My Forbidden Desire

Book 2: My Immortal

by Carolyn Jewel

Genres: Paranormal Romance; Paranormal; Romantic Fantasy; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

TORN BETWEEN... Alexandrine Marit is a witch in mortal danger. An evil mage craves the powerful, mysterious talisman that supplies her magic, and the only person who can keep her safe is a dark and dangerous fiend called Xia. With his fierce animosity toward witches, he's hardly the ideal bodyguard. Yet as days turn into nights, she can't deny the white-hot passion between them. DESIRE AND TEMPTATION Xia hates witches. They enslave and mercilessly kill his kind. But he's been ordered to protect Alexandrine, who, to his surprise, has a spirit he admires and a body he longs to possess. With the mage and his henchmen closing in, Alexandrine and her protector must trust the passion that can unite them...or risk losing everything to the enemies who can destroy them both.

Release date: May 7, 2009

Publisher: Forever

Print pages: 388

Sample

blood-twin: A bonded pair of fiends who share a permanent magical connection. They may be biologically related and same sex. Antisocial
and prone to psychosis.


copa: A plant derivative of a yellow-ochre color when processed. Has a mild psychotropic effect on the kin who use it for relaxation.
On mages, the drug increases magical abilities and is highly addictive.


cracking (a talisman): A mage or witch may crack open a talisman in order to absorb the life force within and magically prolong his
or her life. Requires a sacrificial murder.


demon: Any of a number of shape-shifting magical beings whose chief characteristic is, as far as the magekind are concerned, the
ability to possess and control a human.


fiend: A subspecies of demon. Before relations with the magekind exploded into war, they frequently bonded with the magekind.


kin: What fiends collectively call each other. Socially divided into various factions seeking power over other Warlord-led factions.
The kin connect with other kin via psychic links, often collectively. They typically possess multiple physical forms, at least
one of which is recognizably human.


mage: A male who possesses magic. A sorcerer. See also magekind.

mageheld: A fiend or other demon who is under the complete control of a magekind.


magekind: Humans who possess magic. The magekind arose to protect vanilla humans from the depredations of demons, a very real threat.


sever: The act of removing a mageheld from the control of a mage or witch, through the use of magic.


talisman: A usually small object into which a mage has enclosed the life force of a fiend, typically against the fiend’s will. A talisman
confers additional magical power to the mage who has it. Sometimes requires an additional sacrifice. See also cracking (a talisman).


vanilla: A human with no magic or, pejoratively, one of the magekind with little power.


warlord: A fiend who leads some number of other fiends who have sworn fealty. Usually a natural leader possessing far more magic than
others of the kin.


witch: A human female who possesses magic. A sorceress. See also magekind.

An icy sensation prickled across the back of Alexandrine Marit’s neck and raised gooseflesh on her arms. The significance of
that ripple of cold should have penetrated, but she was distracted and not thinking clearly. Instead of doing something, she
just stayed on her couch and looked around for an open window while absently rubbing her prickling skin. Her crappy apartment
wasn’t big, so that took all of two seconds. No open windows.


The reason she was distracted was right smack in front of her. Harsh Marit. Dr. Harsh Marit, actually. She’d spent the last
ten years of her life believing her brother was dead. Only guess what? He wasn’t. He’d just taken a call on his cell and was
now standing with his back three-quarters toward her. Like that was going to make it harder for her to overhear.


She totally wasn’t over the shock of him being here. Alive. She still had the shakes. Her emotions continued to seesaw between
elation and disbelief, interspersed with a humiliating urge to cry. While he was on the phone, an iPhone for crying out loud,
she was trying to calm herself down and not succeeding.


“Yes,” he said into his phone.

The chill hit again, rolling along the surface of her skin. She resettled herself on the couch and put on one of those I-am-politely-not-listening faces. Of course, she heard every word her brother said. But Harsh wasn’t doing much talking. He was listening mostly.


He kept talking and listening on his iPhone. The talking part he carried out in a low voice: very cryptic because, doh, she
was sitting right there with functioning ears. He did the listening intently. She got another prickly roll along the back
of her neck and up and down her arms. This time—third time being the charm?—she realized her goose-pimply skin had nothing
to do with an open window somewhere in her apartment or with being stunned to have her brother here.


