“I almost died three weeks ago and the moment I realized it, the moment it sank in, the first thing I thought was that I would have died without ever touching you the way you should be touched.”

And that was when the ghosting touch of his hands came to and end. He pressed the weight of his body into her, and his hand slid down her chest until he had filled his palm with her breast, pressing her own flesh into herself, making her feel the intensity of his words and the desire riding hard behind them.

“I feel the soft shape of you like this and I can’t decide whether to take you softly on my bed or take you hard, right here where we stand. And it doesn’t matter because I know you’ll be magnificent either way. It’s going to come down to the impression I most want to leave on you, Marissa. It’s going to come down to the understanding that I finally have you here. So,” he said, his lips and breath hot against her hair as he continued to allow her to hide from him, “before you tell me we are strangers … before you tell me I haven’t thought this through, I want you to think. Think about everything you’ve thought and felt since I announced my intentions to make you mine.”

She looked up then, her whole body shaking from the impact of his words, his touch and his heat. She wanted to be outraged, but somewhere along the line it had abandoned her. Now all that was left was an overwhelming rush of curiosity, of possibilities … of things she never would have thought herself capable of thinking.

“You just … you never said anything … you were so …”

“So were you. And tell me now that you never thought the same thing. Tell me you never looked my way and wondered …”

“I wasn’t allowed—”

“No,” he said roughly, his grip on her breast tightening enough to get her attention and make her catch her breath. “We are done with bullshit and the shells of lies we armored ourselves with. Think, Marissa. Think … I was dead. If not for Menes, I was dead and gone from this world and from you. You were there at that moment. Do you remember? You think it was a dream, but you were there, holding me, screaming for me. I looked back from the Ether and could hear you.” He leaned close to her ear and whispered fiercely against it, “I knew then that I had died without ever knowing what it meant to live. Knowing I’d had sex, but never made exquisite love, that I’d known lust, but never true passion. I knew longing, frustration and craving much too well and satisfaction not at all. I came back for those reasons, but mostly, Marissa, I came back for you.”

Tears burned at her eyes, clawed up her throat and suddenly, like a veil lifting away from her mind, she did remember. She remembered having a horrible nightmare about three weeks earlier, waking from the cold death of sleep with a gasp, feeling tears dried on her cheeks and rawness in her throat as if she had truly screamed, as if she had truly lost him. She had flown from bed, scrambled through her things, rummaging through clothes she couldn’t remember taking off while in pajamas she couldn’t remember putting on. She had found her cell and the work directory, searching frantically for his number and was about to hit send … until she realized what she was about to do and stopped, her breaths hard and ragged. She had realized how inappropriate it would be. Had realized she could never call him just to see if he was all right. Not then. Not ever. She had collapsed onto her knees then and wept. She told herself later that she had cried because she’d been rattled by fear, but in the face of his honesty with her, she didn’t have it in her to lie to herself again. Now, knowing it had been real, that he’d almost slipped away from her forever …

“You see?” he breathed, when he saw the comprehension in her eyes, the dawning of the terrifying realization of what might have been if not for fate and the very unlikely choice of an Egyptian king thought long dead. “That was the exact feeling,” he said, letting go of her and drifting fingers up over her breast, chest, and throat until he was touching the corner of her awakened eyes. “And to know that much grief without ever knowing that much passion of life is the stuff of too many human tragedies. Don’t let this be another of those tragedies. We’ve been given a second chance, you and I. We can’t waste it. If we do then we deserve every single moment of the pain we should suffer for it.”

His kiss, as light as it was, was so incredibly poignant that she felt her throat closing up. When, she wondered, had anyone ever kissed her like this? As though she were a unique and precious thing, not to be toyed with lightly, but not to be shelved and untouched either. The answer was never. Even when she had fancied herself in love, even in what she had once considered her most loving relationship to date … as exciting or as hungry or as hormonal as anything might have been, none of it was in the same class of the way Jackson was making her feel. Every argument, every sound reason, every piece of shielding and armor she had ever erected to protect herself tried to crowd the understanding out. You hardly know him. How can you even trust him? He’s not even human!

She gasped when that last thought sent leaps of forbidden excitement along her every major artery. Menes had saved Jackson’s life. Had Blended with him and given him these incredible powers as well as making him nigh indestructible, but … what else had the Blending enhanced on him?

She flushed crimson, or so it felt, and she tried to turn her head. “Not this time,” he scolded her softly. “Face it or embrace it, but whatever you’re feeling in this moment, do not run away from it.”

“I’m not running,” she said softly, sounding no more convincing to herself than she must have sounded to him. “I’m just very overwhelmed, Jackson. The past forty-eight hours …”

With what sounded like a very reluctant sigh, Jackson eased back from her, giving her room to breathe and, coincidentally, room to catch a chill. The man was like a living furnace, giving off an almost volcanic heat. Or maybe that was just her perception because …

Marissa shook the thought away. There were more important things to worry about … and to say.

“How do I know you’re not just saying all of this because …” She didn’t know how to say it without sounding cold and accusatory, and some part of her acknowledged he’d never done anything to earn the blight on his character.

