by Larissa Ione
Arik hadn’t bothered to argue with Limos or Ares. She’d gated him back to her house, left him to shower, and he’d numbed out under the hot spray, his mind drawing a blank on all the reasons they were wrong.
All he’d wanted for his entire life was to fight for what was right. He’d started by defending his sister and mother. He’d moved on to join the military to fight for his country. Eventually, when the R-XR had tapped him, he fought for the entire human race. The idea that he was now a liability, a threat, even, left him dazed. The situation wasn’t acceptable, and somehow, he had to fix it.
He threw on the jeans and a white T-shirt that were in the duffle that was still in Limos’s bedroom, and then in a bizarre move, Hekili had called him to the kitchen, thrust a beer and a towel into Arik’s hands and motioned toward the water. As Arik started down the steps to the beach, Hekili stopped him.
“She is in one of her… moods. Help her before she hurts herself.”
Arik had no idea what the warg was talking about, and he didn’t have a chance to ask because Hekili took off like his kitchen was on fire.
He found Limos fifty yards away, acting as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
She was, in fact, dancing on the beach like a lunatic. A sexy, gorgeous lunatic in a hot pink bikini. With a white flower in her hair. No one looking at her would know that the ultra-feminine woman doing the hula could kick ass like the newest model Terminator.
What the hell had Hekili been talking about? The only way she was going to hurt herself would be if she threw her hip out of joint from dancing like that.
Arik laid out the towel and sank down in the sand, back against a palm tree, his fingers gripping the cold beer so tight he figured it was close to shatter threshold. How could she dance without spilling her margarita?
When she spotted him, she stilled, her too-gorgeous-to-be-real eyes drilling into him. In a slow, deliberate motion, she brought her margarita glass to her lips. Her ton higue came out and swiped the rim, licking off a line of salt before she locked her lips onto the glass and sipped. In Arik’s hand, the beer bottle shook.
Limos walked toward him, her hips swaying, her toned muscles flexing. She was beautiful, so fucking beautiful. He stood, figuring she was ready to head back to the house. He’d welcome the air-conditioning to cool off his suddenly overheated skin.
“I think I’m going to throw a party at my other house,” she said, stopping in front of him.
“The Apocalypse is knocking at the door, and you want to throw a damned party?” No wonder she had never found her agimortus. She’d spent her life drinking, dancing, and painting her nails.
“I like keeping myself busy.”
“Yeah, well, here’s an idea. Instead of acting like a sorority butterfly, you could keep yourself busy by searching for your agimortus.”
She sipped her drink and started swaying to a silent beat. “I lost my chance. Killed the bastard who might have been able to find it. So… whatevs.”
This. Was. Bizarre. “You lost your chance, and that calls for what… a celebration?”
She shrugged, her tan shoulder glistening in the splashes of sun that streamed between the palm fronds. “Not a celebration. A distraction.”
A warm breeze stirred her hair, and he resisted the urge to brush it away from her face. “Now isn’t the time to lose focus, Horseman.”
“Horseman.” She said the word as if it were something bitter she was testing on her tongue. “Yes, I’m that. That, and Satan’s fiancé.” Her lips turned up in an impish smile. “And I’m feeling the need to slip into Sheoul to taunt him. To dare him to catch me.”
“What?” Arik wondered what she’d do if he grabbed her and shook some sense into her. “Tell me you aren’t serious.”
“Oh, I’m serious.” She spun in a graceful circle, head back, hair flying, as if she were on a dance floor. “He’ll get me, you know. No matter what, he’ll get me.”
Something dumbly primal turned his brain to mush and his vision red, and he grabbed her by the upper arms. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
Surprise in her expression faded to sadness. “You can’t stop it. And you can’t stop me from meeting my fate. It’s coming. I saw a preview of it today.”
“What are you talking about?”
