Chapter Six
Gryphon went still as stone, unsure what to say or do.
The voice that had been taunting him again as he’d searched for a way out was suddenly gone. Replaced by only that low buzz, the one that was irritating as hell but manageable. And oh, gods, right now he didn’t even mind the buzz, because Maelea’s hot body was pressing into his, lighting up his groin, distracting him from everything but her.
Skata, he didn’t dare move, because then it’d be painfully obvious he had a hard-on the size of Mount Etna—not that she couldn’t already feel that damn thing pushing into her stomach—but he also knew if he moved right now, the friction against his dick might just be too much. He swallowed hard. Tried like hell to fight the need. But only one thought prevailed.
Bloody hell, he wanted her. Any way he could get her. Wanted to shove her up against the rock wall at her back and ravage every inch of her body until she screamed. Then he wanted to do it all over again.
Fantasies swam in his head. Followed by the harsh slap of reality.
This was not a good idea. She was afraid of him, dammit, had wanted nothing but to get away from him earlier. He wasn’t stupid. There was something about her that was interfering with that voice. Anytime she got close, it dimmed, gave him the chance to think. Except, man, when she was this close, there was only one thing he could think about.
He told himself to stop thinking with his dick. She could be the key to his finding Atalanta. He could use her to keep his sanity while he hunted. But the only way he was going to get her to cooperate was to give her the impression she was safe with him, even if that wasn’t the truth.
He stepped back, intent on putting distance between them, but her hand slid from his chest to his abdomen, and he froze again. Her fingers were warm, her touch sure. And as she trailed a hot, needy line down his stomach, lighting up ever nerve ending in his body, all that “common sense” shit flew out of his head.
Need circumvented control. He grasped her hand at the wrist, pushed her back until her spine hit the rocks. Her eyes flew wide. Her breath hitched. But there was no fear in her features, only excitement. The same blinding excitement consuming him. A dim voice in his head yelled No! but he ignored it. He was dying to know what she tasted like. Needed to know if she was as good as she smelled.
He lowered his mouth to hers. Felt her draw in a surprised breath. But she didn’t push him away as he expected. Her lips were soft. Her heat, intoxicating. He kissed her, feeling that pressure in his chest ease for the first time in months. Kissed her again, this time more insistent. And then she opened her mouth to his, slipped her tongue along his, moaned against him—something he never in a million years would have expected.
Whatever restraint he’d had snapped just that fast.
Her tongue was slick and wet and tangling with his before he could find his footing on the rocks. Her nipples brushed his chest. Hard, stiff, begging for attention. Her fingers dug into his biceps, pulling him closer. He answered by shifting into her, pressing her against the rocks, pushing his already hard dick against her stomach.
A clatter echoed through the cave. He pulled away from her mouth and looked down to see the blackened skull rolling across the rocks, where he’d accidentally kicked it with his boot.
She went rigid against him, stared at the skull with wide eyes as her chest rose and fell with her quick breaths. Then muttered, “Oh gods.”
Her face paled. She lifted a hand to her mouth as if she were about to be sick.
And his stomach rolled. Shit, what was he doing?
He let go of her. Immediately stepped back. Swiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to calm his racing pulse. Skata, he’d been about to take her against the rocks, just as he’d imagined. Just as he’d promised he wouldn’t do. He turned away, gripped his hair, pulled hard with both hands until the burn was all he felt. Until it killed whatever asinine desire had been toying with him and he was no longer tempted to touch her.
“Wh-what was that?” she asked in a quiet voice.
Stupidity. Lack of self-control. The monster he’d become not caring whom he hurt, so long as he got what he wanted.
He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure. I didn’t plan to—”
“No,” she said quickly, her boots clicking on the rocks at his back. “The skeleton. Was it…? Is it human?”
Her question cut through the self-deprecating thoughts. Wondering what the hell he’d missed, he turned, studied her from a good five feet back. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring down at the remains, her dark hair falling across her shoulder to partially shield her face. But she didn’t look scared—at least not of him. If anything, she looked…wigged-out at what they’d found.
“Yeah, it’s human,” he said, still watching her for any indication he’d scared the living daylights out of her. Couldn’t see it.
She knelt, one hand on her knee, and studied the charred remains, careful, he noticed, not to touch them. “They look…burned. But down here? How is that possible?”
He didn’t have an answer that made sense. Only knew the poor guy had been more unlucky than them.
“He probably wound up here the same way we did.” Happy she wasn’t going to bring up the kiss that was still ringing in his toes, he leaned over and lifted the sword he’d dropped. “I found the remains earlier, when I was looking around. It’s where I got this.”
She glanced over her shoulder, eyed the sword in his hand. Her hair was a dark, wild tangle around her face, her lips still swollen and pink from his mouth, and her eyes were clear. Clear and mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, teasing him to slip close all over again.
“There’s a satchel. Did you look inside?”
His gaze slid from her eyes to her straight, regal nose, then to her mouth. Plump, soft, so damn erotic. He imagined that mouth making a trek down his body, kissing his belly button, sliding lower to open and—
“Gryphon?”
