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When she went back to work wrestling his jeans lower, his breath grew rough. Reaching out, Rhys scooped up a silken lock of her hair and used it to stroke the swinging point of her nipple.

  Olivia shivered in delight, but kept dragging his jeans lower. She paused after his upper thighs were revealed and lowered her head to nibble. The teasing sensation made his cock buck. “Beef,” she purred. “It’s what’s for dinner.”

  “You really are a bad girl.”

  “Bad girls have the most fun.” She had to stop to deal with his ankle-length Italian boots. To his amusement, they resisted her efforts. With an irritated growl, she straightened, magic sparkling around her hand.

  Before she could zap them, he protested, “Hey, those cost four hundred bucks!”

  “I’ll make you another pair, rich boy.” But she went back to wrestling with them.

  “I,” he informed her, “am not a boy of any kind.”

  She glanced up at him as the boot came off. “Well, that’s for damn sure.” She gestured at the remaining boot before he could protest. This time when she grabbed it, it slipped right off. “Ha! There’s more than one way to strip a stud.” She whipped off his jeans with a flourish and sent them sailing into a corner.

  Olivia straightened, her eyes bright, and propped her fists on her hips as she scanned him with possessive heat. Her gaze lingered on his rearing erection. “That’s more like it.”

  “Now you’re overdressed.” He gestured. Her remaining clothing vanished, leaving her lovely and naked, all smooth, feminine curves.

  She glanced down at herself. “I thought we weren’t in a hurry.”

  “You might not be.” He gave her a deliberately evil grin.

  “Bet you were the kind of kid who sneaked around opening his presents before Christmas.”

  His eyes dwelled on the silver tuft of hair between her thighs. “Well, there’s presents and then there are presents.”

  “There certainly are.” She crawled onto the bed, her eyes fixed on his erection currently bobbing over his belly. The look in her eyes reminded him of a cat sneaking up on a pigeon.

  Rhys’s fists clenched in the coverlet in an effort not to grab her like the barbarian he wasn’t.

  Long, slender fingers wrapped around his shaft and she studied it, angling it upward. He caught his breath as she leaned down to take it into her mouth. The sensation of those soft lips closing around him made his hands tighten on the comforter.

  Olivia knew what she was doing, sliding her head slowly up and down, her tongue swirling intricate patterns, finding exquisitely sensitive nerves that thoroughly approved of her technique. He strongly suspected he wasn’t going to be able to last if she kept that up. He had to swallow before he could speak. “Let me return the favor!”

  She lifted her head, easing off his shaft. His body howled in protest. “Actually, I’m enjoying myself right here.”

  Maybe if he had something else to concentrate on besides how exquisite her mouth felt. . . . “Sixty-nine?”

  Olivia grinned, probably at the way his voice broke. “If you insist.” She turned around until she could straddle him, head down. It wasn’t going to make for a particularly comfortable position, since he’d have to crane his neck to . . .

  Before he could finish the thought, gold sparks flashed around them both. He felt his shoulders lift off the bed; she had cradled them both in a cocoon of magic. It tilted her hips down over his face while angling her torso up, the better to reach his cock. It was all he could do not to moan as she went back to nibbling him like something tasty.

  Rhys blinked, not entirely comfortable with the sensation of floating in midair. And how the hell was she supporting both his weight and hers?

  But then she engulfed his cock again, and every other thought vanished right out of his head.

  Chapter Seven

  It had been a long time since Olivia had done this trick, though levitation had proved useful over the years, often in lethal circumstances. Still, she kept in practice, so she wasn’t worried about dropping either of them.

  At least, not until he parted her vaginal lips and gave her a long, juicy lick.

  Oh Goddess! The man knew what he was doing. He slid a forefinger into her pussy in a teasing little caress that sent a jolt of delight up her body. Each sweet lick made her nervous system sing.

