Denying Ecstasy (The Guardians of the Realms Series) (5 page)

He still couldn’t comprehend that the last kill left to him, the one he needed beyond anything, had also been taken from him.

Cyril had died days ago by another. He couldn’t deny that the female had earned the right to kill the bastard, but he still felt fucked. That death should have been at his hand. There was no way left to avenge his friend, nor would he ever forget that it could have been one of his brothers that those bitches killed in front of him. The scent and feel of his friend’s blood on his skin was burned into his senses. He would never forget.

“Uri’s right. She is a good female,” added Bastian, who rarely spoke. He sat there listening, assessing. His long black hair was pulled back with a band. His tanned face held no emotion, just calm.

Dorian shook his head. It didn’t matter that his brothers liked the Mageia; there were too many reasons he couldn’t, wouldn’t claim her.

He eyed his brothers. “If she’s good and worthy, then I’m the last male she deserves. She doesn’t even need to know how screwed she could have been.”

He looked over to the dance floor. Not one female had shoulder-length blonde hair that was tipped with purple. No vibrant, dancing eyes. Not one came close to comparing to the female his beast wanted. The one he was desperate to find a way out of claiming, for both their goods.

He took a long drink of his beer. The whole train wreck was unbelievable. He’d managed to avoid the manor since scenting her at Gregoire’s mating. Then a few days ago the unthinkable happened. He’d lost his fucking mind and touched her.

He still couldn’t believe he’d done it. When she and his brother’s mate had been taken by Cyril, his beast had nearly gone insane battering inside his body. Up until that point he’d only had the scent of her. That had already been fucking with him, but if it had just stayed away, he wouldn’t be so screwed. He closed his eyes. The moment his beast had learned she was in danger, it wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him stay away. Shit, it had been intense, a compulsion. He couldn’t help but go to her, touch her, hold her to his chest and feel her heartbeat. What the fuck was that? He’d never even spoken to her, but his beast didn’t seem to give a shit. It also hadn’t given a fuck that
any
of his brothers could have easily taken her out of there. He’d felt it snarling and itching to lash out at anyone that touched her.

After delivering her safely to Sirena, he’d barely been able to make his legs work to take him out of the healer’s office. He’d fucked up big. Touching her had made things so much worse. When all he’d had was the faint scent of her, it was bad enough. Now he knew how her skin felt. He’d felt her slight weight against him and dreamt of sinking deep inside her body. That touch had triggered a nightmare. His jaw was so tight his teeth ached from it, and he needed that bit of pain. He wasn’t keeping her. He fucking couldn’t.

His dick would soon rule him, no matter what he did. Jacking off wasn’t doing enough. He could get hard for another female, but his beast rebelled like nothing he could’ve imagined. Two nights ago he’d tried to fuck another. His brain hadn’t wanted it any more than his damned beast. It was a first for him and in no way normal for a Nereid. He’d managed to work through that bit of insanity and thought he’d finally get some relief. The human female had been on her knees ready and more than willing to suck him off, but his dick had been shot with intense pain the minute she put her hands on him. The jolt of electricity to his cock was enough to send him fleeing the place as if his dick was on fire, which was what it’d felt like.

“You need to talk to Sirena. She’s the only one that can come up with something.”

Dorian nodded, knowing Uri spoke the truth and hating it. It would be a fight with his sister. Going against a mating would be like sacrilege to her, and she was ruthless in her goal to find Immortals mates. She was going to be pissed as shit. That was why he’d been hoping Uri had the answers to his questions.

He took a deep pull from his beer and leaned back against the chair. The tension rolling off his brothers was intense. They wanted to fight him, he could tell. He was so fucking beyond hearing any of their shit. He absently banged his head against the wall a couple more times. His dick was hard and ready under his worn jeans. Ready for something that wasn’t going to happen. He’d spent hours swimming around his island and out to the furthest points in the sea. Steering clear of the humans’ shipping routes as he’d pushed his body.

Light flashed as the door to the bar opened again. He caught sight of Drake walking in, his seven-foot frame barely clearing it. They were all tall, but Drake wasn’t just tall, he was built like the dragon he was. His power fell off him in waves, and the humans instinctually cleared a path. It was time to come clean. Shit.

