Dark Solstice (10 page)

She’d parted her legs for him as he rolled over her, though, cradling his hips between her thighs. As he moved over her restlessly, exploring the soft flesh of her breasts and throat with his lips, his dick plowed a path along her hot, moist cleft.

She was panting for breath. He couldn’t figure out if it was fear inspired, desire inspired, or if he was crushing her with his weight—because he couldn’t
fucking
think! Everything inside of him screamed desire, though, and when his dick hit a snag in just the right place, his hips curled of their own accord, pressing a little deeper—just to be sure he’d found the spot.

She lifted to meet him.

Mistake, he thought! But it was too late to try to reason with his dick. The poor bastard had found the right spot alright, and he wasn’t listening to any attempts to dissuade him from burrowing deeper, and the deeper he went the more mindless Kyle felt as waves of tortuous pleasure washed over him.

“God! I’m sorry, Rhea,” he muttered mindlessly near her ear. “I can’t stop now, baby!”

She sucked in a sharp breath as he drove deeper. It ended on a groan that lifted goose-bumps all over him. He shuddered, tried to get a grip on his self-control.

She’s faking it, he told himself, but everything else inside of him tensed, surged toward release, and he lost focus on anything beyond striving to reach his goal, pumping into her furiously.

She tensed, arched her neck and uttered a sound that shredded the last of his control. He felt her shudder, buck beneath him, felt the muscles along her sex ripple along his dick like a hand, milking him. It tore a choked groan from him as he felt his body respond instantly, pumping his seed from him in a scalding, rapturous tide of release.

He didn’t want to stop even when he’d pumped every drop of fluids he could muster into her. He stopped because every muscle in his body lost tone and turned to rubber, slumping heavily against her, dragging her scent into his lungs with every desperate gasp for breath, relishing it.

He would’ve lain there on top of her, inside of her, right on if the fucking alarm for shutdown hadn’t abruptly blared, goosing him with a cold blast of reality. It still took an effort to roll off of her and not just because he felt weak as hell.

He wanted her again. His blood had already begun to stir with reawakened desire.

Raathe, he discovered, was staring at him with a look that said he would’ve cheerfully cut his throat from ear to ear if he’d had a shank to do it with.

It was just as well the bastard didn’t have time to kick his ass, because it wouldn’t have been a contest. Bending down, he grabbed his suit, locked his weak knees and stalked from Raathe’s cell toward his own, hoping nobody challenged him along the way—because he was dead meat if they did. He sure as fuck wasn’t in any condition to defend himself.

Rhea shivered at the withdrawal of Kyle’s warmth, watching him through her lashes as he stalked past Raathe and left, more than a little stunned at the force of the climax that had rocked her.

She was almost as stunned that she’d gone from ‘faking it’ to mindless appreciation so quickly she wasn’t even sure of when she’d made the transition. Somewhere along the way, though, she’d completely forgotten that she was pretending to enjoy Kyle’s caresses to annoy Raathe.

The thought brought her attention back to Raathe. He met her gaze for a long moment and turned away.

In that handful of seconds, though, she saw that she’d succeeded in annoying him a lot more than she’d expected to and it unnerved her. With an effort, she pushed herself upright and climbed from the bunk, moving to the lavatory to bathe herself off. She could still taste Kyle on her lips, though, could catch his scent faintly on her skin with each breath she took and each time she did she felt a fresh stirring of warmth.

He’d called her by name, she realized with a jolt as she finished cleaning up. How had he known her name? She hadn’t told anyone and she couldn’t recall that it had been announced when they’d led her into the arena.

Maybe they had, though, and she’d just been too mindless with terror to notice?

Raathe caught her as she headed back toward the bunk, his hand closing tightly around her forearm. She looked up at him with a mixture of surprise and wariness. He reeled her closer, threading the fingers of his free hand in the hair at the nape of her neck and dragging her head back on the stem of her neck. Before she’d fully assimilated his intent, he dragged her up against his length and claimed her mouth with his own. Too surprised to react at first, by the time the message had traveled to her sluggish brain, warmth had spread through her, turning her knees to water, and any thought of resistance had melted.

