Page 38 of Brought to Light
“I know,” he said simply. And he finished cleaning me, rising a couple of times to rinse out the cloth, my sweat and the blood from my split lip and all the dirt of travel trickling away.
I leaned back and watched as Callum efficiently stripped his own clothes, setting his guns carefully on the marble vanity table. His torso offered me a map to his history, the faded, overlapping scars of so many brushes with death. Lean muscles, like a panther, all coiled power and ruthlessly suppressed violence. As he swiped the cloth over his own body, I wished I had the energy to trace its path with my tongue, taste the marks that his life had left on him. His pants came off next, and my fingers clenched around the edge of the chair. Ancestors, but he was a work of art. Not a painting, or a sculpture, but a charcoal sketch by an artist of incomparable talent, rough lines and motions translating to something exquisite. He dropped his boxers and rinsed out the cloth again to wash below the waist, and then I couldn’t look at anything but his cock. Nowthatwas perfect.
Callum dropped the cloth on the sink and turned, totally and unselfconsciously naked, to pull me up and out of the chair. I moaned as he pressed me against him, finally with nothing between us. I wanted to rub against him like a cat, but he half-carried me back into the bedroom and slid me between the sheets of the bed before I could do more than hold on.
He disappeared into the bath and returned a moment later with a small bottle in his hand and a light in his eyes I couldn’t possibly misinterpret. When he climbed in, I spread my legs and pulled him down, into my arms and into my kiss.
Callum didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. Every touch showed me that I was precious, that I had value—at least in that moment, and at least to him. It couldn’t have been more different from the night before: slow and careful instead of rough and brutal. But I’d needed that the night before, craved it. Today, I needed what he gave me.
I tipped my head back to let him lick a path down my throat, my eyes fluttering closed, and stroked my hands down his back, feeling the play of muscles there. If we had all the time in the world to explore one another, would it always be like this, and like the night before? Callum expertly reading me, knowing precisely what I needed, and giving it to me without hesitation?
He moved in me with measured, controlled thrusts, a hand buried in my hair. His teeth caught at my shoulder and then his lips found my cheek, kissing me and breathing me in.
When I finished, it felt more like the tide rolling out than the frantic explosion of the night before. All in a rush, what little strength I had flowed away. Callum pulled out of me but didn’t go anywhere, enclosing me in his arms and tucking me under the blankets, safe at last. I fell asleep with our hands wrapped together, pressed against my heart.
Callum
Linden had been asleep for a solid hour before I dared to stir.
Well, before I forced myself to stir, at least. I didn’t want to leave. Real life seemed very fucking far away, and even more unappealing. I had Linden wrapped up so tightly that I could hardly tell whose legs were whose, all tangled together. I’d wanted this the night before, to have him in a real bed. Safe. Cozy. Unafraid.
I had it, and now I had to leave it. Leave him. No fucking choice in the matter, because Evalt might be dead, and all the problems he’d caused in this realm on their way to being solved, but the same couldn’t be said for my own world. Had he put the spooks under the same compulsion he’d used on his soldiers here? Possibly, and if so, that magic would’ve broken at the same time. There might be a couple of incredibly fucking confused CIA assholes sitting in a cubicle somewhere, blinking out of what felt like a dream and wondering why they’d abandoned all their paperwork to chase some two-bit hitman and his handler around. I hoped they got burned for it, but I couldn’t count on it. Evalt might’ve used some good old-fashioned non-magical compulsion, like a large untraceable wire transfer. That would stay operational long after he’d died.
I needed to go home.
Pulling my fingers out from between Linden’s felt like the heaviest lift I’d ever had. Long and slender, they slid between mine like silk, and their absence made my hand feel empty. I rolled away from him, from the soft swell of his ass nestled into my groin, from the length of his elegant back pressed to my chest, from the lightness of his hair tickling my nose. I pressed a single kiss to the point of his shoulder and then covered him with the blankets all the way up to his neck.
