Kiss Me Deadly

by Shannon Stacey

  “Never. But I can’t wait much longer, and if I don’t get inside of you, I’ll come all over myself like a virgin.”

  She smiled. “I’m ready for you.”

  He moved to lay between her thighs, but stopped. “Is my weight too much for you? Do you prefer me on my back?”

  She saw the tenderness in his eyes—the truth of his question—and gave up a little more of her heart. He didn’t care if he was too heavy for her. He cared if he frightened her.

  “I trust you,” she whispered—words she’d never before said to anybody. And she meant them, she realized. Somehow she knew she could give herself to this man and he would cherish her.

  He entered her slowly, carefully, and Bridget lifted her hips to welcome the exquisite stretching sensation. She panicked briefly, sure she couldn’t take all of him, but Khail stopped. He rocked his hips, pulling back and then slowly sliding forward. The friction felt wonderful and her body welcomed him deeper with each gentle stroke. Finally he filled her and was still, but for the cock pulsing inside of her.

  She gazed up at Khail. Sweat beaded at his hairline and his arms trembled as he held his weight above her. The man had been celibate for almost four hundred years and he still had the capacity for restraint?

  “I’m not fragile, Khail. I won’t break.”

  “I want you to…find pleasure with me,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “And I will if you move—” She rocked her hips up. “—just…like…that.”

  And he did. Bridget wrapped her legs around his waist, urging him on. Her hands couldn’t get enough of him. She ran them through his hair and over the smooth muscles of his back. They settled on his ass and she scraped her fingernails over the taut muscles that flexed with every thrust.

  Khail shifted, lifting her hips until her feet rested on his shoulders. He plunged into her, the depth of his thrust nearly taking her breath away. When he reached down and used his thumb to put subtle pressure on her clit, Bridget came. Her head thrashed and she dug her nails into his flesh as her muscles spasmed and the waves of pleasure ripped through her body.

  She’d barely returned to Earth when Khail let her legs drop so he could lean forward and kiss her. His clipped mustache and goatee tickled her upper lip and chin, but she parted her lips to let his tongue slide over hers. She sighed against his mouth, perfectly content to kiss this man for hours.

  But he lifted his head to gaze down at her with those bottomless dark eyes. She smiled, trailing her fingertips lightly up his back just to watch him shudder.

  “You are beautiful when you come, moya kisa.” He grinned, making her heart flutter in response. “Do it again.”

  “I can’t just—” She yelped when he grabbed her ankle and crossed one leg over the other, turning her sideways without withdrawing. He pressed her knees together and began moving with slow, even strokes.

  “Oh, my…Khail,” she cried. The new angle—the new pressure—had her clutching the bedspread. There was no way she could have another orgasm so soon. No way.

  Keeping his right hand on her knees, Khail put his left next to her head and leaned over her. A whimper escaped her throat as he quickened his pace, but not nearly enough.

  “Yes, I am yours, Bridget.” He leaned slightly to the right and took his hand from her knees to cup her face. He turned it gently, not enough to pull her neck, but enough to see her. “Open your eyes. I want to see your face when you come for me.”

  His strokes quickened and she knew his orgasm was near.

  Suddenly he reared up and uncrossed her legs so she was flat on her back again. He reached over her head and grasped the top of the mattress, using the muscles in his arms and back to drive his cock deep into her.

  Bridget cried his name again as the orgasm overtook her, even more intensely than the last.

  “Mine,” Khail growled into her neck as he thrust into her harder and faster.

  He roared her name as his hips bucked and he spilled himself into her. Aftershocks wracked her body with each thrust, until they were both spent, panting and slickened with sweat.

  Khail collapsed on top of her, then immediately rolled to his back, taking her with him. In her languid state, she was perfectly content to rest there, her head on his chest.

  But in the seconds after the greatest orgasm of her life, the rapid pounding of Khail’s heart was nearly drowned out by the thumps of winged bodies throwing themselves against the wooden shutters.

  Chapter Three

  She must die.

