Niniane thought she saw something odd as Aryal looked back at them. The harpy’s eyes were narrowed, her angular face white with strain. Niniane might have been mistaken. Dangling upside down, everything looked wrong. People moved in weird ways, their smiles all turned down, and liquid spilled from drinks falling up. It was like looking in a carnival hall of mirrors in a dream.
Tiago strode down the hallway. Office, to the right. It was a small, cluttered cubbyhole, piled with yellowed papers. Restrooms. He could hear someone moving around in one and the whine of a small motor as a hand dryer started. Niniane wriggled on his shoulder and almost slid off. He hitched her light little body back into place and kept going. There, toward the emergency back exit, was an open door.
He veered toward it and strode into a shadowed room filled with metal shelves and boxes. One corner of the storeroom had been turned into a break area, with a battered comfortablelooking couch, a sagging armchair and a scarred coffee table with a pile of old magazines. A folded afghan blanket lay on the back of the couch, and a unit against one wall held a clunky thirteen-inch TV with an antenna and a digital converter box. A microwave sat on a middle shelf.
He came to the middle of the floor and stopped. She waited a moment. Nothing happened. Tiago’s massive body stood rigid.
She let go of his ear, and maybe her fingers accidentally brushed along the side of his neck.
“I look pretty,” she whispered. She rested her cheek against his wide, muscled back.
He took a breath. She felt it shudder through his whole frame. He laid one hand against the back of her thigh and stroked her leg. The light rasp of calluses on his broad palm left a trail of goose bumps on her sensitive bare skin.
Then he bent forward. With exquisite gentleness he eased her onto her feet. He kept his hands at her narrow waist until she had her balance back. They looked at each other, her head tilted up, his bent down. She felt absurdly tiny whenever she was this close to him, and warmed in a way that had nothing to do with their physical bodies.
“I am so goddamn old,” he said. His voice was so quiet she almost couldn’t hear him. “And you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
She rested her fingers on his forearms so that she could relish the heat of his skin as she looked up into his half-hidden stranger’s face. The aggression had splintered and left him looking shaken and—vulnerable. He was such a self-contained fortress. In all the years of their acquaintance, she had never seen him look this way. She reached up to take his sunglasses off. His obsidian eyes glittered in the shadowed room.
“If you think I’m beautiful, why didn’t you say so?” she asked. Her breath hiccuped. “Why are you so mad at me?”
Listen to her. She was going to be the queen who stamped her foot and cried because her feelings got hurt. Whole nations would tremble in fear.
He cradled her face with both hands. They were so big they encompassed the graceful curve of her head. He growled, “You drive me out of my mind. You make me so fucking crazy I can’t think straight. Did you even notice? Every male out there, along with several of the women, were undressing you with their eyes—and they didn’t have far to go. You can’t go out in public like this. I mean, Niniane. What. The. Hell.”
He was winding himself tight again by talking about it. His face and body clenched. She blinked as she stared up at him. Light dawned.
He was so jealous and possessive, he was burning up with it.
That could only mean one thing. He still wanted her.
She said, “So you like the dress.”
He glared at her, the picture of startled offense. “That’s not a dress.”
Delight tasted like honey mead and turned her drunk. She started to smile. “Then what is it?”
“It’s–it’s—” His gaze ran compulsively down the length of her body and grew ravenous. He had to swallow to clear his throat. He said, his voice gone husky, “Young lady, that thing barely covering your body is cause for a street riot.”
Her smile widened. She took one of his hands in both of hers. His hand was huge and filled with killing strength. Veins patterned the expansive back and ran down long calloused fingers. She ran his hand down the sequins that covered the dress. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” she murmured.
He had taken countless lovers throughout his long life, and they had all been strong-limbed warrior women who could take a good pounding. They hadn’t expected anything afterward except to walk away. Niniane was such an exotic creature to him, with her love of feminine fripperies and the lush delicacy of her body. With the shabby storeroom as a backdrop, she looked shocking and glamorous, like shadowed lightning, and the bright, tiny dangling things as they ran over his fingers felt cool and hard like shards of ice. Entranced, he fingered one and breathed, “Hell, yeah.”
Her smile faded, and her huge gaze gathered the shadows from the room around her. “I’m sorry I sent you away like that,” she said.
His hand turned and he squeezed her fingers. “I’m sorry too, faerie,” he said. “I knew about your past. I should have been more careful, and I wasn’t. There’s no excuse. I was thoughtless and I fucked up.”
She reached up and laid her fingers against the warm, carved edge of his lips. For someone who could look so brutal, his mouth had a severe elegance, stamped as it was with both temper and sensuality. “I thought you might have gone back to New York,” she said. “I missed you so much already.”
He opened his mouth and took her forefinger between his teeth. He nipped at her with such sensual enjoyment it sent pleasure rippling down her body. “I already told you once.” His voice had darkened, turned gravelly. “I’m not leaving.”
He said the lie with such conviction her truthsense tried to convince her to believe him. She closed her eyes and explored his face with her fingers, reading the strong, heavy frame of his bone structure like Braille. His lips moved feather-soft against her palm. She felt like someone was dropping stones, one by one, on her chest, in a slow-building pressure. It was getting hard to breathe. Soon the weight would become intolerable and crush her ribs.
In the main room somebody finally got the music back up. It roared back on with a suddenness that made her eyes pop open. She looked so surprised as she tottered on her four-inch heels that Tiago laughed and yanked her against his chest. The Black Eyed Peas came over the speakers and rocked it out. The walls of the building vibrated as lyrics careened headlong through the air.
Still laughing, he picked her up, turned and put her against a wall. He held her up at a height where they were face-to-face. He made it look effortless, with one arm under her hips to brace her. With his face alight and his black eyes sparkling, he had such a barbaric beauty it took her breath away.
Then his Power mantled over her, and she felt a need for him that was so terrible it drew her knees up and sank into her DNA, and she knew in that moment she would never be free of it, or him. He was carving himself into the deepest, most secret places inside of her, and she felt herself reforming in response. She was Galatea, made of stone, coming to life as he fashioned her.
He nudged his hips between her knees and took hold of one of her ankles to draw her leg around his waist. She wrapped her other leg around him and locked her ankles behind him. She ran her hands across his broad-muscled shoulders. My God, she had to take an anatomy class. Every single one of those muscles had its own name.
She wound her arms around his neck and watched as that sparkle of laughter in his eyes turned dark with a different kind of savagery. He widened his legs and pushed his pelvis against her. Her head fell back as she felt the thick arch of his cock through the fabric of their clothes. She rubbed herself against him, whimpering, and he hid his face in her neck as he swore under his breath. The massive weight of his body as he pressed her into the wall was exquisite, as excruciating as everything else was between them. He wouldn’t fit easily, she knew. He was too big, and it had been too long since she had last taken a lover. They would have to work to get him in, and it would burn so good as her muscles stretched tight to accommodate him, and then—and then—