He blinked. Realized his mind was getting away from him again. Skata, if he wasn’t hearing voices, he was living in a freakin’ fantasy world. He gave his head a swift shake. Slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead, hoping to knock something loose. He needed to get a grip, like now. “No, I heard you scream and went back for you.”
She eyed him as if he had a third eye. But that was okay. That he could deal with. That, at least, was normal for him. It was when she looked at him as if he were a real person that things went straight into the shitter.
Her gaze skipped past him to the darkness of the cavern they’d come through, and she shuddered. When she turned back to the remains and reached for the satchel hanging off one side of the skeleton, he saw her hand shake. “Do you think they’re gone?”
She was talking about the kobaloi. He looked behind him, didn’t see any sign they’d been followed. But that didn’t mean they were safe. “Yeah,” he lied, not entirely sure why he cared if she was scared or not. She was not his problem. “I think we proved they shouldn’t mess with us. They’re tricksy gnome-elves. They like to cause trouble, taunt people, but that’s it. I doubt they’re violent.”
She didn’t look so convinced, but as she turned to glance over the remains, he noticed the way she tucked her dark hair behind her ear, the way the light caught the delicate line of her jaw, the way—even dressed in all that black and those ridiculous boots—she was soft and feminine and tempting as hell.
Skata. He was losing his ever-loving mind. What the hell was he doing? She was a means to an end, nothing more. The sooner he remembered that, the better off he’d be. What he should have been focused on was the fact he’d been so swept up in some insane psycho lust because of her, he’d nearly forgotten they weren’t alone in this cavern.
He slid the sword into the scabbard draped across his back and was silent as she pawed through the satchel, pulled out
a wallet. Tried like hell to remember what Orpheus had said about her during those miserable hours his brother had sat in his room trying to cheer him up while he stared out the window wishing he could stab out his eardrums. Somehow she was linked to the gods, but he couldn’t remember which ones. She wasn’t a goddess herself, but she’d been the one to tell Orpheus where the Orb of Krónos was located.
What if she was casting some kind of magic over him? What if she was playing head games? She’d been trying to escape from the colony herself tonight. He didn’t put it past her to use whatever means she could to get free of him. She’d gone from scared shitless to queen of irate to completely turned on faster than he could flash in Argolea. Something was off with this female. Something that sent a shiver of foreboding down his spine.
She opened the wallet. It too was blackened and crusty, as if it had been burned, but the contents inside were still readable. She turned it so he could see. “Vladimir Aristov. That sounds Russian.”
Cautiously, he took the wallet from her, ignored the way heat arced from her fingers into his. Ignored the fact that just that little contact reminded him what she’d felt like, all hot and bothered between him and those rocks. “It is. Aristov…That name’s familiar.”
She pushed to her feet next to him, and he smelled jasmine. Remembered the rush of heat that had sent him into a tailspin only moments before. He wanted to move back, but there was nowhere to go except into the freezing river. And he wasn’t risking that again.
“Wasn’t Aristov the name of the Misos who built the castle?” she asked. “The one the colony is housed in? I’m sure there’s a plaque in the library about him.”
Gryphon’s gaze slid to the blackened skeletal remains, and understanding dawned. “That’s why no one’s ever found the colony.”
“What are you—?”
He pulled the ore from his pocket. The one she’d dropped earlier when she wigged out and left his ass behind. “He must have come down here and taken samples back up. When the ore is warmed, whatever it’s touching becomes invisible. I bet you ten bucks there’s a room in that castle full of these.” He looked up and around, a new tingle sliding down his spine, one that had nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with urgency. “It’s not the mountains and the lake protecting the colony, it’s the ore. And that means there’s some kind of access from the castle down here to this cavern. One a whole lot easier to access than the way we came through.”
Sonofabitch. They needed to make tracks before Nick and his men caught up with them. They’d wasted precious time getting warm, drying out their clothes, kissing.
No more fucking kissing. Not with her. Not now. Not ever. He was not going back to the hell of that colony. Not because of her. Whatever she was doing to him, it ended here.
He turned to tell her just that, when trepidation slid over her face, and she looked at the body near her feet. “Then what about him? All the stories I heard said Aristov never actually lived here. If he did—”
“Then they were covering up his death.”
Maelea’s worried gaze shot to him, then slowly slid back to the remains. “What else is down here that they want to keep secret?”
A clicking sound echoed behind them. Followed by hushed whispers wafting on the air. Lots of them.
Maelea tensed, looked past him into the dark. And froze.
Fuck.
Slowly, Gryphon turned too. Then swore again when dozens of beady eyes stared back at them from the dark.
He’d thought they needed to get out of this damn cavern to get away from Nick’s men? Think again. Right now they needed to find a way out so they didn’t get eaten by the forty or fifty kobaloi waiting to devour them alive.
“What do we do?” Maelea whispered at his side.
“Run like hell.”
***
Maelea’s heart pounded hard in her chest as she pumped her arms and pushed her legs forward. Her boots slipped on the wet rocks, but she caught herself at the last second and kept from going down. Behind her, Gryphon yelled, “Haul ass, female!”