Her reaction was something else entirely.

Alexandrine’s stomach fell to her toes. Why now? Like she didn’t have enough on her mind already.

Harsh glanced at her once while he talked into his phone, and the odd prickling along her arms stopped, as did her feeling
of uneasiness. That was strange. Her premonitions didn’t usually come and go. They were unpredictable as hell, but when she
had one, her physical reactions remained until the situation resolved itself. One way or another. So the fact that she now
felt perfectly normal made her wonder if she’d gotten it wrong.


Her brother went back to listening, and her goose bumps returned, crawling along her arms to the nape of her neck and down
her spine. The back of her head felt cold. From the inside. Which pretty much cinched things. No mistake. Something bad was
coming her way.


“Fine,” Harsh said into the phone. He disconnected his call and for about ten long seconds stared at the icons on the phone’s
screen. God, that phone was gorgeous. The chill in her head didn’t go away. In fact, it got worse.


Oh, shit, she thought.


One time, several years ago, when she was a teenager and still living at home, she’d spent several minutes talking with an
older guy who had seemed perfectly normal. But as they talked—and admittedly, she’d been using half her brain to decide whether
she wanted to flirt with him, which was probably why she’d missed the signs at the outset—she’d met his gaze, and whoa. One
look into the guy’s eyes and she’d just known. Rock solid: He wants to kill me.


That time she’d had all the symptoms at once. He was trolling for a kill, and if she didn’t leave—now—she’d be next. So she’d
left. Pronto. Two days later, a girl’s body turned up about a block from where she’d met the guy, with all the usual media
hoo-ha over women killed in brutal fashion. Nothing happened, though, because the murdered girl was a runaway and poor and
turning tricks to support a habit. For three weeks afterward, she’d had nightmares about would have happened to her if she
hadn’t lit out.


Premonitions were her thing. If there was anything reliable about her limited ability to use magic, that was it. Some things
she just knew. It wasn’t any big deal to look into someone’s eyes and realize sanity was lacking. Any loser with half the
empathy doled out to regular folks could do that. Her premonitions started out with prickling skin and an uneasiness that
curled into her gut. And then sooner or later, she’d know she had to do something. Like don’t go to the store after all. Or
don’t take the shortcut.


Now, just like that day with the killer and a dozen times since, Alexandrine knew something bad was going to happen and that
the bad thing involved her. Always did with her premonitions. Harsh Marit was back from the dead, and her life was facing
a bifurcation. Go one way and she was dead. Go the other way, she stayed alive. A binary set of possibilities. Zero or one.
How she would get to the point where she knew which way was dead and which way wasn’t was anybody’s guess. This wasn’t one
of the more useful that-guy’s-looking-to-kill-me kind of premonitions where her course of action was perfectly clear.


Something bad was going to happen. But she didn’t know what. Not yet. She didn’t even know if Harsh, specifically, was involved
or if it would happen today or a week from today.


“Alexandrine,” Harsh said. Like her, he was adopted, so they weren’t genetically related and didn’t look anything alike. He
was tall, dark, and exotically handsome, and she was tall, platinum-blond, and probably a little above average in the looks
department. She and Harsh might not have a blood relation, but everything else that mattered said they were brother and sister.
They’d lived enough years in the same household that she loved him like the big brother he was. That hadn’t changed even if
he had let her think he was dead all this time. Harsh tucked his phone into his front pocket. “I’m sorry about that.”


She tried not to let her awareness show, but it wasn’t easy, and from the look in his eyes, she wondered if he sensed on some
level how she’d gone cold inside. She was practically shivering from it. She didn’t think he was the reason she was freaking
out like this. But she’d bet real money he was the catalyst for whatever was coming at her. The question right now was whether
her brother had any idea what she was. If he didn’t, she’d really prefer to reveal that later. Much, much later. If ever.
Preferably never.


“I need you to do something for me,” Harsh said.

