Frustrated, Kyra asked, “Is that what you want to believe happened here tonight?” She was incredibly uncomfortable with her impersonation of Ashlynn Brown. The play-pretend wasn’t protecting her emotions, which felt now like they were right on the surface of her skin. He was trying to ruin everything. He was trying to take the one moment of connection she’d felt in centuries and turn it ugly. “Do you think that a good girl like Ashlynn wouldn’t have sex with you willingly?”
He tilted his head at her use of the third person.
She was so disoriented that she’d nearly given herself away, but she couldn’t stop herself now. She was angry and didn’t know why. Maybe it would make her feel better if he was angry, too. “Or maybe it turns you on to think I didn’t want it.”
Marco gave her a sharp look, then the flats of both his hands slammed down on the mantelpiece. “After all these years, you still don’t understand the first damned thing about me!”
They stood there, facing each other, he in the bathrobe, she clutching the blanket around herself. Then the beeping timer on the oven split the night. Kyra turned toward the kitchen, but Marco grabbed her by the arm. He was fast, just like he’d been when they’d fought in the hotel. And remembering his strength, how they’d brawled, Kyra flinched. “You are afraid of me. Did you think I was going to hit you?”
Of course, he had hit her before. Mind you, he’d been fighting for his life at the time… “No—no,” Kyra stammered, unable to spin a quick lie.
Marco swallowed, letting her go. “Get dressed.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get dressed,” she said, nostrils flared.
“Who knows how long you were floating in that ice water before I pulled you out? You could have hypothermia. Put some clothes on.”
“Oh, is that an order?” she asked sarcastically.
“Ashlynn—”
“You’re not a soldier anymore, Marco, and I don’t take orders from you. I don’t care how much money you have, I don’t care how many guns you own and I don’t care how many governments you’ve helped topple—”
He reared back. “Is that what you think I do?”
In spite of their argument, maybe this was an opening for her to persuade him to give up arms dealing. To warn him about Ares before it was too late. Wasn’t that the whole reason she was here? “Yes, Marco, that’s what I think you do.”
He looked as if he were going to deny it, but then he started coughing. “What’s that smell?” She smelled it, too. It was smoke. Dinner was burning. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Get dressed.”
Kyra fetched a robe while trying to think of what to do next. She hadn’t planned to sleep with Marco and now everything had changed. For now, she didn’t need to chain him up—the storm had trapped him here with her. But what would happen when it let up? How could she keep Marco away from Daddy and the other war gods who would try to use him for their own purposes?
“So I noticed you aren’t wearing a ring,” Marco finally said, cutting around the burned edges of his dinner and into her thoughts. “Didn’t you marry that asshole?”
Kyra didn’t know anything about Ashlynn’s life and wasn’t sure she could keep faking it. Should she just reveal herself as a nymph now? Marco had told her his secrets, so why shouldn’t she share hers? Because he might kill her, that’s why, and she was every bit as trapped here by the storm as he was.
Kyra stirred the mashed potatoes in the tray. “Things didn’t work out.”
“Sorry to hear it,” he said, taking a bite.
She glanced at him and saw his smug expression. “No, you’re not.”
“Sure I am…” His body language was all arrogance.
“You’re not sorry, Marco.”
“Okay, so I’m not sorry. I hated that guy. There’s nothing worse than being in a war zone knowing that your buddy is back home stealing your girl. And you know what else? While we’re telling the truth here, I don’t remember you caring so much about toppled governments. I must’ve written you a hundred letters about Rwanda, and you never took an interest. All you wanted to know was when I was coming home and what flavor wedding cake we should have. Remember?”
Kyra was developing a distinct dislike for the woman who she was pretending to be. What kind of silly, self-absorbed little girl had Ashlynn Brown been? But maybe that wasn’t fair. Marco was remembering a teenage girl, not a woman grown. “Don’t you think people can change?”
