Hard Breaker Read online

  “What shall we say?”

  Ivy jerked her head forward and fixed her wide-eyed gaze on the computer monitor. A jolt of adrenaline temporarily wiped away the strain of fatigue. “Uh, um, what about something like this?”

  Her fingers flew as she composed a posting that said nothing specific, yet would be read by someone familiar with the Guild and the Guardians as highly significant. It helped that she had just written something very similar to Asile, and she borrowed heavily from that message.

  Baen leaned closer as he read the draft, his chest brushing up against her shoulder in a move that made her wonder if it was entirely accidental. Either way, it made her fight hard against a shiver of awareness. In the back of her mind, she realized that she had expected him to be cold for some reason, maybe because of the stone he resembled in his natural form, but she’d been wrong. The Guardian radiated heat, a heat she wanted to lean into and absorb through direct skin-to-skin contact.

  Down, girl.

  Oh, bollocks. She was losing her bloody mind here. She needed to get a grip.

  Ivy cleared her throat and tried to subtly scoot herself out of accidental touching range. Because that was all it could be, she assured herself—entirely accidental. “So, uh, what do you think? Will this work?”

  “There is only one way to know for certain,” Baen said, straightening. “Allow others to read this message and hope that among them, we can find my brothers.”

  “Okay, then.” Ivy clicked the button to post the ad and let out a sigh. The act seemed to drain the last of her energy, and she almost swayed on her feet when she stood up from the desk chair. “Now all we can do is wait, and I plan to wait while I’m unconscious. I really, really, really need to get some sleep.”

  She felt the Guardian rake his gaze over her, taking in her red and swollen eyes, her pale skin, and the subtle tremor in her arms and legs. “You have allowed yourself to become too exhausted,” he growled. “This is unacceptable. Where do you plan to rest this night?”

  “Uh, duh. Of course I’m exhausted.” She glared at him. “In case you didn’t notice, there were a lot of things I had to get done tonight. Did I hallucinate that you watched me do most of them? And where the heck do you think I’m sleeping? Like I told Martin, there are three bedrooms upstairs. I’m kind of assuming he’s only using one of them. I’ll take the second, and you can use the third.”

  Before she had more than the first few words out, Baen had reached out and swept her off her feet. Literally. It wasn’t terribly romantic, given he had just scolded her for something she hadn’t been able to avoid and she was in the process of chewing him out over that, but it happened nonetheless. When she mentioned the bedroom situation, he turned toward the hall and the stairs to the second floor. Carrying her. Like a toddler having a tantrum over nap time.

  Bad analogy, though, because Ivy wanted nothing more just then than a soft mattress and her warm blankie. Automatically she took a deep breath, gearing herself up to protest being manhandled, when a voice in her head demanded to know what was wrong with her. The Guardian wasn’t hurting her, and him carrying her would save her from expending energy she didn’t have to drag her drooping behind up a flight of stairs and down another hall to the place where she could finally get some sleep. Why shouldn’t she let him?

  “I have no need of more sleep,” Baen said. The words vibrated from his chest in a way she could actually feel as he cradled her against him. It felt almost like the purring of a really gigantic cat. She kind of liked it. “I have had my fill over the past few centuries. I will keep watch while you and the other Warden rest.”

  Ivy didn’t realize her eyes had closed until they flew open at the feel of being set down on a bed and covered with a thick duvet. She had missed most of the trip, her body giving out on her with the need to sleep. Now, the Guardian leaned over her, his face only inches from hers. Without her permission, her hand lifted from beneath the heavy cover and reached up to press her palm against his cheek. His skin felt at once both smooth and rough, like polished marble warmed by the sun and rough granite weathered by wind and rain.

  Or maybe that was just evening stubble. Whatever. Either way, it made her fingertips tingle.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, a tiny little chirping tried to tell her to stop! Back away! Run for her life! Avoid all entanglements! But Ivy was too tired to listen. Her eyes drifted shut again, and her lips curved in a small smile.

  “G’night, Guardian.”

  She slurred the words, already half asleep. But that didn’t prevent her from feeling the very distinct pressure of warm male lips pressed to hers for a lingering moment.

  “Good night, little Warden.” The deep, familiar voice caressed her as she drifted into oblivion. “Rest well. And dream of me.”

  * * *

  As tempted as he was to remain at her side and watch her sleep, Baen rose from his seat on the side of Ivy’s bed and forced himself to leave the room. The sight of her warm and relaxed in slumber tempted him on a level he had never before experienced, and that in itself was something that called for careful consideration.

  A Guardian was not supposed to form an attachment to any particular human. His kind existed in order to protect humanity as a whole, not to single out individuals for special favor. Never before in his long centuries of existence had he even considered anything different, but meeting the small female named Ivy had turned his entire world on its head.

  He padded down the stairs to the ground floor, his steps naturally silent even in his human guise, which had begun to chafe and bind like a set of clothes one size too small. He itched to return to his natural form, but such a confined space would barely accommodate his body, let alone his massive wings, so he would have to tough it out for a while longer.

  Might as well take advantage, he thought, and threw himself down backward onto the sofa in the modest living room. Couldn’t do that while wearing his wings.

