by Zoe Ashwood
“I can’t wait to take this off you,” he mutters and presses a hot, prickly kiss into the valley between my breasts. “I’ve been wanting to do this for years.”
His words wash away the last of my uncertainty, and I tear my clothes off with trembling hands. Levi removes his shorts, and suddenly, all that’s left between us is our thin cotton underwear.
I reach out and cup his impressive erection through his black boxer briefs, and he drops his forehead to my shoulder. His hips rock forward.
“Nora,” he murmurs.
With my other hand, I palm his jaw to bring his lips to mine again, and show him with my kisses and my touch how much I want this. How much I want him.
He trails his fingers down my belly and finally slips them under the waistband of my panties. My breath stutters as he brushes a fingertip over my clit, and when he dips lower, I let out an indecent moan.
It’s as though a switch flips inside us. Levi wrenches my panties down my legs, and I scramble to reach the clasp of my bra. Then he pushes down his underwear, mutters a simple spell to protect us both, and settles between my legs. Shivering with excitement, I hook my legs around his waist and draw him closer.
Levi notches his cock at my core and pushes inside me in one fast, rough thrust.
I gasp, my back bowing off the bed, and Levi stills inside me, braced on his arms above me. His beautiful green eyes widen with shock, his lips part, and his expression is so damn unguarded. So open.
I wonder what he sees in my face.
There’s nowhere to hide, not now, and we remain motionless for a long moment, silently acknowledging that we’re actually doing this. It’s crazy, but there’s no return. I will never forget how he’s looking at me right now or how perfectly he fills me with his cock. Whatever happens during this competition, and after, we’ll always have this.
Levi lowers himself to his elbows and pulls out, then rocks back in with a ragged exhale. The urgency that whipped our need earlier is gone, replaced by an almost painful closeness. I stare up at him, unable to find the words to tell him what I’m feeling, but he seems to understand. He kisses me, his lips hot, and our tongues touch in a seductive, sensual dance.
The heat between us builds, my damp skin sliding against Levi’s. I throw my head back and bite my lip to hold in a loud moan. He kisses my neck, my jaw, and finds my mouth again, then slips one hand between our bodies to touch my clit.
I shudder, my hips rocking up, chasing pleasure.
With every slow thrust, the tension inside me rises, and my magic threatens to spill over, to light us both up. I pull it deep inside me, holding it down, until I sense a tendril of power that’s not my own brushing up against it.
My eyes fly open—I didn’t even realize I’d closed them. I meet Levi’s gaze, and he stares down at me in shock.
“Did you feel…?” I gasp.
He slams into me again, harder this time, as though his control is slipping from his grip. He grasps my hands and presses them against the bed, entwining our fingers. The sense of his magic gets stronger, and I reach out with my own power to touch it, letting them meld together. The sensation is so intimate, so incredible, it throws me right off the cliff of pleasure.
I come, sparks detonating through my body, and Levi shouts as his own climax pulls him under, his lips on my throat, his cock so impossibly thick, it wrings pleasure from me until the very last thrust when Levi stills inside me.
In the aftermath, our harsh breaths are the only sound in the room. I’m too stunned to move, but Levi brushes his lips over my ear, then kisses me deeply, thoroughly, as if he wants to punctuate what just happened.
A tremor runs through me, and I return the kiss, knowing that within seconds, the real world will intrude in this bubble we’ve created, and I have no idea how to go back to how we were before—or if I want to.
Levi lifts onto his hands, and I already miss the heavy, solid weight of him. Still, I unhook my ankles and let him roll off to the side. My limbs feel too heavy to move, and my body still tingles all over. The cloud I’m floating on descends slowly, bringing me down to earth.
I turn my head to the side and meet Levi’s gaze. He grins, his eyes alight with joy, then leans in and presses a quick kiss to my lips.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he commands in an echo of last night.
He disappears into the bathroom, and while water turns on in the shower, I find my lost panties and bra. Suddenly, I feel too naked, too bare, so I race to pick up discarded pieces of clothing and tug them on.
