Page 38 of Cast in Shadow
Realization sliced through my confidence as if it were smoke. “How long have you known?”
“That you weren’t dead? A while. That you were here?” He motioned toward his living room windows and to the city hidden behind the heavy curtains. “Eight months.”
Sonofabitch.How could we have missed him coming and going? How the hell had he found me? I’d gone to enormous trouble and spent a small fortune making sure I stayed invisible.
“How?” I couldn’t even manage the rest of the question thanks to the lump of frustration lodged in my throat.
“Which part?” The first thread of anger seeped into his voice, but his eyes were still that deep blue I’d fallen in love with forever ago.
“That I was alive.”
A dark chuckle sent a ripple of heat through me. He stood and moved across the room to the same counter he’d laid me out on the first time he’d brought me here. “Kismet,” he said, leaning back against it and gripping the edge. “I’d taken a few days to myself, traveled to Athlone, and I saw you crossing the street.”
Athlone, Ireland? “I haven’t been there in…”
Over ten years. All the air leaked out of me.
“Like I said, a while.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans, gave me a half-shrug, and looked away. His gaze roamed the room without settling on anything. “I thought I was hallucinating at first. Again. After the fire, you were everywhere. Every street corner, every café. Everywhere I went, I would catch a glimpse of you, but when I tried to find you…”
He shook his head. “Imagine my surprise when, a lifetime later, I saw you again, walking across the street in front of the pub. I wasn’t sure I could trust my own eyes until you stopped in the middle of the road and pressed your hand to your chest.” He mimicked the motion with his own hand, pressing it against the gray fabric of his blood-spattered henley.
My heart lurched at his words and at my own memories of that trip. I remembered that moment. It was tiny, just a fleeting beat of a bird’s wings in the great span of time. I’d been thinking of him, and out of nowhere, I was struck with a bout of homesickness so strong it stole my breath right there in the street.
My hand crept to my chest, just as it had then, trying to calmthe storm building within. “Why did you come here, Emerson?” I asked quietly.
“Why else?” He pushed away from the counter and crossed over to me. When he reached out his hands, I shouldn’t have taken them. I knew better, but I was unmoored, raw with grief and guilt, and secretly longing for a lost connection I’d mourned for over a century.
15
Emerson gathered me up in his arms, pressing his face to my hair and inhaling deeply, igniting a familiar ache in my core.
“For you, Sai.” His fingers tangled in my hair as he tugged my head to the side, exposing my neck to his soft lips. “I came here eight months ago because that’s how long it took me to find you again.”
My body was at war with my mind. One was screaming at me to run, the other was desperate to hold onto this moment.
He nipped gently at my sensitive skin. “You are an incredibly difficult woman to track.” His lips traced over the same spot to smooth the sting, triggering a wave of goose bumps that bordered on painful.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my words slurring on my tongue. Gods, I felt drunk having him this close.
“I have been trying to control myself, but I need you, Senna.” The hand in my hair tugged harder, sending delicious pin pricks of pain along my scalp as his teeth skated along the tendons of my neck. “Now.”
His other hand came up, wrapping around my throat so fastI barely had a chance to pull in a breath before he squeezed just the right way.
I knew it was wrong when he spun us around and walked me backward through his bedroom door. I wasn’t thinking clearly when the back of my leg bumped the mattress, and he squeezed a little tighter.
Then his grip loosened, and a single word rumbled out of him that made me forget why I was fighting him at all. “Breathe.”
He gave me just enough time to let out the breath that was burning my lungs and drag in another before cutting off my air again.
“Do you remember the signal?”
I should have said no. I should have broken his hold on me and run for my life.
Passion burned in Emerson’s eyes as his grip on my throat loosened again, just enough for me to answer with a whispered, “Yes.”
My air was cut off again. “Show me.”
Instinct took over, and I reached up and tapped his wrist three times.