She reached up and traced the outline of his dogtag chain under his T-shirt. “The barriers between the demon world and human world are so thin now. It’s only a matter of time before I won’t need to go to Sheoul for Satan to grab me. He’ll be able to do it here. The invasion at your base was just the beginning.” She moved closer, and his heart beat faster. “Then there’s Sartael.” She peered up at him, and God, he’d never seen anything so sad in his life as the look in her eyes.k i hi “He was the best hope I’ve had of finding my agimortus in thousands of years. And I killed him.”
“I’m sure you did what you had to do.”
Her sudden burst of laughter startled him. “Yeah,” she said. “I did.” Throwing back her head, she downed the rest of her drink and hurled the glass into the sand. “Just like I did what I had to do when I erased your memory.”
He stiffened, the raw anger from what she’d done coming back at him with as much force as if she’d slapped him. And he knew from experience that she could hit hard.
“What’s the matter, Arik?” She pressed up against him in a bold, unexpected surge. “You still mad at me? That’s fine. I deserve it. I deserve every drop of hate you have to spare. It was my fault you went to Sheoul. I did want you to kiss me, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop it.” She dragged her hand down his chest and stopped with her fingers on his waistband. “Oh, I’m powerful enough to slaughter a legion of fallen angels, but I didn’t have it in me to turn you away. And the memory thing? I thought I was helping you, but you know, maybe I did it because it’s what I would have wanted. Because I’m not strong enough to own up to hurting my brothers. So I assumed you wouldn’t be either. But you are, aren’t you?”
Arik’s heart was pounding against his ribcage, and his thoughts were a messy knot. He had no idea what the thing with her brothers was about, and Limos’s behavior was confusing the shit out of him. Worse, he sensed there was a whole lot of pain behind her actions that he couldn’t do anything about. How did he fix something he didn’t understand?
“Look, it wasn’t so much the fact that you messed with my memories that pissed me off as it was the fact that you didn’t tell me, and then you lied about it.”
“Lies,” she murmured, as she trailed her fingertip along his waistband, letting it dip underneath as if testing the waters. “My entire existence is built on them. They’re catching up with me.”
Squeezing her shoulders, he gave her a little shake. “Horseman!” he barked, trying to snap her out of whatever this mysterious mood was. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I don’t think I have time to tell you what’s wrong.” Leaving one hand on his waist, she brought the other up to his neck and dragged his head down so his lips were so close to hers he could almost taste the salt and lime on them. “There are things I want before I’m taken, Arik,” she whispered. “I know you hate me, but please… give me this.”
She kissed him. Hard. Her tongue met his with an aggression he hadn’t anticipated. Before this, she’d been timid, accepting of his actions, but whatever was driving her now was also starting to affect him. Because she was wrong about him hating her. Very, very wrong. Oh, he wanted to hate her, but at this point, he needed to be with her more than he needed to hold onto his anger.
Fisting her silky hair, he hauled her against him, and when his hips met hers, he groaned at the intimate contact. He’d been naked with women, skin on skin, but nothing had rocked him like this.
And then, in a shocking move, Limos dropped to her knees on the towel and clawed at his fly almost desperately, as if getting his pants open was the key to saving the world or some shit.
“L—” Cutting himself off before her name spilled
from his lips, he grabbed her hands. A wild, animal sound came from her throat as she swatted him away and dove back to her task, this time managing to unsnap all the buttons in a single yank.
He was hard, and his cock sprang free, but before she could go any further, he tackled her, taking her to the ground, half-on, half-off the towel.
“Let me!” she shouted, once again reaching low for him, but he seized her by the wrists and pinned them to her belly.
“Stop.” He used his weight to control her, though he knew that if she wanted to, she could throw him like a two-thousand pound rodeo bull. “Sweetheart, stop. You don’t want this.”
“I do.” She snarled up at him, and for a long moment, they locked gazes and simply concentrated on breathing. In the distance, thunder rolled, as if the heavens were echoing her mood.
Gradually, he eased up and loosened his grip, hoping the fight had gone out of her. But when she pulled her wrists free and wrapped her arms around his neck and locked her legs around his waist, he knew she’d merely changed tactics. Angry sex: scratched. Tender sex: at the starting gate.
