My Forbidden Desire Read online

  “Huh?” Whoever was at the door knocked again.

  Three times. Very slowly. Very loudly. Jerk. “Should I get that?” she asked.

  He frowned. “I’m trying to save you from yourself, Alexandrine.”

  Right. He wanted to save her from herself. What a laugh that was, if only he knew. “Too late, bro. I’m a big girl now. All grown up.”

  “Alexandrine—”

  “I’ll be twenty-six in three months. More than old enough to have a job, pay taxes, drink hard liquor, and vote for president. At the same time if I want.”

  “I understand you’re no longer a child.”

  The last time she’d seen her brother, she’d still been living at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, without any pressing need for a brassiere. Massachusetts was three thousand miles away from the City by the Bay, where her brother had gone to do medical research at the University of California at San Francisco. Her big brother the doctor. Mom and Dad were so proud. And then he disappeared. Dropped off the face of the earth. Presumed dead.

  Right.

  Not so dead after all.

  “Things do change, don’t they?” she said.

  Harsh’s phone pinged again. He answered it with, “I told you, five minutes.” He touched the screen to disconnect the call, and by coincidence, Mr. Impatient outside her apartment bammed a fist on her door. Great. The neighbors were going to love that. They were probably calling the landlord now.

  “I don’t need protection,” she said. And the minute she said it, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach because, hell, maybe she did. “I’ve been on my own a long time, Harsh.”

  He stopped pacing. She didn’t remember his eyes being such a piercing brown. She couldn’t dismiss the creepy thought that something more was living behind her brother’s eyes. That gave her the shivers, legitimate shivers, not premonition shivers. “When was the last time you talked to Mom and Dad?” he asked.

  They’d been so busy reestablishing their relationship that she hadn’t gotten around to catching him up on family news. “Talked to Dad two years ago.” True statement. Harsh understood there was more and that she was baiting him. But he refused to step in it. Killjoy. “He’s dead. Heart attack.”

  “I didn’t know.” He closed his fingers around his vibrating phone. “What about Mom?”

  Yeah. So where the hell had her brother been that he didn’t know anything at all? Turning into a freak didn’t stop you from using Google or reading the paper, did it? Or getting on the phone, for that matter. The parents who had raised him and put him through college and medical school, which they would probably have done for her if she’d been a genius, too, had been destroyed, because they thought he was dead. “She’s gone, too, Harsh. About eight years ago now.”

  For half a second, his expression was the Harsh Marit she’d missed every day for the last ten years of her life. Her chest went tight, and she had to concentrate to keep the tears away. They’d missed so much of each other’s lives, and now that he was back, she didn’t want him to leave again. Harsh was all she had left.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Finally, he asked, “What happened?”

  “Cancer.” She let out a breath. “Ironic, wouldn’t you say? Her son, the brilliant oncologist, wasn’t around to save her life.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, and she felt rotten for the low blow.

  “Look,” she said. She scrubbed her fingers through her above-the-shoulders-length hair. “I’m sorry. That was unfair and not very nice. I didn’t mean it.”

  “You’re right.” He fisted a hand. “I wasn’t there.” He was quiet for a bit, then said in a much lower voice, “I wish I’d been there to help her.”

  Alexandrine waited for him to tell her where he’d been all this time. He didn’t. Again. “So, like I said,” she said. “I’ve been on my own a long time. And nothing all that bad happened.” But then, bad encompassed such a wide and varied spectrum. Bad included skipping meals to make the rent. Or getting evicted. Or hanging with a very rough crowd and wondering if you’d make it to twenty-one. “I left home, banged around a while, saw the sights. Did some stuff. Went to college.”

  She’d done things she wasn’t going to talk about with anybody. “Now I have a job. I make shit money, but they let me telecommute two days a week.” She held his gaze. “I rent this lovely hovel in the most beautiful city in the world.” She tilted her head back and looked around her Mission District apartment. Ugly one-bedroom for fourteen hundred bucks a month, and she was lucky to have something that cheap. She brought her attention back to her brother. Ten years was a long time to vanish from someone’s life. “I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  Harsh was taller than she was, which, considering she was five-eleven when she slouched, meant he was tall. Tall. Handsome. Doctor. Where the hell had he been for all those years when she could have used a big brother?

