Free Into Thin Air by Cindy Miles Page B

gaping in adolescent awe at the David statue. She'd even copped a feel of the solid marble appendage that had captivated her and her friends. Good Lord! Her father would've croaked if he'd ever found out.
    She gasped. "Oh! I remembered something!"
    Gawan, who had a ridiculous grin on his face for some strange reason, pulled up at the castle entrance, stopped, and threw the Rover into park. He cleared his throat. "Er, what?"
    Ellie turned in her seat to face him full-on. "My father! I was sitting here, wondering about all those tattoos you have. Then I thought about how I'd seen you naked that one night and how sexy I thought those tattoos were, and that led to a memory of me at a museum feeling up a statue of David, and then I thought about how my father would croak if he ever found out." She laughed.
    "I've got a father! I'm remembering!"
    Gawan just stared at her, that funny, almost smothered grin changing, as a slow, easy smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
    "What?" Ellie said, and gave him a punch in the arm. "Isn't that great?"
    One dark eyebrow rose above one sinfully dark chocolate eye. "You were thinking of me naked?"
    Ellie blinked. "Well, yeah."
    The grin widened. "And you find me markings sexy?"
    Ellie feigned an exaggerated yawn. "Sort of."
    Gawan's eyes held hers for a moment, and that darn glint of his was back. The muscles in his jaws flexed, making his features intense, and Ellie's mouth went dry as a bone. That couldn't possibly be a good thing.
    With a deep breath, she laughed it off. "Sooo, how 'bout those books, huh?" She gave him another playful punch in the biceps—which, she noticed not for the first time, was quite the rock. "Chop chop! The sooner I'm no longer mostly dead, the better, right?"
    Just that fast, Gawan's expression changed. Gone was the playful, flirty look; now a solemn, remorseful one took its place.
    Thinking it best to tackle one bizarre thing at a time, the first, of course, being her inconceivable state of affairs, as Gawan had called her almost-deadness. She pasted a pleasant smile to her face and jumped out of the Rover. "Come on, Grimm. Get the lead out of your pants. Let's get down to the business of saving me, okay?"
    She didn't wait for him as she bounded up the half dozen steps and through the castle's wide double oak doors.
    Literally through the double oak doors.
    Gawan blinked. Damnation, Ellie had vanished again. Here one second, gone the next. Bloody frustrating, that was what it was.
    He sat in the car and stared at the space she'd just occupied. A feeling of emptiness washed over him, and he wondered why, in all his centuries of being a Guardian, he had not felt the same toward any of his other charges. Aye, he'd felt compassion, and he'd done his job well. He'd never lost a soul, not once. He'd never become overattached to any of them, though.
    He felt rather attached to Ellie of Aquitaine.
    It pained him to think of not remembering his time with her.
    Grabbing the two leather tomes he'd acquired at Mrs. MacGillery's, he shut the door to the Rover and stopped as Ellie's words came back to him.

    ... that led to a memory of me at a museum feeling up a statue of David ...
    Gawan laughed out loud as he climbed the steps and opened the doors. "The girl's surely mad."
    "Sir Gawan! I seen her, but then she disappeared through the bloomin' door!" Davy said, breathless, just inside the hall. "Came straight through the wood, she did, smiled at me so big I seen all her teeth. Then off she went!"
    Gawan closed the doors behind him and grinned. "You sift through doors and walls regularly, boy.
    And I don't think you saw all of her teeth."
    Davy ran alongside Gawan. "Aye, I did see them all—back ones, too. Could see them in the dark, I s'pose, they're so bloomin' white." He skipped ahead and turned to walk backward, facing Gawan.
    "Whitest teeth I ever did see, methinks—next to yours." He grinned. "And I slip through doors and such, aye, but I'm a spirit in truth. Lady