Intrigued, he walked over to her, and his reaction to her proximity was so strong, his cock stiffened and began to tent the sheet. Quickly he snatched up the sweatpants and held them in a casual way so that they draped in front of his groin.
Claudia looked up. He noted with deep satisfaction that she glanced at his bare chest and averted her gaze quickly. She had so much innate poise that any slight, telltale sign of reaction she had was as loud to him as a shout, and her clean scent, still with that hint of gun oil, now carried dusky notes of sexual attraction.
He loved it. He loved her. The carved, sensual maturity of her features was totally unlike the girlish, rounded faces of the young women he had known. She was so far beyond anyone he had ever been involved with, complex and nuanced, sleek as a bullet and just as dangerous. He’d had no idea that someone could embody everything he admired and also capture every ounce of his desire, until she had.
He knew without being conceited that nature had been prodigious in its gifts to him. He had more than his fair share of looks, physical and intellectual strengths, and abilities. Until now he had cruised through life at half-throttle. He played at dating and wallowed in sex, and it all came too easily for him.
It was all too simple, until he encountered Claudia. Now something that had been curled tight inside of him and asleep his whole life awoke, and expanded, and said, Now there’s a challenge worth striving for.
And hell’s bells, his body was out of control. He could not get his flag to fly at anything below half-mast.
He felt the sudden urge to growl, bend over and kiss her lavishly. He wanted to fling all the rest of the world’s considerations away. He wondered what she would do if he did, if she would kiss him back or push him away… Man, he had to grab at the nonsense galloping around in his head and rein it in hard.
Because the rest of the world’s considerations mattered, so much so he had shed blood and nearly lost his life over them.
Her attention had turned back to what she was doing. He watched her deal out the first seven cards from the top of the deck, and he recognized the god on each card as she turned it over. Nadir, Camael, Hyperion, Taliesin, Will, Azrael, and Inanna. The Depths, the Hearth, Law, the Dance, the Sacrifice, Death, and Love.
Then she scooped them up, shuffled the deck—really shuffled it, he saw—and flipped over the first seven cards, and all the gods appeared again.
Well, damn.
“What are you doing?” he asked, growing fascinated, despite his runaway hormones.
She said, “I’m giving my hands something to do until you’re ready to talk.” Was her voice a touch huskier as she replied?
He could give her hands something to do. It almost fell out of his mouth. Somebody should hit him.
He gestured to the cards laid out on the table. “How are you doing that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. The cards have been doing that ever since someone in New York gave them to me.”
He held his palm a few inches over hers as she handled the cards. Warm, aged Power pressed gently against his palm. “These are old,” he said. “Really old. How long have you had them?”
“Since January. Some strange woman stopped me in the street, told me the cards wanted to come to me and pushed the box into my hands.”
“Objects of Power often have wills of their own, and they influence the world in ways we don’t understand,” he said. She frowned, clearly not liking that thought. He asked, “What happened to the woman who gave them to you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the last I saw of her, and the cards have been doing this ever since. I found a discussion about it in an online forum. The general opinion was that it meant upcoming events would have ‘life-altering significance’. I feel like the cards are shouting at me, only I have no idea what they’re saying.”
Life-altering significance. Yeah, he could agree with that, but for all seven of the Major Arcana to keep showing up repeatedly, he was pretty sure the significance was about much more than one person.
Somehow she had ended up in Nirvana at exactly the right time to save his life. As an old object of Power, the deck might be exerting influence on the world in ways that had nothing to do with her understanding what the cards might be trying to tell her. He had heard sacred stories of items that the gods threw into the world to enact their will. The Machinae, they were called. The machines.
But those were legends. As far as he could tell, this was just a deck of cards.
“When we have time, I’ll do a real reading for you,” he told her.
Her head snapped up. “You know how to read the Tarot?”