Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones

then pinched the bridge of his nose. Tactically, killing the royal Raintrees first was smart. If you cut off the head of a snake, taking care of the body was easy. The comparison wasn’t completely accurate, because any Raintree was a force to be reckoned with, but so were the Ansara. With the royals all dead, the advantage would be theirs and the outcome inevitable.

      The mistake they’d made two hundred years ago was in not taking care of the royal family first, a mistake that had had disastrous results. As a clan, the Ansara had almost been destroyed. The survivors had been banished to their Caribbean island, where most of them remained. But they had used those two hundred years to secretly rebuild in strength, and now they were strong enough to once more engage their enemy. Cael thought so, anyway, and so did Ruben. Only Judah had held them back, preaching caution. Judah was a banker, for God’s sake; what did he know about taking risks?

      Discontent in the Ansara ranks had been growing for years, and it had reached the crisis point. The Raintree had to die, and so did Judah. Cael would never let him live, even in exile.

      Ruben’s power was substantial. Because of that, and because he was Cael’s cousin, he’d been given the task of eliminating the most powerful Raintree of all—a task made more difficult because Cael insisted the death look accidental. The last thing he wanted was all the Raintree swarming to the homeplace to protect it. The power of Sanctuary was almost mystical. How much of it was real and how much of it was perceived, Ruben didn’t know and didn’t care.

      The plan was simple: kill the royals, breach the protective shields around Sanctuary and take the homeplace. After that, the rest of the Raintree would be considerably weakened. Destroying them would be child’s play.

      Not destroying the Ansara homeplace two centuries ago, not destroying every member of the clan, was the mistake the Raintree had made. The Ansara wouldn’t return the favor.

      Ruben sat for a long time, deep in thought. Getting to Raintree would be easier if he was distracted. He and the woman, Lorna Clay, were evidently lovers; otherwise, why take her home with him? She would be the easier of the two to take out, anyway—and if she were obviously the target rather than Raintree, that wouldn’t raise the clan’s alarm.

      Cael’s idea had been a good one: kill the woman.

      Chapter Fourteen

       Monday afternoon

      “What happens if you die?” Lorna asked him, scowling as, car keys in hand, he opened the door to the garage. “What if you have a blowout and drive off the side of the mountain? What if you have a pulmonary embolism? What if a chicken-hauler has brake failure and flattens that little roller skate you call a car? Am I stuck here? Does your little curse, or whatever, hold me here even if you’re dead or unconscious?”

      Dante paused halfway out the door, looking back at her with a half amused, half disbelieving expression. “Chicken-hauler? Can’t you think of a more dignified way for me to die?”

      She sniffed. “Dead is dead. What would you care?” Then something occurred to her, something that made her very uneasy. “Uh—you can die, can’t you?” What if this situation was even weirder than she’d thought? What if, on the woo-woo scale of one to ten, he was a thirteen?

      He laughed outright. “Now I have to wonder if you’re planning to kill me.”

      “It’s a thought,” she said bluntly. “Well?”

      He leaned against the door frame, negligent and relaxed, and so damned sexy she almost had to look away. She worked hard to ignore her physical response to him, and most of the time she succeeded, but sometimes, as now, his green eyes seemed to almost glow, and in her imagination she could feel the hard, muscled framework of his body against her once more. The fact that, twice now, she’d felt his erection against her when he was holding her only made her struggle that much more difficult. Mutual sexual desire was a potent magnet, but just because she felt the pull of attraction, that didn’t mean she should act on it. Sometimes she wanted to run a traffic light, too, because it was there, because she didn’t want to stop, because she could—but she never did, because doing so would be stupid. Having sex with Dante Raintree would fall into the same category: stupid.

      “I’m as mortal as you—almost. Thank God. As much as mortality sucks, immortality would be even worse.”

      Lorna took a step back. “What do you mean, almost?”

      “That’s another conversation, and one I don’t have time for right now. To answer your other question, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

      She was almost swallowed by outrage. “What? What? You don’t know whether or not I’ll be stuck here if something happens to you, but you’re going to go off and leave me here anyway?”

      He gave it a brief thought, said, “Yeah,” and went out the door.

      Lorna leaped and caught the door before it closed. “Don’t leave me here! Please.” She hated to beg, and she hated him for making her beg, but she was suddenly alarmed beyond reason by the thought of being stuck here for the rest of her life.

      He got into the Jaguar, called, “You’ll be okay,” and then the clatter of the garage door rising drowned out anything else she might have said. Furious, she slammed the kitchen door and, in a fit of pique, turned both the lock on the handle and the dead bolt. Locking him out of his own house was useless, since he had his keys with him, but the annoyance value was worth it.

      She heard the Jag backing out; then the garage door began coming down.

      Damn him, damn him, damn him! He’d really gone off and left her stranded here. No, not stranded—chained.

      Her clothes had been delivered earlier, and she’d changed out of the ruined pants—and out of his too-big silk shirt—so he wouldn’t have had to wait for her to get ready or anything. He had no reason for leaving her here, given that he could easily prevent her from escaping with one of his damnable mind commands.

      Impotently, she glared around the kitchen. Being a drainer—king—whatever the hell he’d said—had made him too big for his britches. He pretty much did whatever he felt like doing, without worrying about what others wanted. It was obvious he’d never been married and likely never would be, because any woman worth her salt would—

      Salt.

      She looked around the kitchen and spotted the big stainless steel salt and pepper shakers sitting by the cooktop. She began opening doors until she found the pantry—and a very satisfying supply of salt.

      She’d noticed he put a spoonful of sugar in his coffee. Now she very carefully poured the salt out of the salt shaker, replaced it with sugar from the sugar bowl, then put the salt in the sugar bowl. He wouldn’t much enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning, and anything he salted would taste really off.

      Then she got creative.

      About an hour after he left, the phone rang. Lorna looked at the caller ID but didn’t bother answering; she wasn’t his secretary. Whoever was calling didn’t leave a message.

      She explored the house—well, searched the house. It was a big house for just one person. She had no frame of reference for estimating the square footage, but she counted six bedrooms and seven and a half baths. His bedroom took up the entire top floor, a vast expanse that covered more floor space than most families of four lived in. It was very much a man’s room, with steel blue and light olive-green tones dominating, but here and there—in the artwork, in an unexpected decorative bowl, in a cushion—were splashes of deep, rich red.

      There was a separate sitting area, with a big-screen television that popped out of a cabinet when a button was pushed and sank back into hiding afterward. She knew, because she found the remote and punched all the buttons, just to see what they would do. There was a wet bar with a small refrigerator and a coffeemaker in case he didn’t want to bother going down-stairs to make his coffee or get something to eat. She’d replaced the sugar with salt there,