Free Breath of Desire by Ophelia Bell Page A

brighter with the subsequent arousal.
    Aurik felt himself becoming aroused merely by their proximity and waited to let them have the privacy of their own lift before pushing the button for himself. He could sense them as they traveled upward, the allure of the magic growing dimmer the further away they got. There were no threads seeking their way outward from that pair, either, so engrossed were they in each other, cocooned in their own desire.
    Rather than hit the button for the floor of the room he’d been assigned, he hit the button for the sixth floor, the level he’d sensed Thea on. He had no plans to stay the night.
    ***
    Thea smacked her hand down on her notes, frustrated. Something was missing. Some crucial detail left out of the information Dimitri had given her. She scoured through the files again. There were hundreds of subfolders on the small drive. Some contained scanned pages of illuminated texts. How Camille had managed to get those, she had no clue, but Thea was impressed with the woman’s translation skills. All except for one particular passage. It was almost as though it had been overlooked, and the poor attention to detail in that particular spot was inconsistent with how thorough all the other translations had been.
    She’d managed to trace the family’s lineage backward at first, to ensure she was following the right paths going forward from the point in time Camille had left off. The focus of names shifted every few generations, when a female descendant would marry and take her husband’s name. She’d followed the family from Germany to France and was now stuck, trying to figure out what this impossibly obscure language meant. All she had to go on were the images in the margins of the scanned page on the thumb drive. Roses. Red roses coiled around the edges of the page and around some circular emblem at the top, a medallion with six dragons entwined within, that she’d seen repeated on many of the other images. She wasn’t after that image, but couldn’t shake the feeling it was significant to her search somehow.
    She cursed, the feeling that she’d been deliberately left in the dark over this whole project returning even stronger than before.
    “What the fuck are you keeping from me, Dimitri?” she muttered, her words almost obscuring the knock at her door. She checked her watch trying to remember if she’d ordered room service. She had forgotten to eat but couldn’t remember if that detail had already crossed her mind. Work tended to take precedence over all else when she had her teeth sunk deep enough in such a meaty project as this one was.
    When she opened the door, it took her a moment to register what she was seeing. His hair hung in shining waves to his shoulders, framing the too-perfect golden features of his face. His trimmed goatee caught the hallway light, making it seem to glow against the darker tan of his skin. And those eyes, God, she still couldn’t get them out of her mind.
    She was simultaneously more frustrated at the sight of him and aroused at the memory of their lovemaking. She stood gaping at him, torn between punching him and kissing him. His bearing and serious expression suggested neither option would be the right one, however, so she merely stood back wordlessly and let him enter.
    “Aurik. What are you doing here?” She checked the hallway, but he appeared to be alone.
    “I need a favor,” he said. “It’s about what I told you last week.”
    She raised a brow. “You mean about you leaving?”
    Aurik nodded and swiped a hand nervously through his hair. The utter desperation on his face struck a chord deep inside her. Her ire settled slightly, her previous urge to wring his neck subsiding into mere agitated curiosity. She’d probably had a touch too much coffee to listen patiently to whatever he needed to talk to her about, so she went to the mini fridge and pulled out the bottle of wine she’d been saving for a moment when she chose to relax,