Mac♥Jericho Appreciation #1: Because whatever brought Mac to Dublin, also brought her to him.

Welcome to the 1st Mac & Jericho Appreciation thread.

**header yet to come**

Mackayla Lane found her way to Dublin, Ireland when her sister was murdered and decided that if the police weren't going to do something, then she would.
Upon this quest she stumbled her way into a bookstore where she came in contact with mysterious store owner, Jericho Barrons.
Together they would have to work together to find the missing evil book they seem to be both after, possibly for different reasons but nonetheless if either of them wished to succeed, they would have to put their trust in one other while trying to keep themselves alive along the way.
What they didn't expect.. was to come to depend on each other, and possibly more..


Shippers
1. Guinevere
2. lakers0604
3. -Kas-
4. Burning Up A Sun
5. shadow kissed
6. broken|smile
7. PJ_Believer
8. Eviekins15
9. colorblind85
10. LG rocks my socks
11. Honey-Girl
12. lisagslack14
13. Nat
14. Mushkah




He Studied me with his predators gaze, assessing me from head to toe. I studied him back.
He didn’t just occupy space, he saturated it. The room had been full of books before, but now it was full of him.
About thirty, six feet two or three, he had dark hair, golden skin and dark eyes.
His features were strong, chiselled.
I couldn’t pinpoint his nationality anymore than I could his accent, some kind of European crossed with old world Mediterranean or maybe an ancestor with dark gypsy blood. He wore an elegant, dark grey Italian suit, a crisp white shirt, and a muted pattern tie.
He wasn’t handsome. That was too calm a word.
He was intensely masculine. He was sexual. He was attracted.
There was an omnipresent carnality about him, in his dark eyes, in his dark mouth, in the way he stood.
He was the kind of man I wouldn’t flirt with in a million years.


He thrust me against the wall and held me there, a hand at my throat, his dark gaze moving restlessly over my face, my neck, the rise and fall of my breasts beneath my lace camisole.

Moving majorly over my breasts. I might have snorted if oxygen had been in plentiful supply.
There was no way Jericho Barrons thought I was a hottie.
We couldn’t have been less each other’s type. If he was Antartica, I was Sahara.

“Try to act like you like me”
When he put his arm around me and pulled me close, the shiver went clear down to my toes

When he returned his attention to the box, I caught my breath and stared blankly at the top of his dark head.
Barrons had just given me the most carnal, sexually charged, hungry look I’d ever seen in my life and I was pretty sure he didn’t know even he had done it.

My breasts felt hot and flushed and my mouth was suddenly uncomfortable and dry. Jericho Barrons might be only seven or eight years older than me, and he might be what most women consider extremely attractive in a dark, forbidding way, but he and I came from two different worlds; we didn’t see life the same way.
After a long puzzled moment, I shook my head, thrust the inexplicit look from my mind - there was simply no room for it in my reality.

With his left arm around my waist, his right hand on my shoulder, fingers lightly brushing the swell of my breast, he steered me toward the entrance, locking gazes with men brave or stupid enough to let his gaze dip below my eyes, holding it until the man looked away.
He could not more clearly branded me as his possession.

I think he kissed me then.
But it wasn’t like any kiss I’d ever felt before.

I wouldn’t call him Jericho if he didn’t like it.
But I wanted him to call me Mac, I insisted, sleepily.
“Mac” he said my name and laughed.
“What a name for something like you. Mac” he laughed again






Barrons and I have this unique way of communicating.
We have these little nonverbal conversations,
where we say all those things we don’t say with our mouths with our eyes instead,
and we understand each other perfectly.
He didn’t say If you ever burn one of my quarter of a million dollar rugs again I’ll take it out on your hide,
and I didn’t say Oh honey wouldn’t you like to? And he didn’t say Grow up Ms Lane, I don’t take little girls to my bed,
and I didn’t say I wouldn’t go there if it was the only safe place from the Lord Master in all of Dublin.

