Storm's Fury Page 3

  His brows drew together even as a slow smile spread over his handsome face, but Stormy didn’t let his amusement faze her as she scooted to the other side of the large, too comfortable bed, and slid off. He moved to come around the bed and Stormy released the blankets and pushed her hands out toward him to fend him off. “Stay away from me. I have friends. They’ll start to miss me, and when they do you’ll be the sorriest man walking the face of the planet.”

  His expression was impassive, with the exception of one quirked dark eyebrow. “I see. And who are these friends of yours?”

  She stumbled, bent, and picked up her shoes. “That’s none of your business, but if you try to stop me from leaving, they’ll be all over you.” Stormy took a hesitant step for the door.

  He moved a fraction of an inch in her direction. At least she thought he did, or had she merely blinked? Before she could figure it out, he unleashed a low, velvety soft chuckle that was entirely too disarming.

  “Weren’t you taught that lying is a sin?”

  She’d never been a good liar. Sure, she could pretend with the best of them, but outright lying? Well, that wasn’t one of her particular talents. And the fact that he’d figured that out so easily pissed her off.

  “Weren’t you taught that kidnapping is against the law?” she snapped back. If he was anyone else she would have stared him down, but the jackass he was, he’d probably enjoy it.

  She turned her attention to the room instead. It was beautiful, with a high beamed ceiling and an open loft set off to the right. The loft’s only entrance was a dangerous-looking spiral wooden staircase without hand railings.

  He must have the dexterity of a cat.

  The walls were made of treated logs, lending a rustic feel to the space. The logs also added an up-tempo elegance that she couldn’t quite define. If this room was any indication, the rest of the home had to be an architect’s dream. A large bay window made up the entire left wall. It looked out into sheer darkness that should have terrified her. It didn’t. There was an intricate pattern carved into the headboard of the huge four-poster bed, but she couldn’t make sense of it. It looked like a weird form of hieroglyphics. The most spectacular feature, however, was the large stone fireplace built across one corner of the room. A large wardrobe stood catty-corner from it.

  She could envision herself stretched out on her back on the thick black rug laid in front of the fireplace. Her body naked and burning with need for him.

  Stormy blinked away her wanton thoughts and looked down at the floor to hide her embarrassment. He couldn’t have known what she was thinking, but if he looked at her right now, she was sure he would see her deepest secrets and desires.

  “Do you like it?” He strolled across the room, flipped a switch to ignite a blaze in the hearth, and leaned back against the mantle. His muscular arms crossed over his broad, sexy-as-hell chest.

  Stormy clutched her shoes to her chest and defiantly kept her head high and her back straight. “I don’t have to like it. I’m leaving.”

  “And where exactly will you go? Back to that filthy alley where I found you?”

  “Where I go is none of your damn business.” She stood up on her toes and tried to peer over the bed to the floor on the opposite side. “Just give me my damn purse, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “What if I don’t want you out of my…hair?” His voice was entirely too smooth for her liking, and to top it off, he had the faintest accent, which she couldn’t place. Holy hell, if the man kept talking to her she was going to drop her panties and beg him to screw her into a coma.

  “You don’t know me well enough to want me in your…hair.” She set her jaw. “Now, where’s my purse?”

  “Your purse?” He hadn’t moved from his perch against the mantel, though he did shift, crossing his feet at the ankles. “Could you describe it?”

  “Do you have so many women here you don’t know which woman owns what purse?” Stormy rolled her eyes, her hands going to her hips as she glared at him. All she wanted was to make it out of there with her sanity intact.

  She wasn’t asking for much—she wasn’t.

  Scratching at her right wrist, she shifted from one foot to the other. Why the hell was he standing there staring at her with his coal-black hair, thick luscious eyelashes, and his full kiss-me-now lips? Nobody should look that good. She wanted to look away, to say something insulting to him to bruise his ego, but instead she found her eyes roaming the length of his body as if she were some oversexed teenager.

