And she sure as hell wasn’t going to answer those questions either.
She wasn’t about to tell him anything about herself, or her ability. An ability that hadn’t been as reliable as she’d first assumed, obviously. Case in point, trusting the man who’d just abducted her and tied her to a chair, and now sat staring at her as if he’d like nothing more than to strangle her with his bare hands. She hadn’t sensed any harmful intent in him when he’d stared at her across the nightclub. Nor had she sensed malevolent objectives when he’d offered her his assistance.
A tiny frown pulled at her brow. Even now, glaring at her as he was, she still couldn’t sense any imminent threat from him—though he was dangerous, of that she had no doubt.
Her attention swerved to him against her will, and she studied his features head-on. Amber eyes so bright they all but glowed. Like sunshine on gold. His jaw was strong, his shoulders and tattooed arms well muscled, his lips…nope, not looking there. His hair was a wild, tumbled mess. Like fingers had raked through it in the grips of passion. Over and over.
Sexy.
Nope! Nope! Nope! Does not matter!
But exactly what he was, she still couldn’t figure out. He wasn’t human. His little magic tricks had proven that. He wasn’t an angel. He didn’t radiate goodwill, didn’t give off that warm, fuzzy feeling angels did. Not that she’d had all that many encounters to rely on, only the couple of times she’d come face-to-face with the sperm donor.
But she’d had more than her share of run-ins with demons, albeit from a distance. And he didn’t feel like that either, not exactly anyway. There was no choking, cloying sensation of evil, like the greedy, malignant black of an oil slick, oozing from him. In fact, try as she might, she couldn’t sense either good or evil within him. He was a void. Favoring neither, but capable of either. Any sense of danger came solely from her human instincts alone, the instinct for self-preservation and survival.
Survival. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? The sperm donor’s decree that she would learn to recognize and avoid the constant threat of a world he’d forced upon her. A world that, up until her twenty-first birthday, she’d been blissfully ignorant of. So the sperm donor had wanted her to be able to recognize angels and demons, wanted her to hide herself away and avoid notice. Well, she already knew how to recognize angels and demons, thanks to his birthday curse. That wonderful sixth sense clued her in every time.
She eyed the man in front of her. Well, almost every time. But the sperm donor had refused to show her how to fight, told her she was too weak. Told her that her only chance for survival was to hide.
Well, hiding wasn’t exactly in her nature. And it hadn’t been a very effective strategy anyway. Witness her current situation.
Aside from showing her how to conceal her curse—and obviously he hadn’t done a stellar job of even that—the sperm donor hadn’t wanted anything else to do with her. Perfectly fine with her. She had a life, one she wasn’t going to ditch every time she caught a whiff of something-evil-this-way-comes. She had a good, solid career. Great friends. A nice home. She didn’t want anything to do with the sperm donor either, him or his crazy messed-up world.
Her abductor regarded her with a new intensity. “Do you know what I am?”
She tore her gaze from him, focusing on the massive oil painting behind him. Horses and hounds. A fox hunt.
She felt like that poor little fox right now. Trapped. Helpless. With no way out.
Damn Michael to Hell and back.
“I don’t know anything,” she finally said, in a voice as calm as she could possibly make it. “Just let me go. I won’t tell a soul about this. I promise.”
“You don’t know anything?”
“That’s right.” She looked him right in the eye, and lied through her pearly whites. “Not a thing.”
One corner of those delectable lips of his lifted, just slightly, just enough to reveal the hint of a dimple in his cheek. “But you know Michael?”
Gritting her teeth, she cursed her earlier slip of the tongue and returned her attention to the oil painting.
“Did your father—”
“He’s not my father,” she hissed, the angry words exploding from her before she could contain them.
He leaned back, his head cocked to the side as he regarded her with unmistakable surprise. One long moment passed, then another as he seemed to search for the right words.
“Let’s start over, shall we? I think we got off on the wrong foot here, darlin’.”