Ultimate Warriors Read online

  After a few moments, she shook her dark thoughts off. It was absurd, really, to grieve over a woman she’d never even known.

  She glanced at Dr. Savage as they reached the car. "Was that weird, or what?"

  He stopped, turning to look at the building they’d just left speculatively.

  Nariko didn’t particularly like the look in his eyes.

  "If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure you, nor anyone else, ever found out anything about yourself."

  "I thought I was just being paranoid … I mean, I can’t actually prove that I’m her next of kin."

  Shrugging slightly, he got into the car. "Maybe," he said when Nariko had settled beside him. "And maybe not."

  Nariko frowned. "You think all of my problems are somehow connected to my father?"

  Savage glanced at her sharply. "It would explain a lot of things," he said after a moment.

  Nariko waited for him to continue. He didn’t. "What things?"

  "The possibilities are too endless to speculate on without more information."

  Nariko fell silent as he started the car and negotiated his way off the grounds of the sanitarium. Instead of asking him to elaborate, since she knew he wouldn’t, she considered what he’d said, speculating on what he’d left unsaid.

  She supposed it was possible that things had happened to her that she just didn’t remember and that that might be the underlying problem that was causing the dreams. The ‘demon’ thing was just absurd, but maybe her mother had only meant he’d seemed demonic? Or maybe he had been crazy and thought he was one?

  But she hadn’t even been a year old when they’d put her mother away and put her in the orphanage. Even supposing there was something to the ‘father was nuts’ theory, how could he have made any sort of impression on her while she was so young? And why would it come back to haunt her now?

  And, more importantly, how could the dreams be so vivid that they affected her physically?

  She discovered when she emerged from her abstraction that they’d arrived at her apartment once more. This time Savage made no attempt to get out of the car, however.

  "You’re going in after the records, aren’t you?"

  "Yes."

  "I’m really starting to get uneasy about all this."

  "All what?"

  She turned to study his profile. "I just didn’t expect you to get so deeply involved in my situation as to risk … the things you’re risking."

  To her surprise, he smiled, albeit somewhat grimly. "As much as I’d like you to think I’m going way beyond the call, the truth is the risks are minimal … and, in your case, even if they weren’t, I’d still consider it worth doing."

  Nariko frowned, trying to decide if there was an underlying meaning in what he’d said. "I think I could understand it a little better if I’d been your patient for years … or if there was something … uh … personal between us, but I’m practically a stranger."

  He slid a glance her way. He was frowning faintly. "I seem like a stranger to you?"

  It was Nariko’s turn to frown. "Actually, it’s really odd--because you should--but you don’t."

  To her surprise, he chuckled. "Good. It would have been a real blow to my ego if you’d said yes. Mostly, I figure once I’ve had my tongue in a woman’s mouth, we’ve moved beyond considering ourselves strangers."

  Nariko blushed to the roots of her hair. "But that was a … distraction, wasn’t it?"

  "It sure as hell distracted me."

  She hadn’t thought it was possible to blush any harder but she managed it. "That’s not what I meant."

  To her surprise, he reached across the seat, grasped her hand and dragged her toward him. She fell against his chest, looking up at him with a mixture of surprise and burgeoning anticipation. He was aroused. She could feel it beneath her bottom. The knowledge made a peculiar warmth spread through her limbs.

  "What did you mean?" he asked, a faint smile playing about his lips. There was an intensity in his gaze that Nari found both unnerving and electrifying.

  "Uh … I thought you were trying to keep me quiet because you thought I’d give us away."

  "Hmmm," he murmured, his eyes dropping to her lips.

  "Was I wrong?" It was a mere breath.

  "Completely." His head dipped toward her. Nari felt her own head start to whirl. She parted her lips on a harsh breath that stopped completely when his lips finally touched hers. Every nerve ending in her body focused on him, on the softness of his lips, the pounding of his heart against her chest and her own echoing heartbeat.

  The kiss they’d shared before was nothing like this, merely an appetizer that hadn’t done nearly enough to satisfy her appetite.

  Heat shot through her body, so intense she seemed to liquefy. Her bones turned to jelly. His tongue probed the seam of her lips, his hand tightened at the back of her neck, holding her steady, allowing her no retreat. Even had she been able, she couldn’t stop this. She craved it … had been craving a connection to him since she’d first set eyes on him.

  Her lips parted on a ragged breath. His tongue thrust its way inside, staking bold possession, stroking the roof of her mouth, her teeth, her tongue.

  She whimpered, unable to control the mewling sounds she made as he invaded her mouth.

  He moved an arm around her back to support her, freeing his right hand to rest at her waist, fingering the hem of her shirt a brief moment before he was pushing beneath and upward, striving for her breasts. The skate of his fingers over her never-before-touched skin cause shivers to course over her.

  Just looking at him made her pulse quicken. To have him touch her was nearly more than she could bear. And when his hand closed around her breasts, pinching her nipple between his fingers, she cried out in his mouth, clutching at his arm, afraid he’d pull away and stop what he was doing to her.