  “I didn’t imagine you were,” he said.

  “Where have you been, Dr. Marit?” Sarcasm was her specialty. A useful skill in her opinion.

  He walked from her crapola analog television to her jam-packed bookcase and back. “I can’t tell you.” Mr. Impatient knocked on the door, and Harsh’s cell phone rang. At the same time.

  “Golly, Harsh, why don’t you tell the guy to go get a life?”

  He looked at her. Very unsettling, that piercing look. The skin on her arms prickled again. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been.” He frowned in the direction of the door. “Can we just leave it at that?”

  “The land of Oz? Siberia? Witness Protection? Off to find your birth parents like me? Timbuktu? No, wait, that was me.”

  “You went to Timbuktu?”

  “Uh-huh. And you? The Arctic? Prison?” That got her a poisonous look. “You don’t have any tats. If you were in prison, you’d have the body art.” Which she knew on account of the fact that for longer than she cared to recall, her bosom buddies were felons, complete with homemade tats. She cocked her head. “You were in the military, weren’t you?” Who else had the ability to make a person completely disappear? “Government something. Am I right?”

  Harsh stared at her. She didn’t think he was going to answer, but instead, Dr. Harsh Marit, her adored big brother, clapped a hand behind his neck and said in a dark, raspy voice, “Prison would be a more accurate description of where I’ve been.”

  The desolation in his voice popped her angry-as-abee’s-burned-behind balloon. “What do you need from me, Harsh?”

  His damned phone went off again with a different ringtone. This time he answered with, “Harsh speaking.” She watched her brother listen to whoever was on the other end. “No. I’m here. Yeah.” He darted a glance at her. She didn’t recognize the man behind those eyes. She rubbed the sides of her arms, but it didn’t make the goose pimples go away. “Not yet. He’s outside. Yes. Yes. I know. I will.” Then he lost it and burst out with, “For Christ’s sake, Nikodemus, she thought I was dead. Cut me a break, would you?”

  Alexandrine rose. Her pulse thudded in her ears. The nervous feeling in her stomach refused to go away. Nikodemus? Now there was a name to make a girl sit up. Especially if she was a witch.

  “Yes,” he replied more easily, still talking into the phone. His eyes were hard again, flat-out pitiless, and Alexandrine wondered what horrible things her brother had endured while he’d been gone. A motorcycle engine revved outside. One of those loud, obnoxious bikes driven by jackass men in leather pants.

  Harsh disconnected his call, lifted his head, and then touched his phone again. After a bit, he said, “Don’t you dare leave.” He was staring at her. “You want Nikodemus on your ass instead of just me?” he said into the phone.

  Well, shit. That gave her another jolt and a half. Him saying a name she’d read about in the books she’d managed to scavenge. Nikodemus? No effing way. She got an all-body chill like you would if you found out Jack the Ripper not only wasn’t dead but also lived next door.

 
“Park the damn bike and come in. I’ll open the door for you.”

  “News flash, Dr. Marit.” She sure as hell didn’t want to meet any of his friends. “I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it since before you disappeared.”

  Harsh closed his phone and drew a deep breath. “Not against these guys.”

  “What guys?”

  The motorcycle cut off.

  “The guys who don’t give a shit if you die as long as they get what they’re after.”

  “What?” That happened to be the only word she could find to say, and it came out sounding like smart-ass disbelief, which wasn’t what she intended at all. It was just that this was too perfectly timed with her premonition for her not to be thinking, Here it is.

  “This is what I want from you, Alexandrine.” His gaze pinned her. Gloves off, metaphorically speaking. “I want him to stay here.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  Harsh laughed, only without actually laughing. “With him here, no one gets to you.”