“Like what?” The icy chill in her head went off again, but it wasn’t bad. Just enough to know the choice was still out there.

“Does it matter?” he asked. His shoulders tensed up.

“Yeah,” she said, “it does.”

“Don’t be difficult about this, Alexandrine. I don’t have time to explain.” His eyes went hard. “Just do it, all right?”

“Just do it?” she said. “Who the hell you think you are? ‘Just do it.’ ” Actually, that was a pretty good question. Who the
hell was he? Didn’t every adopted person eventually ask that question? She had.


Harsh folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t look like he’d been dead at any point during the last ten years. Ergo, he
must have been alive the entire time, including all those times she was crying about losing him. Which, come to think of it,
kind of pissed her off.


“I’m your brother,” he said. The set of his mouth softened, but his eyes stayed hard, and that was downright creepy. “What
else could I be, Alexandrine?”


The question was softly put, even fondly. But she didn’t doubt there was more to his question. She wished Maddy were here.
Maddy would know what to do. More importantly, Maddy would probably know what not to do. Her best friend knew a hell of a
lot more about this stuff than Alexandrine did.


The security doorbell buzzed and shocked the hell out of her, because she thought it didn’t work. They both looked in the
direction of her door. Then his phone went off. Again. This ringtone was a series of sonar pings.


“Don’t answer, Harsh.” She knew him. He was her big brother, and she just couldn’t believe he’d hurt her. If he was here to
kill her, her premonition would almost certainly have been more specific. Wouldn’t it? It was also possible, she had to concede,
that her premonition had nothing to do with Harsh. This could be one big coincidence. Only, she didn’t think so. “Please,
don’t. Just this once.”


“I have to.” He slid the phone out of his pocket, touched the screen, and said, “Five minutes.” Then he touched the screen
again, looked straight at her, and said, “I am your brother, Alexandrine. Nothing has changed that.” He met her gaze straight
on. “Nothing.”


“My brother,” she said as he touched the iPhone again. Another series of icons appeared on the screen. “Right. My brother.”
All of a sudden, she felt like she was six instead of twenty-six with all the emotional maturity that implied. She tried to
get a handle on herself, but so far her evening had been a bit too stressful for that.


“Alexandrine…” He gripped his phone. Hard. “I’m not here to hurt you. You have to believe that.”

She did believe that. She really did. “Where have you been all this time?” she asked. He didn’t answer. “Mom and Dad had a
service for you. It was nice. Very refined. You would have liked it. Lots of crying. Tears. Emotion.” At the time, Alexandrine
had been, what, barely sixteen? The age of attitude. With a capital A. But she sure as heck remembered missing her only brother. After the police decided he must be dead, even without a body,
their lives just… stopped. Losing Harsh like that broke the family into little tiny pieces. None of them had ever really recovered.


“I’m sure it was very nice,” Harsh said in a voice that was just a little too flat.

Alexandrine jabbed a hand in his direction. Since she’d know if she was in immediate danger from him, she decided they ought
to get on with the surface business of him reappearing in her life. “You can’t just drop back in without a word of explanation.”


He sighed, but when he spoke, his eyes were just as hard as before. “I’m trying to save your life, Alexandrine.”

“You’re about ten years too late to be saving me, Harsh.” Wow. That came out a lot more accusatory than she’d intended. But,
then, she was upset. And unnerved.


“Full credit for surviving,” he said.

“No thanks to you.”

His eyes went far away. About a million miles. He hadn’t told her yet where he’d been all these years. Why not?

The last time she’d seen her brother, he’d been wearing a suit and tie, and his hair had been short and neat. Ten years ago,
he’d had a beeper surgically attached to his waist, and the damn thing used to go off all the time. Now? The professional
look of the newly minted doctor of medicine was gone in favor of some kind of uncool grunge look. He wore faded jeans, a ripped
T-shirt, and battered leather work boots. They didn’t fit like they were his. His hair was down to his shoulders, and judging
from the size of his arms, he’d been spending quality time in the weight room. Harsh had never been a gym rat. What new doctor
had time for that? He’d barely had time for a kid sister once he went off to California.