Clicks and scratching sounds echoed in every direction. It sounded as if they were being pursued by at least a hundred kobaloi, maybe more. Panic swamped her chest. The green glow from the river lit up the steadily shrinking cavern. Ahead, the river wound to the right, disappearing in darkness. The cave narrowed to only an archway over the river, nothing but sheer rock walls rising straight up on each side.
They were running out of ground. There was nowhere else to go.
Her feet slowed. That panic tightened her chest until she could barely breathe. Before she could turn to look back, Gryphon grasped her arm and hollered, “Jump!”
He yanked her with him into the frigid water. Her head submerged. She came up sputtering, grasping for Gryphon’s arm, as the current caught hold and whisked them downstream.
His arm encircled her waist, and the long, hard line of his body came up against hers. Shrieks sounded from the shoreline. One look over his shoulder confirmed the kobaloi were pissed, jumping up and down, waving their scaly arms, hissing toward the river. But they made no effort to jump in and follow.
Relief was bittersweet. A shiver racked her body as they passed under the archway and were drawn into the low-ceilinged tunnel. She grabbed on tighter to Gryphon in the hope his body heat would keep her from freezing to death. “Wh-what now?” she managed through chattering teeth.
“I don’t know.”
He grasped the sword in one hand. The other was wrapped tight around her body, holding her close. As he studied the tunnel for some escape route, she eased back and took a good look at his face. Maybe the first good look she’d taken since this nightmare began.
Water dripped down the sandy blond hair plastered to his head, slid over his temples and along his chiseled cheekbones. His skin was pale—not as white as hers, but it clearly hadn’t seen sunshine in months—and a hint of blond stubble ran along his strong jawline. He had a straight nose and a small mole near his left temple, and his irises…they were the most mesmerizing blue she’d ever seen. Light, not rich—like the summer sky on a clear morning.
Handsome. The word came out of nowhere. Ricocheted in her head. If he didn’t have that dead look to his eyes, she’d think him good-looking. And if she’d seen him anywhere else—like on the street back at her home in Seattle—she’d likely have been attracted to him for purely physical reasons.
His head swiveled in her direction, and his gaze pinned hers with an intensity that pierced the core of her. She sucked in a breath even as the pull toward him intensified. The one that stirred the darkness inside with excitement.
“You’re staring at me.”
“I just…” But she didn’t have a valid comeback, because she was. And who was she kidding? She was attracted to him now, regardless of the vile things she knew about him. Because of the vile things she knew about him.
She looked quickly away, but didn’t let go. Not even she was that stupid. Another shiver raced over her skin. “Where do you think this goes?”
“I don’t know,” he said again as they bounced along with the current. “But until it opens up, all we’ve got is each other.”
That wasn’t exactly a comforting thought. But that darkness inside her leaped again just the same.
They floated downstream in silence. If he was cold, he didn’t show it, didn’t even shiver, but every time she did, he dragged her even closer, as if trying to warm her. Below their feet, the ore on the bottom of the river glowed bright, illuminating the small tunnel around them like daylight awash in a blinding green. There was more ore here, she noted, as if the kobaloi hadn’t mined this area.
The rock ceiling was only a foot above their heads. And for the first time Maelea wondered how the hell the tunnel back at the colony had given way in the first place, landing them here.
But before she could ponder too much, a crashing sound echoed from ahead, dragging her from her musings.
Gripping Gryphon’s shoulders, she shifted in his arms to look. The river seemed to pick up speed, and the ceiling was gradually climbing.
“Skata,” Gryphon muttered.
“What?” It wasn’t his curse that brought every muscle in her body to attention, it was the way he tightened his arms around her that told her something was coming.
“Don’t let go of me.”
“Why would I…?”
Her voice trailed off when she saw the rapids. A flurry of undulating whitecaps broken only by the occasional green glow from the riverbed. The current grew faster, the sound of rushing water louder. Maelea tightened her arms around Gryphon’s neck and held on as they passed through the first rapids, grunting when her body smashed into a rock and pain shot up her spine.
“Hold on!” Gryphon yelled above the roar of the water, gripping her around the waist with one arm, pushing away from the rocks with the other.
They bounced downstream, slamming into rocks with their backs, their sides, fighting to keep their heads above water. Gryphon grunted, loosed his hold on her waist. And then he slipped beneath the water with a gasp.
“Gryphon!”
Maelea floundered in the water as he let go, sputtered and kicked as hard as she could so she wouldn’t go down too. Just when she was sure he’d drown, his head popped up three feet in front of her.
He twisted back her way, held out his arm. “Grab on!”
She didn’t miss the blood trickling down his forehead, but she didn’t have time to think much of it. A roar grew louder in the distance. The green glow that had illuminated their way so far faded to nothing. Darkness closed in as she kicked and finally reached his hand. His solid body slammed against hers then he pulled her tight.
“What is that?” she asked, heart pounding, body shaking from both adrenaline and the bitter cold.
He listened for a second, gritted his teeth, and pushed away from boulders with his feet to keep them from smacking into them again. “Skata, it’s another waterfall.”
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