His taste and scent and touch were as different from Kyle’s as the physical differences between the two men. It lit her up. She was so disoriented by his kiss, she wasn’t certain she would’ve even noticed the gentle collision with the wall he pressed her against if not for the iciness of it against her overheated skin. The coldness sucked the breath from her lungs, though.

Before she could drag air back into her lungs to fight the dizziness that swept over her, he’d hoisted her upward along the wall, dragged her legs around his waist, and transferred the heated adhesion of his mouth from hers to her breast. The covetousness of his possession was heady, seemed to paralyze her lungs in her chest, making it nigh impossible to drag in a decent breath. Giddiness enveloped her.

She struggled with the burning need for air in her lungs, the drunken lethargy that swept through her, the searing jolts traveling along every nerve ending with the pull of his mouth on her flesh, panting for breath. She’d just managed to drag a decent gulp of oxygen into her lungs when she heard the tearing sound of his suit closure parting, felt the press of hot, hard flesh at the mouth of her sex as he found her, claimed her. A low, animalistic groan escaped her as she felt his flesh parting hers, felt him sink deeply inside of her.

Insane it might be, but the way the man made her feel when he joined his flesh with hers was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, delightful almost past bearing. He impaled her ruthlessly, shifting once he’d plumbed her depths to a position more advantageous and pounding into her in a way that carried her so swiftly from blossoming desire to completion that it took her breath. She sucked in a gasp on the sharp edge of a scream at the power of the explosion that rocked through her as she convulsed with ecstasy. He issued a low growl of satisfaction when he felt her climax, stiffened for a split second, and then thrust harder and faster until he joined her release.

She felt completely drained of energy when the convulsions had eased off, hardly even possessed of the strength to breathe. It was fortunate he didn’t release her at once, instead leaning heavily against her and bracing her between himself and the wall. She knew with absolute certainty that she couldn’t have stood on her own. She could barely lock her knees to keep from slipping to the floor when he did finally allow her to slide to her feet.

He tangled the fingers of one hand in her hair, dragging her head back so that she was forced to look up at him. “You’re mine, woman,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “Don’t ever forget that.”

Chapter Nine

Perish the thought!

Rhea didn’t voice that thought aloud, though. In point of fact, it was a while before her sluggish brain even managed to decipher the unnerving possessiveness of Raathe’s claim so that she was able to grasp that it went deeper than a simple reminder that she was his ‘munch’. The anger in his voice when he’d said it seemed to indicate that, in any case, since he’d never shown anything before but cold indifference.

Maybe she’d misunderstood, though? Maybe it only occurred to her to think he’d begun to feel possessive of her because she’d been so focused on ‘punishing’ him by pretending she enjoyed sex with Kyle as much or more than she did with him?

She’d succeeded far better than she’d anticipated, she realized, more than she should’ve wanted.

“What did he say to you?”

Rhea looked at Raathe blankly. Hours had passed since she’d made the ‘payment’ on the information Raathe wanted and his reaction had so completely redirected her mind that she hadn’t actually given a lot of thought to her interlude with Kyle since.

The question jarred her out of her absorption with her thoughts about Raathe, though. She felt her face redden. “I don’t remember,” she lied uncomfortably, partly because she didn’t want to provoke Raathe any more than she already had and partly because she was reluctant to share her intimacy with Kyle any more than she’d been forced to already.

The look he gave her was a clear indication that he knew she was lying and it sent a surge of anger through her. She glared at him. “I can’t hold it, baby!” she snapped.

Raathe’s face darkened—with anger, she was sure. She doubted very much that he was the least bit embarrassed. His lips tightened. She could see he was wrestling with the inclination to pursue it, realized she was still lying, or at least omitting something.

“Besides that,” he ground out finally.

She stared at him while she struggled with the instinctual fear that telling him would be a mistake somehow. She didn’t know how it might, but the very fact that it had surprised her that Kyle knew her name made her wary of mentioning it. “I honestly don’t remember. I had other things on my mind at the time. I wouldn’t have remembered that except that I thought he was going to run off and leave me hanging.”