  She had to fight to concentrate on exploring the long vein on the underside of his cock, nibbling and tasting. The scent of him filled her senses. Ozone and sandalwood and man. And something else, something a little feral and wild, a kind of musk that didn’t seem entirely human. Somehow it reminded her of the scent of a cat’s soft, fine coat.

  She nibbled her way down to his balls and sucked first one and then the other into her mouth, enjoying the way he groaned in delight.

  He rewarded her with a delicious swirling lick over her clit, then closed his mouth and suckled hard. She drew off his balls and went back to his shaft, nibbling her way up the underside along the sensitive vein. To her delight, his powerful torso rolled under her in a shudder of pleasure.

  The second of his thick fingers joined the one in her pussy to stroke in and out. Each erotic slide reminded her of that big cock grinding pleasure into her brain

  Olivia drew her mouth away to eye his shaft, shivering a little at the delicious magic he was working between her thighs.

  Reaching down the length of her body, Rhys found the aching point of one nipple and began delicately to tug and twist. Arousal stormed through her, hot with the need to fuck.

  The intensity was such that she raised her head and glanced around at the magic swirling over them. Very little of it was green. Her lust was real.

  Opening her mouth, she angled her head and swooped down over his cock, taking every inch she could until he groaned in pleasure between her thighs.

  He was far too long to deep throat, so she wrapped one hand tighter around his shaft and teased his balls with the other.

  “Okay,” he gasped. “That’s about as much as I can stand.” Rhys surged against her magic, and she knew he meant to roll her over as he’d done the night before.

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Olivia lifted her head off him and tightened the grip of her magic, grinning at his surprised gasp at finding himself pinned.

  Not that she could’ve held him for very long. Fortunately, Rhys wasn’t really all that interested in escape. His pupils were ringed in irises gone gold, and his expression was feral with lust. She levitated, adjusting her position in midair until she hovered over that fat, delicious shaft.

  Aiming his cock upward with one hand, Olivia positioned her juicy sex over the shaft and took him deep, groaning in delight at the slick, delicious pleasure. Letting her magic support her knees, she began to ride him, thrusting up and down as he writhed in the grip of her magic.

  Deeper. She needed him deeper. Leaning back on her heels, Olivia grabbed her ankles, gaining the leverage to grind down on him even harder.

  Goddess, it felt so good! That thick shaft plunging all the way to the balls, the penetration exquisite as it hit sensitive nerves buried deep . . . Biting her lip, she started plunging thrusts, shivering as he filled her hard with every rise and fall.

  Rhys reached between them, slid a finger between her vaginal lips to seek her clit. But with her driving so hard, he had trouble finding the rhythm.

  With a restless growl, he sent magic rolling from that teasing finger. It felt like a hot mouth sealed over her clit.

  Olivia cried out, the sound high and shocked. And rode harder, faster, loving the sensation of being so thoroughly stuffed as a phantom tongue swirled over her clit. Writhing, she slid up and down the thick shaft, her head thrown back so that her long hair danced over them both.

  Rhys lifted his head, his expression savage, teeth clenched with effort as he ground up at her, golden eyes wild. One big hand gripped a handfu
l of comforter and pulled tight. The thick tendons stood up in his throat and his face flushed as his orgasm built.

  He did something with his magic, tightening around her clit in wet, delicious friction even as his cock slammed to its full depth inside her.

  Olivia came screaming, lost and maddened in the sheer perfect pleasure of it. Rhys roared back, a deep, leonine sound.

  And came.

  Magic exploded around them, a fountain of swirling blue and yellow sparks. There was no green at all.

  Olivia felt his big body start to drop under her—she’d almost lost the spell, dammit—but she caught him and herself, and lowered them both to the bed. She collapsed atop him with a heartfelt groan, sweating and ecstatic.

  “That . . .” he panted,” . . . didn’t last quite as long as I’d hoped.”

  “We’ll just have to try harder next time.”

  He snorted. “I’m not sure I’ll survive the next time.”

