Poisoned Kisses (7 page)

Oh, no, the cage! “Marco, wait!”

“I’m going to go check your pipes,” he said, and in a few purposeful strides he was already halfway there. “Is this the basement door?”

“No!” Kyra nearly shrieked the word, rushing toward him. She could well imagine what would happen if he went down into the basement and saw the dungeon she’d made for him. No amount of explaining her good intentions would make him forgive her.

Marco’s hand rested uneasily on the doorknob. Confusion swirled in his eyes. “It’s not the basement?”

“Please, just don’t.” Here he was, poised at the basement stairs. All she had to do was let him go down and follow him with the knife and handcuffs she’d secreted for just this purpose. But that’s not what she wanted. That’s not even who she wanted to be anymore. She didn’t want to be Ashlynn Brown, and she didn’t want to be a hydra slayer, and she didn’t want to be Marco’s captor. “Just please don’t go down there.”

Marco searched her face, as if trying to understand. He
reached up, tilting her chin to look at her. To look at
Ashlynn.
Never before had holding on to the appearance of another woman been so painful. She wanted to let him see her, the real nymph beneath the illusion, but before she could reveal herself, everything went dark.

Marco found himself plunged into darkness, holding a woman who had looked, only moments before, as if she were going to shatter. “Your power is out,” he said, trying to soothe her. “It’s just the storm. That’s all.”

“Don’t go,” she said, clinging to him fiercely.

An unnamed emotion tightened in his chest.
Don’t go.
She’d asked him that when he was just a kid, and he hadn’t listened. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to make sure that the things that happened to his mother never happened to anyone else. He wanted to do something good in the world and Ashlynn had tried to hold him back. He’d judged her for it. But maybe some part of her had known what he’d see in war and wanted to protect him.

“Ashlynn,” he said, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light. “What were you trying to tell me before?”

“You won’t believe me,” she whispered.

“I’ll believe you,” Marco said, resolved. “I promise.”

In the blackness, all he heard was the sound of her breath, ragged. All he felt was the trembling of her shoulders. All he could smell was her hair, smoky and alluring. And all he could see was a strange, flickering light in her eyes… “I want you,” she said.

And he believed her.

This time she led him to the bedroom and there was no shyness, no strangeness, no barriers between them at all. She was different in the dark. She became something wilder, more elemental, something utterly raw. And as she kissed him, all he wanted to do was fling her onto the mattress. Yet, when she reached beneath his bathrobe to curl her fingers around
his shaft, the white-hot pleasure of it kept him still. She was wickedly talented with her hands and she gave him sweet, painful tugs that sent him careening toward the edge.

She was all in shadow—only the light of the moon outside showed him the silhouette of her sleek body—and he wanted to take things slow this time, to treat Ashlynn with the respect she deserved. But the way she stroked him filled him with an urgent and burning need. His breath went ragged and his fists clenched at his sides as he struggled to regain control. But then she crawled over him and straddled his hips. He was so hard it was almost painful, and when she teased him, grinding herself slowly along the length of him, he felt her wetness. He found her hair in the dark and made fists of it, pulling her body down onto his cock. She let out a cry as he filled her, and once he was buried all the way, she thrashed atop him with a violent, rocking motion. He was half-afraid she was going to hurt herself, or him, or both of them.

He wanted to flip her over and ram himself into her again and again, but her thighs were too strong around his waist. He tried to guide her with his fingers, letting them dig into the flesh of her hips, but she wasn’t something he could tame or control. As she rode him, her thighs tightened like a vice around his hips and her body battered against his.
More combat than sex,
he thought.

As they moved together, he caught glimpses of her in the dim moonlight, which made her skin almost translucent. Atop him, she was some goddess of the night, exorcising his demons, scourging his skin with the hot whip of her dark hair. She was frenzied, but he matched her stroke for stroke.

This side of Ashlynn was one he’d never seen before, and it made him want to consume her. Mark her. Make her his. It wrecked him. Destroyed him. His reason was gone. Every cry, every desperate sound, every undulation, turned him on more. It also made him fiercely protective. This was a side of Ashlynn she’d plainly been hiding from the world. Or maybe
just hiding from him, for fear that he’d somehow crush it like he crushed everything else good and beautiful.