Someone knocked on her door. Loudly. She lived in a crappy apartment building with broken security, so it wasn’t any surprise
that someone could get upstairs without getting buzzed in. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, though, and she wasn’t
sure if it was because she was startled or if it had something to do with her premonition. For the count of three, she and
Harsh stared at each other. Interesting. He didn’t ask if she was expecting anyone. And he didn’t look surprised.


His iPhone did its sonar ping again. Harsh looked to see who was calling, and, boy, did she get a flashback. Thirteenth birthday.
Beeper going off. Beloved older brother visiting from Harvard Med—it wasn’t far, the Marit family lived in Brookline—leaving
the party before the cake was out. Again.


“Just like old times, isn’t it?” she said under her breath. Except not, because in the intervening years, Harsh had apparently
turned into something scary. Different from what she’d become. Louder, she said, “Save me from what?”


He touched the phone’s screen and told the caller, “Not now.” Then he hung up. She got the feeling he wanted to shake the
gadget. He didn’t. Harsh had always been in control of himself. He looked at her and said, “From yourself.”


“Huh?” Whoever was at the door knocked again.

Three times. Very slowly. Very loudly. Jerk. “Should I get that?” she asked.

He frowned. “I’m trying to save you from yourself, Alexandrine.”

Right. He wanted to save her from herself. What a laugh that was, if only he knew. “Too late, bro. I’m a big girl now. All
grown up.”


“Alexandrine—”

“I’ll be twenty-six in three months. More than old enough to have a job, pay taxes, drink hard liquor, and vote for president.
At the same time if I want.”


“I understand you’re no longer a child.”

The last time she’d seen her brother, she’d still been living at home in Brookline, Massachusetts, without any pressing need
for a brassiere. Massachusetts was three thousand miles away from the City by the Bay, where her brother had gone to do medical
research at the University of California at San Francisco. Her big brother the doctor. Mom and Dad were so proud. And then
he disappeared. Dropped off the face of the earth. Presumed dead.


Right.

Not so dead after all.

“Things do change, don’t they?” she said.

Harsh’s phone pinged again. He answered it with, “I told you, five minutes.” He touched the screen to disconnect the call,
and by coincidence, Mr. Impatient outside her apartment bammed a fist on her door. Great. The neighbors were going to love
that. They were probably calling the landlord now.


“I don’t need protection,” she said. And the minute she said it, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach because,
hell, maybe she did. “I’ve been on my own a long time, Harsh.”


He stopped pacing. She didn’t remember his eyes being such a piercing brown. She couldn’t dismiss the creepy thought that
something more was living behind her brother’s eyes. That gave her the shivers, legitimate shivers, not premonition shivers.
“When was the last time you talked to Mom and Dad?” he asked.


They’d been so busy reestablishing their relationship that she hadn’t gotten around to catching him up on family news. “Talked
to Dad two years ago.” True statement. Harsh understood there was more and that she was baiting him. But he refused to step
in it. Killjoy. “He’s dead. Heart attack.”


“I didn’t know.” He closed his fingers around his vibrating phone. “What about Mom?”

Yeah. So where the hell had her brother been that he didn’t know anything at all? Turning into a freak didn’t stop you from
using Google or reading the paper, did it? Or getting on the phone, for that matter. The parents who had raised him and put
him through college and medical school, which they would probably have done for her if she’d been a genius, too, had been
destroyed, because they thought he was dead. “She’s gone, too, Harsh. About eight years ago now.”


For half a second, his expression was the Harsh Marit she’d missed every day for the last ten years of her life. Her chest
went tight, and she had to concentrate to keep the tears away. They’d missed so much of each other’s lives, and now that he
was back, she didn’t want him to leave again. Harsh was all she had left.


He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Finally, he asked, “What happened?”

“Cancer.” She let out a breath. “Ironic, wouldn’t you say? Her son, the brilliant oncologist, wasn’t around to save her life.”

He didn’t say anything to that, and she felt rotten for the low blow.

“Look,” she said. She scrubbed her fingers through her above-the-shoulders-length hair. “I’m sorry. That was unfair and not
very nice. I didn’t mean it.”