  Olivia collapsed next to him on the bed, breathing hard. A piece of fabric flopped under her hand. She lifted her head to look at it and laughed. “You tore the hell out of the comforter.”

  He rose onto his elbows and eyed the shredded fabric with a grin. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Then she frowned. Olivia had spent enough time using a sword to know what a blade puncture looked like. “Wait, that’s not a rip. It’s a slice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  They got up and flipped back to the comforter to find she was right. The punctures went all the way into the mattress. “It looks like claw marks.”

  Rhys stared at them, a muscle rolling in his jaw. “Am I a werewolf?”

  “Werewolves don’t use magic, so you’re definitely not a were.”

  “But I’m something,” he said grimly. He hadn’t looked that shaken when the gang of werewolves were getting ready to rip him apart. “And I don’t think it’s human.”

  Olivia frowned, studying him. He meant it. “Don’t be ridiculous. You may have abilities that we don’t understand, but you’re the same man that you always were—the same good man.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” She lifted a hand to cup his cheek, urging him to meet her eyes. “Rhys, you came to the rescue of a woman you found curled up on a park bench freezing to death. A woman you didn’t know.”

  He shook his head. “Anybody would have.”

  “No, not anybody. And anybody sure as hell wouldn’t have stood his ground before a pack of werewolf assassins.” She waved at the claw marks. “That’s a feature, not a bug. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need all your powers if we want to survive.”

  A fine muscle flexed in his jaw. “One way or another, we’ve got to figure out what I am. Whatever abilities I have, I can only use them if I know what they are.” He reached down to the mattress, hovered his hand over the puncture marks. Blue sparks drifted down from his palm. When they vanished, the mattress and sheets were whole again. “And that means we’re going to have to go talk to my parents, find out what they know.”

  Rhys turned to the bedside table where a cell phone lay. He picked it up and began typing, his thumbs dancing in the practiced way that reminded her he was a millennial.

  When it came to texting, Olivia herself was all thumbs. Clumsy, clumsy thumbs. “What are you doing?”

  “Texting my mother.” He stuck the phone in a pocket. “She helps my dad run his carpentry business. She’ll text back when she gets a chance. Either way, we probably won’t be able to talk to them until seven o’clock or so. In the meantime, I have some other calls to make.”

  “Do you want some privacy?”

  He gave her a smile at that, though it looked a little absent. “No, though I’m not sure you’ll find it particularly interesting. Just me making a living. Shouldn’t take long. Then after that, I’d like you to demonstrate those magical techniques you mentioned earlier, the ones that work against werewolves. I want to be ready for the furry bastards the next time they show up.”

  “I have to agree with you there.” Olivia followed him out of the room and across the hall.

  By now she wasn’t surprised to find that built-in bookshelves covered three walls of Rhys’s home office. Books—paperbacks and hardback—shared space with vases and graceful statuary in bronze and marble. The fourth wall held a fifty-inch flat screen.

  But the focus of the room was a massive oak desk with geometric carving and a leather executive desk chair. Dropping into the chair, he opened his laptop and booted it up.

  Olivia settled into one of the armchairs sitting across from the desk. “What is it that you do, if you don’t mind blatant nosiness?”

  He glanced up and gave her a smile. “Play the stock market.”

  Olivia’s brows lifted. “Judging from the Porsche—not to mention this house—you must play well. How’d you get started doing that?”

  He shrugged. “When I was a kid, my mother did a little bit of investing, more as a hobby than anything else. She got me involved, too, but I think her real objective was to foster an interest in math. Every night we’d sit down together and watch CNBC. One day we were watching the ticker and I pointed out one particular stock and told her it was going to drop thirteen points the next day. And it did—by exactly thirteen points.”

  Olivia’s eyebrows flew up. “You have the Sight?”

  He waggled one hand in a “kinda” gesture. “It seems more reliable when it comes to picking stocks. When it comes to actual life events . . .” He shrugged. “Depends.”

  “With the Sight, it usually does,” Olivia agreed dryly. “At least from what I understand. It’s not one of my talents.”

