The Immortal Highlander

Page 38

But this thing; oh, this car was almost as dangerous as the fairy who’d stolen it.
Unsnapping her seat belt, she slipped her purse over her shoulder, got out of the car, waited impatiently while he disentangled himself (the roadster wasn’t an easy fit for a man of his brawn), then pressed the little button on the keypad to engage the alarm.
When she’d first slid into the plush leather seats of the dreamy car, she’d popped open the glove box and damned if there hadn’t been a tidy little registration in there, free of lien, with her name on it.
And the bill of sale: $137,856.02.
No doubt about it, her life had plunged from the realm of the absurd into the downright surreal. She’d just driven a car that cost more than a lot of people’s houses did. And already a tiny part of her was busy making the case that, considering she was risking her life, surely she was entitled to some recompense? It was only a car, right? And nobody would ever know. It wasn’t as if she were hurting anybody. He’d said so himself: How was she ever going to convince anybody to take it back when it sure looked like she was the legal owner? And there were no outstanding parking tickets on it. No warrant for her arrest. Which begged the interesting question: “What did you do with my car?”
“Drove it into the Ohio River,” he said mildly.
“Oh.” Well. Nothing she’d not been tempted to do herself a time or two. Looked like she was stuck with the BMW if she wanted to get to work next week. Assuming she lived through the weekend.
“Hurry up,” she said, impatient to get on with things. She couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that her life had only begun its downward spiral and worse things were yet to come.
As they stepped from the dark garage into the momentarily blinding sunlight and began walking toward the square, Gabby scanned the busy streets, searching for fairies. The sidewalks were teeming with people moving en masse down toward the river in the general direction of the stadium. Must be a baseball game, she decided, briefly torturing herself with the thought of normal, pleasant things like hot dogs and beer and pretzels, family outings, and the sharp crack of ball against a bat.
Once again people were out doing things, socializing and having fun, while she was frantically attempting to rectify the latest fairy debacle.
“Just what am I supposed to say when I find these beings?” she asked irritably.
“Tell them that I’d like an audience with the queen at the next new moon.”
“The next new moon?” Scowling, she stopped walking. “Why not today? When is the next new moon?”
He shrugged. “The last one was a few days ago. We missed it.” At her pointed glare, he added, “She only grants audiences once per cycle of the mortal moon.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He was, but not about to admit to it. He’d realized in the car—while watching her hand close around the leather-bound stick shift, and mentally substituting his own leather-clad stick shift that seemed to have gotten firmly lodged in overdrive—that if they were successful today, he’d lose his human body.
He’d gotten strangely all-too-humanly panicked. His stomach had actually felt queasy and he’d nearly insisted she turn around. The only thing that had stopped him was that he knew that if she knew that he wanted to stay human just so he could have sex with her, she’d go beg every fairy she could find to take him away this very instant.
And one of them might.
Aoibheal had no such ridiculous schedule, but what his petite ka-lyrra didn’t know, she couldn’t use against him. He would get her to tell them to come collect him at the next new moon. He’d easily have her in bed long before then. Get to sate his curiosity before reclaiming his rightful place.
“I am not going to be stuck with you until then,” she was saying.
He smiled. By Danu, she was sexy when she was angry: eyes sparkling, nostrils flaring, breasts rising and falling with her tight, angry breaths.
When he made no reply, she flung an exasperated hand in the direction of a bench some distance away, in the middle of the square. “Oh, just go sit over there, okay? They tend to hang out on the square sometimes. I think they like to people-watch, or I suppose fairies would say human-watch.”
When he opened his mouth to disagree, of no mind to sit so far away from her, she placed her palm flush to his chest and gave him a little push toward the bench. It was the first time she’d touched him of her own accord. And he’d not missed the tiny hesitation after she’d placed her hand on his body before pushing. As if she had savored the feel of his chest beneath her hand. Her barriers were dropping. Fascinating.