muscular legs, wearing black slacks with a knife edge crease. Up past a flat abdomen and a broad chest covered by an open-throated, long-sleeved white shirt. Up beyond a square, hard jaw, a proud nose that had been broken at least once and into flat, dark eyes that stared, unblinking, down at her.
“Santos.”
He frowned, glanced up and down the street, then shifted his gaze back to her. “You again. How do you know my name? Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Erin pushed herself into a sitting position, dusted the palms of her hands together to get rid of the gravel biting into her skin, then glared right back at him. “I’ve come a long way to find you.”
“That explains nothing.” He set fisted hands on his hips.
She was tired, dirty, sore and oh, yes, terrified. So she wasn’t exactly feeling polite when she said, “I’ll explain everything. Later. Right now, I’d like to recover from someone just trying to run me down in the street.”
He nodded and shot a look in the direction the car had disappeared. “I saw it. I couldn’t reach you in time—”
“Someone did,” she pointed out.
“I saw that, as well.”
“You had quite the view, then.”
“Who are you?”
“Erin Brady,” she said and held one hand out toward him.
He looked at it for a long moment before grabbing it and yanking her to her feet in one smooth motion. “And I am Ricardo Esteban Amadeo Santos.”
“Wow.” She’d known the Santos part, but his whole name was magical and musical and…back on track, Erin.
“You have told me your name, woman. Not who you are.”
But Erin hardly heard him. At the first touch of his hand on hers, her mind had erupted with images. Visions rushed through her brain and she held her breath as she experienced them all in a heartbeat of time.
She and Santos. In bed. Limbs tangled on ivory sheets. His mouth on hers. His hands caressing. She felt the need swell within and heat filled her center, making her knees weak and her breath catch in her throat.
She tried to pull free, but his fingers tightened on hers. And in the space of a breath, the sultry, sexual images faded. Terrifying images swamped her. Darkness. Shifting shadows. Glittering knives. A palace of black stone that shone like obsidian under the light of an orange moon. Memory? One of his memories? They didn’t feel like memories though, and that scared her.
Erin swayed with the power rocketing through her.
“Woman?”
She couldn’t hear him.
Couldn’t hear anything but the screams rising up from the shadows in her mind.
Santos watched the woman’s eyes roll back in her head. Moving quickly, he caught her before she smacked down hard against the street. He heard each wrenching breath torn from her lungs and knew he couldn’t ignore her. Though truth be told, he would not have left her on the street anyway. Not until he discovered just who the hell she was and how she had come to haunt him, not only now but five hundred years before.
He looked down into her face and felt the strength of the connection that had been forged long ago. On the night of his death. When she had appeared to him on the heaving deck of the Niña, he’d thought at first she was an angel. A portent of death. And since he had died only moments after seeing her, that seemed a reasonable assumption.
Her features had danced through his dreams for centuries. Taunting, teasing, smiling at him in a way a woman does when desire takes her.
Santos swept the woman into his arms and simply held on to her for a long moment. His heartbeat hammered in his chest. His breath rushed in and out of his lungs. The woman from his dreams. Impossible to believe she was here. Warm and real and in his arms. The woman he’d seen the night he died. The woman who only yesterday had appeared before him on a city street.
He held her closer and narrowed his gaze. Instinct had him searching the area with a slow, thorough scan. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. The man who had saved her from the speeding car had disappeared as quickly as the threat.
He sniffed the air, but found no trace of a demon nearby. Finally, he shifted his gaze back to the woman lying unconscious in his grasp. She was short and curvy and her breasts rose and fell with her even breathing. He wanted her to wake up. Wanted to look into those emerald-green eyes again.
Wanted to know who the devil she was.
“Soon,” he whispered and bent to scoop her purse off the asphalt. Then he stalked to the drive, holding his own personal phantom close.
The magical wards set up around the perimeter of the property strained as he passed through them. Strong enough to keep out any demon that might try to invade the Guardian’s home, the protection spell allowed passage to all but the demon realm. Now, he thought that perhaps he should arrange for stronger wards. To keep out all but he and those who worked for him.
Moments ago, he’d been standing on the balcony of the great house hidden in the trees. He had seen the woman start across the street. Seen the car burst into life and charge at her—aiming directly at her. Seen the man come out of nowhere to push her to safety. All in a matter of seconds. He had been too far away to reach her and in that heartbeat of time, he’d felt more helpless—more powerless than ever before in his life. A man used to action, to protecting mortals, he had been forced to watch as a young woman faced her death. Only to see her survive.
At the memory, his arms tightened around her, pressing her body closer to his. He’d had no idea then that she was the woman he had dreamt of for centuries. No idea that she was somehow even more than that.
From the first instant he touched her, he’d felt it. A rush of…expectation. Of destiny. He wanted to shake it off, but that bone-deep realization would not fade. It was the sure and steady sense that nothing in his life would ever be the same again after today. That this woman was going to bring chaos and wonder into a world that had become commonplace.
But there was a part of him that resented her very presence. His life was as he had made it. As he wanted it. Introducing a woman—even this woman—into it was only asking for trouble.
She stirred as he crossed the meticulously kept lawn. Her amazing eyes opened and fixed on him. And for one brief moment, Santos indulged himself by looking into the depths of those eyes.
Then she spoke and the spell was shattered.
“Where are we going?”
His jaw tightened and his spine stiffened. He was a Guardian. No man to be waylaid by the promise of deep green eyes and a lush body. “My home.”
“Oh,” she said on a grateful sigh, “good.”
One eyebrow lifted. As much as he felt a connection to her, he was not ready to dismiss centuries of suspicion. “Do not think yourself a guest quite yet, woman. There are questions that must be answered.”
“That’s