  Baen stared up at the ceiling and tried to sort through the huge amount of information that had crashed down upon him since his waking. The fact that Ivy kept intruding into his thoughts didn’t help, but it did add to the evidence that had begun to pile up to indicate that this waking would turn out to be something very different from the ones in his past. Something strange was afoot here.

  It all had begun with the manner of his waking. He had been correct in thinking that neither Ivy nor the cowardly Warden, Martin, had intentionally summoned him from slumber. That counted as oddity number one. Like them, he had always believed that nothing else could penetrate the magical sleep that held the Guardians in stasis between the times when their aid was needed to battle against the Demons of the Darkness. All the legends indicated this.

  Well, all except one.

  Baen stacked his hands behind his head and let his mind settle on that particular legend. He had never paid that one much attention in the past. After all, it had all happened so long ago, back at the very origins of his kind, that most Guardians, himself included, tended to dismiss it as folklore. A pretty tale, romantic and sweet, but not at all applicable to the Guardians who existed in Baen’s time.

  The Guardians and the Maidens, the tale was called, during those few times when anyone bothered to mention it. According to the story, after the Guild had initially summoned the first seven Guardians and those warriors had completed their task by ridding the human world of the threat from the Demons, they had been sent into their first slumber by the Wardens. That had been fine, but after they woke to battle the next threat, they received the same treatment, and the same after that.

  And the same after that.

  After a time, the first Guardians had lost any interest in protecting humanity. They had no connection to the people they defended, spent no time with them, knew little of their characters or their customs. Eventually, a time came when the Wardens summoned the Guardians to defend them from a new threat, but the Guardians did not wake. They failed to respond to the humans’ need, and it loo
ked as if the mortal world would fall to the Darkness.

  The Guild had despaired. Until one day, a woman of power—one who had magic of her own—appeared and ignored the Wardens’ attempts to dismiss her. She knew the danger to humanity was great and that the Guardians represented the only hope for her people to survive. So she knelt at the foot of the statue of a Guardian and she prayed for him to awaken and defend her. The Wardens scoffed and berated her, but her pleas worked. The Guardian responded to her as if to a summons and woke from his magical slumber. He claimed the woman as his Warden and his mate and once again took up arms against the Darkness.

  One by one, more women of power appeared and woke the Guardians, becoming their helpers and their mates. The supernatural warriors defeated the forces of Darkness, but once the threat was vanquished, they refused to return to sleep and be parted from their mates. Instead, they remained among the humans, giving up their immortality to live out their days with their partners. New Guardians were summoned, and the legends recorded that any who came after retained the right to find a human mate and forfeit their position to remain at her side.

  Among the Guardians who came after them, the story took on the status of a fairy tale—something to be told and retold, passed down across generations, but unlikely to ever actually happen. Baen had never even considered the possibility.

  Until he had smelled the sharp, sweet tang of citrus and seen a tiny human female take a stand against three minor demons and fight like a Valkyrie, despite the near inevitability of defeat. She had captured his attention, to be certain. Ivy fascinated him, and he found that implication … disturbing.

  His mind skittered away from the M-word. He had no proof of the legend of the Maidens, and he had certainly never wasted his time contemplating the repercussions of its veracity. He couldn’t afford to waste time now, either. Instead of worrying about his reaction to Ivy—strong and unexpected though it might be—he should worry over how exactly he had woken from his sleep.

  Clearly there had been no summoning, and he harbored no illusions that Ivy had paused in that alley while cornered by three demons to pray for the intervention of a Guardian. There had to be something else behind his waking, a sort of magic he had never before encountered.

  He made a sound of disgust and shifted his position on the battered sofa. He lifted his feet to balance his lower legs on the arm of the piece of furniture to compensate for it being too short to encompass his entire frame. Yet another inconvenience of the human realm. Even in his disguise, this place was not designed to accommodate him.

  Perhaps Ivy was, though.

  Groaning, he cursed his thoughts for drifting even as her image appeared in his mind’s eye. He wished he had seen her in sunlight instead of the dark alley and then the dim, artificial lights inside this dwelling. As keen as his night vision might be for shapes and details, it could not show him the true color of her pale skin or long, straight hair. Those things could only be appreciated in the day, and morning still had hours before its arrival.

  Until then, he would just have to experience frustration. It built within him, only accentuated by the memory of that single, chaste kiss.

  He shouldn’t have done it. Baen knew perfectly well it had been a mistake, knew it even before it happened, but he had been helpless to resist. She had felt so tempting in his arms, small and delicate and soft in spite of her obvious strength. The excuse of carrying her up the stairs had not lasted long enough, and he had placed her on the narrow bed with great reluctance. His instincts had urged him to hold on to her, or better yet, to stretch out beside her and cradle her close while she slept.

  When he thought of it in those terms, a brief kiss seemed like a reasonable consolation prize.

  Perhaps it would count as such if it didn’t haunt him now, the feeling of her soft lips, her sleepy warmth, the faint taste of flowery hops and sweet malt mingling with bitter tea on her lips. Her scent had filled his head, bright and mouthwatering, and now he could not get it out of his mind.