Arik: fucked.
* * *
Limos stared up at Arik, unable to believe he was trying to stop her. After all the pain she’d put him through, she was offering to make him feel good. Offering to let him use her to take back some of what she’d done to him.
Offering to let him punish her.
Did he not understand that she was on the verge of losing everything? That it wouldn’t be long before her secrets were unearthed and her brothers tossed her to her fiancé themselves. Or her fiancé would come for her, but either way, it was only a matter of time. She had to give Arik what she could now, before it was too late. And if she was hurt in the process, so be it. It was what she deserved.
“Arik, please.”
He reared back, and she let him untangle himself from her. “Why?” He went up on his knees and gently took her hand to pull her up too. “Tell me why.”
The urge to lie was so great it made her tremble, but he deserved better than that. Okay, so… honesty. The very thought of such deep-down sincerity made her stomach cramp and the scales on her shoulder blade wobble wildly. “I owe you.”
His lips formed a grim, hard line. “And you think giving me an orgasm is how you pay that debt?”
“Why not?”
“You know what? Fuck you.” He shoved to his feet. “You don’t get to work off your guilt on my dick. guilt odichei
She leaped up and seized his forearm. “Then hit me.”
“Excuse me?”
Frustration and unspent lust turned to sudden poison in her veins and on her tongue. “Hit me,” she spat. “Do to me what the demons did to you. Take your revenge on me. Now.” He stared at her like she’d sprouted horns, which was fitting. All the demonic vileness in her was surfacing as the weight of centuries of lies and pain bore down on her and the tattooed scales dipped in favor of evil. “Are you deaf? Break my bones, Arik. Make me bleed.” She shoved him hard enough to make him stumble backward. “Or is it only your sister you like to beat?”
It was a low blow that slammed the scales into such a deep imbalance that she felt like she might tip over from the amount of malevolence growing like a cancer in her evil half. Somewhere inside, her angel half was crying out in anguish.
“Stop it.” Arik paled, his skin taking on a waxy sheen. “What is wrong with you?”
“It’s what I deserve.” It was what she craved. Need oozed through her, a need to go crazy with fun and danger and pain. “Dammit, Arik, you are so stubborn.” She cast a Harrowgate, but before she could step into it, he snagged her arm.
“Where are you going?”
His hand on her skin was like a balm, smoothing out her raw edges, and some of the oily anger inside eased. Her scales even shifted a little. “Sheoul. I… need to.”
“You need to—” He sucked in a harsh breath. “Jesus. You punish yourself. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
Yeah, it was. When she was afraid, stressed, or when people suffered from famine, she wanted to hurt herself with recklessness and risks. She got utterly stupid and self-destructive, but she didn’t like that Arik had determined that. She hated the way he saw through her.
“It’s part of my curse,” she said flatly.
“Being self-destructive? Losing focus? Being a total ass?”
His hand was still on her arm, his thumb rubbing circles on her skin. She might hate how easily he saw through her and called her out on her shit, but she loved the way he could bring her down with his touch, his voice, his very presence.
“Yes,” she sighed. God, she despised herself sometimes. She despised the demon half of her that tapped into a well of evil so deep it would never run dry. “You’re right. I’m an ass. I didn’t mean what I said about your sister.” Her scales leveled out, and she gulped a breath as if she’d been drowning.
“What about when you said you owe me?”
She closed her eyes and chased away the desire to lie, but not because her nature was demanding a lie, but because the truth meant exposing a part of her she wasn’t used to showing off.
“I do owe you, but that’s not the only reason I w nlytant to… to… get you naked.” Her cheeks heated, and she wondered how much she was blushing.
“So what’s the other reason?”
“Remember when I asked you how many women you’d kissed?” She opened her eyes. “Answer me now.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
He narrowed his gaze on her. “No, you don’t.”
