Demon's Fire (17 page)

The closer he drove her to culmination, the more that strength came to her aid, helping her to hold back the way he’d told her to. Her pleasure was a shining wire, coiling tighter and tighter on the verge of springing free.

She suspected she was hanging on that verge too long for him. He began to grunt with his thrusts, began to looked pained from his longing for release. She wished his release could include ejaculation, craving that burst of seed inside of her. Another part of her, the same that held her so triumphantly steady, reveled in his suffering. His veins were drawn on his temples in strong blue lines, his facial muscles twisting with the strain. He was trying to maintain his precious demon control, but it was unraveling before her eyes.

Her body bowed without warning, the orgasm like a beast breaking from a cage. It slammed out from her sex as he slammed in, hitting that ringing spot deep inside her. Just as he’d predicted, the burst of energy triggered his release. He didn’t scream, but he shouted, hoarsely, pulling out one more time so he could shove back. Her hands were wrenched free of their mooring. Only he held her then, only he, with his hard, long cock convulsing forcefully.

And then it softened at long last, slowly, steadily, pulling a sigh from both of them. Her sexual muscles caressed it as it faded.

He had not spilled, but by Heaven he had relaxed.

“Beth,” he said, and tipped her head to rest on his shoulder. He stood with her in the water. She didn’t remember when he’d changed their positions. Had there been a moment’s extra dizziness tipped into her lightheaded glow? Regardless, it felt lovely to hug him like a monkey climbing a tree.

It felt even lovelier to be hugged back.

He was breathing hard but not exhaustedly, holding her tight with him still inside. Though the water supported much of her weight, his control impressed her. She’d lost herself at the end. He’d been the one to keep her safe.

“Holy hell,” whispered a voice behind her back.

It was Charles’s whisper. He must have heard the noises they were making and come in from the garage to investigate. How much he’d seen only he knew.

Pahndir’s head lifted from where he’d buried it in her hair. Perhaps he’d been unable to recognize Charles from his voice alone. When he did see who it was, his sexual organ started to lengthen inside of her.

“Charles,” he said, and the thing gave a little thump like a tail wagging.

The moment was a revelation, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. From the beginning, Beth had thought it probable the Yama was interested in Charles in a sexual way. To feel the evidence of that attraction swelling within her flesh erased any possible scrap of doubt. The bigger shock was her body’s reaction.

She was excited. The flicker of her inner muscles, the resurgent wetness and rising ache could not be denied. She
liked
the idea that Pahndir wanted Charles.

By accident or intent, Pahndir had turned them so they could look up at Charles where he stood at the pool’s wet edge. Charles’s glare notwithstanding, Pahndir didn’t loosen his embrace. She didn’t think this was because her body hid his arousal. He seemed far more wary than embarrassed, though the continued stretching of his organ said it was happy to stay where it was.

Charles’s eyes were stricken when they met hers. “What are you doing, Beth? I warned you to stay away from him.”

“I know,” Beth said softly. She squirmed a little in Pahndir’s hold, less comfortable than he was with flaunting what they’d been doing. She wished the confidence she’d felt when she was alone with Pahndir would come back. Anything had seemed permissible to her then, as if the rules by which other people lived were simply suggestions.

That was then, though, and this was now. She pushed aside her insecurity. “The thing is, Charles, I’m not yours to warn. You made it clear you and I would never be intimate again.”

“Again?” Pahndir’s voice had an edge of sharpness. “You made love to him?” He turned his head to Charles. “
You’re
the one who took her virginity?”

Charles flushed, the stain on his cheeks so much darker than the one on Pahndir’s. Anger beat behind the color, and guilt, and perhaps a shade of unwilling arousal. As Charles drew breath to speak, his eyes were so blue they snapped.

“Hey,” Beth cut in, stopping him. “Nobody ‘took’ anything from me.”

Pahndir ignored her in favor of continuing to berate Charles. “I thought such things meant something to your people. How could you be her first, and then say you’d never be with her again?”

“I was trying to protect her! And a fat lot of good that did with you seducing her as soon as my back was turned.”

“Hey!” Beth said, louder this time. “I made my choices.
Me.
As I have every right to do.”

Charles frowned at her and crossed his arms, patently unwilling to cede this point. “You had sex with him. In the pool.”

Beth didn’t see why this was worse than making love to him somewhere else, but Charles’s deeply reddened face said it was.

“You could have made love to me in the pool, if it had occurred to you.”

