. He never applied too much pressure, never crossed into causing her the tiniest discomfort; he simply refused to surrender his hold.
“I’m fine,” she said. Just like she’d said a thousand times since they regrouped in that square while the local fire crew responded to the blaze they had just escaped. “I wasn’t hurt, I was only a little rattled and dazed from the auditory episode. I don’t need a doctor. Or an overprotective, rock-headed nursemaid.”
Baen’s eyes narrowed. “Nursemaid? You think me a hovering female? Perhaps drastic action is needed to change your mind.”
The Klaxon in her head blared out a warning at the glint in those dark eyes, but somehow she knew it came just a split second too late. Apparently, that was one insult too far for the Guardian.
She tried to backpedal so fast, she could almost hear the chains falling off her mental gears. She opened her mouth to take it all back, but she never got the chance. He pounced like a big cat, and she—God help her—squeaked like a little furry church mouse.
It was humiliating.
It was mind-blowing.
Baen’s mouth seized hers as if it were a medieval village, and not the fortified kind either, with walls and moats and actual working defenses. No, she was the laughably vulnerable kind, where there were no men under ninety left to fight off attackers and no one had eaten a decent meal for six months, so they barely had the strength to run and hide.
Oh, who was she kidding? She practically threw him a welcome-home party and crowned him king of her libido. It was downright embarrassing.
Or it would have been, if she hadn’t been way too busy enjoying herself to think that hard.
He tasted like fire, or at least like she imagined it tasting, like the burn of alcohol without the sharp sting. Just light and heat and destructive power. He sure as hell destroyed every protest in her head before it could finish forming, leaving her weak-kneed and weak-willed and eager for more of his intoxicating taste.
Her head spun, and she reached out for something to hold on to, clenching her fingers in the smooth fabric of his shirt and leaning into him. It was either that, or fall flat on her ass, and if she fell, she wouldn’t be able to reach his lips anymore. Totally unacceptable.
Baen didn’t appear to like that idea, either. He finally let go of her shoulders only to wrap those brawny arms around her and pull her snug against his hard body. With the differences in height, he made good use of his altered grip to lift her feet clean off the ground and leave her dangling in midair while he continued to devour her mouth. She felt one arm clamp around her waist to pin her in place while the other moved lower to brace against the curve of her bottom to support her.
And, you know, cop a feel.
That was what finally jump-started her brain cells back into working order, the sensation of that big hand squeezing as it drifted across her ass. Not that she found the sensation unpleasant, but because it took her by surprise. It had been a long time since her last date, let alone the last time she’d gotten this caught up in a simple embrace, and she’d almost forgotten how it felt to have a man’s hands on her. Not that any of them had ever made her feel this way. Especially not before the first date.
Ignoring the inner voice in her head whining not to do it, Ivy tore her lips from Baen’s and flattened her palms against his chest. She opened her mouth to utter some witty quip, but nothing came out. She was too rattled. He had scrambled her brain like a couple of eggs, and not even a good shake of her head managed to rattle things back into place.
Sheesh, what was wrong with her?
Hormones, her brain said.
Overthinking, her hormones countered.
Ride him like a rented pony! her libido shouted.
Ivy ignored the last suggestion and clenched her thighs together to stifle further comment from that quarter. Last time she had checked, her genitalia had not registered to vote.
She cleared her throat to make sure it still worked in theory, then tried again to speak. “Um, maybe you should put me down?”
Instead of the protest she had half expected, Baen merely loosened his grip enough to let her slide to her feet. Slowly. With a lot of interesting friction that told her more than she had really needed to know about how much the kiss had affected him. Don’t get her wrong, she was flattered, but really?
Well, flattered and a tiny bit intimidated. Yowzah.
Ivy pressed against his chest again, and this time he let her put a few inches between them. Wait, that sounded wrong. A few inches of space between them. “I’m not sure that was such a good idea.”
“I thought it worked out very well,” he rumbled, the deep, vibrating sound going right to the part of her that was least likely to behave itself when she ordered it to. “You taste delicious.”
“Thanks. Wait! Um, I mean—” She caught herself and felt her entire body spontaneously combust.
Well, okay, not really, but she did blush from the soles of her feet to the part in her hair.
She blew out a breath and stepped resolutely backward, a small part of her brain registering stunned surprise when she didn’t trip over anything and ratchet up the level of humiliation another notch. “What I meant was that you shouldn’t say things like that. It’s not appropriate. We need to stay focused on the mission at hand, not let ourselves get distracted by … um … things. If you really think that I’m somehow your Warden, then that means we’re working together, and I have a strict rule that I never get involved with coworkers. Period.”
Baen just watched her with his eyes gone black and burning and the corners of his mouth tilted up in that wholly male expression of self-satisfaction known far and wide as a smirk. He smirked at her, and the bastard had the nerve to look sexy while he did it.
Jerk.
When he remained silent and crossed those thickly muscled arms across his ripped chest, Ivy tore her gaze from all those tempting grooves and bulges and turned her back on him. Maybe if she couldn’t see him, this ridiculous awareness of him would finally fade.
The traitorous flesh between her thighs told her not to get her hopes up.
