Stone Cold Lover (11 page)

“Yes and no,” she answered, her attention on the brushes she was cleaning with a stained rag and a solution that stank to the heavens. “I paint, but it’s not how I make my living. I restore artworks for museums and private collectors. Occasionally, I take a commercial commission like my papa used to. My grandfather. He had a sign-painting business, and it’s not my thing, but I still do the odd favor for old friends of the family.”

Felicity had changed out of the clothing she wore to the café and the hospital and now wore a pair of battered trousers that looked like the bottom half of a military uniform. Paint and other things stained them from waist to ankles, and Spar could see why when she began to stuff the multitude of pockets with tubes, bottles, cloths, and tools. Over the pants, she had pulled an equally stained tank top that might once have been black but now more closely resembled the color of aging asphalt.

She kept the temperature in the room warm, obviously for comfort, but Spar felt the rise in his temperature had more to do with the sight of her slender arms bared by the sleeveless top. The way the fabric had hitched up at her waist around the rag she had tucked there didn’t help. Every time she shifted, he caught a glimpse of the pale, soft skin of her belly and his mouth watered with the desire to see if her taste there matched the one in her mouth.

Dragging his eyes back to her face, he saw her frown at him and quickly cleared his throat. He required a distraction.

“You said before that your grandfather raised you,” he said, thinking perhaps conversation would help. “Why did your parents not do so?”

“Grandparents. Both my grandfather and grandmother.” She shrugged and began to squeeze pigments onto an oval palette. “My parents weren’t in the picture. I never knew my father. He was just a guy my mom fooled around with, and she wasn’t capable of taking care of herself, let alone of me. She had a drug problem. Leaving me with her parents was probably the best thing she could have done.”

Her tone held no bitterness, which surprised Spar. He had always believed that humans harbored intense feelings of attachment to their parents.

“Grandma and Papa were amazing. They raised me without a question. I belonged to them, and as far as I was concerned they belonged to me right back. I had the best childhood I could have asked for.”

“Did your grandfather teach you to paint?”

Her mouth curved in a smile. “Among other things. He taught me to paint, how to run a business, how to fix cars, anything with a motor really. The summer before my sixteenth birthday, he brought the Tiger home from a junkyard for me. We spent four months rebuilding it so he could teach me to ride in time to get my driver’s license.”

Her voice glowed with affection. Spar found himself envying her grandfather for holding so much of her heart.

“And Grandma taught me how to cook, cheat at cards, and swear in Lithuanian.”

“Lithuanian?” Spar shook his head. “I had wondered at the words you use. I speak Russian, and I did not understand why you made no sense to me.”

Felicity smiled as she feathered dark paint onto the blank canvas. “Lithuanian. Both Grandma and Papa were born in Canada, but their parents all emigrated from there back in the 1920s.”

“Your grandparents sound like fine people.”

“They were.” She dropped her brush in a jar half filled with solution and reached for another. “What about your family? Do Guardians have families?”

She cast him a brief glance, but her attention was focused on her painting. Already the tension in her shoulders had eased, and Spar realized how much her art soothed her. He would be sure to bring her here regularly until the danger passed. The outlet would help her cope with the situation into which she had been thrust.

“The other Guardians are my brothers,” he told her, pleased that she wanted to know more about him. “I have no mother or father because we are not born, but summoned.”

“What does that mean?”

“I was never born, never a child. I was summoned into this realm as I am now.”

“Summoned by the Guild, right?”

He hummed a yes. “Indeed. Each of us was called when the need was great, so we had to be ready to go immediately into battle.”

“I suppose that’s why you carry that ginormous spear, huh?”

“It is a useful weapon, though not all of us use weapons. Our teeth and claws do damage enough to vanquish many foes.”

Felicity made a face. “Yeah, nice image.” She layered more color on the canvas according to some pattern Spar could not determine. “So, when were you all summoned that first time? I mean, exactly how old are you guys?”

