Tempting Danger (26 page)

“Don’t belittle your champion’s skills,” he said wryly. “I let him do nothing.”

“You knew he would attack you when I opened the door.”

He shrugged. “I allowed him to set the terms of our negotiation. The claws in my face were entirely his idea, however.”

She started laughing. “That’s a negotiation?”

“Cats negotiate differently than humans.”

“I should get something for that cut. Some antibiotic ointment.” But she moved toward him, not the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. The pull was so strong. “I didn’t expect you to like cats.”

“I respect them.”

She stopped in front of him.

He touched her hair. His eyes were hot and dark with need. “
Nadia.
I can’t wait any longer.”

She swallowed. “I’m going to do this, aren’t I?”

“We,” he said, and wrapped his hand in her hair. “
We
are going to do this; yes.”

“Then do it,” she said, suddenly fierce. “Quit talking and do it. Put yourself in me.”

As if she’d hit him, he gasped. Then his mouth came down on hers, hard.

She clutched him with both hands, digging her fingers into the flesh beneath the damp T-shirt, and hung on. He ran his hands up her back, then down, cupping her butt and holding her hard against him. She moaned.

He had a scent, too, she realized—one even her human nose could find when she nuzzled his neck. A wild scent, mingling man and damp cloth and something else, something indefinably Rule. It made her crazy. She bit him on the column of his throat. “Now.”

He groaned. One of his hands moved. He unzipped his jeans and sprang free, then tugged at her sweatpants and panties. She stepped out of them, dizzy with need. Shaking.

“It’s all right,” he told her, and put his hands beneath her butt and lifted her off the ground. “Put your legs around me, Lily. Yes, like that.” He shuddered when she obeyed, opening herself to him. “It will be all right,” he repeated. Still standing, he slid inside.

She made a noise, the sound of something breaking open—something private inside her being breached. “Ahh,” she said then, clutching him, squeezing her eyes closed and seeing white, not dark behind her lids—swirling white.

He was thick. Long and hot and thick inside her.

Then he began walking, still lodged inside her. The sensation was incredible. Her eyes flew open. “What, you do it walking?”

He may have meant the stretch of his mouth for a grin, but strain made it a grimace. “The chair. I can’t make it to your bed.”

I love you.
She almost said it and was appalled. Where had that come from? Because he was inside her? Because she was a fool, an idiot, unable to tell the difference between—

“This will be crowded,” he said, looking at her chair and a half. “It’s made for snuggling, not fucking.”

And he ought to know. He’d probably fucked more women than she’d shaken hands with men.

“What is it?” His eyes were suddenly fierce. “Where did you go? You aren’t with me anymore.”

She stared back. “If I were an inch more
with
you, you’d be inside my uterus instead of rubbing up against it.”

He groaned. And sank to his knees with her riding him, causing his cock to move inside her, rubbing places that had never felt quite that sensation before. “Hold on. Hold onto me,” he said, and eased her onto her back. And began to move.

Driven by the flexing rhythm of his hips, she flung her head back, dug her fingers into his shoulders, and met his thrusts with her own. It was a wild ride. Her need, and his, made it a short one. Climax ripped through her, bucking her body and blanking her mind. He cried out.

When she drifted back to herself moments later, her face was wet. Her name, she realized. It had been her name he’d called when he came.

Why would that make her cry?

Rule was sprawled on top of her, his head next to hers, his breath stirring her hair. He’d caught himself on his forearms as he collapsed, so not all of his weight was on her. He was still inside her . . . and still hard.

“Lily?” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Ah,
cara,
don’t. What is this?” He pressed his mouth to the corner of her eye, then licked at the tears. He kissed her mouth, his tongue soft, persuasive. His lips said to trust him. To let him inside, all the way inside. “Don’t cry. Please don’t.”

“I don’t . . .” Her breath caught as he shifted his hips. “I don’t cry. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Is that”—she pushed up with her hips, demonstrating—“normal for you?”

“Very little is normal for me right now. Or for you, which is why the tears, perhaps.”

“I guess.” She wanted him still. She’d just hit a home run for the record books, and the need was already building. “If this was supposed to clear my mind, it didn’t work.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Then we’d better try again. See if we can get it right.”

“I know the male answer to everything is sex, but—oh!”

He’d bent and was suckling her through her T-shirt. After a moment he looked up. “Naked would be better.”

“Yes.” She ran her hands up his back. “Yes, it would.”

Thirty minutes later she was flat on her back in her bed. Rule lay beside her on his back. They were both breathing hard, which gave her some satisfaction, considering the advantage his nature conferred. “I think . . . I can safely say”—she had to stop and drag in air—“that yes, naked is better.”

He chuckled and rolled onto his side, propping himself up to look at her. “Mmm.” He drew his hand along her ribs, down her hip. “You are as close to perfection as it’s possible to get without boredom.”

She turned her head to look at him. “You couldn’t possibly.”

“No?” He quirked a brow at her. “I’ve heard that the first month for a Chosen pair can be . . . strenuous.”

“I’m not sure I buy all this Chosen stuff. There’s a bond, a pull, something. I don’t deny that. But you might have some of it wrong.”

“Perhaps. I believe that everything I’ve told you is fact, but this . . . what’s happened to us . . . it’s rare. I don’t know all there is to know about it.”

She fell silent. She ought to ask questions, and part of her wanted to do that. To interrogate him, break down his story—or find out the truth of her condition.

She didn’t want to know. Lily closed her eyes, tried to close off her thoughts. She was in bed with a man who was still a stranger to her in many ways. But worse was that she was a stranger to herself.

