Shadow Bound Page 0,93

question. Her man?

He’d certainly dedicated his life to Talia’s cause, even before she knew what she was meant to do. The network of resources he’d established had therefore been set up for her purposes, her ends. The lives that had been sacrificed had been lost to protect her, so that she could end the wraith war. And all this was done freely.

That’s not what the kid meant, though. Not the way he held his breath waiting for Adam’s answer. The kid was speaking literally and not a little hopefully. As if he might just have a shot with a faery princess. Poor kid.

Maybe Abigail had been blabbing about the window again.

Adam’s body stirred at the memory. The way he’d buried himself in Talia as they hovered over the city, her impossibly perfect, silky skin under his hands. Her heat squeezing him, her shadows filling the room. The glimmer of a beauty, hers, recognized not by his mundane senses, but by something deeper. Maybe his soul, if he still had one. He thought of the pills in his pocket, the fact that he’d trade his life to make sure hers was safe, that strange beauty untouched.

“Yeah,” Adam answered. In every way possible, he was her man.

“Oh.” The kid sighed heavily. “Okay, then.”

Adam left the kid with his dashed dreams and headed up the stairs.

The narrow hallway at the landing had doors off to each side, but Adam bet the one with the handwritten DO NOT DISTURB!!! sign was Talia’s. The three exclamation marks screamed Zoe.

He let himself quietly inside, shutting the door behind him, turned, and stopped in dumb shock.

The scene from the painting Sleeping Beauty shimmered in reality before his eyes. The artist had to have been a visionary like Abigail, but with the talent and technique to capture the sight on canvas.

Talia reclined on an old-fashioned divan. She wore a black satin robe, deeply parted to the thigh, a long, slender leg revealed to the hip. Her white-gold hair tumbled over the red velvet cushion on which she rested, fat curls gleaming. Her face was peaceful, lips parted just slightly.

Talia. Sleeping Beauty.

To match the painting perfectly, that robe needed to be parted, her body revealed entirely. Her eyes needed to be open, though still slumberous. And she needed to be looking at him with desire.

The thing to do, of course, would be to kiss her. To wake her like a princess in a fairy tale. To set the fantasy in motion.

But Adam couldn’t. There was no time left for fantasies and dreams. All the happily-ever-afters of the world were bankrupt.

He crossed soundlessly to a side table, took the flash drive out of his pocket, and placed it on top of a pad of paper. He paused over the note, but had no idea what to say. There were no words for how he felt. All of the ones that came to mind seemed too short, or too simple, or too overused to capture the knot in his chest.

For Talia~ It’s everything I have. Adam

The note was crap, but it’d have to do.

He straightened, brought his gaze back one more time to look at her, and took a deep breath to inhale the moment. To hold it within him where he was going.

Her eyes fluttered and opened, sleepy and sensual.

Adam froze, rooted to his spot.

He caught the moment consciousness flickered into her gaze. Awareness of her surroundings and awareness of him. And with it, damned desire. Desire was the last thing he needed, but the only thing he wanted.

Heat roared into his exhausted body; the room swayed slightly in his vision.

She slipped a finger into the knot at her waist and released the satin tie. The robe parted and completed the image from the painting.

EIGHTEEN

THE blur of sleep cleared from Talia’s eyes, but the dream remained.

Adam. Back.

Grizzled with stubble, stinking with exhaustion, gaze hooded, wary, and troubled—the weight of the war bearing down on him as he gazed at her.

But back.

Now: how to keep him here?

Talia brought a hand to her robe and pulled the tie apart. Gravity slid one side of the robe off her body; the other she brushed aside herself. Her heartbeat went from sluggish to surging, her nerves from idle to quivering and edgy. The exposure of her skin to the cool air of the room sent a wave of goose bumps racing up her legs, over her stomach, to peak at her breasts.

Adam groaned as he gazed at her, the sound wrenching from his gut,