“You don’t have to hide anything from me,” he rasped and her touch faltered, her sweat-soaked belly quivering with pent-up want. He knew she was close to the edge, but she seemed to be trying to make him come first. So he held back and he teased her, liking the sense of mastery that it gave him. She arched her back to take him deeper, balancing awkwardly with one hand on the mattress. He braced her at the small of her back, and heard himself saying, “I won’t let you fall. I’ll never let you fall.”

And then they came together, a throaty cry from her that mingled with his shuddering release.

K
yra let mortals see only what she wanted them to see and, for her, sex had only ever been a way of filling empty hours. A way of feeling needed, a way of letting the pleasure crowd out all the dark thoughts in her head. Over the centuries, there’d been times when she could’ve let sex become something more—but whenever the opportunity came, she’d let it slip away. If there was ever a time when telling the truth would’ve brought about intimacy, she lied. If there was ever a time that letting a man look her in the eye would’ve shown him her heart, she looked away.

That was how she lived, how she survived, as a
lampade
and a daughter of Ares. As a nymph, anything else was to invite her own destruction. So why did it suddenly make her so sad that the man whose body was tangled with hers couldn’t see the truth of who she was? Maybe because Marco—whose breath was finally steady and untroubled as he slept—had no idea who he held in his arms. He had no idea
what
he held in his arms.

She’d called him a monster, but she was a dark creature, too.

Was it so wrong to have let herself feel like a woman, buoyed with airy desire, for just a few moments? Even now, Kyra could feel nothing else but the places on her body where he’d touched. It reminded her of how his fingers had pressed into her hips. The way he’d held her at the small of her back and promised not to let her fall. He’d taken her breath away, and for those precious moments, she’d pretended there were no secrets between them. But that had been a lie. He didn’t know that she’d once tried to kill him. He didn’t realize that the woman he’d just slept with had lured him here with the intention of chaining him up like an animal. In fact, he didn’t realize that he’d had sex with
her
at all. He’d told her that she didn’t have to hide from him, but he didn’t know she was a nymph, and he’d only leave her if he did.

That’s how it always happened. Men came into the lives of nymphs and held them so tightly they thought they could never fall. Then men left and didn’t even glance back to watch as a nymph tumbled down, like a fallen angel, crumpled and broken on the ground. Kyra had seen it all before.

Calypso had been sexy and alluring. She’d rescued Odysseus from the sea and loved him. But in the end, Odysseus preferred his modest and mortal Penelope. Calypso wasn’t the only one. There was also Clytie—a spirited nymph who loved and lost Apollo, then grieved herself into stone.

That’s how love stories ended for Kyra’s kind. Men pursued nymphs with urgency, told them they were sexier than mortal women, wild and untamed. Men told them they were loved just as they were…and then abandoned them. One way or another, the love of a man always changed even the strongest, most dangerous nymphs, transforming them into something harmless, like a tree, or a cloud, an echo.

Because she was
war-born,
Kyra had always thought herself too strong, too proud, to let love change her into
something softer. Nevertheless, the world had changed, and now she was changing, too. She was tired of lying, tired of disguises. Millennia worth of tired. But she’d earned Marco’s trust in the guise of another woman. Now she’d have to keep on pretending, and for that, she had no one to blame but herself.

On the pillow beside him, Ashlynn’s cheek glowed pink in the light of rosy-fingered dawn. Marco caressed her innocent face, wondering how it could belong to the woman he’d made love to last night in the dark.

They had been good in the dark. Better than good.

Ashlynn had always been a fine-looking woman, but all he had to do was think of the shape-shifting assassin in Naples to remember what pure lust felt like.
That
woman had been half-dressed and wearing brothel perfume. He knew what lust felt like, and this was something better. This thing with Ashlynn was…something else. It was grief-sex. It was need. But it had somehow turned into more than just skin against skin. More than just the taste of her. More than the erotic sounds she’d made above and beneath him. It’d been different. Not just different than the series of trysts that had filled the past years his life, but different than it’d ever been with Ashlynn before.

When they were high school sweethearts, her innocence frustrated him to no end—especially when it made her so vulnerable to guys on the make—but she was no longer a shy ingenue who blushed at the sight of a naked man. No. She’d changed, and for the better.

And she knew his secrets. She knew what he’d done, what he was, and still wanted him.

He’d lost himself in Africa but, last night, she’d found him again. Since Rwanda, Marco had taken on so many different faces that he’d become anonymous to himself; she’d helped
him remember who he was. She’d compared him to a monster, but somehow made him feel more human than he’d ever felt before. She’d pulled him free of the darkness as surely as he had pulled her from that icy drainage ditch. She’d been a beacon of light on one of the darkest nights of his life and he didn’t know how the hell he was ever going to thank her for it.