  Khail sat, once again wrapped in the blanket, at Bridget’s kitchen table, waiting anxiously for her to get out of the shower. They had made love there, but then she shoved him out so she could actually get clean. No sooner had the bathroom door closed behind him than the Unkind wormed their way back into his head.

  During the night, while he made love to Bridget and then held her in his arms, it was as if the Unkind couldn’t infiltrate his mind. For the first time in centuries his thoughts were his own and he’d felt almost human. They’d thumped against the windows for a short time, outraged at his intimacy with the chosen one, but they hadn’t gotten into his head.

  She must die. Bring the woman out.

  He pressed his fingers to his temples and tried to conjure an image of Bridget as she came under the steaming water, her cunt squeezing his fingers. The buzzing abated slightly, but he knew they were out there. Watching. Waiting.

  He didn’t know how to defeat them. He shared a collective consciousness with them, but knew of no fatal weakness in the supernatural flock.

  You cannot destroy us, Mikhail. You are one of us.

  And he would destroy himself along with them if it would keep Bridget safe. But he had no weapon, no magic, at his disposal.

  Kill the woman, the Unkind demanded.

  I trust you, Bridget had whispered.

  Khail clung to that voice in his mind. It was a gift she hadn’t given lightly, he knew. And he would never betray her.

  You betray the Unkind.

  Yes. I do. Khail was no stranger to battle. This would be the first, however, he couldn’t win with a good horse and his scimitar.

  When Bridget finally emerged, clad once again in the red robe, with her towel-dried hair hanging free, Khail breathed a sigh of relief.

  Something about her unburied the humanity he’d thought lost deep inside of himself. When he held her, he was a man again—a man with an identity and cleansed of the blood on his hands. A man not cursed by the Unkind.

  He watched Bridget pour herself an oversized mug of coffee, and he thanked her when she refilled his water glass. The slight jerkiness to her movements let him know some of the afterglow of their intimacy was fading and their reality was creeping back.

  “Why do you have those wooden shields on your windows?” he asked when she had seated herself across from him. He’d seen them on the outside of many homes—his own, so long ago, had had them in lieu of glass—but he’d never seen them on the inside before.

  “They’re emergency storm shutters. I try to use the exterior ones because they protect the glass, but up here a blizzard can come up out of nowhere. If it’s very sudden or the middle of the night, I don’t want to have to go outside. Especially since I live alone. They also come in handy if your house is attacked by a flock of pissed off, murderous werebirds.”

  He winced at her flippant use of that word, but laughed despite it. No doubt she understood the gravity of the situation—humor was simply her coping mechanism.

  “My turn,” she said, and he braced himself for the inevitable question. Could he face her if she knew how he’d come to be cursed? He could see the ghost of past violence in her eyes. Would she turn away from his past? “If you’re an almost four hundred year old Cossack, how do you speak English so well?”

  He almost laughed out loud in relief at her painless question. “I’ve been practically invisible among the humans for centuries. Watching. Listening. I speak many languages and know many things. Wh
y do you choose to live such a lonely existence in such a remote place?”

  Almost immediately, Khail regretted carelessly tacking the question onto the end of his answer. Bridget’s fingers tightened on her coffee mug and her gaze shifted away from his.

  “It’s not as remote as it seems. Well, it is from the front, but there are homes and camps not too far away over the hill to the back. That’s how I was able to get electricity and phone run to the cabin, though they cost me a small fortune.”

  She hadn’t answered his true question, and they both knew it.

  “How are we going to get out of this?” she asked after too long a silence.

  To Khail, it spoke volumes that she’d rather talk about the threat of death hovering over them than her past. Perhaps she was only giving voice to her fears, but he got the distinct impression she was changing the subject. And he let her.

  “We…they don’t know why you didn’t die. Their anger makes them determined to solve the puzzle of why? I can feel it.”

  “I take it this doesn’t happen often?”

  Khail shook his head. “Not in my collective memory of the Unkind.”