  She’d never acted like this with anyone. Sure, women said that kind of crap all the time, but she honestly had never been this hot and bothered in her life. Okay, so maybe she’d had the prerequisite high school crush. The occasional wet dream about some nameless stranger, and made it to second base once or twice. But Stormy had never gone all the way with anyone. It wasn’t necessarily because she didn’t want to. It was more because to do so would have only complicated her life more.

  For as long as she could remember, her senile old grandmother had preached to her about the value of holding onto her virtue, of waiting for her white knight. It was crap, the stuff of fairytales, but she’d listened because it took too much energy not to. After her grandmother had died, Stormy went to live with, or rather take care of, her father—God bless his drunken soul. That hadn’t allowed for any personal petting time with anyone. And after he’d died, well, it had been a constant fight just to stay alive. So yeah, sex had always been something of an afterthought.

  But now, as she stood there staring, she could barely contain the need to push him down and straddle him. To reenact every fantasy, dream, and wicked desire she’d ever entertained. She wanted to feel his hands on her. She wanted the taste of him on her tongue, and she wanted to feel the weight of his body on hers as he slid deep inside her, filling her and touching her in places no one had ever touched before.

  Stormy shook her head, determined to halt that dangerous chain of thought. “Look, whoever you are, give me my purse and I’ll be on my way. We can forget this ever happened. I won’t go to the police or tell anyone. It can be our little secret. Promise.”

  “I’m Furiosus, son of Anubis, but you may call me Fury.” He said it with a slow drawl and such casualness she nearly missed the oddity of his statement.

  Stormy blinked, shook her head, and backed away from him. “What did you say?”

  “You may call me Fury?”

  “No, you jackass. Before that. You’re the son of whom?”

  Fury grinned at her. It was a feral smile, but something about it and the way he looked at her made all the instincts in her body—except the horny and wicked ones—go straight to sleep.

  For the first time, she noticed the sharp pointed edges of two tattoos sticking out from beneath the short sleeves of his button down shirt. Each point stopped mid-bicep after making what had to be a wicked spiral around his upper arms. He moved a fraction of an inch, causing the material of his shirt to shift and just like that, the tats vanished.

  Stormy prayed he hadn’t noticed her interest. From the time she was a little girl, she’d always had a fascination with body art. She, of course, didn’t have any herself since she was deathly afraid of needles, but she loved seeing it on other people—piercings, tattoos, the whole shebang.

  She shook her head and tried to recover from her moment of insanity. “Great, I’ve been kidnapped by a nut case.”

  “I’m certainly a lot of things, but a nut case I’m not.” He pushed off the mantle and moved toward the door, his steps sure and quick. “I’ll locate your purse.”

  “And then you’ll let me leave?” She already knew the answer to that.

  Fury turned to look at her. “We can discuss it when I return.”

  “Discuss it? There’s nothing to discuss, you crazy jerk! You can’t keep me here. This is America, not wherever the heck you’re from. Kidnapping is against the law, and for kidnapping someone like me, punishable by death.” It was an idle threat, b
ut he didn’t need to know that.

  “Death? Exactly who do you think you are that your human authorities would kill me for taking you?” He grinned, his gray eyes glinting with mischief.

  “Don’t you worry about who I am. All you need to understand is that if I’m not taken back to the exact spot where you took me from in thirty minutes, there will be hell to pay.” Damn, she was stretching the truth. No, she was reinventing it. She hadn’t had a true family since the night her mother was murdered. Or was it the night her aunt disappeared? Or maybe, just maybe, the night her grandmother drove her car off a cliff?

  “I see.” He paced the area between the fireplace and the door, his hands shoved in his pockets. He paused momentarily, ran one large hand down the side of his face, and then across his kiss-me-now lips before he spoke quietly. “You keep saying I kidnapped you, but wouldn’t that mean I took you from someone who wanted you?” He started pacing again, his eyes trained on her face for what seemed like forever before he began visually devouring her. “From the way you’re dressed, I would be hard-pressed to believe that anybody anywhere would ever miss you.”