When Levi returns to the room, still smiling, I’m sitting at the edge of the bed, braiding my hair.
His smile slips a little, and he pauses in his tracks, then stoops over to grab his underwear. “You’re dressed.”
It’s both a statement and a question, one I can answer only with a curt nod. What else was I supposed to do? We—we haven’t said anything about cuddling. Or doing anything more than seeing where this leads. And I won’t be the clingy woman who expects more than the guy offered, then gets her heart broken. I’ve done that in the past, and it hasn’t worked out well.
Levi’s eyebrows draw together in a frown, and it seems like he might say something, but my phone rings, its bleeping muted in my backpack. I dig it out and flash the screen at Levi.
“It’s Raphaël.” I answer the phone, putting it on the bed so I can finish my braid. “Hey, you’re on speaker.”
“Where are you?” Raphaël’s clear voice is tense, his words curt. “Have you returned to the hotel?”
I glance at Levi, who’s putting on his clothes. “Yeah, we’re here.”
“Good. Stay there. I’m coming.”
The call disconnects, and we’re left staring down at the phone screen.
“What was that all about?” I mutter, pinning my braid up so it doesn’t stick to my sweaty neck.
Levi makes a grumpy sort of sound and sits on the bed next to me, deliciously disheveled in his wrinkled t-shirt and unbuttoned cargo shorts.
“What?” I ask.
He throws his hands up. “I don’t know. This whole thing is…” He shakes his head and doesn’t finish the sentence.
A lump forms in my throat, cutting off my air supply, and I swallow several times to get it to go away. My eyes prickle with tears, which is ridiculous, because I almost never cry. Peering up at the ceiling, I pull myself together enough to ask, “Is it going to be weird now? Between us?”
Levi blows out a breath. “No.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulls me into his warm embrace, and kisses the top of my head. “Do you want it to be weird?”
I shake my head, so my forehead rubs against his chest.
“Then it won’t be.”
He takes my chin and lifts it so I have no choice but to look at him.
“I’m pretty sure what happened just now was as amazing for you as it was for me, yeah?” he says, his lips stretching in a grin that’s just shy of cocky.
I elbow him in the ribs, a small nudge to chastise him for his display of ego. “You know it was.”
At his heated expression, I can’t help but bite my lip. My core’s still wet from what he did to me, and I can’t wait to see what else we can achieve together.
“Thought so.” He grips my chin more firmly and tugs me up with his other arm until I’m perched in his lap. “We’ll make this work.”
I want to believe him so much. Throwing all my worries out the window, I press myself to him and kiss him lightly. I nibble on his lower lip and soothe it with my tongue. His arms form a steel cage around me, and his cock grows hard beneath my ass, showing me just what’s waiting.
“Later,” I gasp when Levi slides his hand beneath my linen blouse. “Raphaël’s on his way.”
“Mm.” He kisses my neck, sending shivers down my spine. “Let him come. I bet he’d love to watch.”
The thought is so shocking, so wrong, and yet… I moan at the images that shoot through my mind, deepening our kiss. Levi’s skin is hot
, he smells amazing, and I just want to remain in this room and never come out, never bother with any of—
Someone bangs on the door.
Levi groans, touching his forehead to mine. “Go away,” he mumbles half-heartedly.
But I wriggle away from him, righting my blouse and doing up the three buttons that Levi has managed to undo. “Coming!”
Levi opens his mouth, probably to make a dirty joke. I point a finger at him in warning, then scramble toward the door, throwing it open without checking who it is.
Raphaël bursts in and shuts it tight. His hair is disheveled, his expression pinched. “You can’t just let anyone in, Nora. I could have been—”
He stops dead in the middle of the room, taking in Levi’s rumpled clothes, the messy bedsheets, and my flushed face. His nostrils flare almost imperceptibly, and I know he can smell what we just did.
