Page 24 of The Guardian (Dark-Hunter 20)
Chapter 8
Lydia woke up with the strangest sensation. Never in her life had she not dreamt. But not a single dream had come to her last night. When the Guardian had said he'd stripped her powers, he wasn't kidding.
He didn't even know she had that one.
Did he?
Stretching, she rolled over to find him at his desk where he'd been when she fell asleep. Still dressed in his loose black clothes, he'd pulled his chair around so that he faced the bed and his back was to the wall. But he wasn't paying her any attention.
Instead, he held an old-fashioned leather-bound book in his lap with one large, graceful, masculine hand. He leaned back in the chair with his arm propped on the desk and his undamaged cheek resting on his fist. His insanely long legs were stretched out before him, and crossed at the ankles. She smiled at the unexpected sight of his well-shaped bare feet. They were so cute and she'd never thought that about feet before. Normally, they grossed her out.
How strange that the sight of them succeeded in making him seem like any man, anywhere.
Well, not any man. Men this handsome were few and far between. Men this good-looking and ripped were even rarer. And finding one with his body, hair, and eyes was like finding a unicorn. In fact, she'd never seen a man with red hair who wasn't freckled or pale-skinned-not that there was anything wrong with that. It was just what you expected whenever you met a natural redhead, male or female. But there wasn't a single freckle anywhere on his body and even though he hadn't seen daylight in who knew how long, his skin was tanned and tawny.
Gah, even bruised and scarred, he made her mouth water.
How could that pose be so incredibly sexy? So lickably luscious?
With the one hand he had on the book, he turned the page without looking up.
She smiled at the sight of all those unruly auburn curls. Shirley Temple had nothing on him. And yet they still managed to be unbelievably masculine. More than that, she really, really wanted to play with them.
And as she studied his features, she noted that the bruise around his blood-filled eye had turned an ugly shade of dark purple. He had another new bruise on his ear that had been bleeding the night before. The handprint was also more pronounced today, as were the swollen, fresh bite marks on his neck.
She wanted to weep at the sight of them. Yet there he sat, so used to them that he didn't even comment on the pain they had to be causing him.
I'm so sorry I stabbed you. He was so not what she'd thought him to be when they first met. How could she have misjudged him so?
But then it wasn't entirely her fault. In spite of the legion of beatings and insults he'd endured, he carried himself as fiercely and confidently as any warrior or king. He exuded so much power and authority that no one would ever suspect he was Noir's punching bag and, from what she'd seen last night, most likely Azura's bootie call boy-toy.
But then maybe that was his shield. His way of not letting other people know his shame.
It kept them at arm's length, and in this hellacious place, it probably kept others from hurting him, too. That thought made her want to wrap her arms around him and hold him close.
If only he'd let her.
Clearing her throat, she finally spoke. "Did you not sleep at all?"
He shook his head, but didn't elaborate. "Are you hungry?"
"Not yet. I need to be awake for a few before I eat." Sitting up, she frowned at the closed laptop. "You stopped researching?"
"There was nothing to be found and I got tired of trying to decipher a writing form that makes no sense to me."
But he'd been so happy when she'd gone to bed ... at least she thought it was happy, looking at all the pictures and listening to her music. Now he was back to that solemnity that seemed to be hardwired into his DNA.
She slid off the bed and went to see what he was reading, but she couldn't understand his alphabet. It definitely wasn't Egyptian, but it kind of looked like it. "What is that?"
"Bilgames."
Whoa ... that was a new one on her. "What people spoke Bilgames?"
He frowned. "I don't understand."
Well, at least she wasn't the only one in the room lost. "What kind of language is Bilgames? Where does it come from?"
"It's not a language. It's the name of the story." Then his features relaxed as if a thought had occurred to him. "I think your people know it as Gilgamesh."
"Oh..." Now she knew how he'd felt last night when she kept using computer jargon. She had half the puzzle. But the other half was even more intriguing. "What language is it written in?"
"Akkadian."
Holy snikes. She was floored by his disclosure. She didn't know much about history, but she was extremely old and that predated her living knowledge ... In fact, she'd barely heard of it, it was so old. "And you can read that?"
His eyes snapped fire at her. "I'm not that stupid, nor am I illiterate."
"Obviously not. No one who can read something that complicated in an alphabet that is basically scribbled nonsensical lines could ever be called stupid."
That seemed to soothe him. "It's not that hard."
"For you. If you're as lost looking at my alphabet as I am with this one ... it says a lot." She continued to study it, but it was like trying to read Braille. "So are you Akkadian?"
"Egyptian."
"Really? You don't look Egyptian."