His brothers all got up to leave at once, each dropping down cash. They were leaving him to deal with Drake on his own. Conn shook his head and raised a pierced eyebrow. “Good call having him meet you in public. I doubt he’ll burn the place down when you tell him.”

He watched his brothers leave. Drake waved the waitress away and leaned against the wall. He wore a dark green tee stretched tightly over his muscled chest and shoulders, and worn jeans over his tree-trunk thighs. Half of his shoulder-length hair was pulled into a tail high on his head. Every female in the room stopped and stared when the seven-foot male walked in, and Dorian saw that the staring hadn’t stopped. He and his brothers drew a lot of attention, but Drake was an entirely different animal. The biggest and most powerful of the Guardians.

“Speak.”

He cringed, knowing what was coming would be fucked. “Rain is my mate.”

Drake cocked a brow and looked at him for a minute, silent. “And you’re trying to find a way out of it,” he said, watching, assessing.

“Yes.” He shouldn’t have been surprised that Drake would know what he planned. He expected Drake to do more than stare at him. He felt like a kid, wanting to squirm in his seat. He got the distinct feeling his leader was seeing into his soul. He hated that about Drake. Dorian waited for the order, his gut clenching hard, because he knew there was no way in hell he’d claim her, ordered or not. He couldn’t.

It was fucking eerie sitting there while Drake just watched him. Finally the dragon nodded once. “You’re pulled from patrol the second it’s a problem. Go.”

He felt his mouth drop open. What the fuck was that? He didn’t order him to mate the Mageia. Drake wasn’t even going to guilt him? Tell him he was letting his brothers down by not mating? All mated pairs gained power and strength. They needed the added power from another mated pair. Drake cocked a brow, and Dorian got up and left before his luck ran out. He got the distinct impression he was still screwed, he just didn’t know how much. His leader was intelligent and cunning, that thought made Dorian’s neck crawl.

Chapter 2

Guardian Manor, Tetartos Realm

Rain didn’t remember sitting, but she was glad she was. Her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest at any second.

“What?” Her mind was still reeling from what Sirena had just told her. Her head buzzed with so many emotions, ranging from shock, excitement to dread. She’d known something was wrong with her. She’d felt aroused and needy for days, even throughout everything that had happened in the last week, which had been insanity.

“Your blood shows signs that you’ve entered the mating frenzy,” the healer Guardian said. Concern scrunched her delicately stunning features.

She shook her head. She’d never imagined she was going through a mating. She assumed that arousal was the way her body dealt with the worry over everything happening to Delia, the young female that had worked in her shop before being captured and tortured by Cyril. Her concern for the Mageia hadn’t seemed to affect her body’s neediness. She’d assumed it was some weird physiological issue about life and death, her mortality and needing to feel alive; she didn’t think for a second that it was a mating. Those were so damn rare, and her best friend, Alyssa, had just found her other half in the Guardian Gregoire. So few Immortals found their mate, and only a select few of those were among Mageia like her, the odds had been miniscule.

She stared at the thick brown rug, sitting in the seating area of her room, still trying to process how she missed the clues. So much had been going on even before Delia was taken by the Realm’s biggest enemy. That had to be why she disregarded what was going on with her body. She’d been uprooted from her home and business, thrust into the Guardians’ manor, for her own protection… She and Drake, the Guardian leader, had shared words about his high-handedness, but in the end, after he’d nearly scorched her eyebrows off in his dragonish annoyance, she’d made her own decision to stay. She wasn’t stupid, and even though his behavior had set her off, she wasn’t one to make a decision out of anger.

A week or so after she was taken away from her life, she and Alyssa were abducted. It was only for a short time before they were rescued, and she’d been unconscious through almost all of it. A thought that thoroughly disgusted her. She hated feeling weak. The only thing she remembered was being grabbed and fighting whoever held her, a sharp sting on her neck, and then waking up on Alyssa and Gregoire’s couch. She still felt a little twitchy. Creators… None of that mattered… It didn’t matter why she missed the signs. Sirena was right. Her flesh felt heated, and her nipples strained against her bra as she sat there. Her body was telling her what it wanted. Those thoughts did nothing but jack up her heart rate.