My cheeks burn with heat, and I clench my jaw, determined not to break his gaze. I refuse to feel shame over what happened. To my surprise, Raphaël’s expression turns predatory, not accusing, and I could swear he glances at my lips, then lower to my chest. But a moment later, he gives himself a small shake and straightens his shoulders.
“There are others in the city who are searching for the unnamed valley,” he announces, then gracefully sits in an armchair, looking for all the world like a king on his throne. “Aya called me. People were in the market, asking after you. We might have been too careless leaving their shop.”
This means we were right about the rental car incident at the airport.
I lean back against the door. “Do you know who it is? Which teams?”
A muscle ticks in Raphaël’s jaw. “I only saw one of them myself. A tall, blond man. Beard. Blue eyes. Maybe Swedish? Or Dutch? He was with another man, an American by the sound of him.”
The way he wrinkles his nose tells me what he thought of them.
Levi leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and voices my suspicion. “It has to be that Icelandic dude. Isak Something-son.”
“Einarsson,” I reply softly as I remember how he held me while we danced at Ballendial Castle. “Why did he pick Egypt of all places?”
Levi grins. “Maybe he’s as suicidal as we are.”
“There’s definitely something strange about him,” Raphaël says.
“Like what?” I ask.
His fingers twitch impatiently. “I followed him and his friend for maybe half an hour, enough to make sure they weren’t directly on your heels. I’ve never seen a person drink that much.”
I draw back in surprise. “What—alcohol?”
When I danced with Isak Einarsson at the opening ceremony, he didn’t give me the impression that he was a heavy drinker. He certainly hadn’t smelled like one.
“No.” Raphaël taps the arm of his chair. “Water. He downed at least two large bottles, and he mixed something in before he drank.”
This makes no sense. But I don’t see how it matters to our mission. “Where are they staying? And where are they getting their equipment?”
Raphaël explains about a rental company that caters to wealthy tourists. “They won’t get their stuff as fast as we will. But that’s not the main issue. Aya told me of another team—that one worries me more. It’s a couple, Russian or Ukrainian by the sound of them, and they arrived in the city a day before us, so we’re running behind.”
It’s got to be…
“The Dorokhovs,” Levi mutters. “Shit, they looked dangerous to me.”
“I was hoping they wouldn’t pick the same location as us.” I blow out a long breath. “Any chance we could leave tonight? The drive to Kharga alone will take more than seven hours. If we could travel at night, then search for the valley…”
“Way ahead of you,” Raphaël interrupts my ramble. “Aya will have our car and supplies ready by sundown. We’ll meet her at the coffee shop to pick up the keys.”
Levi eyes him with an appreciative gaze. “You work fast.”
Raphaël’s answering shrug is more elegant than I could ever manage. “Well, the stakes of this game are high. Even for me.” He pauses, then adds almost as an afterthought, “Especially for me.”
That reminds me of Aya’s reaction in the café, and unease stirs in my belly. “Hey, what kind of a spell are you thinking about?”
But he just gives me a smile, mysterious as a Sphinx. “That’s for me to know. Until the right time, that is.”
I exchange a worried glance with Levi, but I have to trust Raphaël to hold to the rules of our bargain: the spell can’t be used to hurt anyone, and that encompasses pretty much anything bad he can think of. I’m more afraid he’ll make me erase me from his memory again. I can’t help but think that he was probably happier without me and my mess in his life.
But as he said, that’s for him to know until the end of this mission, anyway.
“So…no time for practicing spells, then?” Levi asks, leaning back on his hands.
Raphaël gives him a scathing glare. “It’s not like you were practicing spells before I arrived, is it?”
I open my mouth to argue, then close it again. He’s right, of course. Levi and I were having crazy-hot sex while Raphaël was out, tracking our competition and arranging our transportation. Did he even manage to get to that blood den?
I have to get my head in the game, forget about Levi and my attraction to my vampire ex-boyfriend until we find what the Scottish witches hid for us in Egypt.
And then?