Fury glittered in Raathe’s icy blue eyes for a moment. He tamped it with an obvious effort, looking her over speculatively. “I’m glad to see your experiences haven’t completely crushed it, but it would be mistake to let that feisty spirit of yours overrule good sense,” he said coolly.

Rhea swallowed with an effort against the hard knot of fear that leapt into her throat. She felt the blush that had heated her cheeks recede until she felt cold instead. “I did what you wanted,” she said in a suffocated voice.

He looked angrier for a moment but seemed to thrust it aside. “And now you’re going to answer the question,” he said evenly.

Rhea chewed her lip, thinking. “He said he wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I heard that.”

“I don’t know!” Rhea said a little desperately. “I really don’t remember. Something about he was sorry. It felt good. It was just … love talk.”

“Love talk,” he repeated, sarcasm in his voice now. “Baby, he fucked you. You were just a piece of munch. Get over it.”

She sent him hurt look. She couldn’t help it. He made a sound of disgust, seemed to wrestle with himself for several moments, and finally joined her on the bunk. Dragging her down until she lay full length against him, he caught her chin and tipped her head back, forcing her to look at him. “You are so far out of your league it would be disgusting if it wasn’t so pathetic. Don’t fall into the way of thinking he’s going to rescue you from me, baby,” he growled. “Nobody’s going to rescue you.”

Rhea swallowed with an effort against the knot of emotion that clogged her throat. “I didn’t think that.”

“No?”

She shook her head slightly.

His gaze wandered over her face. “You thinking about pitting the two of us against one another? Maybe changing partners? Because it’s not going to work. You’re mine and I’m sure as hell not trading you off for a little bit of information that may or may not be useful to me.”

She stared at him speechlessly since the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Is that what that was about?” she asked finally. “He was trying to convince you to trade me for information he has?”

His expression closed. It was like a door had slammed in her face. She tried to look away, but his grip on her chin tightened. When she shifted her eyes to his face again, she discovered he’d leaned closer. His lips brushed hers, startling her. He transferred his grip from her chin to the side of her face, curling his long fingers along the back of her head and holding her while he leisurely explored her lips with his own.

“What are you doing?” she whispered uneasily.

“Something incredibly stupid, probably,” he responded, molding his mouth more firmly against hers.

Heat cascaded through her in a fiery tide as he settled more snugly against her, pressing her back against the mattress even as he slipped his tongue between her lips and raked it boldly along the surface of hers, infusing his drugging essence into her system. She struggled briefly against the tide of desire that rose temptingly inside of her, but it was a lost cause. There was no stopping the passion he aroused so easily in her, no slowing it down. Her body burgeoned, caught fire as he nestled the evidence of his arousal against her cleft and arched against her rhythmically, the synchronized motions of his tongue lifting her higher.

Regret filled her that she’d dressed, that they were both clothed and she couldn’t feel his skin against her own. As welcome as his weight was, and the hard pressure of his engorged cock, it teased at the pleasure she might have had.

“You’re a bad liar, Rhea,” Raathe murmured when he broke the kiss at last and wove his way toward her ear, making her shiver with delight at the brush of his lips and the heated caress of his breath on her sensitive skin. “He called you Rhea, didn’t he? I’m wondering how he knew that.”

Enthralled as she was already, the questions, murmured softly, almost hypnotically, still pierced her consciousness enough to arouse wariness. “I told him,” she lied breathlessly.

He lifted his head and looked at her through narrowed eyes. “That is your name, then.”

Rhea stared at him blankly, still too rattled by the desire he’d evoked in her to think clearly.

His lips tightened. He drew away from her abruptly, turning and settling upright on the edge of the bunk with his back to her. “Is he that fucking good, Rhea?” he growled, sliding a narrow eyed look at her. “One good fuck and you’re his slave, is that it?”

A cold dose of reality swept the desire away so swiftly that it left her cloaked in shock. “I don’t know what you want,” she said breathlessly, her lips so dry abruptly that she felt dehydrated by the fear that was beginning to wind its way through her.