  Stormy stumbled back, shocked at his knifing comment, but he was right. She didn’t have anyone waiting on her, or a place to go, with the exception of her motel room. If he wanted to keep her here for eternity, no one would ever miss her. There was no one to report her missing to the police. Once her deposit ran out, the motel personnel would go into her room and divvy up her meager belongings. In the blink of an eye, every trace of her would be gone.

  She shook her head in an attempt to shake the pain of his words away, her gaze focused on the floor beneath her bare, un-pedicured toes. The truth was a son of a bitch and it hurt like hell, but she’d be damned if she allowed him to see that his words had any effect on her.

  “Give me my damn purse,” she ordered as she glared up at him, her tone filled with renewed defiance.

  He took a cautious step in her direction, an expression she didn’t quite understand crossing over his face. If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve said that fleeting look could’ve been regret. But he was her kidnapper. He wouldn’t care whether he hurt her feelings or not.

  “Stay the hell away from me.” Stormy backed away until she was against the wall, and then slid down it to the floor. She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them as she inhaled slowly, and then exhaled. “Just stay away from me.” She closed her eyes and chanted softly. “I’m Dorothy, this is Oz, and when I open my eyes I’ll be back on the farm with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry.”

  I wish I could stay away from you.

  Fury wanted to turn away and leave her to her own devices. Unfortunately, the part of him that was once buried deep now stood at the forefront, and it wanted to go to her and pull her onto his lap, to kiss her pain away and make her understand that he was new to this chosen thing. It wanted to tell her that he didn’t yet understand what he could and couldn’t say, or how to say it. It wanted to make her understand that his people were a straightforward bunch who knew no other way but to speak the truth, regardless of how much it hurt. And he wanted to tell her, to make her understand that though he was thankful for this chance, he had no room in his life for her. His days and nights were filled with his need for vengeance.

  Even as those thoughts filled his mind, he called to her. “Ambrosia.” The shared pain in her chest was a terrible thing against his soul. She didn’t respond or look at him, but he continued. “I can’t allow you to leave, but I will retrieve your purse.” No, he couldn’t allow her to leave. He could never allow her to leave.

  He left the room to retrieve her purse from the alley where she must have left it and to give her some privacy, but curiosity got the best of him.

  Fury dissolved into water molecules instead and slipped back in the room via the crack beneath the door. Had he been in human form, his heart would have rattled within his chest as her sorrow at his insensitive choice of words and actions beat against his soul.

  She sniffled, and began weeping softly while mumbling incoherently about Kansas and a dog named Toto.

  Fury had seen enough—he floated out of the bedroom, through the house, and out into the night.

  He could command the fiery pits of Hell, seek and control the minds of animals, become the rain falling from the heavens or the fog rolling in off the bay. But the farther and the faster he traveled away from her, the more he understood that her pain would never be something he could outrun or overcome.

  Chapter Four

  The moment Stormy opened her eyes, she accepted that everything that had happened the night before was not a drug-induced hallucination. She wasn’t lying in the rat-infested motel room that had been home for the past couple of weeks. Noise from the Price is Right wasn’t blasting through the paper-thin pastel walls, and she didn’t hear any traffic outside. She was lying in the lap of luxury, beneath a plush blanket of dark fur, and surrounded by overly fluffed pillows and deafening silence.

  She peered around the room looking for him, for Fury—the pompous idiot who had kidnapped her, sent her hormones into overdrive, and insulted her. She was alone, which was nothing new. But this time, and for reasons she couldn’t explain, she felt more alone than she ever had before. Instead of evaluating why she was feeling this way, she steadied her mind and focused her attention on maiming her captor the moment she glimpsed the first flicker of his gorgeous gray irises.

  Stormy scanned the room, looking for a way out other than the door sitting directly across the room from her—a very noticeable last resort. He would be expecting it. If he thought for one second she was some pathetic twit of a woman who was simply going to lie down and play the helpless victim, then he needed to rethink his plans. She hadn’t survived on the streets this long by being a pushover, and she wasn’t going to start being one now.