“You’re right.” He fisted a hand. “I wasn’t there.” He was quiet for a bit, then said in a much lower voice, “I wish I’d been
there to help her.”


Alexandrine waited for him to tell her where he’d been all this time. He didn’t. Again. “So, like I said,” she said. “I’ve
been on my own a long time. And nothing all that bad happened.” But then, bad encompassed such a wide and varied spectrum. Bad included skipping meals to make the rent. Or getting evicted. Or hanging
with a very rough crowd and wondering if you’d make it to twenty-one. “I left home, banged around a while, saw the sights.
Did some stuff. Went to college.”


She’d done things she wasn’t going to talk about with anybody. “Now I have a job. I make shit money, but they let me telecommute
two days a week.” She held his gaze. “I rent this lovely hovel in the most beautiful city in the world.” She tilted her head
back and looked around her Mission District apartment. Ugly one-bedroom for fourteen hundred bucks a month, and she was lucky
to have something that cheap. She brought her attention back to her brother. Ten years was a long time to vanish from someone’s
life. “I’m not a virgin anymore.”


Harsh was taller than she was, which, considering she was five-eleven when she slouched, meant he was tall. Tall. Handsome.
Doctor. Where the hell had he been for all those years when she could have used a big brother?


“I didn’t imagine you were,” he said.

“Where have you been, Dr. Marit?” Sarcasm was her specialty. A useful skill in her opinion.


He walked from her crapola analog television to her jam-packed bookcase and back. “I can’t tell you.” Mr. Impatient knocked
on the door, and Harsh’s cell phone rang. At the same time.


“Golly, Harsh, why don’t you tell the guy to go get a life?”

He looked at her. Very unsettling, that piercing look. The skin on her arms prickled again. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been.”
He frowned in the direction of the door. “Can we just leave it at that?”


“The land of Oz? Siberia? Witness Protection? Off to find your birth parents like me? Timbuktu? No, wait, that was me.”

“You went to Timbuktu?”

“Uh-huh. And you? The Arctic? Prison?” That got her a poisonous look. “You don’t have any tats. If you were in prison, you’d
have the body art.” Which she knew on account of the fact that for longer than she cared to recall, her bosom buddies were
felons, complete with homemade tats. She cocked her head. “You were in the military, weren’t you?” Who else had the ability
to make a person completely disappear? “Government something. Am I right?”


Harsh stared at her. She didn’t think he was going to answer, but instead, Dr. Harsh Marit, her adored big brother, clapped
a hand behind his neck and said in a dark, raspy voice, “Prison would be a more accurate description of where I’ve been.”


The desolation in his voice popped her angry-as-abee’s-burned-behind balloon. “What do you need from me, Harsh?”

His damned phone went off again with a different ringtone. This time he answered with, “Harsh speaking.” She watched her brother
listen to whoever was on the other end. “No. I’m here. Yeah.” He darted a glance at her. She didn’t recognize the man behind
those eyes. She rubbed the sides of her arms, but it didn’t make the goose pimples go away. “Not yet. He’s outside. Yes. Yes.
I know. I will.” Then he lost it and burst out with, “For Christ’s sake, Nikodemus, she thought I was dead. Cut me a break,
would you?”


Alexandrine rose. Her pulse thudded in her ears. The nervous feeling in her stomach refused to go away. Nikodemus? Now there
was a name to make a girl sit up. Especially if she was a witch.


“Yes,” he replied more easily, still talking into the phone. His eyes were hard again, flat-out pitiless, and Alexandrine
wondered what horrible things her brother had endured while he’d been gone. A motorcycle engine revved outside. One of those
loud, obnoxious bikes driven by jackass men in leather pants.


Harsh disconnected his call, lifted his head, and then touched his phone again. After a bit, he said, “Don’t you dare leave.”
He was staring at her. “You want Nikodemus on your ass instead of just me?” he said into the phone.


Well, shit. That gave her another jolt and a half. Him saying a name she’d read about in the books she’d managed to scavenge.
Nikodemus? No effing way. She got an all-body chill like you would if you found out Jack the Ripper not only wasn’t dead but
also lived next door.