  “If I’m immune, then I should just be able to walk outside, right? Let them touch me.”

  “Perhaps their mere touch will not kill you. But the touch of hundreds—maybe thousands—of razor-sharp beaks and talons would most certainly hurt you.”

  Bridget shuddered, and Khail resisted the urge to go to her. If he took her in his arms now he would make love to her again. They needed to focus and perhaps come up with some solution to their problem, unlikely as that seemed.

  “But,” she said, turning her coffee cup around and around in her hands, “if they stalk me and then tear me to shreds, that’s not random. Although my being chosen was, it didn’t work and they should go randomly end somebody else’s life.”

  “I cannot be sure anymore that my finding you was random. I believe it was meant to be.”

  Her gaze shifted away from his in an almost guilty way, he thought. “If our coming together was meant to be, why won’t they go away?”

  “I’m sorry, moya kisa. I don’t know the answers.”

  “What does that mean—moya kisa?”

  He felt like a boy trying to kiss a girl for the first time—bashful and hot around the neck. “It means…my little cat, or my kitten. It’s a term of endearment, I guess you would call it.”

  Bridget laughed then, and he was pleased to see some color return to her cheeks. “What is so funny?”

  “That’s a pretty ironic endearment coming from a guy who’s also a bird, don’t you think?”

  He chuckled, but shrugged his shoulders. “It is what my father called my mother.”

  “Tell me how you came to be cursed.”

  Khail’s heart tightened in his chest. He didn’t want to talk about it. The pain of that day throbbed always like a sore tooth, and just the thought of reliving the events aloud made the pain flare.

  And he dreaded her reaction to what he had done. She was not a woman to forgive violence easily.

  “Tell me, Khail. Please.”

  The soft caring in her eyes was his undoing. Already he could deny this woman nothing, even at the risk of driving her away from himself. He rose from his chair to pace the room. Even though well-lit, the cabin, with its covered windows, seemed to close in on him. He desperately wanted out, but he couldn’t leave without Bridget, so he would stay. To stay, he must talk.

  “In the year 1645, I was away from home often. I was either fighting or training to fight. One day I came home to find my wife and my little girl murdered.”

  Khail heard Bridget’s sharp intake of breath, but he didn’t turn. While that part of his story was the most personally painful, it was not the worst of it.

  “In the village they told me who had done it—a drunkard who I had taunted for his poor horsemanship. True, it was the gravest of insults among our men, but his honor was not worth the lives of my family. I hunted him like a wild antelope. I ran him to ground in a church—he had begged sanctuary in a holy place. I slaughtered him. And when his wife tried to shield him with her own body, I cut her down, as well.”

  He heard Bridget rise from her chair. From the corner of his eye he saw the hand pressed to her mouth in horror, the tear running down her cheek. She was moving slowly toward her bedroom.

  “And as that innocent blood I spilled in a blind rage soaked into that holy ground, so I was cursed.”

  He turned to her then, and the fear in her eyes made the gorge rise in his throat. “Bridget, I would never hurt you.”

  “You’re no different from…all of them,” she said, and then a hoarse sob broke free from her throat and she fled to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  We cannot be denied.

  Khail wanted to raise his face to the ceiling and scream out his rage and heartache and uncertainty. But it would serve no purpose but further frightening Bridget, and he would do anything to prevent that.

  She is ours. The Unkind will take her.

  No, she is mine, Khail thought fiercely, his hands curled into tight fists.

  We will not be denied.

  You will, because I will not let you have her.

  You are cursed and you both belong to us. The woman will die.

  Bridget sobbed into her pillow until the tears ran dry, and still she didn’t move. Men…rage…violence. It was the story of her life, and even here in the haven she’d built for herself she couldn’t escape it.

  She had cried also for Khail. He had committed violence and caused pain, but he had received much, as well. Closing her eyes, she tried to picture a happy, uncursed Khail with a wife and a daughter. But all she could see was him, blood-soaked with his face contorted in rage.

