“Was that a threat?” Rush snarled suddenly, knowing full well that was exactly what it was. He surged forward, but yet again she stayed him, her hand hitting him squarely in the center of his chest and holding him at bay while she kept her gaze steadily trained on her political adversary.
“Sir,” she said, dropping the address just as coldly as he had dropped hers, if not with an added chill of tempered Delran running through it. “You would do well to remember that the entirety of the council exists at my leisure and for my pleasure. The council was created by a long-ago emperor and can be dissolved by a present one, should she understand that it is not serving its purpose in this world. Instead of casting threats about and feeling your cock to see how big it is compared to mine, perhaps you can take your energies and direct them toward bringing forth the needs of the people to the ear of their ruler. Isn’t that, after all, the essence of your job? And if I believe for all of an instant that you are failing to do your job, Prelate, I will cut you off from all this power you seem to think you have and replace you with one of the no-doubt very hungry paxors who are currently sitting so tamely at your heels but will, given the moment’s opportunity, turn and bite you on your ass and gleefully drag you down to sit tamely at theirs.”
The nobles and politicians in the room collectively gasped at her crude speech, all of them staring in silent awe as they saw the blood of her family line pulse powerfully through her. But instead of using that power for selfish gains and vanities, she was turning it into something else. Something that would, perhaps, be stronger in the long run. Rush smiled crookedly to see the shock on all those faces and the way they looked at her. They didn’t know what to make of her. Every time they thought they were able to pigeonhole her into some kind of neat package, she changed things on them. But in spite of her ability to hand the prelate his ass on a platter, Rush was infuriated by her constantly cutting him off from doing what he deemed as his job. How could he protect her if she wouldn’t give him a chance?
He reached out to curl a slow, powerful hand around her upper arm and pull her close so he could speak to her ear alone.
“Madam, a moment in private, if you will?”
“Now, nobles,” she spoke aloud to the crowded room before her, “I am told I am needed elsewhere. Please. You will join me tonight at the inaugural ball.” She straightened up, and all save Rush lowered themselves in respect. Rush merely raised his hand to her and took a moment of odd pleasure in the way she slid her fingers against his. It was the closest thing to a caress they would likely ever share again.
As he led her away, he tried to understand why that thought made him so irritable. He walked her through the private receiving room behind the public one and with a sharp gesture ordered back the small entourage of servants and retainers she seemed to be gathering at her train. They irritated him too. He had not yet vetted any of them, except for Suna, and didn’t know what their purposes were supposed to be or even if they could be trusted to do so much as hand her a glass of water. The rest of the IM had fallen back once she had reached her throne safely, occupying the rear of the room as discreetly as they could, and allowing the Imperial Guard to stand watch over her, and Rush to watch over the Imperial Guard. He realized very clearly that they could not be trusted any more than anyone else in this damn place. He had a hell of a lot of work to do, just as she did, and there honestly was no protecting her. If her uncle decided to stage a coup right there in the palace, ordering the guards who were loyal to him to cut off her head, Rush would be the only thing to stand between them, and demented mutation or no, he couldn’t see how he could stand between Ambrea and an entire country and somehow manage to keep her alive.
This was what he was thinking as he let the door shut them away from the rest of the palace, his thoughts feeding his already tested temper. He wasn’t exactly known for being hotheaded. Quite the opposite, he’d say. He had learned long ago to keep control of his emotions for fear of what his hidden freakishness might set up on display. But there was something about Ambrea that put him on a knife’s point.
“Can I ask you what the hell I’m here for?” he growled at her the moment they were securely alone. He had spun her about, seizing her between his two hands, giving her a little bit of a shake even though his actual urge was to shake the head off her shoulders.
She blinked at him with those big blue eyes of hers, the action so slow and deliberate that he was instantly torn between the anger he was feeling and the peculiar sensation that he was about to make a total ass of himself. He had never realized just how much power Ambrea could pack into a single look. After spending a day watching her make powerful eye contact with her subjects, though, he was seeing much more of her depth with every passing instant. And on top of everything else, she was wearing this beautiful gown made of a gauzy, shimmering material in soft pastel lavender that seemed to accentuate all of the things he found so enchanting about her physically. That golden red hair running down her back in natural crimped waves, that ever-so-pale skin and its milky perfection, and her tall, statuesque figure that would make other women seek out surgeons in order to achieve it. Perhaps he had thought she was a bit bony early on, but now that he was seeing her in flattering clothes and a neckline that tortured him as it hovered on the precipice of demure and daring, he was ready to admit he had been wrong.
“I’m sure you know the answer to that. I need you for my protection. I’m dancing among vipers out there,” she said, a delicate shiver running through her. It was the first sign she had given, in all of the hours gone by so far, that she was in any way intimidated by her surroundings. Rush knew that was the way it had to be. If she showed even an instant of weakness in front of them, they would fall on her like rabid beasts. He was the one who had pressed that understanding on her.
“Then why do you constantly push me back?” he demanded through tight teeth. “Let me smack a few of the insolent bastards around, teach them—”
“Teach them what?” she cut in with a hot demand. “That I’m just like my father? That I will knock out the teeth of anyone who speaks against me? That I will be a tyrant and a bully?”
“No!” He growled in a long sound of frustration, his hands tightening on her, pulling her up closer. “You can’t let them treat you like that! There is such a thing as a healthy fear. Respect! You must demand their respect!”
“I must earn their respect!” she countered fervently. “Setting you loose on them is not the way!”
She was breathing quickly as she challenged him with her strong gaze and her raised chin. Rush couldn’t resist the urge he had to reach up and thread his big fingers through her soft, fine hair, the delicacy of it in his grip seeming almost obscene to him, as though he was some kind of uncouth, unwashed thing daring to touch a goddess.
“You are too naïve,” he accused her in a low voice. “You wish to see things in these people that are simply not going to be there. You have to learn to expect the worst and then protect yourself from that worst.”
“I do not have to learn that,” she said fiercely. “Perhaps you do, perhaps all of my guards who will be protecting me do, but I do not. I’m going to give each one of these people the benefit of the doubt for as long as it is reasonable to do so. It’s your job to catch them with the knife in their hand as they’re trying to stab me in the back. Then you will bring them—and the evidence—to me and I will be cold and terrible and consign them to the wet rooms or worse.”
He was so close to her that he saw the instant her eyes went wet, the moment they filled, and he felt when she began to shake. That was when he realized she would never lightly cast a sentence like that on anyone. She would always remember what it had felt like to live in those rooms, always wondering how those who had sent her there could consign her to such a life so unfairly and still manage to sleep so effortlessly. She would rather die in her efforts to treat others fairly than for one instant find herself casting down an unfair or false sentence.
Rush was
overwhelmed by the sudden and painfully needy impulse that rode down through his body and caused him to pull her mouth under his. He knew all the reasons why he shouldn’t do this, all the things that were dangerous about it, and all the ways it made her vulnerable to what he was, but he had looked all of his life for so pure a place of acceptance and fairness in the universe. It felt as though it would be such an essential crime to his soul to make himself walk away from her right then, to deny himself what he had longed for. He simply was not strong enough to do that.
Her lips were sweet and soft, as untried as they had been the first time he had kissed her. The realization that he was the first and only man to know her this intimately warmed him from the inside out, livened the nerves all along his skin. That sensation made him very aware of what could happen next, and almost as soon as he had seized her he was jolting away from her, pulling his hands free of her and holding them up and out of reach so he couldn’t hurt her, burn her, set her on fire.
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 t
o 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.
Seduce Me in Flames Page 20