A quiet snort puffed against her ear, Pahndir’s subtle demon laugh. The tiny movement shifted him inside her, reminding her how firmly, how fully, he was filling her. It occurred to her that he wasn’t judging her for having been intimate with Charles. He’d been surprised, but his anger seemed mainly at the idea that Charles might have treated her disrespectfully. Now he held her (claimed her, some would say) but he wasn’t trying to scare Charles away. Indeed, he was quite obviously stimulated by his presence. A door clicked open in her mind, spilling possibilities into her awareness that seemed as natural as breathing once she saw them.

Tou hadn’t had any problem with this sort of arrangement.

She let her gaze slide down Charles’s rigid body. He wore Northern clothes: trousers, a loose white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The less-than-exotic garments could not disguise the bulge at his groin. He was aroused by what he’d witnessed, and twice as defensive on that account.

She knew her voice was going to be throaty even before she opened her mouth. “You could take me in the pool now, if you wanted. You could take us both.”

“Yes, you could,” Pahndir agreed.

Charles’s jaw dropped, his breath rushing out in shock. “You’re both crazy.”

“We both like you,” Beth said. “We’d enjoy pleasing you.”

Pahndir gave her hip a little squeeze of support. Charles looked from one to the other, his formerly flushed face gone pale. She saw he was truly stunned by their offer. The muscles that formed his expression tightened. Anger rose into his eyes, but not before the deepest pain she’d ever seen sliced across his face. She didn’t know if the pain was hurt or longing, but it was frighteningly powerful. He slashed his hand through the air and turned.

“I don’t need this,” he said, already striding toward the door. “The pair of you can go to hell.”

Maybe she should have expected him to lash out, maybe any normal male would have, but his words stung nonetheless. Impatient, she dashed away the one small tear that had squeezed from her eye.

“Shh.” Pahndir kissed the spot where it had been. “He’s just afraid.”

“Of me? Of us? Doesn’t he know I’d never deliberately do anything to hurt him?”

Pahndir let her slide from him onto her feet. He was still hard, but that didn’t seem to matter. “He’s afraid of himself, Beth. Of how much he wants what you were offering.”

“He thinks I’m a pervert.”

Again, he gave that snorting laugh. “No, Beth. He thinks
he’s
one.” His hands came up to frame her face, his silver gaze even more intense than usual. His fingertips drew slow, drugging circles on the skin behind her ears. “Tell me, love. Is the three of us together what you really want? Or are you trying to be nice to the hapless males?”

“You mean you truly wouldn’t mind?”

His smile was crooked but unmistakable. “I’d count myself a lucky man twice over. I simply thought it would take more maneuvering to coax you into entertaining the idea.”

She realized her mouth was hanging open when he kissed it gently shut. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but hearing him admit that he’d been hoping to arrange a threesome unsettled her. Sensing her disquiet, he smoothed his thumbs over her wet eyebrows.

“Wanting you both doesn’t lessen what I feel for you. Trust me, whether I’m lucky once over or twice, I appreciate how very fortunate either of those options is. I had…” He hesitated, suddenly awkward. “I had rather given up hope of experiencing such fondness toward anyone who would return the sentiment.”

Beth’s smile seemed to well up from her heart. She had more than a small suspicion that when a demon spoke of “fondness,” the emotion was no light matter.

“I’m fond of you, too,” she assured him. “Fond and intrigued and quite a bit lecherous.”

He caught her hands beneath the water before they could find his sex. “You’ve had enough lechery for one day, especially since we’ve blown to shreds the idea of not being caught. I’ll send you a message in a day or two.”

“I’m sure I don’t need that long to recover.”

“You say that now, but I didn’t hold myself in check the way I should have. You’ll sing a different tune when your bruises bloom.”

He had drawn her hands to his chest and was squeezing them lightly above his heart. His eyebrows were pushed together, offering the apology he’d almost voiced. Maybe demons didn’t believe in them.

“I won’t regret a single mark,” she promised him.

His eyes darkened. That and the small contraction of his fingers revealed his pleasure at her words, a pleasure she sensed she didn’t fully understand. He pulled her knuckles up for a kiss.

“Be well,” he said, soft as smoke. “I shall count the hours until we meet again.”

From the honeyed warmth that spread inside her, in strict defiance of her body’s well-sated lassitude, Beth knew he wasn’t going to be the only one counting.

Pahndir fell into sleep with the relish of a drunkard falling into wine: deep, sweet, dreamless sleep. His needs weren’t exhausted, but only because a prince’s never were. They were content, rather, lulled like his worries into a patient state due to his ravishment of and by Beth. That this patient state might not last didn’t matter. He had a chance. He had hope. He had a woman who’d embraced him with both tenderness and desire.