He stared down at his fork. “Sure. Just not usually for the better.”
He was going back to that dark place inside himself where he was so much harder to reach. She had to stop him, distract him. She slid her tray over to him. “You can have the rest of mine… It’s all burned and…really terrible. I guess it’s not exactly the kind of fare a big shot like you is used to.”
“Maybe not, but I’ve seen too much starvation to turn my nose up at food,” he said, taking her tray. “This would be a feast for some kids. And when I’m out in the field, I eat MREs.”
As the storm continued to howl outside, Kyra settled farther down into the corner of the sofa, pulling the bathrobe around her for warmth. “An MRE?”
“It’s a military acronym. Meals Ready to Eat,” Marco explained. “You can eat them cold, or add a little water, or heat them up.”
So he really did still think of himself as a soldier; it’s just that he was fighting a war all by himself. “Do you steal them from the army?”
There was just enough offense in his tone to let her know she was crossing a line. “I wouldn’t steal food from soldiers. You can buy MREs at any good camping store.”
“Let me get this straight…” Kyra said, appraising him anew. “You’ll steal weapons and resell them, but you won’t steal MREs?”
“It’s totally different,” he said, as if she just didn’t get his moral code.
“Why do you steal weapons, anyway?” she wondered. “There are enough folks involved in illegal arms trade that would sell them to you.”
“I don’t want them to profit from it.”
She noticed he was rubbing his shoulder again and her guilt bubbled back up. After the accident, he’d been worried about calling an ambulance for her. It hadn’t occurred to her she should call one for him. “Do you need some—uh, some medicine? For your shoulder?”
“No. My shoulder always hurts,” he explained. “There’s still a bullet fragment in there.”
Kyra had seen it, sensed it, a little sliver of evil embedded in the bone. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to touch it, and when she did, his fingers tangled with hers. “Ashlynn, don’t.”
She ignored his warning. “You insulted me before, when you said that I’d only slept with you because I was afraid of you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his expression sincere. “But you are afraid of me. I see it in your eyes.”
Kyra looked up, lifting her chin. “There are a lot of things that people want that also make them afraid.”
His grave look turned just a little bit smug. “Like what?”
Like love, Kyra thought. Everybody wanted it, and everyone was desperately afraid of taking the risk. But she said, “People are afraid of change. People are afraid of knowing too much about problems that seem overwhelming to solve.” That struck a chord in him, she could tell, and when his fingers closed tighter around hers it seemed as if she couldn’t pretend to be Ashlynn Brown for even one more second. “People are afraid to tell the truth. I need to tell you the truth about something, but I’m afraid to. I need you to promise…”
“Promise what?” Marco asked, dipping his head closer to her.
What did she want him to promise? Promise not to kill her? Promise not to leave? Nymphs always asked mortal men to make that promise, and they never kept it. Never. Kyra’s voice quavered. “I need you to promise that you’ll believe me.”
He was about to answer her—his lips were actually parted in promise—when a loud creaking noise erupted from the basement, startli
ng them both. “It’s your pipes. They might be freezing.”
Cursing under her breath at the interruption, she watched him get up. When Kyra bought this stupid old house, plumbing wasn’t something she’d worried about. All she’d cared about was whether or not she could fit a man-size cage in the basement.
Oh, no, the cage! “Marco, wait!”
“I’m going to go check your pipes,” he said, and in a few purposeful strides he was already halfway there. “Is this the basement door?”
“No!” Kyra nearly shrieked the word, rushing toward him. She could well imagine what would happen if he went down into the basement and saw the dungeon she’d made for him. No amount of explaining her good intentions would make him forgive her.
Marco’s hand rested uneasily on the doorknob. Confusion swirled in his eyes. “It’s not the basement?”