  Bridget had been adopted as an infant, orphaned again at five, then sent into a foster system that dealt her abuse, humiliation and pain—both mental and physical. She’d escaped the system and gotten married far too young to the first man who wanted her. Her husband had abused her for ten years before he put her in intensive care and himself in prison. Yes, she knew the color of blood and the taste of fear and rage.

  Khail had seen both sides. She knew his past—and the Unkind—weighed heavily on him. He’d slept restlessly, even after the hideous birds had stopped throwing themselves at the windows. He had tossed and turned, and sometimes violently shook his head as if to dislodge the memories and the voices filling his dreams.

  He would quiet when she touched him. She caressed his cheek and murmured soft nothings until his brow smoothed and he breathed deeply again. But when she fell asleep and moved away, it wasn’t long before his thrashings woke her again.

  Khail was a man haunted. Haunted by what had been done to him and by what he himself had done. That would change a man irrevocably.

  Bridget rolled to her back and stared up at the ceiling. Almost four hundred years ago he had committed an act of violence that turned her stomach. But now…well, she believed he still had it in him.

  He was a warrior, with a warrior’s intensity and passion. She had no doubt if the ravens came, Khail would slaughter them in her defense if he could.

  But he was also the man who had made love to her so sweetly. A man who had the care to be attuned to the subtle nuances of her body—so concerned the ghosts of her past would destroy the pleasure he wanted her to feel.

  He wasn’t like the other men she had known, and Bridget sorely regretted telling him he was. She wished she could take back the words she had flung at him in her shock. How it must have cut him to have the first person he could share his curse with turn away in horror.

  Her anger shifted to the Unkind. What kind of punishment offered no chance of redemption? What good was a man serving penance eternally with no hope of forgiveness?

  Angry, sad and confused, but feeling slightly more composed, Bridget stalked to the bedroom door and flung it open. Khail sat in the rocking chair, his head in his hands. Her heart ached for
him, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch him quite yet.

  “How the hell is three and a half centuries of killing people punishment for killing somebody?” she demanded, not caring that her voice was too loud in the small cabin.

  “We don’t take lives without feeling the loss. We feel the grief of the loved ones. Each victim of the Unkind is like a lead weight hung upon my soul.”

  “They all seem eager enough to see me die,” Bridget reminded him, thinking they’d be sorely disappointed by the lack of grief in her loved ones. She didn’t have any.

  “It is fear. We…they do not understand you, but you have defied the natural order of things and that frightens them.”

  “Is there no mercy?” Not that she’d ever been shown any. “Your wife and daughter were murdered, for heaven’s sake.”

  “And if I had arrived at that moment and struck him down, then I would not be cursed. It was the hunting of him that started my soul on the road to damnation. It took me nearly a week to find him and then, in a rage, I cut him down in front of sacred relics while he begged for his life.”

  Bridget closed her eyes. No, please, the little girl inside of her begged. Please don’t hurt me anymore. The voice grew older. You’re hurting me. Please stop. Please…

  “You should know,” Khail said, dragging Bridget out of the past, “that I don’t regret killing the man who murdered my loved ones. But I regret killing his wife. Every single day of the last three hundred and sixty-one years I have mourned her death as keenly as I have the deaths of my wife and my sweet Ekaterina. She is the cross I bear, and every life I have taken since is a weight added until the regret crushes my very soul. My crime is my penance for all eternity. That is my curse.”

  Bridget watched the tears shimmering in his eyes, but they didn’t fall. Her own, though, flowed freely over her cheeks. This man came from a place she wanted nothing to do with—a place of violence and bloodshed and death. And yet she still wanted to pull him into her arms and stroke his hair until the sadness left his eyes.

  Khail took a deep breath and blinked away the unshed tears. “I don’t know what brought me to you, Bridget. I don’t know if it was an accident or a part of some divine plan. But for the first time in my life I feel peace. I can’t help but believe I was meant to find you. If you turn your back on me, I will be lost. The man who manages to live inside of me will be lost and I will be nothing.”