To expect Charles to drop as easily into his palm would have been greedy.

So he snuggled into his big, solitary bed as if it were all pillow and slept like the dead. The windows were open, their sheer silk hangings stirring in the soft night breeze. A dog barked in the distance and was hushed. At four in the morning, all but the most dedicated partygoers slumbered. Pahndir had sent his last customer home at three. As a result, no one saw the half-dozen shadows that swarmed silently up his wedding cake of a house. No one heard the faint scuffle of footsteps on the exquisitely carved stone of his balcony—or no one who’d admit to it. One by one, the shadows slipped inside without a whisper, each knowing what to do, each covered from head to toe in pure matte black. Only their eyes showed through their wrappings, scarcely glinting in what little light there was.

Four of the tall, whip-thin intruders circled his bed, leaving one to watch the windows and another to block the door to the inside hall. They didn’t expect Pahndir’s servants to interfere; they’d been assured all possible eyes had been bribed to turn blind. But they were professionals, and they’d done this sort of job before. They watched the entrances and exits because that was good form.

The tallest of the shadows, the most solid in musculature, lifted one finger and then tipped it down.

It was the signal they all had been waiting for.

Pahndir woke with a panicked lurch. He was being pressed into his mattress by four hard weights, his bedcovers smothering him around the neck and face. He struggled, tried to cry out, but the only noises he could make were muffled by the sheets. A fist backhanded him, as heavy and unforgiving as if it were made of iron. The strike simultaneously stunned him and woke him to the seriousness of the danger he was in.

Fury rose in a bitter wave. He wasn’t going to die like this, wasn’t going to let these assassins snuff out his light when his life was finally turning around. The universe could screw itself if this was what it had in mind for him. He called on his royal strength, tearing one hand through the covers like it had claws. With that arm free, he heaved a body off him so that it hit the wall with a crash.

He had an instant to wonder that his victim did not cry out. For that matter, someone on his staff should have come running.

“Aran,” a voice hissed close to him. “Ether.”

Pahndir knew what ether was, though not whether it could affect him. Yama had resistance to many human drugs. Preferring not to chance it, he threw himself toward the hissing voice, his attackers’ apparent leader. His weight and momentum barreled both of them to the floor.

Like any prince, he’d been trained in hand-to-hand defense, but not like these fighters had been trained. These were street fighters, vicious and creative. Hissing Voice kneed him in the balls without a shred of mercy. Human or not, the force of the strike sent his breath wheezing out in eye-tearing pain.

An instant later, two more fists made his ears ring from either side, warning him he could not afford to nurse his previous injury. As he blocked his attackers’ blows, he realized they were wearing heavy oxhide gloves with what felt like lead shot sewn into them. He was lucky they were human. Any Yama armed with those would have put him out. Angry, and not appreciably disabled yet, he ignored their continued pounding to wrap his hands around Hissing Voice’s neck.

Which was when he noticed Hissing Voice was female.

“Back off or I’ll kill her,” he warned.

But he wasn’t squeezing as determinedly as he should, as determinedly as he would have had she been a man. If she’d been a man, he’d have smashed her skull into the carpet and been done with it. The hesitation cost him more than he could afford.

“Now,” she rasped through his hold, and someone—two someones, in fact—clapped a sickly sweet-smelling rag over his face.

He gasped, his body’s instinctive response to losing its air supply. That first choking whiff was enough to turn his knees to water. He realized the heavy veiling his assailants had wrapped around their faces might serve a purpose besides disguise. Ether was a volatile liquid, quick to evaporate, but this rag was soaked, dripping with what seemed like a dose fit for ten humans.

He went limp, and Hissing Voice wriggled out from under him. The two who’d pressed the rag to his face kicked him forcefully onto his back, probably hard enough to break a human’s ribs. Pahndir hoped they broke their toes on him. His arms flopped like a fish as he rolled, his fingers refusing to even twitch. He blinked in slow motion up at Hissing Voice, feeling consciousness inexorably drain from him.

In the meantime, he had an unpleasant epiphany. No one was coming to save him. Not his personal staff. Not his employees. They’d been paid off, most likely, or maybe just didn’t care if someone so different from themselves lived or died.

“Good,” Hissing Voice said, like an answer to his darkest thought. She was on her feet, looking down at him. Either she was very tall for a woman, or his perceptions had been distorted by the drug. Her black-turbaned head appeared miles away. “Prince Muto will be pleased he has not been harmed.”

As Pahndir lost his futile struggle to remain awake, he had a feeling he wouldn’t like the reason for that announcement.