The Dark Highlander
Page 3

She’d been sleeping with him for two months, and knew no more about him now than the day she’d met him in Starbucks, across the street from O’Leary Banks and O’Malley, where she was a partner, thanks partly to her father, the senior O’Malley, and partly to her own ruthlessness. One look at the six foot four, darkly seductive man over the rim of her café au lait and she’d known she had to have him. It might have had something to do with the way he’d locked eyes with her as he’d lazily licked whipped cream off his mocha, making her imagine that sexy tongue doing far more intimate things. It might have had something to do with the pure sexual heat he gave off. She knew it had a great deal to do with the danger that rolled off him. Some days she wondered if she’d be defending him as one of her controversial high-profile clients in the months or years to come.
That same day they’d met, they’d rolled across his white Berber carpet, from fireplace to windows, wrestling silently for the supreme position, until she’d no longer cared how he’d taken her, so long as he had.
With a reputation for a razor-sharp tongue and the mind to back it up, she’d never once turned it on him. She had no idea how he maintained his lavish lifestyle, how he afforded his obscenely expensive collections of art and ancient weapons. She didn’t know where he’d been born, or even when his birthday was.
At work, she’d mentally prepare her interrogatory, but inevitably the probing questions stalled on her tongue the moment she saw him. She, the merciless interrogator in a courtroom, tongue-tied in his bedroom. On occasion, tied in infinitely more pleasurable ways. The man was a true master of the erotic.
“Woolgatherin’, lass? Or merely deciding how you want me?” he purred.
Katherine wet her lips. How she wanted him?
She wanted him out of her system. Kept hoping the next time she slept with him, the sex might not be so mind-blowing. The man was far too dangerous to get involved with emotionally. Just yesterday she’d lingered at Mass, praying that she would get over her addiction to him—please, God, soon. Yes, he heated her blood, but there was something about him that chilled her soul.
In the meantime—hopelessly fascinated as she was—she knew exactly how she would have him. A strong woman, she was aroused by the strength of a dominant man. She would end the night sprawled over his leather sofa. He would fist his hand in her long hair, drive into her from behind. He would bite the nape of her neck when she came.
She inhaled sharply, took one step forward, and he was on her, dragging her down to the thick carpet. Firm lips, sensual, with a hint of cruelty, closed over hers as he kissed her, golden eyes narrowing.
There was something about him that bordered on terrifying, she thought as he pinned her hands to the floor and rose over her, too beautiful, rife with dark secrets she suspected no woman should ever know—and it made the sex so much more exquisite, that fine edge of danger.
It was her last coherent thought for a long, long time.
Dageus MacKeltar braced his palms against the wall of windows and stared out into the night, his body separated from a plunge of forty-three stories by a pane of glass. The soft buzz of the television was nearly lost in the patter of rain against the windows. A few feet to his right, the sixty-inch screen was reflected in the glistening glass and David Boreanaz stalked broodingly, playing Angel, the tortured vampire with a soul. Dageus watched long enough to ascertain it was a repeat, then let his gaze drift back to the night.
The vampire always found at least partial resolution, and Dageus had begun to fear that for him, there would be none. Ever.
Besides, his problem was a little more complicated than Angel’s. Angel’s problem was a soul. Dageus’s problem was a legion of them.
Raking a hand through his hair, he studied the city below. Manhattan: A mere twenty-two square miles. Inhabited by nearly two million people. Then there was the metropolis itself, with seven million people crammed into three hundred square miles.
It was a city of grotesque proportions to a sixteenth-century Highlander, the sheer immensity inconceivable. When he’d first arrived in New York City, he’d walked around the Empire State Building for hours. One hundred and two floors, ten million bricks, the interior thirty-seven million cubic feet, one thousand two hundred and fifty feet tall, it was struck by lightning an average of five hundred times per year.
What manner of man built such monstrosities? he’d wondered. Sheer insanity was what it was, the Highlander had marveled.
And a fine place to call home.
New York City had beckoned the darkness within him. He’d made his lair in the pulsing heart of it.