  Rhys nodded. “At first, Mom assumed it was a coincidence. So I started trying to predict the market as a game, experiment, whatever. Turned out I was always right. All I had to do was look at a stock and I had a fair idea what it would do the next day. It wasn’t long before I started playing the market with my allowance. Paid off, so Mom encouraged me to plow the money I made right back into investing. By the time I got out of high school, I’d financed my college tuition.”

  “And you just own one Porsche? With talent like that, you could buy a garage full of cars, plus a multimillion-dollar mansion and your own island.”

  He grinned crookedly. “That’d just be tacky.”

  “Okay, so I’m crass. What do you do with the money?”

  “Invest in assorted business ventures, mostly high tech. And there are various charities I give money to.”

  “I’m surprised the SEC hasn’t investigated you.”

  “They probably would, if I weren’t careful to lose occasionally. And I’m damned careful not to break any laws.”

  “Rhys, you’re using magic to play the stock market.”

  “Which is not against the law.”

  She grinned. “Okay, yeah.”

  “So what do you do?”

  Olivia shrugged. “This and that. I’ve been an artist, a soldier, a spy, a reporter a few times, a shopkeeper, a midwife, a courtesan during a particularly suicidal patch, captain of a merchant vessel, and my own heir whenever one of my identities started getting inconveniently old. At the moment, I run a high-end antiques store, though I’m older than most of my stock.”

  “Well, given that you’re two hundred years old . . .”

  “Closer to three, actually.”

  His eyes gleamed with curiosity, but before he could ask whatever question he had in mind, his phone began emitting the clink of coins and the first few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Money.”

  Rhys sighed. “Annnnd . . . I’ve got a call. Excuse me.” He picked up his cell. Olivia, who knew a bit about financial matters, understood only one word in ten of the call that followed.

  Deciding to give him some privacy, she got up and slipped out.

  * * *
<
br />   A couple of hours later, they sat down to a lunch of vegetable soup and thick ham and cheese sandwiches.

  Licking mayo off her thumb, Olivia asked, “So what did your parents think of your magical abilities?”

  Rhys popped a pretzel into his mouth and crunched thoughtfully. “The stock thing was really the first magic I worked—if you can call it that. Mom taught chemistry and physics in high school, and she didn’t believe in magic. But by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I started developing abilities we couldn’t explain any other way: levitating objects, doing little fireworks displays, that kind of thing.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t end up outing us all.”

  He gave her a dry look. “I read comic books and science fiction. I was afraid of ending up in a government lab somewhere, so I was really careful about when and where I did my tricks.” The humor drained from his eyes. “I was in the ninth grade when this older kid decided I’d make a good victim. He was a football player—had about thirty pounds on me, a lot of it muscle. Got me down and started just beating the hell out of me.”

  Olivia winced. “What did you do?”

  “I lost my temper and gave him one of my bottle rocket spells right in the face. Made a loud boom. A teacher witnessed the whole thing, so I got suspended for bringing fireworks to school.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t expelled.”

  “I probably would’ve been, but nobody could find any evidence. No surprise, since it hadn’t been fireworks. No gunpowder smell, no actual bottle rocket. I didn’t really hurt the other kid, though I did scare the living hell out of him. He did rather more damage to me, including a black eye and a split lip, so he got suspended, too.”

  “Bet he never messed with you again.”

  He smiled slightly. “You’d win that bet.”

  “So what did you think about your magic?”

  “Like I said, I always figured I was a mutant. My parents certainly couldn’t do anything like that.”

  “What was their theory?”

  “My mother pointed out I was lucky I didn’t burn the kid. She advised me to practice with my magic, figure out how it worked, and make sure I never hurt anybody by accident.” His lips twitched. “My father, on the other hand, hired this ex-Navy SEAL bricklayer he knew to teach me Krav Maga. Said the next time some asshole tried to beat me up, he wanted me to give him more than a light show.”