  Her brain froze up. Pure ice between her ears. The moment of decision was here. Ringing her doorbell, actually. This really was it. The decision, only she still didn’t know which way she needed to go. Was the guy on the other side of the door a one or a zero?

  After Harsh went to let in his employee from Human Protective Services, there wasn’t any sound in her shitty apartment. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was alone. But she wasn’t. Harsh was at the door, making goo-goo eyes at it for all she knew. She addressed his back. “I found my biological father.”

  He turned around just as Mr. Impatient and I Have a Motorcycle knocked. His eyes lasered her. “You did not.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I did. In Turkey. A little village about two hundred kilometers north of Ankara.”

  Harsh opened the door and said, “Not in Turkey you didn’t.”

  He was right about that. “I found out who he is when I was in Turkey.” She waited a beat. “Seems I was born in Turkey. But my dad’s Danish. Go figure. His name is Rasmus Kessler, in case you’re interested.”

  He kept his hand on the knob. The door was about an inch or so open. It was impossible to see who was on the other side. “You didn’t meet him. You couldn’t have.”

  “How do you know?”

  In the light where he was standing, it looked like his eyes changed color. Not possible, but that’s what it looked like. “Because if you had, Alexandrine, you’d be dead.”

  Chapter 2

  Alexandrine watched her front door swing open. Harsh was facing away from her like he’d never said her biological father would want to kill her. Great. Just really great. As if he knew anything at all about her real father. He hadn’t even known their adoptive parents were dead. And he didn’t know anything at all about her. Not anymore.

  The door opened enough for her to see past her brother. She got a chill in the pit of her stomach a hundred times worse than before. One thing was profoundly clear to her: Her brother had just let a killer into her apartment. She was too frightened to notice much besides black clothes and a pair of freakishly blue eyes that had to be a trick of the light outside her door. No way. Just no way, ever. The human eye didn’t come in that color. Alexandrine brushed past Harsh and stuck out a hand, palm out. Perfect timing because Blue Eyes walked smack into her hand. He stopped; she’d gotten to him just inside the doorway.

  “I’m Alexandrine Marit,” she said. Her stomach roiled. Shit, this was worse than anything she’d ever felt before. And the freaky thing was that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. The crisis must be huge. Life changing, of that she had no doubt. But whatever it was hadn’t hit critical yet. When it did, she’d know what to do. She hoped. She always had before. “This is my place you’re barging into.”

  He stared down at her, and her blood froze solid. If she hadn’t been so mad at Harsh, she wouldn’t have gotten within six feet of this guy. She knew bad when she looked it in the eye, and she preferred not to. God knows she’d lived with that kind of bad after she left home. Gave a girl some painful lessons. Harsh’s buddy was scary-bad. Scar-ier than Harsh. She wasn’t at all sure it was a good idea to have Harsh in the apartment, let alone another man just like him, only worse.

  “So?” Blue Eyes said. One word and it was golden. The man had a beautiful voice. The better to take your soul, my dear.

  She had to tilt her chin to look into his face, and that didn’t happen to her often. He wore leather pants, black gloves, black boots, and a zipped-up leather jacket. Black, of course. A motorcycle helmet was tucked under one arm. Ah. The jackass on the bike. Up close, his eyes remained a freaky neon blue. “Nice to meet you, whoever you are.” She gave him a fake smile and hoped he didn’t notice she was trembling. “But I don’t want you here. I’m sorry Harsh wasted your time. Go home.”

  Nothing happened. No change whatsoever in her premonition state; no sense of relief at having done the right thing. No diminution in her physical reactions. And no sense of what it was she was supposed to do to avoid the bad. But nothing was worse, either.

  “Alexandrine,” Harsh said from behind her.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “You are not,” she said without smiling, “the boss of me.”

  Harsh shook his head. One of those secret communication head shakes. Not directed at her but at his Painful-Death-is-my-middle-name buddy. She whipped her head back to the man in front of her.