“Please, just don’t.” Here he was, poised at the basement stairs. All she had to do was let him go down and follow him with the knife and handcuffs she’d secreted for just this purpose. But that’s not what she wanted. That’s not even who she wanted to be anymore. She didn’t want to be Ashlynn Brown, and she didn’t want to be a hydra slayer, and she didn’t want to be Marco’s captor. “Just please don’t go down there.”
Marco searched her face, as if trying to understand. He reached up, tilting her chin to look at her. To look at Ashlynn. Never before had holding on to the appearance of another woman been so painful. She wanted to let him see her, the real nymph beneath the illusion, but before she could reveal herself, everything went dark.
Marco found himself plunged into darkness, holding a woman who had looked, only moments before, as if she were going to shatter. “Your power is out,” he said, trying to soothe her. “It’s just the storm. That’s all.”
“Don’t go,” she said, clinging to him fiercely.
An unnamed emotion tightened in his chest. Don’t go. She’d asked him that when he was just a kid, and he hadn’t listened. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to make sure that the things that happened to his mother never happened to anyone else. He wanted to do something good in the world and Ashlynn had tried to hold him back. He’d judged her for it. But maybe some part of her had known what he’d see in war and wanted to protect him.
“Ashlynn,” he said, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light. “What were you trying to tell me before?”
“You won’t believe me,” she whispered.
“I’ll believe you,” Marco said, resolved. “I promise.”
In the blackness, all he heard was the sound of her breath, ragged. All he felt was the trembling of her shoulders. All he could smell was her hair, smoky and alluring. And all he could see was a strange, flickering light in her eyes… “I want you,” she said.
And he believed her.
This time she led him to the bedroom and there was no shyness, no strangeness, no barriers between them at all. She was different in the dark. She became something wilder, more elemental, something utterly raw. And as she kissed him, all he wanted to do was fling her onto the mattress. Yet, when she reached beneath his bathrobe to curl her fingers around his shaft, the white-hot pleasure of it kept him still. She was wickedly talented with her hands and she gave him sweet, painful tugs that sent him careening toward the edge.
She was all in shadow—only the light of the moon outside showed him the silhouette of her sleek body—and he wanted to take things slow this time, to treat Ashlynn with the respect she deserved. But the way she stroked him filled him with an urgent and burning need. His breath went ragged and his fists clenched at his sides as he struggled to regain control. But then she crawled over him and straddled his hips. He was so hard it was almost painful, and when she teased him, grinding herself slowly along the length of him, he felt her wetness. He found her hair in the dark and made fists of it, pulling her body down onto his cock. She let out a cry as he filled her, and once he was buried all the way, she thrashed atop him with a violent, rocking motion. He was half-afraid she was going to hurt herself, or him, or both of them.
He wanted to flip her over and ram himself into her again and again, but her thighs were too strong around his waist. He tried to guide her with his fingers, letting them dig into the flesh of her hips, but she wasn’t something he could tame or control. As she rode him, her thighs tightened like a vice around his hips and her body battered against his. More combat than sex, he thought.
As they moved together, he caught glimpses of her in the dim moonlight, which made her skin almost translucent. Atop him, she was some goddess of the night, exorcising his demons, scourging his skin with the hot whip of her dark hair. She was frenzied, but he matched her stroke for stroke.
This side of Ashlynn was one he’d never seen before, and it made him want to consume her. Mark her. Make her his. It wrecked him. Destroyed him. His reason was gone. Every cry, every desperate sound, every undulation, turned him on more. It also made him fiercely protective. This was a side of Ashlynn she’d plainly been hiding from the world. Or maybe just hiding from him, for fear that he’d somehow crush it like he crushed everything else good and beautiful.
“You don’t have to hide anything from me,” he rasped and her touch faltered, her sweat-soaked belly quivering with pent-up want. He knew she was close to the edge, but she seemed to be trying to make him come first. So he held back and he teased her, liking the sense of mastery that it gave him. She arched her back to take him deeper, balancing awkwardly with one hand on the mattress. He braced her at the small of her back, and heard himself saying, “I won’t let you fall. I’ll never let you fall.”