  It was a good thing a Guardian needed so little sleep during his brief periods of wakefulness, Baen reflected, glowering up at the ceiling, because at the moment, he could not have rested had the fate of humanity depended upon it. His mind was too full of Ivy.

  And Ivy’s bed was too empty of him.

  Chapter Eight

  A heavy knock rattled the front door at barely half past nine the next morning.

  In the kitchen, Martin gave a sharp squeak and jumped so hard, he sloshed a full cup of tea out over his hand. Then he squeaked again at the pain of the scalding liquid. Ivy turned to glance at Baen, also surprised but hardly ready to panic.

  “No one should know we’re here,” she said even as she pushed out of her chair and set down her half-eaten slice of toast. “Hopefully, it’s just kids working for some fund-raiser or other.”

  “At this time of morning? On a school day?” Martin shook his head and darted a glance at the back door. “We should run.”

  “We should keep calm,” Baen said, and followed Ivy into the hall.

  Another knock sounded, even louder than the last.

  “That does not sound like kids,” Martin hissed from behind them. “For God’s sake, don’t open it!”

  Ivy ignored him. Not that she yanked the panel wide and invited in every stranger and demon passing in the street, but she stood on her toes to peek out the judas hole. The distorted image of two people, a man and a woman, looked calmly back at her.

  She settled back on her heels and turned to look at Baen.

  It was an action she had so far avoided this morning. Waking up alone in a strange bed, in a strange house, had been one thing, but then the memories of her failed attempt to get Martin to France had flooded back, followed by the attack by the demons, followed by the appearance of the Guardian.

  Followed by that Kiss.

  It earned that capital letter.

  Not because it was the best kiss she had ever received, or the hottest, or even the most unexpected. It got the big K because it had shaken her down to her pink-polished toenails, even though she couldn’t be entirely sure she hadn’t imagined it.

  She couldn’t have, right? Ivy wasn’t the sort of girl who went around imagining that men had kissed her when they really hadn’t, not even when she found them ridiculously attractive and they carried her to bed when she nearly passed out from exhaustion. She didn’t. Honest.

  Which could only mean that Baen had kissed her.

  Why?

  A third knock made her jump, which made her cheeks turn the approximate color of ripe pomegranate. She knew from experience that the shade was oh so becoming on her, especially now, since she had removed her wig and makeup as soon as she had woken up that morning. If past experience was any indicator, she probably looked like the illegitimate offspring of Bozo the Clown and the Great Pumpkin.

  “Two people,” she managed to spit out, shifting her gaze to somewhere over Baen’s left ear. “I don’t recognize them, but they look pretty normal.”

  He maintained the same stony expression he’d worn all morning. The one that had made her start questioning the reality of the Kiss. “I detect no energy of the Darkness, but you will step back while I ascertain their identities.”

  Her red cheeks and embarrassment left Ivy incapable of offering up a protest at the overprotective order. At least, that’s what she told herself. It sounded better than admitting to herself that she leaped to obey his commands like some meek little miss.

  Baen slid back the bolt from its latch, then opened the main lock to pull the door ajar a bare few inches. He didn’t bother to offer a greeting, just gazed out at the figures on the stoop like a bouncer at the door to a club.

  From her vantage point behind him, Ivy couldn’t see anything more than she had spied out the peephole. She recalled a woman of average height with an athletic figure and dark hair, as well as a tall, wiry man with a swimmer’s build and hair that fell in tousled waves. Like she had told Baen, they
had looked normal to her.

  Then she heard the woman speak and “normal” morphed into a relative thing.

  “Thank the Light, it is you. We had feared the message was a mistake, or even a trap. Welcome back, brother. It is very good to see you.”

  Brother?

  Startled, Ivy stepped to the side and tried to scoot around Baen’s imposing form to get a better look at their visitors. His arm shot out to block her path and keep her from moving past his side. She looked up at him, back to the dark-haired woman, then back to Baen.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded. “I thought ‘brother’ was what you guys called each other. What gives?”

  The woman turned her gaze to Ivy and her brow furrowed. “Are you his Warden, female?”

  “Female?” Ivy repeated with a snort. “Well, I suppose that’s more original than plain ol’ ‘bitch.’ Who the hell are you? And what do you mean, am I his Warden?”

  The man on the steps inched forward and placed his hand on his companion’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Sorry. Ash didn’t mean to sound insulting. She hasn’t quite gotten the hang of the local vernacular, if you take my meaning.”

  He had a lyrical Irish accent, nothing too thick, just enough to complement his relaxed air. An air that was completely lacking in his female friend.

  He extended his free hand and offered it to them with a smile. “My name is Michael Drummond, and this is my partner, Ash. We saw the ad you posted on Craigslist last night and came over on the first plane. May we come in?”

  Baen ignored Michael’s outstretched hand, but Ivy shook it reflexively.

  “The ad?” she repeated, casting the Guardian beside her a sideways glance full of questions. He didn’t so much as twitch. “What ad are you referring to? Specifically.”

  “The one that said a Guardian had woken here in London and was seeking others of his kind,” Ash said bluntly. “Others like me.”