  Blue Eyes stared at her hand on his leather jacket like she’d just slimed him, and then he stared at her. She had time to register the fact that he was gorgeous. The way a tiger is gorgeous. Not one in the zoo, either, but a wild one. One who hadn’t eaten in a week and thought she looked like dinner in an easy-open package. He stood a head taller than her without even trying. “Fuck off, witch.”

  Well. That sure let the cat out of the bag, now, didn’t it? How the hell did he know that? Or maybe he was just lucky in his choice of name to call her.

  “O-kaaay,” she whispered.

  He sidestepped her and headed for Harsh. She turned around and got a view of him from the back. Right. Black leather. There weren’t many guys who could pull off black leather. His leathers had a lived-in look, and he totally pulled it off without looking like a doof. He and Harsh did some complicated hand thing with each other. All very male bondingish.

  “Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

  Blue Eyes turned his head to look at her. “Yeah.” His gaze traveled up and down her in a slow, half-curious, half-insulting sexual examination. “And then I said fuck off. Maybe you should go do that.”

  Alexandrine started a silent count to ten. She got to three. “Get him out of here, Harsh.”

  Harsh took a deep breath. “Alexandrine, this is Xia. As you may have guessed, he’s a barbarian. Xia, my sister Alexandrine. She’s off limits.”

  She made a face at them both. “Charmed, I’m not. Get out.”

  Harsh gave her a poisonous look, but Xia got one, too. At least they were even in the deadly glare department. “Both of you need to behave. Please.”

  Xia threw his helmet on her couch and then threw his very large body after it. She was damn lucky he didn’t break anything. He picked up one of her purple silk accent pillows and tossed it at the opposite end of the couch. Apparently, purple offended him. Then he unzipped his jacket and draped his arms along the back of the sofa. Was her couch too girly for him? Black velvet with purple and turquoise pillows wasn’t manly enough? Come on. She hoped her girly couch was killing him. His T-shirt was plain white and tucked into his pants. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t even the tiniest bit of excess anything protruding over his waist. Single-digit percent body fat. The guy was seriously scary.

  “Make yourself at home,” she said. “You have five minutes.”

  “Xia,” Harsh said. He tugged on his long hair. “For just once, could you pretend to be civilized?”

  “What for?”

  “Are all your new fri
ends this nice, Harsh?” Alexandrine asked.

  Xia glared at her. She looked at her brother for a bit. No help was coming from him. She studied Xia, hoping for some inspiration about how to dislodge him from her couch. The hilt of a knife stuck out of a dull black sheath clipped to his waist. A shiver of fear rolled down her spine at the sight of the weapon, and, creepily, Xia smiled like he could taste her reaction.

  Another shiver jellied her knees. She knew in her bones he’d used that knife to kill people and wouldn’t think twice about doing so again. She needed every ounce of her nerve to turn her back on him. “Okay, Harsh. You need to explain this.” She held up her hands. Thank God they didn’t shake. What the hell kind of trouble was headed her way that Harsh wanted someone like Xia staying with her? “You need to tell me exactly why you want Killer here to stay. You owe me that much.”

  Harsh sat on her favorite recliner. Also black velvet. “You e-mailed Álvaro Magellan.”

  “So?” What witch worth her soul didn’t want to meet the great Álvaro Magellan? Not that Harsh knew that. Except, he knew about Magellan, and he knew about her e-mail. Her stomach got tight with tension.

  “And you sent a photograph.”

  “It wasn’t a kinky shot.” Her joke might as well have been attached to a lead balloon. Ka-thud. She itched between her shoulder blades, but she didn’t check to see if Xia was staring at her back. He was. She felt his stare in her bones the way you feel the one from a psychopathic axe murderer sizing you up as his next victim. But he wasn’t an axe murderer. If anything, he was a knife murderer but not intending, yet, to use his on her. “So?”

  “So, Alexandrine, there are people who know about you now.” Harsh leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. He blew out a breath to get his hair off his face. Another chill ran down her spine. For the first time since he’d decided to pop back into her life, he was telling her the unvarnished truth. “People who won’t hesitate to kill you for that amulet.”