Seduce Me in Flames (27 page)

His frustration rushed out of him in an infuriated roar through clenched teeth. But she suddenly was stepping up close to him, wrapping his face between her soft hands and gripping the whole of his head between them as she forced him to look down into her eyes. She was flush up against the front of his body, feeling so achingly warm and perfect. He could feel the weight of her breasts against his chest, and even as he feared the heat flushing through his body he deeply craved all the most sinful intimate knowledge of her. He wondered what she would feel like, if only they could meet naked skin to
naked skin, if only he could lose himself blindly and deeply within her.

Her large blue eyes searched his for a moment, no doubt seeing the hot desire within him. Rush wished he could show her remorse. What kind of man did it make him if he knew he could hurt her, possibly kill her, and yet showed no shame for losing control of himself like that?

But she must have cared very little for all of that, very little for her personal safety, because she pulled his head down to hers, pulled his mouth onto hers, covering his lips with the sweetness of her own. Rush was not strong enough to step away a second time. He wanted her too badly, and freely admitted it to himself. The truth of the matter was that he knew just as little about the touch of a woman as she knew about the touch of a man. He could never allow himself even the most blunted of experiences, his arousal so intrinsically connected to his emotions, and his emotions so dangerously connected to his mutation.

He hungrily devoured her mouth, craving a sense of depth that could be achieved only by holding on to her. But he kept his hands raised and held away from her. Luckily she held on to him, and standing on the tips of her toes she sought for just the depth he was yearning for. She was painfully inexperienced and she was clearly being held back by her own awareness of that. She was afraid she was doing something wrong, afraid she somehow wouldn’t measure up. Gods and spirits, didn’t she understand? Hundreds of women could have come before her and still she would have, on her very worst day, outstripped them all in his mind and in his eyes.

She broke away from him, her mouth only an instant’s distance away from his, her breath washing fast and hot over his wet lips. Insecure she may be, but the blatant
hunger he saw in her eyes just then made him rock hard. The instant erection was like no other sensation he could compare it to. Perhaps he had experienced it in the past, but whatever may have caused it in his distant youth had certainly never compared to such a volatile moment and such volatile emotions as were connected to the way he was feeling about this intricate and gorgeous woman.

Rush couldn’t remember the last time he had purposely toyed with sexual need and all of the things that came with it. His few encounters with it in his youth had made him realize how deadly it could be, how dangerous it was for any woman to come anywhere close to him. So he had simply shut it all down, turned his back on it just as he had turned his back on the freakishness that sometimes begged to be set free.

“I can’t touch you.” He ejected a primal sound of frustration even as he lowered his face against hers, let himself breathe in the scent of her hair. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Is it just me? Or is it every woman you’ve ever tried to touch?” she asked him breathlessly as her fingers brushed down the length of his neck. He swallowed, felt her tracing the movement of the action as he shifted under her fingers.

He pulled back so he could look deep into her eyes, seeing her curiosity and that she was teetering on the verge of understanding him a little bit better.

“Every woman. Always. Although I have to tell you, none of them made me feel so desperately out of control. With them I could pull back, shut down, walk away. With you, I just can’t seem to do that.” He curbed an impulse to brush back some of her hair where it was loosened and falling feather soft against her jaw. It was only one of a hundred other impulses he’d had to reach out and touch her. “Why can’t I do that with you, above
all others, when I should do anything to protect what is most worthy of protecting in my eyes?”

She dipped her head briefly, hiding the emotion that his words triggered in her gaze, but unable to hide the soft, vivid coloring along her cheekbones and down her fair neck.

“Rush, did it ever occur to you that all of this repression, all of this denial you subject yourself to, is only making matters worse for you?”

“How so?”

She looked up at him. “It’s like any skill, Rush. Swordplay, marksmanship, or even the intricacies of learning to set the yield and focus of your munitions. None of that is an innately perfected skill. None of us was born knowing how to walk. We first started with a crawl, then learned to stand, then stagger and stumble our way into steps, then strides, then running and more. You’ve never allowed yourself to crawl. How do you think you will ever learn to run smoothly and powerfully and with all of your body under your control?”

She reached up to take his hand, forcefully threading her fingers through his when he tried to pull away. Granted, if he had really wanted to, he could have avoided her, but the one thing he wanted to do most right then was touch her. Somehow. Anyhow. Maybe that was why he was seeing logic in what she was saying. Because he wanted to so badly.

She drew him forward into the large patrician rooms they had entered, the private residence of the ruler of Allay. He guessed that she disliked the look of them almost as much as he did. They revealed a contrived opulence, an almost crude display of wealth, and a definite masculine hardness that in no way reflected the gentility and refinement of their new mistress. The open floor plan allowed an easy view of one room from the next, something he appreciated from a security perspective
because it would allow him to keep his eyes on her at almost every moment. Of course that advantage could easily work as a disadvantage. Although these rooms with their large windows and streams of sunlight faced nothing but a dropoff of a cliff, exposing an enormous view of Blossom City from an eagle’s nest view, it didn’t rule out a clever assassin using a short-flyer or similar ship and then using those same exposing windows as a vantage point to finding her anywhere within her rooms and taking her out before any of the guards realized they were even there. It would likely take out half the palace as well to use the kind of firepower necessary to get through the defensive glass, but no doubt an assassin wouldn’t care about collateral damage.