“Park the damn bike and come in. I’ll open the door for you.”

“News flash, Dr. Marit.” She sure as hell didn’t want to meet any of his friends. “I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing
it since before you disappeared.”


Harsh closed his phone and drew a deep breath. “Not against these guys.”

“What guys?”

The motorcycle cut off.

“The guys who don’t give a shit if you die as long as they get what they’re after.”

“What?” That happened to be the only word she could find to say, and it came out sounding like smart-ass disbelief, which
wasn’t what she intended at all. It was just that this was too perfectly timed with her premonition for her not to be thinking,
Here it is.

“This is what I want from you, Alexandrine.” His gaze pinned her. Gloves off, metaphorically speaking. “I want him to stay
here.”


“I don’t need a babysitter.”

Harsh laughed, only without actually laughing. “With him here, no one gets to you.”

Her brain froze up. Pure ice between her ears. The moment of decision was here. Ringing her doorbell, actually. This really
was it. The decision, only she still didn’t know which way she needed to go. Was the guy on the other side of the door a one
or a zero?


After Harsh went to let in his employee from Human Protective Services, there wasn’t any sound in her shitty apartment. If
she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was alone. But she wasn’t. Harsh was at the door, making goo-goo eyes at it for
all she knew. She addressed his back. “I found my biological father.”


He turned around just as Mr. Impatient and I Have a Motorcycle knocked. His eyes lasered her. “You did not.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I did. In Turkey. A little village about two hundred kilometers north of Ankara.”

Harsh opened the door and said, “Not in Turkey you didn’t.”

He was right about that. “I found out who he is when I was in Turkey.” She waited a beat. “Seems I was born in Turkey. But
my dad’s Danish. Go figure. His name is Rasmus Kessler, in case you’re interested.”


He kept his hand on the knob. The door was about an inch or so open. It was impossible to see who was on the other side. “You
didn’t meet him. You couldn’t have.”


“How do you know?”

In the light where he was standing, it looked like his eyes changed color. Not possible, but that’s what it looked like. “Because
if you had, Alexandrine, you’d be dead.”


Alexandrine watched her front door swing open. Harsh was facing away from her like he’d never said her biological father would
want to kill her. Great. Just really great. As if he knew anything at all about her real father. He hadn’t even known their
adoptive parents were dead. And he didn’t know anything at all about her. Not anymore.


The door opened enough for her to see past her brother. She got a chill in the pit of her stomach a hundred times worse than
before. One thing was profoundly clear to her: Her brother had just let a killer into her apartment. She was too frightened
to notice much besides black clothes and a pair of freakishly blue eyes that had to be a trick of the light outside her door.
No way. Just no way, ever. The human eye didn’t come in that color. Alexandrine brushed past Harsh and stuck out a hand, palm
out. Perfect timing because Blue Eyes walked smack into her hand. He stopped; she’d gotten to him just inside the doorway.


“I’m Alexandrine Marit,” she said. Her stomach roiled. Shit, this was worse than anything she’d ever felt before. And the
freaky thing was that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. The crisis must be huge. Life changing, of that she had
no doubt. But whatever it was hadn’t hit critical yet. When it did, she’d know what to do. She hoped. She always had before.
“This is my place you’re barging into.”


He stared down at her, and her blood froze solid. If she hadn’t been so mad at Harsh, she wouldn’t have gotten within six
feet of this guy. She knew bad when she looked it in the eye, and she preferred not to. God knows she’d lived with that kind
of bad after she left home. Gave a girl some painful lessons. Harsh’s buddy was scary-bad. Scar-ier than Harsh. She wasn’t
at all sure it was a good idea to have Harsh in the apartment, let alone another man just like him, only worse.


“So?” Blue Eyes said. One word and it was golden. The man had a beautiful voice. The better to take your soul, my dear.

She had to tilt her chin to look into his face, and that didn’t happen to her often. He wore leather pants, black gloves,
black boots, and a zipped-up leather jacket. Black, of course. A motorcycle helmet was tucked under one arm. Ah.