“I guess I’m just a little spooked, Barrons.
That’s all. Let’s go home. There’s nothing here”
“Home, Ms Lane?” His deep voice was gently amused.
“I have to call it something,” I said morosely .

He brushed a curl from my forehead and I shivered.
Barrons has strong hands, with long,
beautiful fingers and I think he carries some kind of electrical charge
because every time he touches me it shoots an unwelcome thrill through my body.


He brushed the pad of his thumb across my mouth,
then cupped my chin and angled my face back up to the light,
I thought he was going to kiss me himself,
to taste the complexity and complicity of me.

“One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without,
and find breath is of little consequence”
I could feel the heat off his big body, along with the energy that always seemed to roll of him, that strange electrical current that bristled, omnipresent beneath his golden skin. There was something different about him tonight.


If he’d been any other man and id been any other girl, I’d have called the narrowing of his heavy-lidded dark eyes lust.
But he was Barrons and I was Mac, and a blossoming of lust was about as likely as orchids blooming in Antarctica.



The moment he seen me, he charged me, roughly bundled me over his shoulder,
hauled me to the garage, stripped off my tool belt,
and chained me to a support beam.
I hadn’t even tried to fight him off; there was more steal inside Barrons than in the post behind me.

His hand was on my throat, and he was crushing me back with his body into the cold steel beam behind me.
“Yes, I have loved Ms Lane and although it’s none of your business I have lost.
Many things. And no, I’m not like any other player in this game and I will never be like V’lane, and I get a hard on a great deal more often than occasionally.
He leaned fully against me and I gasped.
“Sometimes it’s over a spoiled little girl, not a woman at all. And yes I trashed the bookstore when I couldn’t find you”

I eyed him, wondering what his elegant Italian suit might conceal.
He had all the tattooing implements. What did Barrons look like without his clothes on?

I must have blinked. His face was close to mine.
His hand was in my hair. His breath was warm on my cheek.
“You can’t die Mac” his voice was flat, implacable..
“I won’t let you”

“This isn’t want I wanted” Barrons was saying.
“This isn’t what I would have chosen. You must know that.
It’s important you know that.”

His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard.
Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way come to matter to this enigmatic, had, brilliant, obsessed man?
I realized he come to matter to me.
Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.


He swapped the fistful of my shirt for one in my hair,
and ground his mouth against mine.
I exploded. I shoved at him, and clawed him closer. He shoved me back, and yanked me tighter to his body.
I pulled his hair. He pulled mine. He didn’t fight fair. Actually, he fought exactly fair.
He didn’t extend courtesies, not a single one. I bit his lip. He tripped me and pushed me down to the stone floor of the cavern.
I punched him. He straddled me.I ripped his shirt down the front, left it hanging in tatters from his shoulders.
“I liked that shirt” he snarled.

He grabbed the hem of my shirt, tore it straight up to my neck,
and inhaled sharply. His mouth was on mine again, the hot silk of his tongue,
the sharp deliberate abrasion of his teeth, the exchange of breath and the small, desperate sounds of need.


He fitted himself to me and began a driving, erotic,
rhythmic bump and grind. Barrons tongue was inside my mouth, and somehow I was inside barrons.

Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile,
taking me to the ground beneath him.
“She stays with me” said, Barrons. His voice too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull.
Of course I was staying with him.
What had I been thinking?


I was about to look away when he reached across the seat, touched my jaw with his long, strong, beautiful fingers,
and caressed my face.
Being touched by Jericho Barrons with kindness makes you feel like you must be the most special person in the world.


Barrons took a seat at the opposite end of the sofa, Even with all that space between us, we were too close.
I remember the feel of his wild, electric body on top of mine.
I remembered lying beneath him with my skirt ripped to my neck, the look on his face.
I looked away.


As I reached the connecting door, I stopped. “Jericho”.
“Mac”
I hesitated. “Thank you for saving my life” I slipped through the door, before I pulled it close, I added softly “again”






“But first I’d like to know what the feck you were doing kissing him.”
Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me
will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don’t back off. “I’m a spitter, if that’s what you’re asking.” I flashed him a too-sweet smile.
“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.”
“Jealous?”
“Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh.”

