I clutched at my breast. “I… I do not.”
I clamped my mouth shut, breathing heavy, not even certain what it was that I’d meant to say. It was all a jumble of noise and confusion in my head. So, so many thoughts rolled one on top of the other. I hugged my arms to my chest, feeling tiny and weak and exposed.
“What is your favorite color, Thalassa?” he asked deeply.
I gasped, caught quite off guard by that innocent and not very pertinent question. “What?”
He was so beautiful sitting there, staring at me with his big, star-lit eyes that were now so clear blue they could rival the glassy waves of my calmest waters. And again, I felt myself drawn to him like a moth toward flame. He would spell the end of me, I just knew it. And yet, I was no longer sure it would be the worst thing in the world.
For so long I’d grappled with only pain and darkness as my constant companions. But now there was something else, something lighter and indescribable. Something that made me hope and wonder and dream.
My hands curled impotently in my lap.
“Color?” he asked again softly.
I blinked. “Purple. I love the color purple.”
Swallowing hard, he nodded his head, but remained silent after that, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to understand why he’d asked me such a trivial question that did not matter.
But the thought of opening my mouth to speak made me feel like I was suffocating, like I couldn’t breathe right. All my plans for destruction, for ending the reign of the petty and lesser gods would die completely if I took this next step. I was at the crossroads, and I had only one choice left.
You think ending them will bring you joy. But, Thalassa, I was never weak. My love for Hades, and his for me, was what made me strong. Made us strong. Learn him. Know him. And then you’ll understand. Then you’ll finally awaken to the truth. Love is the most powerful force in all the realms, in all the worlds. Aphrodite taught us that. You only have to believe. Just believe…
She was so close to the surface that I could almost feel her like a tangible presence. I was shocked to discover that she wasn’t the weak-willed hag I’d thought her to be. I could feel her power, and it was stunning how strong it was. She would completely obliterate the me I was now, obliterate this violence in me, I knew. Deep down, I just knew it. Calypso would come back in, and that would be the end of me.
I took in a choppy breath, shuddering it out with my release. He wanted her, and I was just in the way of their happiness. I closed my eyes, my long lashes flickering upon the tops of my cheekbones.
No one really wanted me. They never had. This part of me had always been too dark, too wicked and full of hubris and violence. It was why she’d drowned me out in the other life and why she would do it to me again. I could have destroyed them all and reclaimed what was rightfully mine, but with just a few words, this lesser—no, greater—god had destroyed me completely.
I clutched at my stomach, butterflies diving and swarming my insides, making me ache, making me want. I looked at his profile, mouth tipped down in a soft frown. I should give her back to him.
I wasn’t one for acts of kindness, but then, I’d never really liked anything enough before to want to bother. My throat felt tight and hot.
“What… what was her favorite color?” I asked softly, so softly I was sure he’d not hear me. But his neck whipped around, and he stared at me as if I was something foreign and strange.
“What?” he asked, voice a deep, shivery tremble.
I shook, feeling heat and warmth and other more powerful, deeper things start to slink through me. The wave in my mind was growing stronger.
I’d made my choice. I was tired of being alone, tired of hanging on to so much hate and rage. I looked him square in his eyes, trapped like a fly in amber, and felt a rolling spark of something new and dangerously addictive beginning to wind through me.
“What was her favorite color?”
Dark, thick brows lowered, and he gave his head a slight shake. “Why would you want to know that? You’re not her. That’s not what I’m trying to do to y—”
Unable to bear his gaze any longer, I hung my head and stared at my dainty ankles as I whispered, “I am not as unlike her as I might have led you to believe, Death.”
I saw his entire body still, saw his broad shoulders become as boards and his spine turn rigid and inflexible, saw his flesh blanch to nearly bone-white, and my soul quickened. He truly did love her. It was so bloody obvious to me now that I almost smiled to see it.
The wave in my head grow louder, fiercer.
