Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,68

anything about that?” I couldn’t help asking.

A bittersweet smile played with his lips. “I was thinking if the timing works out, I might make a brief detour to pay a call on her granddaughter.”

19

Ruse

As he hefted his motorcycle—or as he liked to call it, “Charlotte”—off the back of the RV, Omen couldn’t quite restrain a frown. He set it on the darkened road where we’d parked on the outskirts of Athens and gave me an evaluating look, as if he thought I might break his treasured vehicle just by standing next to it.

“Don’t spend too long on this side trip,” he said in a terse but even tone.

I offered him a jaunty tip of the cap that hid my horns. “By the time you’ve found yourself a ship, I’ll be right there to talk us onto it.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

He got back into the RV, but Sorsha wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry to see me off. My mortal love trailed her fingers over one of the motorcycle’s handlebars and then turned her unusually pensive gaze on me. “Are you sure you need to do this? Are you sure you want to?”

She’d so generously given me her blessing to fulfill my appetites freely, but I thought I caught a whiff of possessiveness or perhaps a more general uneasiness in her demeanor, potent enough that I didn’t need to extend my supernatural abilities to pick up on it. But then, we couldn’t help our emotions, could we?

I touched her cheek, reveling for perhaps the hundredth time as I hoped to hundreds more in the way her bright copper eyes lit up at that simple caress. “There’s nothing this woman could stir in me that you don’t a thousandfold more.”

“You don’t know that yet. You haven’t really had the chance to compare before.” Sorsha let out a rush of breath. “It’s not really that anyway. I just— I know how much she hurt you. Well, the woman this woman will remind you of. No matter what happens, no matter what you see or what she says if you talk to her, it doesn’t change anything about who you are.”

“Maybe it does,” I said.

The gleam in her eyes flared, and I felt a waft of heat she must have suppressed before her anger condensed all the way into flames. “She barely knew you. She didn’t bother to. And her granddaughter has no idea at all what—”

“I know. That’s not what I meant.” I teased my thumb over Sorsha’s chin just below those tempting lips. “What happened back then has stuck with me, though. You’ve seen that, or you wouldn’t be rising to my defense—very admirable of you, of course. That fragment of my history has held like a splinter under the skin of my soul, as much as I have a soul, and I think confronting it might be necessary to finally pulling it out. I’d like to be who I am without it.”

Sorsha made a face at me, but her tone was light. “Well, fine, give a perfectly understandable reason so I can’t grumble about it anymore.” She leaned in to steal a kiss as deftly as she’d stolen so many other things in her career, not least of all my heart. I let my mouth linger against hers, absorbing one last bit of love and courage to carry with me.

As she left me, I swung my leg over the bike. It wasn’t the first time I’d borrowed Omen’s ride, and my body settled into place on the seat easily enough. But despite my reassurances to Sorsha, my spirit was not at all settled as I revved the engine and took off through the crisply warm Mediterranean dusk.

Sorsha’s emotions weren’t the only impressions that had snagged on my incubus senses. From all around, more and more with each passing day, faint ripples of anticipation skipped across my skin from indistinct directions. Ripples with a vicious edge.

I couldn’t say for sure what they were. Possibly it was merely a global epidemic of emotional indigestion. I suspected, though, that I was picking up the violent hopes of those who knew about the Company’s goals and weren’t currently shuttered behind steel and silver. Those who knew that Tempest was only days from reaching that goal.

It wasn’t just Sorsha who needed me. It was the companions I’d promised to help in this mission and all the shadowkind who’d wither away if the sphinx got what she wanted. Maybe I wasn’t all