Seduce Me in Flames (15 page)

Luckily he became aware of her movement and jerked his hand away, the action dousing the fire and leaving the tips of his fingers smoking in small, curling white tendrils. She reached to grab his hand, lacing her fingers through his. Before he had pulled away, she had felt the
incredible concentrated heat of the flames and had known they were as real as could be. Now she gripped him and she felt how hot he was. She suddenly recalled how incredibly warm he had felt in that icy cold water, how he had not suffered from hypothermia at all. She also recalled the streak of light in the overwhelming darkness of the aqueduct water and realized that he had used his ability to generate light to find her, whether he realized it or not. Whether he wanted to admit to it or not. He may have distanced himself from it as much as he could distance himself from something that was in the very heart of him, but it would always be at the edge of his reflexes. Literally at the tips of his fingers.

“Oh, Rush,” she breathed. “That was amazing. It was beautiful!” She took in a breath and could detect the odor of burnt wood. “Surely the Great Being has given you an astounding gift. How can you think this to be a curse?”

She exhaled, and smoke blew lightly out of her nostrils and between her lips. When she had breathed in, she had drawn it in from his smoking hand. Rush watched with an almost speechless fascination as she turned up his hand in both of hers, pulling his palm open and drawing it against her face. She nuzzled against its warmth like an eager, affection-starved kitten, drawing in another deeply pleasured breath. He sat frozen for a moment as she did this, stunned by her reaction and even more stunned by his own. Raw, unchecked delight flooded his big body, a sensation akin to sexual stimulation, but in no way that base. Yet he was very much aroused. The muscles in his body tightened in a clenching cascade, rather like when he was on the very edge of danger. And everything about this, he knew, was dangerous. He tried to pull free of her, but she held on. All he managed to do was jerk her onto his body, their
chests colliding. Rush felt the weight of her, her warmth and softness wrapped up with her eagerness and vitality.

He balked at what she was saying with every inch of his psyche; his memory of that charred field, and a village of superstitious fools who would rather destroy themselves in a screaming conflagration than find it in themselves to understand a boy they professed to love as blood seeming so much more powerful with the passing of time than the traumatic moment it had happened. She hadn’t heard the voices, voices that had once been warm and familiar to him, that had even idolized him, suddenly jeering and yelling for his head. She hadn’t felt the caustic fever of the mob mentality that had quickly developed as they had staked him out in a field, nearly drowned him in fuel, then situated an explosive to set it all off.

“You just don’t understand,” he said quietly, unable to find the heart to be angry with her. After all, she was the first person to express some eagerness and a positive attitude as far as this thing was concerned. Perhaps, too, it had something to do with how close and warm she felt, how long and delicious her body was as it lay tangled onto his.

“I understand that something about a person can sometimes be perceived one way or another way depending on how the person himself feels about it.”

Maybe there was some truth in that, but he wasn’t willing to test the theory. Things had gone pretty well for him as long as he forced himself to keep this thing inside of him dormant. He didn’t want to change the status quo.

And in the moment, the way she was making him feel was very much in danger of changing the status quo. In more ways than she could possibly realize. He had to get a better grip on himself, on the entire situation. When he lost control, things tended to spin into bad directions.

“Anyway, we have more important things to worry about for the moment,” he told her. He reached up with his free hand, using two fingers to brush back some of that flyaway hair of hers. His initial intention was, of course, to dump her off of himself, put her at a safe distance, but instead he found himself noticing that before he had cut her hair, the sheer weight of it had kept it in place, made it an almost perfect sheet. Now that half of its weight was gone, it was clear there was body to it, that it was actually quite fine and soft. Rush had to confess to himself that because he didn’t have much occasion in his lifestyle for soft and delicate things, he was significantly attracted to her. Perhaps just because of the novelty of it. Oh, he spent a lot of time with delicate, feminine women these days. The Chosen Ones.

The Chosen Ones.