  “Don’t you let them fuck you. You gotta fuck them first.” Her father’s slurred voice whispered through her head, strengthening her resolve as she climbed out the bed and stalked to the enormous window.

  If there was a gold medal for drunkenness, her father would have won time and time again. Even so, during some of his most drunken stupors, he gave her the best advice of her life. Advice that, at the time, she’d thought was plain ridiculous and should not have been given to any child, anywhere, ever. However, when his liver failed and she found herself homeless at seventeen, his gibberish became indispensable.

  Running her hands over the plate glass confirmed her worst fear. Gorilla Glass. Shit! Stormy had had a run-in with Gorilla Glass a few years ago at a check cashing store in Seattle. The difference was then, unlike now, the glass had protected her from a would-be robber and his Tech-Nine sub machine gun, instead of holding her prisoner.

  If she had a jackhammer, earplugs, and the strength of a god, she’d never be able to break through it and escape. Hell, Fury would probably be onto her before she created a tiny fissure in the glass.

  She scowled at the landscape beyond the glass. The house was surrounded by a dense forest of lush evergreens and oak trees with sun-dappled, leafy branches that reached into the heart of the sky. As the clouds floated across the sun, dark shadows dipped and weaved among the foliage and scampered across the forest floor, like vampires trying to outsmart the sun.

  She had been a lot of places and seen quite a few things in her life, but views like this only existed in National Geographic.

  None of this was making any sense. Last night she had been in Atlantic City, surrounded by the urban jungle with its sky-kissing buildings, bums, and liquor stores on every corner. How the hell had she gotten here? And where the hell was “here”?

  One eyebrow rose and then fell as she narrowed her eyes and squinted at the far distance. Are those snow-capped mountains? No. Not freaking possible! She turned and slumped against the window. “What have I gotten myself into this time?”

  Stormy glanced around the room again, her eyes coming to rest on the central heating and air vent mounted
in the far wall, close to the ceiling. A ten-year veteran of anorexia wouldn’t be able to fit through it, so there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to. That left the chimney, but she wasn’t much of a climber and tight spaces scared the living shit out of her.

  She scanned the length of the room again, her eyes falling on a tall pitcher of crystal clear water and a glass sitting on the night stand before skidding away and toward the foot of the bed. My purse. He brought it to me. Stormy stepped to the bed, snatched her purse up and pawed through it. She pulled out the stun gun and set it on the bed, and then pulled out the cash she’d procured from Cruddy Face—Paul Sanderson. She counted the roll of twenty-dollar bills first, then the fifties, and finally the cash she’d pulled from his wallet.

  She counted it again before finally sinking down onto the bed and staring at the mounds of cash. “Six thousand, two hundred, and twelve dollars?” In all the time she’d been robbing johns, she had never gotten over thirty-five hundred in one go. Not only that, but throughout her entire work history, she couldn’t remember ever having that much cash at once.

  She could finally live for a few months without doing anything illegal or humiliating, and she had to go and get herself kidnapped. “Just my damn luck,” she growled, shoving the money back in her purse. She took a couple of deep breaths as she scooped up the stun gun and pushed to her feet. An idea born of desperation formed in her mind, and before she could talk herself out of it, Stormy strapped her purse on mailman-style and stomped to the door.

  “Hey! Hey, I need to go to the bathroom!” She waited impatiently, sparing only a second to make sure she had the voltage set to debilitate. When no one came, she yelled again. “I need to go to the bathroom! Open the damn door!” Her heart racing, she moved back from the door and shouted, “Well, I hope you like cleaning up piss off your floor!”

  There was a short silence and the door swung inward, revealing a sleepy looking, bare-chested Fury. Stormy met his drowsy stare a fraction of a second before she charged him. She planted the prongs in the center of his bare chest and pushed the lever.