If it looked like a date, maybe a part of me hoped it could turn into that. But mostly I wanted to set her mind at ease about many things.
I was reaching for some hairspray to set my hair when I glanced down at the countertop and spotted Medusa’s golden feather. My heart quivered.
I, too, had secrets. Secrets I fought like hell to keep secret. Secrets I fought like hell to pretend away. I’d kept my promise to myself and hadn’t returned to her. But each night, I was haunted by visions of her face and heard the words of the oracle whisper like the dead in my ears.
No doubt it was Hypnos tormenting me. The god of sleep had never been a fan of mine. Didn’t enjoy the images he saw in my head, as if I cared. I’d told the bastard countless times to stay away, but he never listened. I was halfway convinced that Mother’s hand was in on this somehow. Mostly because it usually was.
I heard the chime of Aphrodite’s arrival heralded in the winds, and with a final nod in the mirror, I gently hid Medusa’s feather. I didn’t know why I treated the thing as though it were the greatest treasure. It was but a feather. And I couldn’t understand how it was that a female I’d seen all of two times could have me so confused and unsure, but there it was. Every day away from her, my need to know more about the elusive and mysterious woman only grew.
“Ares, are you here? I think we need to tal—”
My stomach clenched as Aphrodite’s golden words shivered like a flame through the air. And when I turned, I was gut punched all over again by her sheer perfection and beauty.
Shorter than me, she was still tall for a woman, with an abundance of golden hair she currently had pinned up in a milkmaid fashion. What should have looked ridiculous didn’t, though, because even if she wore a shapeless potato sack, she was always and would always be the most beautiful woman alive.
Her features were perfectly symmetrical. She had the most perfect body that anyone could wish for. She had eyes so blue that they looked like she’d stolen parts of the ocean to fashion them. She had rosebud lips that I’d had the privilege and honor of tasting on several occasions.
My body tightened as my mind filled with unbidden images of her breathy moans and my hard grunts as we’d made love. I’d never stopped loving Aphrodite, even knowing that she was falling out of love with me. She was the first woman I’d ever truly felt this deeply for, and I was now ruined forever for dalliances, because I knew what it was to have a good woman waiting at home who looked at me with nothing but adoration in her pretty blue eyes.
But more than her outward beauty, Aphrodite also had one other attribute far superior, though few would think it or even believe it. Aphrodite wasn’t merely outwardly beautiful. I rather thought she was far prettier within.
Wearing a dress fashioned of falling stars and rainbow nebulas, she moved, and an invisible breeze whipped around her ankles, swirling the colors into a beautiful blend of controlled chaos. She literally wore the stars upon her perfect form.
She was picking at her nails, a nervous habit she had when something powerful ate at her mind. Nibbling on the corner of her lips, she eyed me slowly up and down, and a soft but appreciative smile touched her lips.
She’d once told me that I had the best body she’d ever seen. In fact, she’d told me so nearly once a day, always sounding shocked or surprised herself by how much she enjoyed my looks.
Though she’d not told me so in many weeks now. Sadness lingered around the corners of her eyes as she slowly glanced at her feet and took a soft, quivery breath that sounded just on the verge of tears.
My heart was clenching, because no matter what, I never wished to see her unhappy. I moved in toward her and gently gripped her chin, tipping her face up so that her eyes met mine.
The rest of the world melted away when I looked into her eyes. Used to be that I thought of nothing else but Aphrodite. No other thoughts would touch me or linger in my mind’s eye. But now I could not escape the vision of a gold-tipped snow-white feather and the mortal it belonged to.
Swallowing hard, I pulled her trembling body into mine and roughly kissed the top of her head.
Her little hands buried themselves in my back, and her tiny nails clawed into my shirt. I sensed the end of us tonight. We were at the precipice of all of it going away.
When she’d come to me, I’d felt her urgency, saw her unshed tears, and knew she’d meant to do our relationship. But we had history, she and I, a truth that couldn’t be altered simply because we were both troubled by our own situations.
Medusa did intrigue me, but Aphrodite was my first, and to her, I would always remain faithful, and with her in my arms now, it felt right that we belonged together. That we should not do this thing we both battled so fiercely.
The dissolution of us when we weren’t together seemed all but inevitable, but when I held her and when she held me back, I was reminded all over again why I’d fallen in love with her.
We’d both meant to speak words when this evening had started, but at some point, she’d begun to play the cassette tape. The scratchy love ballads echoed through my dark halls. The food I’d bought remained untouched, growing cold by the minute until finally it would taste greasy and unpleasant.
A flare of white light covered her gorgeous body, and she was dressed as she’d once been when we’d gone to Earth as happy lovers. That white dress hugged her curves in all the right places, her hair teased and sky-high. Her makeup was almost garish but still perfect because it rested upon the most perfect face.
Neither of us asked what the other had been thinking about. Neither of us disturbed the quiet bubble we’d somehow created. We simply danced in time to the music, our hearts breaking but our grip on one another solidly secure.
I refused to think about the fact that this was goodbye. That we had, without either of us even knowingly deciding to do so, gifted each other one last night of perfect joy.
We danced until Nyx returned to the sky and filled her canvas of deepest blue with burning glints of silvery stardust.
Aphrodite leaned up on tiptoe and kissed me. And if I tasted wetness and salt in her touch, I never mentioned it. I simply groaned and kissed her back with all the heart and soul within me.
And for just one night, I pretended that she and I were as happy as we’d been when we first fell in love fifty years ago.