Those priests and priestesses of a temple in the wilds of the planet Ebbany were gifted with extraordinary powers, from the ability to heal with a touch to the ability to see into the future. Abilities that no one in the Three Worlds had ever seen before. Abilities that Rush had never seen manifested in anyone other than himself. The Chosen Ones had since been forced to leave their wilderness temple and were now members of the Special Active team that had been created just to utilize their capabilities distinctive to each mission, as they had on this mission using Fallon to help psychically guide Rush through the aqueduct tunnels and to the point of extraction. The team was half Chosen Ones and half First Active soldiers, the elite of the IM’s training and experience.

Rush had to confess that his experiences with meeting the Chosen Ones, training with them, and watching how everyone interacted with them and treated them had greatly softened his fears of ever being exposed to his team for what he was. He had been very reserved about the whole thing, watching quietly and pondering
the results. But the problem still remained—his team would not look kindly on him having kept this secret from them all these years. There was also a huge difference between the Chosen Ones’ abilities and the sheer destructive force that he was able to conjure up with just a moment’s concentration. It was like the difference between a stunner and an MX-240. The Chosen Ones could stun and amaze; as such, they were a useful, benign tool, for the most part. He was a 240, savage and brutal, and could cook a person from the inside out and the outside in on a whim. The IM might feel that he was far too dangerous to be running loose and uncontrolled.

Then again, every last one of the former First Actives, now Special Actives, was a dangerous weapon. But they were completely controlled by the IM. As were the Chosen Ones. He had gone over this in his head time and again these past two cycles since they had been integrated into a team with the Chosen Ones. If ever there had been a time for him to come clean about who and what he really was, it had been two cycles ago when the Ebbanite priests and priestesses had first come on the scene. Now the window of opportunity had faded and was most likely gone.

No. He had made a choice and he was better off sticking to it.

It was via the female Chosen Ones that he had gotten more used to the delicate femininity that Ambrea represented. Still, he wasn’t at all hands-on with any of those women, unlike Commander Chapel, who shared the bed of the head priestess, Ravenna. Truthfully, Rush shouldn’t be hands-on with Ambrea either. Certainly not in this situation of high-intensity danger and pinpoint politics, and probably not under any circumstances. But she seemed so strangely compelling to him. All that strong, beautiful bone structure and pretty paleness,
those enormous teal blue eyes. The counterpoint of her gold and red hair. Her golden lashes.

Most of all, she had seen his darkest, most dangerous secret and had not run screaming in fear, had not called him an abomination, a freak of nature. Quite the opposite, and nothing could have been more compelling to Rush’s soul just then. He believed, then, that she would not betray his secret. That she did understand the fickle nature of people and that they could just as easily turn on you as not.

“What will we do now?” she asked softly, her lashes lowering halfway over her eyes.

“What we were going to do before. Make our way to the docking port that abuts the southwestern boundary of the preserve.”

“But we’ll never get past the guards—”

“I meant through the boundary itself. We’ll cut through straight to where we have a ship ported on the tarmac.”

“Won’t a breach in the boundary set off an alarm?”

“Aye, it will. But we’ll be airborne and at the outer rim before they even get to examine the breach. And the rest of the team will be waiting there for us. We have to start thinking about getting mobile again.”

Although he was thinking about it, for some reason he wasn’t feeling that he ought to be in such an all-fired hurry to push her off and away, to put distance between them either physically or personally. Rush had to admit that it was the closest he’d felt to a moment of true intimacy in as long as he could remember. There was something infinitely comforting about it. Welcoming in a way he wasn’t used to. Sure, his friends were warm to him and welcoming, but there was always that distance between them, a distance created by the secret he harbored from them so zealously.

“We should go,” he said quietly, his eyes fixating on the pale pink of her lips.

“Whenever you like,” she said. “And Rush, I know you don’t know me well or even have any cause to trust me, but I won’t deliberately betray you. You don’t need to threaten me or—”

“I know. I’m sorry I did that,” he said with feeling, guilt tripping over itself inside of him. “I didn’t … I wouldn’t. Hurt you, I mean.”

