Then his hand dropped and he walked off without another word. As if he hadn’t been touching me.
I ordered a shot as he walked toward his office with purpose. He didn’t go all the way up the stairs, though. He stopped halfway and then just stared at the crowd. The volume on the television lowered without Kane asking, and everyone fell silent. He had that determined look I’d seen so often. This time it was being directed at specific spots in the crowd.
What the hell was up with him? I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Kane took one last sweeping glance as he straightened. “The next person who walks away from Ollie when she enters the room will find themselves being hosed out of the cracks in the alley.”
There were a couple of gasps, but no one said anything.
“That’s all.” He turned and walked to his office.
I didn’t know whether to be mortified that he thought I couldn’t handle myself or blush because he’d threatened to kill anyone who snubbed me. It was the scariest and sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me.
It was like Kane’s version of a dozen red roses.
Chapter Thirty
Without a knock, Kane threw open the door and stepped into the living room. His theory about not being able to have the same fight twice, when I didn’t remember the first fight about knocking, was absolute bull. I was about to tell him so, until I saw the set of his shoulders and the line of his mouth.
I got off the couch and met him just inside the door. “What happened?”
“There’s been another explosion, down by the harbor.” Anger rolled off him.
Harg. He’d double-crossed us. While I was sitting here, trying to figure out my next step…
Shit, did Kane think I did it? “I was—”
“I know,” he said, stopping me short when I would’ve laid out my morning minute by minute.
He believed me? Maybe he was starting to trust me a little. Although I didn’t know if I trusted myself, except I remembered every second since I’d gotten up.
“I know where you’ve been all day. Come on, we’ve got to go.”
Well, so much for trust. Whatever. I didn’t trust him either these days. At least we were on equal footing. And I couldn’t focus on Kane when I needed to kill Harg.
“You know where he is?” I grabbed my phone off the table, leaving everything else behind.
“No, and we don’t have an ID yet,” he said.
“So we don’t know who did it? It might be one of the ones I let through for him?”
“Or it might’ve been a crawler who came through before. We don’t know.”
We had to work our way around the explosion and the cordoned-off area. That was what the police, the fire departments, and the National Guard did now—rope off the area and let it burn. They said it was safer. It was true. Everyone knew they couldn’t handle the monsters, including themselves. Still, they made it a tad inconvenient to get close. We found a gap where some of the soldiers were busy drinking coffee and keeping their distance.
The good thing about the cordoning off was that once we did get past it, it was clear for a good five blocks in any direction.
The blaze was easy to spot. It was a high rise on fire this time. It looked like the crawler had blown it up, starting with the upper levels.
“You feel anything?” Kane asked, as we stood across the street, but in the shadow of another building.
“Yes.” As I watched the fire from this close, there was a buzz in the air that made my hair stand on end. It made me want to duck farther into the shadows. That was how I knew we had to get closer.
“I say we go in there.” I pointed to the building next door. “The windows are pretty close. If he’s still in there, we might be able to get an ID.”
He nodded, and we crossed the street as quickly as possible, trying to stay out of sight the best we could. The doors to the building were already open, either from the force of the blast from the building beside it or previous looting. When we walked into the storefront, the racks were on their sides and looked picked over. Kane tugged me behind him toward the employees’ section, and then the back entrance.
We took the emergency stairs in the hallway up to the fourth-floor door, which was locked. He gave it a kick, and it swung open to a small office that had a plaque with the name Hayes Accounting hanging on the wall.
We were steps from the window when Kane froze and so did I. The buzz I’d felt before was suddenly amping up until it was almost hard to pull in a deep breath from the intensity. Kane ran at me as what was about to happen was still registering. The place was about to blow, with us in it.
He grabbed me around the waist, and then I was being thrown against a cinder block wall and pressed into the corner of the room. His body covered mine, as he reached over and pulled a filing cabinet down on top of him.
I tried to shove him out of the way, but he didn’t budge. “We’ve got to run,” I said. “We’ll burn to death.”
“Take a deep breath—”
The loud explosion wiped out the rest of his sentence. I sucked in air and held it, knowing I wouldn’t have another chance.
The sweep of heat rushed over us, sucking up all the air along with it. I kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut as I waited for the burning to start. Worse, I waited for Kane’s hands to fall slack where they wrapped around me, the feel of his weight on top of me as his body went limp. I should’ve forced him to run somehow. Maybe we would’ve made it.
The initial blast blew over us, leaving heat in its wake. I was alive but Kane was still. He’d saved me and now he was dead. I felt myself start to shudder as sobs ripped through me, even as the smoke choked me. The worst of the blast was over and I was terrified to open my eyes, though I knew I had to get out of there before smoke inhalation did what the blast hadn’t.
I felt Kane’s weight pull from me, but I was still afraid to open my eyes. I didn’t want to see the last bit of life fading from him. Not him. He was the most alive person I’d even met.
The filing cabinet was shoved away.
“Ollie?” he called, and his hands had moved to my shoulders and were tugging at me now.