“Good. I’m glad you agree,” she said, not waiting to hear whether he did or not. “It will keep things simpler, and I’m sure we’ll all be a lot happier in the long run. I’ll go online and see if I can get us a last-minute flight this evening, and then I’m going to study that book on magic that Drum left me. He said there are a couple of simple defensive spells in there that I should be able to pick up in a couple of hours of practice. After this afternoon, I have a feeling I might need them.”
She kept her back to him and marched toward the door to her bedroom and the laptop she had left there. She did not run away. No, sir. At best, some haters might want to call it a strategic retreat, but there was no running involved. Not even a jog.
Okay, maybe a race-walk, but that was it.
Honest.
Behind her, Baen chuckled, the sound rusty from long disuse but full of self-satisfaction. Full of smirk. She closed the door behind her with a sharp click, then leaned back against the cool panel and closed her eyes. Her nipples remained drawn into hard peaks of arousal, just to taunt her.
Men sucked.
Apparently, even the mythological ones.
* * *
Baen remained in the sitting room of the comfortable flat after Ivy fled, satisfaction filling him. She might have run from him this time, but that kiss had told him some very important things. First, that he affected his little human in much the same way that she affected him. He had felt the heat in her response as she returned his kiss, had felt her nipples draw into tight beads of arousal as they pressed up against his chest. He had felt her shudder when his tongue stroked across hers and plumbed the depths of her sweet mouth. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her. That was good.
Secondly, and most importantly, it had told him that there was a chance he had found not just a new Warden to help him fight back the threat posed by the Darkness; he might have found his own destined mate.
The possibility made his heart and mind race.
While there had been little time to spend with Ash and her Warden, the pair had shared a few significant pieces of news regarding the others of his kind. All five of the Guardians to wake in this time had found themselves paired with a Warden of the opposite sex, an individual who seemed to fulfill all the traits told about in the legend of the Guardians and the Maidens.
All except for Drum, of course, but if he proved to be the exception, that only made sense, because Ash formed the biggest exception Baen could ever imagine. Never before in the long history of their kind had a female Guardian been summoned, which was why it had so shocked Baen to hear her claim him as her brother. He felt ashamed now that he had reacted so badly to the news and had treated her with such disrespect, but surprise had rendered him temporarily unable to think. It had never occurred to him that her existence might be possible, but clearly it was, which made Drum’s place at her side more than possible as well; it made it necessary.
That old story the Guardians held so dear and passed on among themselves from summoning to summoning meant much more than most who heard it first assumed. Listeners often tried to dismiss it as romantic fantasy, a syrupy little love story with scant consequence in the harsh world of endless conflict that made up the existence of the Guardians, but it was much more than that.
It was true that the story gave hope to Baen’s brethren that they might one day escape the endless cycle of sleeping and fighting that defined their existence by finding a mate, but it did something even more important. Baen believed that it showed them the true path to defeating the Seven in battle. After all, according to the legend, the maidens who woke that first generation of Guardians after they ignored the summons from the Guild had given the warriors purpose and added strength. They had joined them in the battle, stood by their sides and aided in the defeat of the Darkness, a defeat that might not have happened without them.
Baen knew his ideas were radical ones. The Guild had long maintained that the taking of mates weakened the side of the Light because it took experienced and battle-tested Guardians out of the fight, forcing the summoning of new, untried replacements. That argument failed to hold water in Baen’s mind. He had once been newly summoned, and he knew very well that each Guardian came into existence in the human world with all the skills and memories of those who served before him. There was no learning curve for a new Guardian. He appeared fully armed, fully trained, and ready to fight, as deadly as the brother he had replaced.
It made him wonder what the Guild hoped to achieve by maintaining their stance of disapproval and discouragement.
Power, his inner voice whispered. It’s always about power.
Baen could find no way to argue with that. To a Guardian, the human quest for power would always remain a mystery. Easily recognized as the species’ begetting sin, the humans’ thirst for power seemed behind all the great conflicts in their history. Certainly, it was behind the plans of the Order of Eternal Darkness and those who followed their masters, for the Darkness itself was always greedy for power. Perhaps that came from the knowledge that the most important power in the universe was the one thing the Darkness would never have—the Power of Creation. Only the Light could bring forth new life; the Darkness could only corrupt, seize, and destroy.
Now he was getting philosophical, Baen admitted to himself with some amusement. It seemed that his little female inspired deep thoughts as well as deep feelings. Part of him urged him to go after her, to corner her in the small room where she had shut herself away and seduce her into admitting her feelings for him.
He stifled the urge with difficulty. If his instincts were right, and Ivy could be his mate, the one destined to change the course of his existence, then he would gain nothing from pushing her. Nothing but an angry, spitting cat of a female. His human had an independent streak.
And, he recalled, a fairly impressive skill with her little consecrated knife. He would do well to step back and give her a little time to see her own feelings more clearly. So that was what he would do. For the moment.
After all, in a few short hours, he would get the chance to distract her for the three hours or so that it took him to fly her from London to Paris. Clasped in his arms high up in the night sky, she wouldn’t have the chance to run from him.
Baen could hardly wait.