Then, everything might be different than it is today.
“I’ll pack my bag,” I say, pushing away from the door. “Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.”
Seventeen
Nora
We take a cab to avoid walking in the glaring afternoon sun. Raphaël slides on a classic pair of Ray-Bans but still squints through the window as though sunlight bothers him. Our taxi gets stuck in rush hour traffic, and the honking of nervous drivers melds with the music coming from the car’s speakers into an ear-splitting cacophony. The windows are down, but there’s no breeze to cool us off, and even Levi, who survived a previous mission in the Cambodian jungle without issue, is cursing in the front seat.
This heat is different, though. I’ve only ever experienced this kind of dry, parching sensation when I visited Death Valley with my parents back in high school. The sun beats down on the car roof, and the air around us shimmers lightly. My throat is scratchy, so I pull my reusable water bottle from my backpack and take a quick sip. My blouse sticks to my back, and I swear I’m even sweating through my ears.
If it’s this bad in the city, where the buildings throw shade on the streets and the watered parks along the Nile offer cool relief, how will we survive in the desert?
Raphaël makes a low sound of discomfort next to me, so I shift to study him.
“Are you okay?” I murmur.
He jerks his head in a quick nod. “It’s not usually this bad, but the sun…”
Levi half-turns and squints back at us. “I thought you said it wasn’t an issue.”
Raphaël runs his fingers through his black hair, pushing the thick strands up and to the side. “It’s not. But in the sun, I’m no stronger than a human,” he says quietly with a careful glance toward our driver, who has a Bluetooth device attached to his ear and has been talking non-stop since he picked us up.
“But it doesn’t make you sick?” I ask, pushing.
“It would, after a while. That’s why I like evenings best.” He peers through the windshield toward the pale-yellow sun still hanging high above the horizon.
“But we’re going to the desert,” I say, unable to keep my thoughts to myself. “If that will hurt you, maybe it would be better if you waited here…”
“Trying to get rid of me already?” he asks, a corner of his mouth quirking up.
“No,” I say quickly. Too quickly. Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I try to cover it by adding, “I don’t want you to suffer while helping us.”
“I
won’t,” he assures me. “We won’t be able to stay out in the sun for long during the day anyway, and Aya knows what I need.”
Levi levels a thoughtful gaze at him. “Is the spell Nora promised you worth so much?”
To that, Raphaël answers with a simple, “Yes.”
The car inches slowly forward, and we fall quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I stare out the window at all the many people hurrying through the streets. So many lives. How many of them are witches? How many have been touched by magic? If Mr. Mansour’s family is any indication, the witches here don’t have the same reservations while dealing with humans as in the States.
What would Egyptian witches do if they found out we’re encroaching on their territory? What if they already know and are anticipating us?
“There it is,” Raphaël says softly.
We round a corner, and a tall minaret comes into view. Its brown spire reaches toward the pale-blue sky, and three more appear as the taxi rolls closer. The little balconies surrounding them are exquisitely carved, and the massive cupolas combined with the crenellated wall remind me of a fairytale palace.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathe as I plaster my face to the window.
“What’s it called?” Levi asks, ducking his head to stare up at the walls.
Raphaël is about to reply when the driver abruptly jerks the car to the side and into a narrow alley.
“Al-Azhar Mosque,” he announces. “We’re close to the bazaar!”
The traffic clears, and we zoom through the streets at break-neck pace, careening around the corners at dangerous speed. I brace my hand against the door and draw on my magic to propel it outward and push any unfortunate pedestrians out of the way should the driver fail to see them in time.
A couple of tense minutes later, we slam to a stop next to an alley lined with shops that leads to another large stone gate. I can’t tell if it’s the same one we took this morning to enter the bazaar or not, but I’m mostly just happy we arrived in one piece.
The driver helps us unload our baggage from the trunk despite our assurances that we can handle it ourselves, and as Levi pays him for the ride, he keeps yelling loudly into his earpiece. Several heads turn our way.