“See,” she said quietly. “You don’t want to tell me because it would hurt me, right?” When he didn’t answer, she nodded. “But if I really, really wanted to know, you’d tell me the truth.”
Muscles in his jaw twitched, and finally he ground out, “Yes.” Lightning streaked across the sky, and it seemed to take forever for the thunder to follow.
“You’re a good person, Arik. Being honest comes easily to you. Protecting those around you does too. I like that. I like that when the khnives attacked, your first instinct was to shove me behind you. You make me feel… vulnerable.”
One dark eyebrow lifted. “Isn’t feeling vulnerable a bad thing?”
She shrugged. “Ares would say yes. But I like that you make me feel that way.” Her hand trembled a little as she pressed her palm against his chest, needing to feel the life pounding in his heartbeat. “You make me feel like a woman. Like I’m not a big, bad warrior who has to stay strong all the time. I like how your strength lets me relax so I can be the person I want to be instead of the one I’m expected to be. That probably doesn’t make sense—”
In a quick movement, he gripped her biceps, hooked the back of her knees with a sweep of his leg, and took her down to the towel. She landed half on top of him, and she didn’t hesitate for a second. She kissed him hard, and he met her aggression tongue for tongue, nibble for nibble, lick for lick.
She lifted herself to crawl more fully on top of him. His hands stroked her back, her hair, her arms, wisely keeping his fingers away from her lower body. Her bikini covered the chastity belt, but no one in their right mind would take any chances, and Arik was definitely not a dummy.
“I want to touch you,” she murmured against his lips.
His tongue made a sensual sweep over her bottom lip. “You sure?”
In answer, she dragged her hand down his rippled abs to where his pants splayed open and his cock jutted upward. He hissed and arched into her touch as she closed her fingers around the thick shaft. The textures fascinated her… silky skin over steely flesh, ridges and bumps that gave way to the velvety smooth head. And when his hips began to roll into her grip, her own pelvis rocked, rubbing her center against his thigh.
With a groan, he gripped her hand and stopped her. “Can you touch yourself? With your chastity belt, are you allowed?”
Heat flooded herat "0em" widt cheeks. “Uh-huh.”
&n
bsp; A naughty smile curved his lips. “I so want to see that.”
She pushed herself up off his chest. “You want to… watch?” God, she didn’t think she could do that.
“I can’t touch, so… yeah.” He dropped his gaze to her bikini bottom. “Take it off.”
“But—”
“Do it.” He sat up and whipped off his own T-shirt. “Now, Horsewoman.”
His voice, a resonant, husky command, had her shivering in appreciation. She’d never taken orders well, but something about Arik’s erotically charged directive made her want to obey. As he peeled off his pants, she knelt next to him and reached behind her to undo her top.
Arik’s eyes smoldered behind heavy lids. He lay back on the towel, propping one arm behind his head while his other hand palmed his cock. As she removed the top, his hand began to pump long, slow strokes along the length of the dusky brown shaft. She’d never thought that a man touching himself could be so sexy, but she could watch this all day.
His body, magnificent to begin with, hardened, all the muscles bunching, the tendons in his neck standing out starkly as he threw back his head, eyes slitted and focused on her. Pleasure was etched on his face, his mouth open slightly, and lower, his fist pumped faster.
Heat built in Limos’s veins, and wetness bloomed between her thighs. She licked her lips, found herself drifting closer. She could replace his hand with hers. Then kiss her way down his chest, his stomach… oh, damn, was she actually thinking she’d like to put her mouth… there?
Yes, yes she was.
The plum-colored head glistened, its color deepening, and the desire to run her tongue over the tip intensified. As if he heard that thought, his entire body undulated, his hips surging, bringing to mind how the motion had been similar when he’d been on top of her, rocking, riding her hard.
“The bottoms,” he said roughly. She’d hesitated, her fingers on the waistband. “Now.”
She hooked her thumbs inside the fabric and pushed down, noting the way his strokes increased in speed. Again, she paused, just before the fabric cleared her center. “I wish you could do this.”