I was dual-natured, and I was about to lose myself to her. I knew it, but I was strangely okay about it all. Hating something was too exhausting and painful, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be so full of hate and rage anymore. I didn’t think I wanted to be alone anymore. If I destroyed the golden ones, I would be hurting him, and I no longer wished to hurt him. More than that, I would forever be alone, then. I would ruin any chance I had of knowing him or of him knowing me. And I wanted to know him. I desperately wanted to know him.
He was the one thing that I truly never wanted to hurt again.
“What. Do. You. Mean?” he asked me slowly, each word enunciated oh so carefully.
He was like a caged tiger gearing up for the strike, the way he held himself so still.
I shook my head. “I… I don’t know,” I admitted softly. “I don’t know. But I think that your female was far stronger than even she imagined. Even now, I feel her, Hades, deep within me, fighting to break free.”
“How is this possible?” His voice was a thread of sound, full of hope and burning with agony. “She said she could not—”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand it. She did not lie to you, you know. There are two very distinct sides to me in this body.” I closed my eyes, shuddering.
If I let her in all the way, I would lose me. I had been born alone, and I would die alone. It was not me that Hades wanted. It was her. And she was just as desperate to get back to him.
But all the rage and anger of the past few months had me weary to the bone. I did not want to be mad at him anymore. In fact, I wanted something very different now.
His thumb was pressed to my chin, and he was turning my face toward his. I could no longer hide from him because he saw me. He was seeing me and not just Calypso trapped within me, but me, the me sitting here on this oyster bed with him as life continued to form a brand-new world of wonders all around us.
Emerald-scaled fish burst from the waters in a symphony of motion, as if in tune to my pleasure, aware that I was altering, becoming more, bigger, better.
I clutched a hand to my throat, so scared of what he was doing to me without his even trying to. Just simply by being him, he was altering me, changing me. I should hate him for it, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t.
I’d spent the last of my anger with him.
I shook my head. “I did not know, Hades. I simply didn’t know.”
He swallowed hard, and I knew he understood what even I wasn’t sure I meant. But there was a peace in his gaze and a warmth in his smile that I felt, deep in my bones, was meant for her alone.
The wave in my head was encompassing me, growing and spreading. There was no way to stop it now, not anymore.
My shoulders wilted, and the pain of the past months was turned quickly to soul-deep exhaustion and sadness. I’d spent so much of my time drowning in hate that I didn’t know how to handle not hating.
He shook his head, his eyes still searching mine. “Oh, my beloved female,” he murmured tenderly as he drew me into his arms. “Ask me anything you wish, Thalassa, and I will tell you everything. Anything.”
“Why? Why would you still care about me after all I put you through? Why would you do this?” I asked, even as I rested my cheek against his chest, hearing the silence of a still and empty chest, just like my own.
But I swear it was weird, because somehow, I felt like I heard the beating of our hearts. I�
�d never heard it before, but it was like the very second I’d decided to let him in again was the moment I heard the first beat of us.
It was small and barely a teeny bump of sound, but it was growing with each second that passed.
Boom.
Boom.
Booooom.
I felt the wave growing within me, felt it surging faster and faster. I closed my eyes and drank in the scent of him, dark and cool, exotic, and so bloody appealing that I felt drunk on him.
I planted my palm upon his chest. The exhaustion was making way for other things, deeper and richer things. My body was starting to ache, and I was drawing closer and closer to him, practically crawling onto his lap, and he let me.
“Her favorite color?” I whispered.
He chuckled. “Purple, Thalassa. Purple like my favorite stone was what she always said.”
Chapter 29
Hades
I could not begin to describe the sensations coursing through me—wonder, awe, and complete and total shock. Not even Aphrodite had known that Caly was still in there. I wondered if Calypso had known she would be, or whether this was a shock to all of us.
Thalassa was so unlike the female she’d been the first day I’d been with her, which now felt like ages ago rather than the three days it actually was.