“The first summoning took place more than seven thousand years ago, according to human reckoning.”

Her head snapped around and she stared at him, mouth agape, until he realized her thoughts and smiled. “I, however am not quite so ancient. None of my brethren has lived all those years unbroken. Three have lived since before the birth of your Christ, and they stand as the most ancient among us. Four of us were summoned later at different times in order to replace those who fell in battle.”

Felicity’s brows drew together, and her expression turned serious as she looked back at her painting. “You can be killed in ways other than just destroying your statues, then.”

Did she ask because she feared him coming to harm? He felt a warm rush of pleasure at the thought.

“As Kees told you, our immortality simply means that we do not die of natural causes. Like any other creature, we can be killed. Destroying our sleeping form is the easiest way, because we cannot defend against such a cowardly attack, but we have fallen in battle over the years. The wounds that fell us must be grievous, though. We can fight on almost until our heart is destroyed. And of course, there is no creature who can survive for long if its head is removed.”

She grimaced, and Spar had to remind himself that she seemed not to enjoy vivid descriptions of battle or bloodshed. He would need to remember to choose his words carefully.

“Suffice it to say, we are a hearty bunch,” he hurried to assure her. “As Guardians we need to be. The enemy we fight is powerful, not to be taken lightly. You should remember that, Felicity. The foulest deeds of the
nocturnis
are like the games of a child compared with the destruction one of the Seven could cause with the smallest of gestures.”

“I told you, don’t call me Felicity.” She pursed her lips and shot him a glance that tried to be sourer than she could manage. He could see the humor under the surface. “No one uses that name. Everyone calls me Fil.”

Spar found he enjoyed the chance to tease her, just to watch her eyes light with mirth and temper. “Everyone must be too dim-witted to understand what is clear to my eyes. Fil is a name for a man. I could not mistake you for a man, Felicity, not if the Darkness struck me blind and stupid.”

“I think someone already beat them to that second one,” she shot back, but he heard no heat in the words. In fact, he thought he detected a certain amount of pleasure. Did she like the idea that he needed her to see him as separate from any others? Or did she like the knowledge that he saw her first as a woman, someone to be desired?

Tearing her gaze from his, she dropped another brush into her jar and set aside her palette. “I need some more linseed oil. I think I have a new jug in the back. Be right back.”

He wanted to seize her, to grasp her and force her to meet his gaze, to see the feelings she stirred in him, but he held himself back. His female was skittish. He sensed the attraction in her, the way she was drawn to him, just as he felt the way she fought against it. She wanted to reject the magnetic force that pulled them together, but he could have told her it was futile. Never in his life had he felt an energy as strong as the one that drew him to her.

Clenching his hands into fists, he watched her step through the half-open door into the stockroom at the back of the shop that she now used for storage. She disappeared from his sight for only a moment before he found himself leaping to his feet and charging after her.

She had screamed violent, bloody murder.

Chapter Eight

Fil drew in a deep breath as she headed toward the stockroom. She had to fight back the urge to run, to put as much distance between herself and Spar as quickly as she was able. The electricity that flared between them had reached the kind of voltage she knew could stop her heart with one careless touch.

She had no intention of getting burned.

When she thought about the strange fascination she’d felt for the gargoyle statue just twenty-four hours earlier, Fil wanted to throw back her head and laugh. As scarily intense as that feeling had been, it was like a drop in the ocean of what she felt for Spar every moment she spent in his company. It was as if there was some strange physical force that wanted to draw them together, some potent pheromone that turned normally rational art restorers into raging nymphomaniacs the minute they came into range of a living, breathing gargoyle.

Or maybe, Fil winced, it was just her.

She really wished she had been able to convince Spar to let her out of his sight for even ten lousy minutes. A brisk walk around the block, just a few minutes of peace out of range of his brooding, sexy presence would have done her a world of good. With luck, it might even have given her panties a few minutes to dry out.

