Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 Read Online Free

to no avail. I was too weak and in too much pain to ignore the comfort that the Magician’s touch would give me. “Don’t I at least get healed first before the speech?”
    The Magician’s laughter expanded, and my mind broke like cheap glass. I lowered my mental barriers entirely to allow him to flow past my defenses, to flood my senses with a deep, soothing balm. It was an ebullient, effervescent, life-altering bliss that broke the charts, marred solely by the fact that he kept talking.
    “Allow me to restate. You should not have been able to do what you did. With the…” His voice drifted off or I did, and I dropped into decadent slumber. It wasn’t always this easy to let the Magician work his, well, magic. For the entire duration of our relationship, up until a few short weeks ago, his touch had incited as much panic as pleasure in me. I wanted his touch, craved it even, but I was terrified of it all the same. But recently, that had changed. The Magician had traded in his Immortal ID tags for a walk on the mortal side, and the result had been—
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I blinked back to awareness as the healing balm to my nerves drifted decidedly south. “I’m not burned there.”
    “You resist what you most want,” the Magician murmured. “I’ll never understand that.”
    “Work on it. Bad enough someone’s eventually going to come in here and find me healed. Let’s not have them find me happy as…ohh.” I sank briefly into subverbal instant gratification, before clawing my way back out again. “I said stop.”
    “You aren’t healed, exactly.” Armaeus said. “I can only do so much without touching you. But you will heal. And when I see you again, we’ll need to talk about setting boundaries.”
    I snorted. “That’s a first.”
    “Until then…” I noted the departure of the soothing mist immediately, but I sensed Armaeus hadn’t left yet, and my instincts were rewarded a moment later as I felt a soft, insistent pressure on my lips.
    My heart rate jacked, but I kissed him back anyway, reveling in the miracle that was his mouth, his skin, the essence of him around, above, and through me. I didn’t understand the Magician; I didn’t want to understand him. For now, it was enough that he existed and, for whatever reason, had the urge to put me back together whenever I broke myself.
    Considering how often that happened, I’d take it.
    “I won’t sense you once I leave this plane,” he murmured, his mouth moving hungrily along my jaw until it reached the sensitive skin below my ear. “Outreach is not that exact.”
    “Try,” I said, before I could stop myself.
    Armaeus paused, clearly startled, then pressed his mouth over mine again. “As you wish,” he murmured, making the last word drift across sixteen time zones as he dissolved.
    Too exhausted to come up with a Princess Bride comeback, I faded to black as well, my chart pinging like a Vegas slot machine. A phalanx of nurses burst into my room, but I truly didn’t care anymore.
    The next time I opened my eyes, however, I cared a little more. I did.
    I especially cared about the gloved hand smashed against my mouth.
    “Don’t scream.” The voice was low, guttural, and definitely not Japanese. “You can see?”
    I nodded once as the man waved a gun in front of my face, the silencer evident on its tip. I could smell too. The gloved man’s pistol had been fired recently. That was never good.
    “You can walk. We go.”
    This wasn’t a question, and I winced as the man ripped the luxurious bedcovers off my body with no further warning. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing a standard-issue hospital gown but a tunic and scrub-like pants, the skin beneath still damp with what appeared to be heavy-duty cold cream. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and the intruder hauled me to a seated position. He was small framed but strong, his face covered by a thin black mask. Another man appeared next to the bed and shoved my boots at me,