How was he still alive? I opened my eyes, scanning his face. He pulled me to my feet as his clothes were dropping off him, the back of his pants and shirt fluttering to the ground in charred ashes. I didn’t want to see his back, but he grabbed my hand and was pulling me after him through a maze of fire, giving me no choice.
His flesh was marred with ash, but beautiful unharmed skin showed beneath, where the soot had rubbed off.
He was moving too quickly for someone injured. We exited the building, the buzz of magic now gone, and we were none the wiser—except that one of the crawlers on the loose wanted one of us dead. If it was Kane they wanted, they were going to have a hell of a time killing him, from what I’d just seen.
We didn’t stop until we were back at his car and he was popping open the trunk. He handed me a water bottle before he pulled out pants.
“How are you alive?” I asked, still staring at him as if he were a ghost.
“Their fire doesn’t harm me,” he said as he stared at me, his hands dropping to his sides. He looked as if he expected me to run screaming.
That was probably what I should’ve done, too. Run like hell. He wasn’t human. No one could’ve withstood that and been able to shelter me if they were. But I didn’t want to run anywhere. I wanted to hold on to him for dear life.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, and I wasn’t sure if he meant from what we’d escaped, or him.
“No.” Maybe I should’ve been scared of both, but I wasn’t. Overwhelming relief left no room for any other emotion.
Unlike myself, he was radiating anger. It pulsed from every tense muscle on display, but something in his eyes softened. He didn’t want me to fear him, and that casually asked question had held untold weight.
“Why were you crying back there?” he asked, his thumb brushing over my s
till-moist cheeks.
“It was…a lot.” I couldn’t stop staring at him. “What the hell are… Forget it. I don’t care.” And I didn’t. All I cared about was that he was alive, standing in front of me. It was as if that blast had burned away all but what mattered. As I stood covered in soot and ashes from the fire of a monster, I somehow felt cleansed of all but what mattered.
Butch, Leon, and Jerry were waiting for us outside the Underground when we pulled up. Jerry whistled as we got out of the car.
“What the hell?” Butch asked, while Jerry and Leon stepped closer, sizing up my charred clothing.
“Were you watching the news?” Kane asked.
“Of course we were,” Leon said.
Butch sucked in a loud breath. “Don’t tell me—you were in the second building?”
“We both were.” Kane turned to me. “Talk to one of the crawlers. Tell them we want a meeting with Harg by tonight. I want the crawler who did this, or they haven’t seen what a fire looks like. I will blast them out of the only home they have.”
I didn’t think much surprised me anymore, but my mouth gaped. He could torch the Shadowlands? Was that possible? “You can do that?”
“I don’t bluff.”
That seemed a hair extreme, even to me. “I know they blew up another building—”
“They didn’t just blow up another building. They blew up a building with you in it.”
He wasn’t kidding, and I was more unstable than the night Zee had drugged me. I didn’t even need a push. I was ready to topple over with a light breeze.
Kane loved me. I didn’t know why or for how long, but he did. It was the only thing that made sense.
I glanced at the guys, expecting to see my shock mirrored there, but no one else appeared surprised. Did they not notice, or had they known?
Kane pointed down the street. “Tell that little ugly one over there. He probably knows right where Harg is,” Kane said. “I’d tell him myself, but I can’t get close enough to even talk to the things.”
“Uh huh,” I muttered, still stunned, even as everyone else acted like it was business as usual.
“They’re out here too?” Butch asked. Kane must’ve nodded, because there was a lot of cursing behind me as I walked over to the little one Kane had suggested and passed on the message.
I’d just stepped out of the bathroom, hair dripping and a towel wrapped around me, when I found Kane leaning against the bedroom door. I didn’t pick a fight over knocking. I was afraid to do anything that might make him leave.
I simply asked, “What are you doing here?” and then prayed my body wasn’t thrumming to life only for him to leave.
“I think you know.” The heat in his eyes left no question why.
I wanted this, and yet the problems hadn’t disappeared just because I craved him more every day.
“You think I’m a monster,” I said, even as my heart pounded and I found myself stepping toward him.
Was I really ready to sleep with this man? A person who thought the very worst of me? I should be kicking him out of my rooms, or at least asking him to leave nicely, since he owned the building. I didn’t. I stood there, in nothing but a towel, hoping he would stay.
He didn’t look at me like I was a monster. He looked at me as if I were a goddess.
“Then you’re the most beautiful monster I’ve ever seen,” he said, stepping closer, his finger trailing along my exposed flesh as he leaned forward and kissed the base of my throat.
“What if I do something else? Black out again and another explosion happens?” If I slept with him, and he looked at me the way he had in the past, I knew without a doubt I’d shatter.
“I don’t care if you’re an angel or a monster. I want you, and that’s all that matters.” His hand grazed my waist.
“And what happens when you don’t anymore?” I dipped my head, staring at his shirt, where I laid my hand, feeling his heat beat beneath.
“That’s the one thing I know will never happen. Wanting you has become as ingrained as breathing.”