Sirena’s melodic voice relaxed her some. “Take a deep breath. We’ll figure it out.”

She would have snorted if she had the extra breath to spare. She hadn’t been able to say more than a few words since the healer had shown up at her door and informed her she was mated.

“Can you tell me what you’re feeling?” Sirena asked.

She put a hand up. “Just give me another second.” She tried to do what Sirena instructed. Taking deep breaths was proving difficult, but she was finally getting it together. The air stuttered as if catching in her lungs.

Rain couldn’t help thinking about the events of the past weeks, everything leading up to that point. She and Alyssa had rushed to an island paradise so that her friend could reassess her life. She closed her eyes, remembering how wonderfully it’d all begun. She’d always longed for a vacation and managed to have one, for all of a day. She had a little over twenty-four hours of experiencing soft sand under her toes and being pampered before going on a huge boat with the charming owner of the island resort. Shortly after that, everything had erupted into chaos. Alyssa’s destiny had come raining down on them in the form of an attempted abduction thwarted by her friend’s possessive-as-shit Guardian mate. The one Alyssa thought had rejected her.

“Rain?” Sirena, the stunning blonde Guardian, asked her in a gentle voice while crouching in front of her in a stylish pencil skirt and heels. It felt like her new cozy home was closing in around them. The stone fireplace seemed to be moving toward her.

What if Sirena was wrong and this was all some kind of mistake? “How do you know for sure?”

“The blood tests I took a couple of days ago, when we got you and Alyssa back from the abduction, indicate you’ve come in contact with your mate.”

Wait. Contact? She furrowed her brow. Instinctually she was sure her mate could only be one male, but if what the healer said was true, that wasn’t possible. Her stomach clenched as she shook her head. She needed to shake off the dread and get some answers.

“You’re sure? Because the only one I can imagine it being has never touched me.” She couldn’t envision her mate being any other than the Nereid Guardian that had been haunting her dreams every night since she’d first seen him at Alyssa and Gregoire’s mating.

She remembered the night, less than a week ago. She had gone in with a heavy heart. Her best friend in the world had found her mate, but the minute she’d walked into the golden temple, that thought was gone. She’d been hit with the same seductive scent she’d only detected hints of while walking in the Guardians’ manor. It had been taunting her for the past couple of weeks as she’d gotten to know her new home.

Thoughts of her friend’s new life and her own fleeting mortality had fallen away, and her whole world had focused in on one male. Her heart had slammed against her chest as her skin flushed. He was the most gorgeous male she’d ever seen. She’d been struck dumb by how perfectly edible he was. His hair was sun-kissed and spiked up with blue tips. She’d fantasized about ripping the clothes from his broad chest. Tearing her eyes from the big blond Guardian to watch her friend’s mating had been nearly impossible. Her eyes tracked back to him over and over through the event, but it was his hard glare that was tough to shake. It jarred her. She had no clue what caused it, she hadn’t even met the male, and his animosity was palpable in the ten feet that had separated them.

“Rain?” Sirena was watching her carefully.

She pushed back her shoulder-length blonde hair, realizing that he had to have known. That realization churned her stomach in knots. Why reject her offhand, because she was mortal? Was it the way she’d looked? That wouldn’t account for the hostility in his eyes.

“There has to be a mistake.” She felt certain it could only be him, and he hadn’t laid a hand on her, except in her dreams. In those he’d done all matter of dirty and sexy things to her. His sexy-as-sin mouth had been all over her body as his eyes filled with lust that was only for her.

She bit off a snort. That was definitely not how he looked at her in real life. No, his eyes had glowed, but what had sparked in them should have cooled her wild attraction. Shocked animosity had shone in their depths, enough that her breath had caught in her throat. Fortunately for her, he’d left the ceremony the minute Alyssa and Gregoire started kissing. It had been the most awkward, yet, somehow, sexually charged experience of her entire twenty-five years.

“The extent of your blood work indicates touch. That’s my concern. You were unconscious with the enemy during the abduction,” Sirena said slowly, at the same time assessing Rain with her intelligent violet eyes.