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Adam stepped between him and Icarus. “This valley is crawling with paranormals,” he said to Cormac. “If we’d kept traveling like we were, we wouldn’t have made it to Monte Corvo unnoticed.”
Cormac ignored him, attention fixed on Icarus. “How’d you do it?”
“You saw me take the Daylight.”
“Not that.”
But now that Icarus had mentioned it, Adam’s most pressing questions throttled back to the front of his mind. “How long will it hold?” he asked Icarus. “Will the bullet dampen the effect?”
Icarus pulled down the collar of his sweater that was already half off his shoulder. There was a tiny pink scar the size of a quarter—a dime a blink later—where a wound should have been. “Bullet’s a nonissue.” He righted the collar and pushed up a sleeve, turning his hand over in the shafts of sunlight filtering through the stalks. “And the Daylight will hold at least until nightfall.”
“You put that hand”—Cormac pointed at Icarus’s flitting hand—“to the ground and made the earth shake.”
“I can’t make earthquakes happen.”
“You’re lying.”
“Havethisconversation once we get to the mountain,” Adam said, throwing Cormac’s words back at him. “We need wheels.”
Cormac spread his arms. “I don’t exactly have my badge on me.”
“Please,” Adam scoffed. “Old man Deere knows who you are.”
“Not this well.”
Icarus stifled a laugh behind a cough. “I hardly know you, and yet...”
Cormac’s violet glare intensified. Adam needed to get them out of not just other paranormals’ paths, but out of each other’s. He dug his wallet out of his pocket and withdrew a wad of cash. “I spotted a clothesline on the other side of the bean patch,” he told Cormac. “Go get what you need. I’ll settle up with Deere”—he flashed the cash—“for that and some wheels.”
Cormac held his gaze a long moment, then flicked it over his shoulder to Icarus. “If you hurt him—”
“One, you came to me.” Feet planted shoulder-width apart, Icarus folded his arms and lifted his chin. Defensive, a low-key flex of strength. “Two, I didn’t carry his ass all the way up here to bite him now.” One corner of his sinful mouth ticked up, exposing a fang. “Unless he asks me to.”
“Adam, we don’t—”
Adam cut off the debate before it continued needlessly longer. “Go.” With a huff, Cormac spun on his heel and disappeared into the stalks. Adam waited for them to stop swaying before turning back to the vamp. “You’re trouble.”
Icarus held his arms out, same as Cormac had. “Not hiding it.”
But he had been hiding what he was, up until an hour ago. Adam wondered what Icarus’s excuse was. Anything like his own? Icarus wasn’t hiding now, though, at least not from Adam, who closed the distance between them and ran his hands up Icarus’s torso. “Thank you for getting me out of there.” He ached—the good kind—to sneak his fingers under the soft knit sweater, to glide his hands over Icarus’s cool skin and firm muscles. To watch the scar disappear for good. But that wouldn’t get them out of there any faster. He inched one hand higher, cupping Icarus’s neck, and settled the other over his too-slowly beating heart.
Icarus curled his fingers into the hem of Adam’s shirt. “You knew?”
“The second you clocked your step tomyheartbeat at Club Sutro.”
“What are you?”
Adam could tell Icarus knew he was hiding parts of himself too; that reckoning was coming for all of them. But not yet. “Add it to the list of conversations.” Adam rose the couple of inches needed to press their lips together, teasing the vampire’s mouth open with a swipe of his tongue, diving in and stealing a taste. He couldn’t let this go on either, but on his long list of regrets was leaving Icarus’s apartment earlier without a goodbye kiss. He erased that regret with his tongue, his lips, and the groan he freely surrendered.
Smiling, Icarus clasped Adam’s ass and held him close, rutting through layers of denim. “So many conversations.” He sighed dramatically.
Adam smiled wider, unable to contain the laughter that bubbled up and out of him. That was something else he’d missed. Something he could hardly remember doing the past ten years until a certain vampire courtesan had marked him as his own.
NINETEEN
They “rented”one of Deere’s rusty old trucks that miraculously got them the rest of the way to Monte Corvo without incident. Worth the extortionate amount of money they’d paid. Once there, Adam ducked inside Cormac’s villa to use the bathroom while Icarus hung back, enjoying the outside it seemed. Adam found him under the pergola, staring at the valley of vines below. Adam leaned against a column and looked his fill, eyes roving over the man he couldn’t get out of his head. It had taken everything in him to suppress his reaction to the gorgeous, ballsy courtesan when he’d first approached him at Club Sutro. It had been unexpected on a night mired in grief and regret, in memories of the last anniversary Adam had shared with his husband and wife. He’d flexed his melancholy, an initial line of defense, and Icarus had crashed right through it, the first person to do so in a decade. A gentle word and a gentle hand from an apex predator, whispered promises and heated commands that didn’t involve kill or be killed, all of it so different from the friends and foes that Adam usually kept.
Icarus was a tangle of juxtapositions, a mystery Adam wanted to solve. Wanted to do other things with too. Especially when he saw him like this—the sun filtering through his bright hair, reflecting off his pale, muscled shoulder, and highlighting the wide expanse of his back, his trim waist, his firm round ass in threadbare jeans... Resistance was futile.