When I lifted my eyes to his, I could see it there, how much he really did want me. But that was now, cocooned in this room, in his building, without the world pressing in.
“And if wanting isn’t enough?” I asked, hoping he’d tell me what I suspected.
“I think it is.”
His hand went to the towel, and I let him tug it free even without hearing the words. It swooshed to the ground, and I didn’t try to stop it. My arms dropped as the towel did. At that moment, I knew I might’ve taken the first step on the road to hell. I might wake up tomorrow and realize I was wrong, that he didn’t love me and he’d never want me again. I knew I’d risk all the torment that might lie ahead for this one moment.
His eyes soaked me in as water dripped from my hair, trailing rivulets down my breasts before dropping lower. I pulled his shirt open so I could feel his flesh, the smooth hardness underneath my hands.
He grasped my hips as he dropped his mouth to lick the moisture from my skin. His arm circled my back as his tongue teased one nipple before he took it into his mouth and sucked hard, my back bowing into him, my fingers curling into the thick, dark hair.
My breath hitched as his hand grazed my ribs and then moved up and forward until he was cupping my other breast.
The flat of his palm grazed over my nipple on its way up toward my neck until his fingers were threading through my hair, tugging my head backward as he moved in closer, his shirt grazing the flesh of my chest.
His eyes burned into mine before his head dipped closer, but instead of his lips closing over mine, they grazed my ear as he said, “I’ve been waiting to taste you for an eternity.”
He walked me backward until I felt the dresser at my back, and he hoisted me upon it, his head dropping lower. Two fingers entered me, hooking forward and rubbing in such a glorious way, right before his tongue joined them. It trailed to my clit and then teased, licking gently at first before sucking hard. I called out, my shoulders and head banging against the wall as I came undone.
His grip tightened and his lips were finally on mine, his tongue delving between my lips like he owned my mouth. Right now, he did. He could have my mouth, my lips, every part of my body, as I feared he already had my heart.
I shoved his shirt the rest of the way off him. His eyes captured mine as he backed away and stripped out of his pants. When he stood before me in nothing but beautifully sculpted muscle, my body ached to be pressed against the length of such strength and become one with it.
His stepped back between my still-spread thighs and slipped an arm around my waist. I wrapped my legs around him as he lifted me then turned to carry me to the bed. I was falling backward as he followed me down. He grabbed my hips and lifted them.
Without warning, he was seated all the way in me, his entrance smooth, since I’d been ready from his first touch.
He didn’t move for a minute, but I didn’t know if it was to allow me to adjust to his girth or if he was as close to the brink as I was. I moved forward on the bed and he tugged my hips back, seating himself deeply within me again.
He pulled out so slowly that I was nearly undone. I wrapped my legs back around him, urging his pace, but he continued slowly, leaning over me, his forearms taking his weight as his chest grazed mine.
He dipped his head, his tongue delving into my mouth as he continued to drag out the pace.
“Kane,” I said, groaning out of a combination of pleasure and frustration.
“I won’t share,” he said, pausing above me, his pace going from slow to nearly stopped, the head of his cock teasing my entrance.
“Ollie,” he said, and I realized he was as serious as I’d ever seen him. He wanted an answer.
“Neither will I. Now give me what I need.”
He had the nerve to smirk as he plunged back into me, sending my nerve endings into a frenzy. He followed it with an urgent pace that made me lose myself as I’d never done.
&n
bsp; I was lifeless on the bed, feeling like my muscles had been given their pink slip. Kane turned on his side, tugging me into him.
“I wouldn’t have pictured you as a cuddler.” I regretted the words as soon as I’d said them. Would he pull away now?
His leg parted mine. “We aren’t cuddling. We’re breaking between rounds. Even boxers get a couple minutes.”
From the feel of him, I didn’t think it would even be that long. His mouth sent shivers down my spine as he nipped at the back of my neck.
“Kane, what do you want from me?” I asked, before I slipped back into caring about nothing but where his hands were touching me or how his body felt against mine.
“Everything.” There was a gravity to the word that wiped out any frivolity I might’ve given his answer.
“I think you’ve already gotten that,” I said, adding a soft laugh afterward, trying to convince myself it was just a joke.
“I’ve barely sipped from the chalice.”
He cupped my breast, holding me against him. My body arched, like I was an addict searching for its drug, forgetting about tomorrow or consequences.
Chapter Thirty-One
We pulled into the cemetery, Butch and Leon in the back, with Flip sitting between them. I was buffered by Kane and Zee in the front. Kane hadn’t wanted to bring Flip or Zee, but I’d insisted they be included. If he had his boys, why shouldn’t I have my girls?
We got out of the truck, and Kane stopped me when I would’ve started walking.
“You ready?” he asked, his hand smoothing back my hair the only indication that things had changed between us. After we’d had sex, I’d fallen asleep for a few hours and woken to business as usual.
“I’ve got this.”
When he smiled in response, the intimacy was there, too. Things had definitely changed if you knew where to spot the signs.
“Oh yeah, they slept together,” I heard Leon whisper to Butch.
Kissed by the Dark Page 18