I’ve felt that body on top of mine, been the focus of that consuming gaze. I try not to think about it. I have a box inside me now that never used to exist. I never needed it before. It’s down in my deepest, darkest corner, and it’s airtight, soundproofed, and padlocked. It’s where I keep thoughts I don’t know what to do with, that could get me into trouble. Eating Unseelie hammers on the inside of that lid incessantly. I try to keep kissing Barrons in that box, too, but it gets out sometimes

Barrons’ lips twitched. I’d almost made him smile. Barrons smiles about as often as the sun comes out in Dublin, and it has the same effect on me; makes me feel warm and stupid.

Barrons and I are pros at ignoring anything and everything that passes between us that might smack of emotion of any kind, even so simple a feeling as embarrassment. Sometimes I can’t believe I was ever beneath that big, hard body, kissing him, getting glimpses into his life. The desert. The lonely boy. The lone man. Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me that having sex with Barrons might just answer some of my questions about who and what he was. It had. And I’d promptly stuffed that idea into my padlocked box. For a gazillion reasons that need no explaining.


Barrons draped an arm over my shoulder and I moved into the shelter of it. The thing on my tongue burned. My brand itched. At that moment, I despised them both.
“Stay away from her,” Barrons growled.
“You won’t harm a hair on her head, or I’ll kill you,” said Barrons

“Nice tan, Ms. Lane. How’s V’lane? Did you have a good time today? I take you to graveyards, but he takes you to the beach—is that what our problem is? Our little dates aren’t good enough for you? Does he romance you? Feed you all those pretty lies you’re so hungry for? I’ve been neglecting you lately. I’ll be remedying that”

After a moment, Barrons resumed his seat in the chair across from me, absorbed my painfully stiff posture, and smiled without humor. “Very well, Mac. Relax.”
Mac? He’d called me Mac? I fought for breath. “Am I about to die?” I wheezed. “Are you going to kill me?”
He looked startled. I’d done it again. Spoken of my own will. He’d released my body, but not his hold on my mind
and mouth. I could still feel it, compelling me, hurting me.
Then he snorted. “I tell you to relax and you think I’m going to kill you? You’re crippled by a woman’s illogic.” He added as a seeming afterthought, “You may speak freely now.”
“I am not. The only two times you ever called me Mac is when I was near death. Since there’s no other threat around right now, you must be about to kill me. It’s perfectly logical.”
“I didn’t call you Mac.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I called you Ms. Lane.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”


I didn’t hear him behind me. I felt him. Electric. Wild. One foot in the swamp. Never going to crawl all the way out.
And I wanted to have sex with whatever he was. Where was I supposed to put that in my head? I wadded the thought up, stuffed it in my padlocked box, and tested the chains. I was going to need a few more.

I would never forget the night we’d fought, the unexpected lust.
We looked at each other and for a moment those clouds of distrust lifted and I saw his thoughts in his eyes.
You were something to see, he didn’t say.
You were something to feel, I didn’t reply.
His gaze shuttered. I looked away.

I turned around slowly, and looked up at him. He stiffened and sucked in a shallow breath. After a moment, he touched my cheek.
“Such naked pain,” he whispered.
I turned my face into his palm and closed my eyes. His fingers threaded into my hair, cupped my head, and brushed the brand. It heated at his touch. His hand tightened at the base of my skull and squeezed, and he raised me slowly to
my tiptoes. I opened my eyes and it was my turn to inhale sharply. Not human. Oh, no, not this man.


I moistened my lips. His gaze fixed on them. I think I stopped breathing.
He jerked so sharply away that his long dark coat sliced air, and turned his back to me. “Was that an invitation, Ms.Lane?”
“If it was?” I asked, astonishing myself. What did I think I was doing?
“I don’t do hypotheticals. Little girl.”