Rush had let himself be distracted by these thoughts in hopes that it would cool his overfired libido and lessen the risk to her as she held his hand. They had not had time to scope out these private quarters, having gone straight to the throne room on arrival, but she seemed to know exactly where she was going as she led him around a corner and into the only completely private room in the royal quarters. As they crossed the threshold, the lights blazed on and the entire rear wall came alive in a sudden rush of water over a lipped outcropping that was a mere foot lower than the ceiling and extended three feet out from the wall. It ran the entire length of the room, forming a waterfall about sixteen feet in length that poured down into a deep tub that would come to his hip should he stand in it.

And apparently standing in it was exactly what she had in mind. She pulled him toward the steps leading down into all that rushing water. He dug his feet in and resisted, making her turn back to him. She looked surprised. She tacked on a smile full of mischief, just to make him feel even more awkward he suspected, with no little sense of petulance.

“Madam, I don’t see the point in all of this. We would do better to walk off and remember all of our own limitations and leave it at that,” he said firmly. Obstinately.

“I see,” she said, turning back to face him and promptly staring him down with those searching, soul-stripping eyes of hers. “So my big, bad soldier is afraid of something after all,” she noted.

The supposition instantly burned his biscuits. Probably because it was true. Damn her and her uncanny way of seeing into people. It was his own fault, he supposed. He had shown her more of himself than he had ever shown anyone else. She had a right to think she knew him better than any other person might. She could make that claim even over his IM family.

“I’m afraid of hurting you. I’ve made no secret of that,” he said gruffly, once again resisting her when she went to pull him forward. “I truly would be a monster if I weren’t afraid.”

“I think it goes a little further than such an altruistic ideal,” she countered. “I think you are far more afraid of the unknown than the known, just as I am.” She reached up with her free hand and stripped off the regal tiara she wore. It pulled all the other pins and combs free as it went, sending them onto the stone floor with various little pings and clinks of sound as she shook back that glorious sheet of hair.

Then she stepped closer to him and reached for the fabric of his shirt where it clung tight to his strong, firm belly.

Ambrea tried not to jump out of her own skin as his free hand smacked tight around hers, seizing her in an almost painful grip. But if there was one thing she had become an expert at over the cycles of her lifetime, it was in not giving away her fear to those she least wanted to see it. The truth was, she was terrified and incredibly out of her depth. But there had been a clear understanding a few moments ago that had made her so suddenly willing to be so bold and brave where she might never have been before.

Rush Blakely was just as much of an untried virgin as she was.

That understanding had just about broken her heart. There was something about how this man had lived his life on the tipping point of life and death, flinging himself into every danger that the Three Worlds could throw at him, almost as if he were hunting down the one danger that would finally be able to beat his unusual genetics right in its tracks. And yet for all of that, he had not lived his life in the ways that truly counted any more than she had. But where she had been held back by others, he had been held back only by himself and his own fears. Just the same, she could see more similarities between them than differences. However, the one difference between them now was that she had been set free.
From her father, her uncle, and more than anything, from herself. She was finally in charge of her own destiny, in charge of the way she chose to live her life. And she honestly couldn’t spin free and leave him chained behind her. There was no one else she would ever want to take with her. No one else had made her feel so much with just the look in his eyes or the smile quirking at the edges of his lips. No one had ever come so close to setting her on fire. Figuratively speaking. Literally as well, but for some reason she wasn’t afraid of that. She would never be able to touch him again if they both were afraid of that.

And that simply would not do.

She needed him. Needed his hands on her skin. Needed to feel him let loose, to feel him set free, to be within reach of his every impulse the minute he realized he was able to indulge in them.

She stepped forward into him, closing all distance between them, pushing her reaching hand up against his belly in spite of his attempts to stay her. She took a deep breath, the rugged, rich smell of him invading her nostrils. It was a combination of so many things, a deep story of who he was. She could smell a harsh solvent of some sort, blending with the softer, more mechanical smell of weapons lubricant. But once she got past those hints of his career, there were the more personal aromas that were strictly Rush. Sweat left behind from working at a high intensity level of awareness and alertness from the moment they had landed. Leather from the clothing he had chosen to wear to keep him from being identified as an IM soldier. Musk from the brief moments of arousal he had allowed himself to indulge in when he kissed her. All of these things combined to make the scent she had come to recognize as strictly his. Ambrea realized that even if she were struck blind, she would always be able to pick him out of a crowd of men. He
smelled incredible, he smelled delicious. Dozens of men could cross her path, she was certain, and no other would affect her this way by the sheer power of his smell.

And that was only the beginning.

She gripped hold of his shirt successfully this time, pulling the Skintex free from the wall of muscle it clung to. He still wore a jacket and a lazily left open shock vest, as if he didn’t care enough to link it properly closed across his chest. It wasn’t military grade. Even her father had worn a military-grade shock vest under his court clothing. And she could swear she’d caught a peek of one under her uncle’s clothing as well at the tribunal. Many high-end mercenaries managed to get their hands on IM-grade equipment, or close to it. She supposed that Rush was trying to come across as less than high end.

Ambrea didn’t see how that was possible. To her, everything about him was high end. She unlaced her fingers from his and shoved her hand under the vest and jacket, pushing both back off his shoulder as she worked the Skintex free of his pants.