And then they came together, a throaty cry from her that mingled with his shuddering release.
Chapter 9
Kyra let mortals see only what she wanted them to see and, for her, sex had only ever been a way of filling empty hours. A way of feeling needed, a way of letting the pleasure crowd out all the dark thoughts in her head. Over the centuries, there’d been times when she could’ve let sex become something more—but whenever the opportunity came, she’d let it slip away. If there was ever a time when telling the truth would’ve brought about intimacy, she lied. If there was ever a time that letting a man look her in the eye would’ve shown him her heart, she looked away.
That was how she lived, how she survived, as a lampade and a daughter of Ares. As a nymph, anything else was to invite her own destruction. So why did it suddenly make her so sad that the man whose body was tangled with hers couldn’t see the truth of who she was? Maybe because Marco—whose breath was finally steady and untroubled as he slept—had no idea who he held in his arms. He had no idea what he held in his arms.
She’d called him a monster, but she was a dark creature, too.
Was it so wrong to have let herself feel like a woman, buoyed with airy desire, for just a few moments? Even now, Kyra could feel nothing else but the places on her body where he’d touched. It reminded her of how his fingers had pressed into her hips. The way he’d held her at the small of her back and promised not to let her fall. He’d taken her breath away, and for those precious moments, she’d pretended there were no secrets between them. But that had been a lie. He didn’t know that she’d once tried to kill him. He didn’t realize that the woman he’d just slept with had lured him here with the intention of chaining him up like an animal. In fact, he didn’t realize that he’d had sex with her at all. He’d told her that she didn’t have to hide from him, but he didn’t know she was a nymph, and he’d only leave her if he did.
That’s how it always happened. Men came into the lives of nymphs and held them so tightly they thought they could never fall. Then men left and didn’t even glance back to watch as a nymph tumbled down, like a fallen angel, crumpled and broken on the ground. Kyra had seen it all before.
Calypso had been sexy and alluring. She’d rescued Odysseus from the sea and loved him. But in the end, Odysseus preferred his modest and mortal Penelope. Calypso wasn’t the only one. There was als
o Clytie—a spirited nymph who loved and lost Apollo, then grieved herself into stone.
That’s how love stories ended for Kyra’s kind. Men pursued nymphs with urgency, told them they were sexier than mortal women, wild and untamed. Men told them they were loved just as they were…and then abandoned them. One way or another, the love of a man always changed even the strongest, most dangerous nymphs, transforming them into something harmless, like a tree, or a cloud, an echo.
Because she was war-born, Kyra had always thought herself too strong, too proud, to let love change her into something softer. Nevertheless, the world had changed, and now she was changing, too. She was tired of lying, tired of disguises. Millennia worth of tired. But she’d earned Marco’s trust in the guise of another woman. Now she’d have to keep on pretending, and for that, she had no one to blame but herself.
On the pillow beside him, Ashlynn’s cheek glowed pink in the light of rosy-fingered dawn. Marco caressed her innocent face, wondering how it could belong to the woman he’d made love to last night in the dark.
They had been good in the dark. Better than good.
Ashlynn had always been a fine-looking woman, but all he had to do was think of the shape-shifting assassin in Naples to remember what pure lust felt like. That woman had been half-dressed and wearing brothel perfume. He knew what lust felt like, and this was something better. This thing with Ashlynn was…something else. It was grief-sex. It was need. But it had somehow turned into more than just skin against skin. More than just the taste of her. More than the erotic sounds she’d made above and beneath him. It’d been different. Not just different than the series of trysts that had filled the past years his life, but different than it’d ever been with Ashlynn before.
When they were high school sweethearts, her innocence frustrated him to no end—especially when it made her so vulnerable to guys on the make—but she was no longer a shy ingenue who blushed at the sight of a naked man. No. She’d changed, and for the better.
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