She needed to finish what she’d begun, find the answers to Carlos Fuentes’s death. To Therese’s. She was a cop. It wasn’t just what she did; it was what she was. But a cop without a badge—What did that make her? “All in all, it’s been a hell of a day.”

“For both of us. These charges against you . . . we weren’t lovers before, as they claim, but we are now. How will that affect you?”

She turned her head. The pillows were on the floor, as were most of the covers, so she looked straight at his face with nothing between them. “I’m probably sunk.”

His face twisted. “I’m truly sorry.”

If he was being straight with her, he’d had no choice, either. He was as trapped as she was, as unable to undo any of it. All she could do was go forward from where she was now. And now . . . it felt so right to lie here with him. Necessary.

And if that bothered her, she’d deal with it tomorrow.

“Distract me,” she said and pressed a kiss to his shoulder, running her hand down his belly.

His breath sucked in.

Already the pleasure was rising in her again, drawn from her as easily as the sun draws mist from water. “You can’t make any of it go away,” she said, “but maybe, for awhile, I can forget.” She nipped the side of his throat. “Maybe we both can.”

THEY
were coming for him again.

Cullen lay on his back on the hard floor, picking up the vibrations from their footsteps with his body. He didn’t get up. They thought he couldn’t sense anything outside his cage, which was damned near true. Glass was miserable to work through, being all but impermeable to magic, and the walls and ceiling of his cage were heavy, tempered glass in a steel frame. The floor was rock, but with a mesh of power beneath it that resisted his seeking with painful efficiency. That mesh was tied to the nearby node, and the node was keyed to Her. The Old One these crazies worshiped.

Desperation can be a real mother, though. His had given birth to patience bordering on obsession. And he’d know about obsessions, wouldn’t he?

They’d kept him alive at first for the novelty factor. A werewolf sorcerer? It wasn’t supposed to be possible. He’d performed for her holiness three times now—the first time while in a great deal of pain.

The pain wasn’t so bad now, but her staff kept her safe, damn it and her, while he did his tricks. It held more raw power than he’d ever seen, more than enough to control him. But she wasn’t herself a sorcerer. She had power, vast power—and little more idea of how to use it than a child playing in the cockpit of a 747.

They needed him. They didn’t trust him but wanted badly to use him. He’d had little trouble convincing them of his essential venality. “Ask anyone who knows me,” he’d told her. “I’m a selfish sod. I can be bought—but money isn’t my price.”

There were disadvantages to having lived a thoroughly selfish life, though. No one would look for him. Max would grumble when he didn’t show up to dance, but he wouldn’t be alarmed. Rule—

The creak of the door had him sitting up. “She’ll talk to you now.”

That was the guard he’d dubbed the Hulk. He was big and stupid, and he had a temper . . . which, unfortunately, Cullen sometimes couldn’t resist tweaking. It was so damnably boring here.

“But of course. I’d be delighted.” He rose fluidly—that hadn’t been taken from him, at least. His body and mind remained his own, much to his captors’ frustration. “Am I presentable?” he asked. “I do so hate to look unkempt when I’m to spend time with a lady.”

The blow to the side of his head from a wooden staff staggered him. “No talking. Put these on.”

The handcuffs landed with a clink on the floor. He went still. The rage was getting harder to master, but he managed. It helped to picture her lithe body writhing in agony as fire consumed her.

He was good with fire.

The only outward sign he gave of his reaction was a single, shuddering breath. Then he bent, picked up the handcuffs, and slid his hands through the bracelets, locking them in place. “And my lovely necklace?”

He got another blow, of course, for speaking. “Come here.”

He wanted to refuse, dearly wanted that. But the only way out of this cage—for now—lay in obeying. He stepped forward.

This was the part he hated most. Hard hands slid the silver choke chain over his head, snugging it around his neck.

Someone tugged on the other end of his leash. “Heel.” Someone else laughed.

Such a simple sense of humor his guards possessed. The same joke over and over, and it never failed to amuse them. Putting a leash and collar on the wolf-man was only part of the fun, though. The rest of the joke lay in teasing a blind man. Tripping him was always good for a laugh.

Cullen took a single step. He knew the contours of his glass cage very well, and his guards never entered it, so he was safe from their humor until he left it. He felt with his foot for the steel doorsill. . . .

A sharp tug on the collar almost overbalanced him. “I said heel, boy. Hurry up.”

This time the rage won. He launched himself into space toward the one holding his chain.

The guards were only human. They couldn’t react in time. He slammed into a big, hard body and managed to loop his cuffed hands over the man’s head as they crashed to the floor. He landed on top and pushed up on one knee, using his forearms as a vise on the man’s head. One good twist—

The pain hit, crippling him body and mind, making his arms spasm. Along with the rest of him. It was brief, though. An instant’s overwhelming agony, then someone’s foot rolled him off his tormentor and temporary victim.

Who was moaning, Cullen noted as he lay on his back, twitching like a dreaming dog, each little spasm sending shards of pain through his muscles. Apparently she’d zapped the Hulk, too. And that smell . . . the Hulk had pissed himself.

Cullen’s mouth contorted painfully as the impulse to grin got tangled up by his scrambled nerves.

“Did you think I wasn’t here?” A thin ghost of amusement brought a rare touch of life to that high, hated voice. She stood near his feet. “You must learn to master your impulses, Cullen. I can’t allow you to damage my servants. Second . . .” The slight shift in sound told Cullen she’d turned. “I asked you to tell the men not to tease Cullen. It causes problems.”

“I told them, Madonna.”

“Then John disobeyed.” That high, cool voice sounded so like a child’s . . . and not childish at all.