  Pleasure radiated from her nipple, converging in an arrowed line straight to her cleft. She was melting again. Her blood turned to lava in her veins. Her clit throbbed with the rapidity of her pulse. Frenetic heat tore at her as he broke from her mouth and slid his tongue along her jaw and down the cord of her neck. Everything he did to her was new, yet not. She felt comfortable with him, eager to have him lay claim to every inch of her body. She wasn’t scared or reluctant as she should have been.

  She reveled to have him.

  He explored her ear, nipping, tasting, sucking the lobe into his mouth. All the while, his fingers plucking at first one nipple then the other, drawing them into hard knots of pleasure.

  She knew what she wanted. She wanted his mouth there. Everywhere. But the car was too confined. It was like a trap. She could couldn’t quite reach her goal.

  Frustrated, Nari pushed his hand aside, reaching down to push the lever to make the seat recline. It went back with a pop that startled them both, making her flatten against his chest.

  Panting with arousal and exertion, she shifted until she sat astride him, leaning low to keep from bumping her head.

  Shayne looked at her, his eyes heavy lidded with lust. He sat up, pushing her top up until he could lay his lips on her, nuzzle her breasts, taste her. She strangled a gasp as his teeth scraped over her flesh, gently biting, teasing her nipples to hard points. "Oh, God, Shayne…."

  He circled her back, cupping her against him as he sucked her breasts to piercing points of arousal.

  She bit her lip, rocking her hips until her cleft reached his encased cock. He groaned and lay back, arching, thrusting his hips upwards. The huge bulge rammed against her, hard as a rock. Even muted through the fabric, she felt his heat, his strength. Her cunt had soaked her panties, seeping into her lightweight pants. She rubbed herself against him, the smell of light sweat and lust arousing her more than she’d dreamed possible.

  Shayne grit his teeth, dropping his hands to her hips until he could control her movement and his own. He thrust again, rubbing hard against her clit, fiercely plunging her into a swirl
of pleasure that heightened with each passing second.

  Nari gasped, flattening her palms against the roof of the car, riding him as waves of bliss crested inside her. A wild excitement engulfed her. She was straining toward fulfillment, her muscles tightening, her throat hoarse and achy with the effort of controlling her screams.

  He groaned loudly, his hands near bruising her hips, and then he was driving against her like mad, roughly rubbing, hands cupping and massaging her ass, bringing her hard against him. She felt his cock shudder, her own arousal peak, culminate in a rapture that zipped through her erogenous zones with the speed and lingering effects of lightning.

  Nari fell against his chest, gasping, goose bumps shivering across her skin.

  It took her many moments until she could find her voice. When she was able to speak, she said, breathlessly, "You’re not leaving without me."

  He shifted beneath her, and she looked up at him. He was grinning crookedly, looking sexy and mussed, with strands of hair clinging to his damp forehead. "Okay. But I think we’re both going to need a change of clothing."

  * * * *

  Nari stared at the darkened sanitarium with a sense of deja vu. This time, however, she’d been ordered to wait in the car. She didn’t like it, but she could hardly argue that she knew the lay of the land as she had at the orphanage. Savage had insisted that he was safer to try it alone and she didn’t feel comfortable about arguing with that assessment. It was bad enough that he was determined to risk yet another excursion for information despite all of her attempts to reason with him that getting her mother’s files just wasn’t worth the possibility of getting caught and the consequences attached to it.

  She sighed as she watched Shayne disappear into the shadows of the sanitarium grounds, wondering if she’d really tried as hard to convince him not to make the attempt as she should have.

  The truth was that the nightmares had been becoming more frequent, and getting worse all the time despite Shayne’s efforts to help her, and she was too scared to think of much beyond stopping it. In some ways, she supposed it wasn’t as bad as it had been since she’d first sought Shayne Savage out. At least now she dreamed of having someone to help her, someone she could turn to when the demon who called himself Onyx invaded her dreams.

  She didn’t doubt that it was the fact that Shayne monitored her when she slept that she’d gained that much of a sense of security, but realistically, she knew it couldn’t continue as it had indefinitely. Sooner or later Shayne would throw up his hands in defeat and leave her to her own devises--or maybe even just give up and try to have her committed.

  She desperately needed a solution to the problem or she really was going to go nuts.

  It had occurred to her, more than once, that it might already be too late. She’d begun to feel as if she was being followed whenever she went out. She never actually saw anyone, but the feeling of being watched persisted. She’d considered mentioning it to Shayne several times, but each time she’d been on the verge of mentioning it, she had dismissed the temptation.

  It had all the earmarks of paranoia.

  He didn’t seem to think she was crazy and she rather thought she would prefer to keep it that way.

  She didn’t want to end up like her mother had.

  After she’d checked her watch about a dozen times in thirty minutes, she got out of the car and paced for a while, trying to focus on her problem rather than her anxiety about whether Shayne would manage to pull off his break in. When she’d walked off some of her excess nervous energy, she settled on the hood of the car and stared up at the night sky.