But no. The stone-skulled lummox had been adamant. She would not stray from his line of sight for so much as a minute longer than it took her to pee, and even then he had insisted that she leave the bathroom door open a crack so he could hear if someone tried to accost her. At this point, Fil could have told him that the only one in any immediate danger was Spar himself, and that was because she was about ten seconds away from wrapping her hands around his neck and squeezing for all she was worth.

Either her hands, or her thighs.

Groaning, Fil pushed open the storage room door and stepped inside. Convincing him to let her come down to her studio had seemed like a major victory an hour ago. It had certainly taken a hell of an argument and three of her favorite curses learned from her grandma to win him over. She’d thought that immersing herself in her painting might prove enough of a distraction that she could be in the same room with him for an entire hour without fantasizing about licking him somewhere inappropriate.

By her calculations, she’d lasted approximately seven and a half minutes.

It didn’t help that the man had started a conversation with her. Why did he have to ask about her life? And why the hell did he have to sound so sincere when he told her that her grandparents sounded like fine people? Her life had been hard enough when she’d just lusted after his delectable body. Why did he have to go about making her like what was on the inside, too?

Maybe coming to the studio hadn’t been the best idea. Fil was starting to think that the paint fumes in the air could not be helping her struggle for rational thought and hormonal control. After she grabbed the oil, she’d ask if Spar would let her open a window or two. She could definitely use a breath of fresh air.

Fil didn’t bother flipping on the light in the storage room. She’d been mucking around back here since the time she could walk, and she’d arranged every one of her supplies with her own two hands. The linseed oil, she knew, sat on the second shelf from the floor against the back wall. In her mind, she was already reaching for it when something shifted in the shadows.

She screamed before she could think.

The thing snarled at her. At least, she thought it did. It was hard to tell since she wasn’t even certain it had a face. Could something without a face really snarl?

Okay, having this conversation with herself was probably the first sign of hysteria, but what the hell with this day?

The thing leapt at her, and Fil dove to the side. Instinct sent her in the direction of the exit door to the alley behind the building, but it didn’t protect her from slamming her shoulder against the wooden frame hard enough to make her cry out. It also didn’t stop the thing from catching her side with the tip of a wickedly sharp claw. It slashed through fabric and skin and muscle like paper, leaving behind a gash that felt bathed in acid and lit on fire.

Pain and fury welled within her, and her vision went dark. Not black, like when she had lost consciousness, but darkened, as if she looked out through a thin veil of black tissue. She could still move, still think, could still hear the thunderous roar of Spar’s battle cry as he launched himself through the door to rescue her. She could even see perfectly clearly, as if her special sight had activated without her even trying. Both Spar and the creature crouched on the floor between them glowed with energy, Spar’s a brilliant blue-white, the thing’s a sickly yellow-green.

Her Guardian had come prepared to save her. Gone was the gorgeous human form with the dark stubble and the snug, worn jeans. In its place stood the seven-foot warrior with claws and spear and vengeance in his eyes. Even as he shouted and raised his spear, Fil knew he intended to destroy the creature that had threatened her, and she felt a stirring of warmth.

Too bad her left hand felt as if it had been encased in ice.

Without conscious thought, Fil raised it, she thought to check if it had turned blue with the cold, but instead she turned it outward, pointing her palm at the slimy, furry, faceless thing in the center of the storage room.

Seriously, how could something be slimy and furry at the same time? she wondered vaguely.

She knew she opened her mouth, but she could have sworn that the word that came out was nothing she had ever heard before in her life. It felt thick and heavy on her tongue, and it left a bitter taste behind. Almost before the last foul syllable had passed her lips, her palm turned from frozen to incendiary, and a ball of red-black energy flashed from her to the nasty little creature that had attacked her.

It exploded.

In an overwhelmingly creepy, messy, entrails-on-the-ceiling kind of way.

Fil screamed, and the veil over her eyes lifted, just in time to see black sticky
thing
’s guts drip off the tip of Spar’s wing. Turning, she took one frantic step and vomited violently into the trash can.