“You might,” she countered, “if you were given good enough cause or if I threatened you and everything you hold dear. I can see that you are the sort of man to protect himself and what he loves at any cost. I see that because, perhaps, there is something similar inside of me.”

Rush frowned. Yes, he would protect what he held dear, that much was very true. It was unnerving that he couldn’t tell himself truthfully what he would do or what motivation would affect him the strongest. If he had to choose between saving himself or saving those he loved, he would sacrifice his life every single time, but if he had to choose between saving those he loved over exposing himself as a freak, he honestly couldn’t say which would win out. There had been a time when the answer had been easy. He had chosen to save the life of a girl over a lifetime of silence. The result had been disastrous. Everyone, including that ungrateful girl, had turned on him like a nest of angry vipers. And every day he forced himself to remember that, to remember the easy changeability of people’s natures.

“Come on, Princess,” he said with a sigh, reaching to move her to the side so he could sit up.

Once again she resisted, staying his attempts at pushing her away. Funny thought, that. For all her long, lean stature, she was still hardly able to be any challenge to his size and strength. He could easily overpower her at any given moment. In any given way.

Ambrea didn’t know why she insisted on clinging to him in such a way. She had never initiated such intimate contact before. And it really was intimate. She could feel all of his strength, all his hard muscle and coiled resistance, against every single point of her body where they connected. Yet for all that seeming rigidity, they seemed to fit together so snugly, so warmly. In the end, she thought that was a large part of what kept her clinging to him. He was so blessedly warm. She felt as though she had been miserably cold for so much of her lifetime, and here he was, heated and strong, vital and safe. How could an utter stranger feel so safe? If there was one thing she had learned in her lifetime, it was not to trust anyone, and yet he invaded her every cell with this overwhelming sense of security.

Perhaps it was because they both had something to lose now if they didn’t trust each other. Perhaps it was all that steady strength she felt and saw in him. Or maybe it was just the gentle way he was touching her hair at the side of her face. He could bullishly threaten her all he liked, but he couldn’t hide the gentleness of those callused fingertips as they toyed with her hair.

Ambrea didn’t know why she did it, but she turned her head to the side and touched her lips to his hand in the merest brush of contact. She didn’t mean to really kiss him, she told herself. But she just felt such a fervent need to make some kind of deeper contact with him. Some way, perhaps, of letting him know he wasn’t as alone as he seemed to think he was. But at the same time it was so strange for her to want to express herself in such a way. A way she never had before.

Rush felt her lips press into the seat of his palm like a brief jolt of lightning. Nothing ever burned him, he couldn’t really feel heat or electricity or shock the way he imagined others did, but this burned him. It seared him to the quick, racing up his arm and deeply into his
bones. He drew in a sharp, startled breath, utterly fascinated with the sensation. His heart clenched tightly, began to race as if he were staring death in the face. Again, an unfamiliar sensation. As far as he knew, he was completely impervious to most modern weapons. The closest he’d ever come to death was when he’d almost drowned in Axiom fuel all those years ago.

Excitement hurried through his blood, and before he could check the response he had her head between both his hands and was dragging her mouth up to his. And there he held her, hovering, just a breath away. His chest hurt, his body was tight with the things it was feeling, the things it wanted to feel. Things he had wisely denied himself for fear …

It wasn’t until that moment that the soldier realized just how much of his life was lived in fear. Fear of exposure. Fear of his own emotions. Fear of living.

Rush covered her mouth with his, probably just to fly in the face of that nauseating idea that he might be afraid of anything. But the moment he felt her gasp softly with surprise at the contact, he had to confess to himself that it was actually just a really good excuse to let himself taste a forbidden fruit that he knew by instinct would be utterly delicious. And she was. Warm and exotic, sweet and complex, her mouth under his was inexperienced and startled. It might have been enough to compel him to back off, to remember himself and their situation, but her surprise lasted only the span of a breath. Then she relaxed against him, her whole essence going liquid and receptive. Her lips parted under his, just to draw in an exquisite breath, but he couldn’t help but exploit it for the advantage that it was. His tongue was seeking hers purely on instinct before she could even finish that breath.