  The dreams, she realized, had become more solidly threatening since she’d begun seeing Shayne for sleep therapy--more real and less dreamlike. She wondered if there was a connection or if it would have happened regardless. It seemed to her that she’d already been heading in that direction–which was why she’d sought his help to start with but she couldn’t help but wonder about the way it seemed to have accelerated just within the last few weeks.

  She’d been dreaming for years. Up until recently they had only been disturbing, but almost as soon as she’d started seeing Shayne about the problem, the dreams had become to manifest physical after effects. Was there a connection? Or was it only coincidence?

  Or was it connected to something else that had happened in her life?

  What if she wasn’t being paranoid about being followed?

  She hadn’t considered that before, but she realized that that sense of being watched and followed had begun after they’d visited the orphanage. Was it only a guilty conscience that made her feel it, or had she triggered something by going back--something in the real world.

  The hostility she’d felt when she’d tried to get the records wasn’t something she’d imagined, not the determination to keep her from learning what was in the file. It was about her, after all. Apart from pure meanness, why might old Townsend want to keep the information from her? Particularly when there didn’t seem to be anything especially important in the file.

  Except the information about her origins.

  And, now that she thought about it, Shayne was strangely focused on her origins.

  She’d thought he was just downplaying her mother’s claims of having been impregnated by a demon, but surely he’d taken that information in stride surprisingly easily … and become more determined than ever to find out what he could about her birth parents.

  If she set aside her fear that she was losing her mind, what did that leave her with?

  Her mother was telling the truth and either hadn’t been able to handle it and had been locked away, or she’d been locked away for another reason entirely … to keep her quiet? To make certain she couldn’t influence, or protect, her child?

  The scrape of gravel snapped Nari from her thoughts. Whirling toward the sound, she saw that Shayne had returned and relief flooded her. Slipping off the car, she met him. To her surprise, he wasn’t carrying anything.

  "You didn’t get in?"

  Instead of answering her, he motioned for her to get into the car. He didn’t speak until they’d headed back to town.

  "I looked through the file. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to remove it."

  Nari glanced toward him in surprise, but it was dark in the car and she couldn’t read his expression. "Why?"

  "Somebody went to a lot of trouble to bury your origins."

  Surprise and uneasiness went through Nari at the same time. "You think so too?"

  He shrugged. "You never know the way they guard records these days--and it’s possible the director of the orphanage is just a bitch who enjoys wielding what little power she has, but I definitely got that feeling when we met with the same resistance to seeing your mother’s records."

  Nari digested that a while, relieved that someone seemed to share her paranoia and at the same time further unnerved. "What could it mean, do you think?"

  He shook his head. "Your mother was killed in a freak accident--at least that was the way it was described. According to the story, they thought she was trying to escape. She had gone up to the roof of the building and was attempting to climb down when the fire ladder came loose and she fell to her death."

  "But you’re not buying it?"

  "It would take a freak accident to kill somebody falling no more two stories. The building just isn’t that high. Broken bones, I could accept, but plenty of people have fallen even further and lived. The thing is, she was cut to ribbons and there just isn’t any logical explanation for that in a fall."

  Sickness welled inside of Nari as a vision of her mother’s broken, bleeding body rose in her mind. "She was attacked."

  Chapter Six

  Shayne had left Nari with her own morbid thoughts after that, refusing to discuss the matter further until they’d reached her apartment. Nariko hadn’t really prodded him, embroiled as she was in her own thoughts. She had doubts that he could really shed any light on the mystery in any case. It only seemed to
deepen the more she learned, not to become more clear.

  She was accepting a lot on faith, of course. The truth was, no matter how companionable she felt about Shayne, she really didn’t know him that well and she didn’t know how much trust she could place in her own instincts considering the distress she was under.

  In her heart, she felt like she could trust him, but how much of that was dependence? How much was based solely on her attraction to him?

  He knew her. She suspected he knew a lot more about her than he’d revealed. But she knew almost nothing about him.

  She found by the time they’d reached her apartment once more than she really didn’t want to deal with anything else at the moment. She was weary to her soul, not just physically. As ridiculous as it might seem to anyone else, she mourned the loss of her mother and that sense of loss was magnified by the horrible way her mother had died.

  All she really wanted to do was to escape to her room to mourn in private and think things through for herself.

  Shayne, however, insisted that the matter was something that needed to be discussed then, not put off until later.

  She settled on the couch, feeling resentment slowly overtaking her confusion and sorrow as she watched Shayne pace her living room.

  "I don’t see why this can’t wait until tomorrow," she said finally when he showed no indication of being forthcoming anytime soon.

  Shayne ceased pacing and turned to study her speculatively for several moments. "I don’t think it’s something that can, or should, be put off. I think you’re in danger."

  Nari’s heart skipped a beat, remembering that pervasive feeling of being followed … hunted. "Why? How? From whom?"

  He frowned, seemed to wrestle with his thoughts for several moments. "Have you considered the possibility that your mother actually was impregnated by a demon?"

  "That’s insane!" Nariko snapped, jumping to her feet. In a moment of weakness, she had toyed with the possibility, but she knew damned well there was no such thing and to consider it was to slide a little deeper toward the madness that had consumed her mother.