“Because you think I’m just looking for a vessel for my queen?” Even with him saying it for her it sounded awful, but it needed to be said. It needed to be addressed. “I came back here with many things on my agenda, Marissa, and I would be lying to you if I said that finding an original for my beloved wasn’t the most crucial of all to me.” He took yet another step away, and she had to tamp down the craziest urge to follow after him. My god, if nothing else the man is utterly magnetic, she thought fiercely to herself. “And I do want you for Hatshepsut. But I want you for me as well,” he said, the abiding craving in his tone running deep with truth. “You are thinking in a single and linear fashion when you consider my faithfulness to Hatshepsut. But, as you know, there is no singularity in any relationship I form. It is, if you will excuse the crude sketch of it, a ménage a quatre, Marissa,” he said. “Multiple individuals coming together to enjoy the pleasure of one another. All have given permission and all understand there is no place for jealousies or peevishness. My queen would want me to find a woman not only for her to live with, but one I could live with as well. If I like her, that is good. If I admire her, all the better. If I lust for her, well, it will only add to the lust I already have for my queen, and I assure you that is quite significant.”

With a flash of blinding realization she thought of all the possible combinations that existed when potentially four people were in bed together. The minute it raced through her mind she knew she was blushing straight to the roots of her hair.

“Ahh,” he said on a soft exhalation of breath, his body reclaiming half the distance he had been putting between them. “Does the idea excite you, hummingbird? Does it make you curious? I can’t see you being anything less than eaten up with curiosity. I’m beginning to see it is an essential part of who you are. After all, the job you do is all about seeing into other peoples’ lives. You get to hear all their desires, all those secret things they would never tell anyone else. All the while, there you sit, living an experience like a voyeur where it is safe and secure. But safety is highly overrated, Marissa,” he said, the richness of his tone flowing over her like a suggestive caress. “It is so much more exciting to live it first hand. As long as you are with someone who will keep you safe.”

That made her laugh, a nervous sound to stave off the tightening of her throat and the heat twisting inside her belly. “You are the farthest thing from safe that can possibly exist,” she said, trying not to sound as breathless as she was. God, she could almost hear the excitement shivering in her own voice. “You’re a target. You were always a dangerous man, Jackson. Anyone who has ever seen you in action knows that without a single doubt. But now, with Menes a part of you, that danger has literally doubled … and I don’t know if I want to be anywhere near you when it all goes to hell. You said it yourself … you painted a bull’s-eye on your back. You … I mean … by nature of the job being a police officer means going out there with a target painted on your back. The criminal element takes one look at that uniform and your life is instantly in danger. You are used to that. It’s the job you signed on for. I didn’t sign on for dangerous duty. I sit in my tidy little office, ordering my neat little thoughts in my crisp, clean files. The biggest danger I face is getting a paper cut!”

“Now that is a waist-high ditch full of horseshit. I was there, if you recall, when Leona Wright lost her shit in your office, leapt across the room and wrapped her talons around your pretty little neck.” He touched a finger to her throat, right about where she’d sported deep, painful bruises for almost two weeks. “You could have been a school psychiatrist, sitting in an office in a cute little elementary school the biggest risk getting a case of head lice. But no, you chose to dance with a melting pot of type-A personalities, being exposed to some of the worst shit mankind has ever seen. You got up in court in the Marscone racketeering case and told everyone flat-out that there was nothing crazy about him and that he was more than competent to go to trial. As I recall he was screaming death threats at you the whole time they were dragging him out of the courtroom.”

“Actually,” she muttered, “it was more of a ‘you stupid f**king bitch whore’ kind of a threat. Rewind. Repeat.”

“Mmm. Not the point,” he said with amusement in his peacock eyes. “You are just as much in the thick of things as I am. It’s one of the things I admire about you. As well as your incredible grace under that sort of pressure. In fact, the first time I even saw you shaken was the night that I …”

Died. Oh god, it had been real, she thought again, feeling a little lightheaded over all that had happened to her in these past whirlwind hours.

And maybe that was why it took her so long to …

Oh my god!

Chapter Eleven

Jackson was watching her face very closely at that point, waiting like a cat in front of a mouse hole, waiting for it to dawn on her what he was truly asking her to do.

And there it was. The widening of clear blue eyes and the sharp intake of breath.

“You mean you want me to die?” she asked him incredulously. “That is what you mean, right? In order for this queen or whatever to come and share space with me, I have to die first! You are out of your mind if you think any sane person is going to volunteer for something like that! And what in hell do you need me for? I’m sure there are dozens of gutsy, curvy little redheads running around dying all over the world! No!” She held up a hand and cut him off when he opened his mouth to speak. “Absolutely no. No talking. No touching.” She pushed his hand away sharply. “No anything! I’m not letting you run roughshod over me and my life just because you need a vessel for some dead Egyptian queen. Sorry, mister, but you have got the wrong woman.”

She shut him down completely by dodging out of his reach and marching off in fairly high temper. He ought to have been concerned for her, he supposed, but the truth was he was just too tickled to death by her. Everything she did gave him pleasure in one form or another. Be it intellectual, emotional or physical, she lit him up on every single bumper.

But she did have a point. Jackson had become aware, at last, of Menes’s plans for her almost at the same time she had. But it would be wrong to say they were all Menes’s plans or all Jackson’s plans. It was all boiling down together, a reduction of motives all pointing in the same direction. It was about wanting a woman and being willing to get her by any means necessary.