With the efficiency of long practice getting the hell out of places quickly, I dressed and got my holsters in place and tiptoed out of the room, shutting the door behind me silently and forcing myself not to look back.
The house had come back to life in the couple of hours I’d spent locked away with Linden, with servants in the halls busy on errands I couldn’t guess at, and the sounds of a household putting itself in order echoing in the distance. I asked the first person I passed, I guessed a housemaid by her apron and air of being incredibly busy, where to find Lady Lisandra, and received a curtsey and directions to her study.
A few hallways and random staircases later, and I knocked at a door that had been polished carefully enough to show me my own reflection, albeit muted and distorted by the grain of the wood. I looked away. I didn’t feel like looking myself in the eye.
Lady Lisandra called to me to come in, and I did, closing the door behind me. The room held a desk, a few chairs set around a low table, and a set of bookshelves against the wall. One of the wide glass doors I’d passed on the terrace looked out over a particularly bright section of flowerbeds. The sun had begun to set, and everything held a weird, reddish tint. I’d never get used to this place. The only other light in the room came from two off-white globes suspended from the ceiling.
Lady Lisandra rose from the chair behind the desk as I entered, bowing her head in a way I knew had to be precisely calculated and that there was no way I’d be able to understand or duplicate. I settled for a nod, and she came around the desk, waving me to one of the velvet-and-gold chairs by the table. I lowered myself into it awkwardly, afraid to break it.
She sat opposite, leaning back with a sigh. She didn’t look like she’d been a hostage earlier in the day. From the top of her perfectly braided dark hair to her immaculate blue dress to the tips of her velvet-slippered feet, she had me outclassed in every possible way.
“I had thought I might see you sooner than later, Lord Callum,” she said. “You don’t seem like a man who rests when he has unfinished business.”
Unfinished business. Like the sleeping beauty upstairs, who didn’t know he’d be alone when he woke up. I forced myself not to fidget and kept my face blank. “Says the woman who’s working in her office instead of resting in her own bed. You’ve had quite a day yourself, ma’am.” She acknowledged it with a shrug and a half-smile. “By the way, I’m not Lord Callum anymore, if I ever was.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Lord Linden bested me in single combat. I surrendered and everything.”
Lady Lisandra stared at me for a moment, and then she burst into laughter, high and bright and musical, her green eyes glittering. If I hadn’t just left the loveliest thing I’d ever touched in a bed upstairs, she would’ve had me on my knees.
“Oh, ancestors,” she said at last, through her giggles, “I needed that. I presume Lord Linden was not the instigator of this…combat?”
“He wasn’t. But he seemed happy enough to hit me.” I hadn’t meant to say that, and I shifted uneasily in my chair. It’d been made for someone about half my size, and it creaked under me. “Anyway. The title’s his. And the lands. And whatever else. If you feel like you owe me a favor, I’d appreciate it if you made sure he got to keep it.”
Lady Lisandra eyed me thoughtfully, tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair. “I owe you a much larger favor than that, Callum. My life and the lives of everyone under my protection are worth more to me than handling a simple matter I’d have seen to in any case for Linden’s sake. But since you’re leaving Lord Linden’s affairs to me, I presume you are also leaving for your own realm.”
She didn’t sound like she approved, but I didn’t need her permission. Did she know how things were, between me and Linden? I’d bet on yes. She seemed way too fucking observant for comfort. Great, someone else who’d think I was a callous asshole. Not that I needed another, but I sure seemed to collect them.
“If the favor you owe me includes getting me there, then yeah, I’m going back. I do have unfinished business.” She made a ‘go on’ gesture, and so I did, telling her briefly how I’d ended up meeting Linden in the first place. Admitting I’d originally meant to kill him made me feel like vermin, but she didn’t seem like someone who put a lot of value on moral judgments over practical results. “So I need to find Jesse, if he’s even still alive,” I finished. “And make sure whoever Evalt had working for him over there isn’t going to be a problem anymore.”