Every muscle screamed as he moved, but he rose carefully so as not to wake her. It was a new day. A beautiful day, actually—the sunlight glistening off the ice-encased trees outside to illuminate a winter wonderland. It was the kind of day that made him wonder if maybe the world wasn’t quite as irredeemably screwed up as he thought it was. Maybe today, he really could decide to change his life. But whatever he decided to do with this day, it’d have to start the same way. He’d have to get dressed, hike up the road and find a phone.

He slipped into Ashlynn’s laundry room to get his clothes and the first thing he noticed was that there wasn’t any laundry—just his stuff in the dryer and Ashlynn’s coat in a basket. The second thing he noticed was that the coat in the basket was making some kind of music, like a funeral dirge.

With a sense of dawning dread, Marco reached in and found a pink cell phone with a macabre ring tone. He flipped it open.

“Kyra.” It was a man’s voice, and it was menacing. “I want you to listen to me carefully and consider the consequences of your actions. Return the file on the hydra and I’ll consider forgiving you for what you’ve done to my armory in Bosnia.”

For a moment, Marco felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He felt as if something had hit him square in the chest and knocked the air right out of him. He just stood there holding the phone
against his ear, all but deaf and dumb. “Do you understand me, Kyra? Defying me would be unwise.”

Marco finally broke in. “Who the hell is this?”

Silence. Then a click—the end of the call.

Some instinct—probably the same instinct that had kept him alive in war zones—told Marco to dial information and ask for Ashlynn Brown.

“Hello?” It was Ashlynn’s voice. All restraint and sweetness.

Marco just stood there, listening to her breathe, as his worst fears were confirmed. Whoever he’d gone to bed with last night wasn’t Ashlynn. It was the shape-shifting assassin from Naples. It had to be. But how the hell had she survived coming into contact with his blood?

Ashlynn’s voice rose a bit. “Hello, is anyone there?”

The smart thing to do would be to hang up. He had his answer. That should’ve been enough. But instead, he found himself saying, “It’s Marco.”

There was a hesitation on the other end. Did he hear the laughter of children in the background? The scratch of a dog’s claws on the kitchen linoleum? He could almost imagine her, coffee cup in hand, leaning up against the countertop with her hair in a tight ponytail behind her head. “Marco, I’m not sure calling me is a good idea.”

He forced the words. “I came home for my father’s funeral.”

“I’m so sorry.” There was a precisely measured amount of sympathy in her voice. “I went to pay my respects, but I didn’t see you there. We must’ve missed each other.” So she
had
been at the funeral. Perhaps if he’d arrived a little earlier, everything would have worked out differently. Perhaps he’d be standing in
her
kitchen instead of in some creepy house out in the middle of nowhere with an imposter.

Who was the woman who had lured him to this house? What did she want with him? Why had she gone to bed with him?

“Marco,” Ashlynn broke in. “You should know…your sister told the police that you were at the funeral. The authorities were at my house this morning but I told them I didn’t know anything. Which is the truth.”

Marco closed his eyes.
Lori.
Swallowing down the bile of betrayal, he said, “I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I really am. I’d have thought with this ice storm, the police would have better things to do.”

“They said you’re wanted in connection with some missing weapons.”

Marco kept his voice low and a wary eye on the bedroom door. “And you want to know if it’s true?”

Another hesitation. “No. I don’t want to know.”

He could have predicted her answer, and it was just as well because Marco had already had this conversation with the woman impersonating Ashlynn the night before and wasn’t sure he could do it again. “Are you happy?”

At that, Ashlynn gave a brittle laugh. “I’m getting a divorce.”

“I’m sorry,” Marco said, and this time, he was pretty sure he meant it.

“He ran off with his secretary,” she said, again, very calm. Ashlynn was never one for big shows of emotion. “I suppose you’d have never done that, Marco. You were always the type to stick with a commitment to the bitter end.”

Was she trying to pay him a compliment or point out a character flaw? What surprised him was that he didn’t really care. The emotions he expected at hearing her voice didn’t come. Maybe it was because he’d already experienced them with a pretender. Maybe it was because he was
over
Ashlynn and had been for a long time, which made what happened last
night with the stranger even more inexplicable. And it was something he was going to have to deal with sooner rather than later.

“Take care of yourself, Ashlynn,” he said, then hung up the phone.