She was talkative and she laughed. There was still an edge to her that had been missing with Calypso, but like a butterfly bursting forth from its chrysalis, she was a completely altered woman, as if the shackles that had held her bound were free.
She was beautiful, and I was falling all over again, deeply, completely. She consumed me in her fires, and I reveled in the burn.
I held her tightly, my hands clasped around her waist, basking in the sensation of her luscious, pillowy breasts pressed tight to my hard chest. If this had been our other time, I’d have laid her down, stripped her nude, and given her three, four, five orgasms with my tongue and cock by now.
Her desires had been as ravenous as my own, and our sexual romps had been exciting, adventurous, and experimental. Whatever she’d wanted me to do, I’d done and had found myself enjoying some rather odd requests more than I’d ever thought I could have.
Playing with carrots had always been a favorite of ours, oddly enough.
But we were learning one another all over again, isolated in this oasis of light and wonder we’d built together, trapped in a cave filled to bursting with exotic gems and fish I had never seen, with heads shaped like puppies and eyes that burned red and were large and lovely and could be terribly wicked if it wanted to be.
She was smiling, and so was I. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.
“Tell me, Thalassa, if you had one desire, one wish above all else, what would it be?”
She grinned and pushed back on my chest, even as her thumbs continued to rub hot circles on my flesh, making me feel dizzy and breathless as pleasure and desire coursed like hot lava through my veins.
Her look was shy and innocent, and stars above, she was glorious. I bit my bottom lip, and the pupils of her dark eyes flared wildly, making me throb all over.
I swallowed a groan of madness and desire. I’d told her I’d be a gentleman, that I’d listen and be good and loving and kind and all the things a lover should be, but I was still a hot-blooded male in desperate love with the female curled like a kitten on my lap.
My cock rose up, hard and stiff and poked her in the backside. She hissed and jerked, but she didn’t shove off of me. Instead, she was looking at me as if I were foreign, and yet as if she were just as desperate as I was.
My nostrils flared, scenting the musk of her desires beginning to curl through the cave we called ours. Like salt and sea flowers, it called to me, reached out to my soul and beckoned me nearer.
“I’ve always wanted to see a dragon fly.”
I blinked, confused by what she’d just said, needing more than a moment to regroup and remember what she was answering. “Oh,” I said, voice full and deep, shivering with the need that I tried so desperately to suppress.
In this life, she was still a virgin goddess, and I knew how much being so had mattered to her. The virgins of my pantheon would kill to protect what they considered to be the pinnacle of their godhood.
She’d been no different.
But I remembered the taste of her body, the feel of her flesh pressed to mine, the throaty rumbles of her purrs in my ear as I’d make her come for me over and over again.
I shuddered, digging my fingers into her back. This was a small torture, holding her, and yet, I never wished her to part from my side.
She nodded. “Calypso does not care for the beasts. She finds them—”
“Reptilian,” I said with her at the same time, and she gave me a soft, crooked grin.
“Yes, exactly. She does not much care for things with wings and scales that fly through the air. But I do. I always have. I’m fascinated by the monsters that I cannot control, the beasts that do not bow to me.”
As she said it, she swiped her thumb gently, almost like a whisper, over my bottom lip, and my body reacted instantly, flaring with heat so white-hot and intense that the tip of my cock began to leak. I groaned, dropping my cheek into her palm.
“I’d stopped daring to dream that you would ever touch me so,” I whispered honestly and hoarsely, not taking the time to censure my words. I was lost in her just as I’d once been and just as I knew I always would be.
Both of her tiny hands were on my face. “Look at me, Hades,” she whispered heatedly, her own voice just as scratchy and raw as mine.
I looked, not bothering to hide what I felt, knowing she could read everything in my burning gaze. I had a fever, and it was all because of her, because of what she did to me, what she made me feel without even trying.
Her eyes, which had grown dark and stormy even as her waters surrounding us continued to burn brighter and brighter with golden light, searched mine. Her soft pink lips that I’d suckled on for years and that had haunted me into this new life were gently pressed together.
“Gods above.” My voice cracked. “I love you. I could not love you more if I tried, Thalassa. I will always love you. Always want you. Always need you. Don’t you know that, yet?”
I was ashamed of the crack in my voice, but she was shaking her head and smiling so sweetly, so gently back at me. I suffered a recollection of her grasping the neck of the soul siren, her face a twisted mask of demonic and goddess-like fury as she’d very nearly snuffed the life from the creature for simply daring to exist. The dichotomy of this woman and that one wasn’t lost on me.
But if I were honest with myself, truly honest, her sheer power had always been one of the biggest draws for me. I’d loved her darkness because it had so perfectly matched my own. We were two behemoths who fought tooth and nail to be better than we were designed to be, and only we could unleash the full might of our fury and potent powers upon one another because we could handle it. We could take it, and not only that, we delighted in it.
I loved her teeth. Her bite. Loved her claws raking down my flesh, making me hot and weak and fevered. I loved her waters that overwhelmed and drowned me. I was not afraid of Thalassa’s or Calypso’s powers. I loved them.
I shuddered, cock leaking harder now, and I moaned. “Thalassa, I do not think I can—”
She planted a finger on my mouth and laid her forehead against my own, stealing my breath for her own and making me light-headed and dizzy.
“Shh,” she murmured tenderly “Shh.” She wiggled her luscious backside on my cock, and I groaned from deep within me, grunting like a desperate, raging beast.
“What are you doing to me, woman?”
“Don’t speak,” she murmured, as she dropped a tender but scorching kiss onto my lips. “Say nothing else.”
She writhed on me, making my blood rage and steam. My fires began to burn, encasing us both.
She moaned, and still she danced on me.
I gripped her hips tight,
wanting to ram myself deep inside her wet warmth, wanting to take her, own her, but never wanting to scare her off.
She moved like silk, like a sensuous snake, writhing and undulating her broad hips, making me reckless and wild and stupid. I stared at her, in awe of her alien beauty.
I’d always loved Caly’s goddess form, and Thalassa’s wasn’t that different. Her hair was a nest of writhing black serpents, her flesh glassy waters. Her lips tasted of ice and wine as she teased my mouth, my jaw, and my chin with tiny little kisses and sharp bites.
I hissed as she moved. This was a dream I wished never to wake from. A dream I wanted to die in and exist in for the rest of my damned eternity.
“Look at me, Reaper,” she said. But this time, I did not mind the use of the word because there was tenderness in it, a claiming. Desire.
I opened my eyes. She was nude, her body exposed to me completely. Her hands were on my shoulders and she was moving, grunting as her beautiful face screwed up and she rode me harder and faster.
“You’re like lightning,” she hissed, spine bending backward, forcing me to adjust my grip on her body so that I could keep her sealed tight to me.
She moved as if she knew how, as if she remembered, and I knew that somewhere deep down, she did.
“Hades. Oh, my Hades,” she whispered in a throaty drawl that felt like it was sucking the very life, essence, and soul right out of me. She was all things, everything I’d ever wanted and thought I could never have again.
She stared at me, and her face was a mask of intense lines and concentration. I could read the orgasm rising in her, and I’d never even slid home. We were simply rubbing ourselves off on one another.
But it was the best I’d ever had.
Ever.
I moaned, and the waters began to churn. My cave walls began to rumble, and an explosion of new life started to form. Underwater lights. Sun, stars, a moon. We were creating a brand-new world.
My cave was also filling with beasts. Birds with plumage of jeweled flame. Flowers made of diamonds and pearls. Beasts I’d never seen before, stomping heavy feet down as they moved through a forest alive with sounds and smells and sights so beyond earthly imaginings that there was no description for it.
The Greek Gods of Romance Collection Page 33