We lay together just as the sun rose. We didn’t make love. We’d not done so in near to a year now, and I didn’t have to ask her why to understand she’d fallen in love with my brother. We simply held onto each other for dear life.
When I awoke later that night, I found my bed empty. Two weeks later, Aphrodite was gone—to him. The fairy tale was no more.
Mother had raged at me to retrieve her, to make her stop loving the “beast,” as Mother had not so kindly taken to calling Hephaestus.
She swore to me that she would fix this and forced me to exact a promise that she would do no damned such thing.
“She is happy now, Mother! That is all that matters!” I couldn’t keep the pain from my words, but I was sick of pretending like nothing ever bothered me. I’d fought so hard to keep this thing between us working, but a small part of my head whispered I’d not fought hard enough. Not when Aphrodite’s face wasn’t the only one buried in my heart.
Now I stood pacing the length of my bedroom like a madman, thinking so many damned thoughts, none of them healthy.
For the past two nights, I’d thought of nothing else but going to see Medusa, and now, I was doing everything in my power not to go there. It’d been a fluke, the emotions Medusa had pulled out of me. A fluke that had had disastrous consequences, a stupid preoccupation that had meant nothing and yet had cost me everything.
Rage burned through my bones, and I decided that once and for all, I was going to excise the bird girl from my heart. And then, then I would fight for Aphrodite’s hand once more. Then I would win her back, because I would have finally regained all parts of me to devote to her completely.
Except,
when I got to the place where I knew Medusa rested for the night, it was not the satisfaction of realizing I was right that flowed like water through me but rather the horror of recognizing I’d been very, very wrong.
She lay upon a bed, her dark curls draped sensuously upon the pillow. Shadows turned the strands to something almost snake-like in their coiling motions, and her wings were tucked in tight to her body. Even so, I was reminded of my strange fascination for them, the way the moonlight glinted off the golden threads. I swallowed hard, rocked to my very core by the powerful emotions flooding through me at a punishing and brutal pace.
Why was I here, inside her bedroom, staring down upon her sleeping form like a sick, perverted freak?
I’d just experienced a breakup, and that was all this was. It wasn’t Medusa that tempted me, it was the idea of forever being alone. This mortal wasn’t who I wanted. This woman I barely even knew wasn’t who I needed!
I was the god of war, godsdamn me to Tartarus! I should not have felt these strange quiverings fluttering through me, my knees growing weak and my stomach twisted up in knots. I should not have had this powerful feeling of breathlessness and a want so fierce it ate me up like a cancer.
I hadn’t meant to make a sound. I’d intended to go, to leave her alone. The image of her in repose, of the night smelling of sea salt and water flowers, and hearing her breathy, soft inhales and exhales would be a memory I would treasure forever in those moments when I allowed myself to think of what could have been.
But that was not to be, because I couldn’t keep from taking a sharp inhale of breath between my teeth at the sight of her perfect form.
The female must have been as light a sleeper as I was, because she shoved up, eyes wide and mouth parted. We held eyes for what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds at best. And I read the thoughts that scrolled over her face almost as though she’d spoken them aloud.
Shock. Confusion. Surprise.
And finally… “A… Ares? What? Why are you? What?” She glanced out the small window of her bedroom as though she would divine the answers from out there.
Clenching my jaw, I wet my lips and tried to make sense of why my palms sweat so terribly. Why my body throbbed and my head ached and why I was even fucking here at all. “I—” I snapped my mouth shut.
Why the fuck had I come here? Panic was starting to eat me up. I should go. I should rip open a travel tunnel and get the hell out of Dodge. And yet, my feet were like blocks of stone. I could not move.
Panic was chewing me up worse than I’d ever felt before, and I couldn’t keep from gasping for air like a fish dying on land. I must have looked wild, manic.
“Ares?” My name was soft upon her lips. Then she was up, and somehow, I was in her arms, and I didn’t even know when she’d moved.
But the moment she wrapped her tiny arms around my waist, I calmed, and that terrible sickness started to melt away.
“Come on,” she prompted, giving me a gentle tug as she moved us toward her bed.
“I… I didn’t come to do… this, Medusa.”
Her smile was soft, but even so, it pierced my chest like a fiery blade. “You never struck me as the type. But I am tired. I had a long day. And so have you, it would appear. So let us rest together. That is all. Nothing more. Yes?”
She looked at me beneath her long lashes, and my world tipped. Aphrodite, the great love of my life, was off cavorting with my brother. They were making a happy home for themselves. I should have been at my lowest, and yet in Medusa’s arms, I barely felt the pricklings of that betrayal.
Without speaking a word, I nodded slowly. Her bed wasn’t large. Not like my own.
And it was hard as a bloody rock. Yet when she laid me down and crawled over me and stretched out those gorgeous wings of hers so that they covered us both almost like a blanket, I knew I’d never been more comfortable.
I softly groaned, and the tension slipped out of me, second by second. She gave a little mewling sound, and I couldn’t begin to describe how I felt then. All I knew was I’d needed this.
Needed to feel the touch of a woman and not just any woman but one who meant something to me. I’d fought like the devil to resist Medusa, and I hated and despised myself for my weakness where she was concerned. But tonight, I did not feel that holding her was a weakness.
Hugging her tight, I kissed the top of her head, burying my nose in her brown curls, and my heart leapt when I sensed her smile upon my chest. She liked this. I knew she did. She did not find my touch one to be endured but rather one that she actively enjoyed.
And just for tonight, I did not think once of Aphrodite. I simply closed my eyes, and for the first time in two weeks, I slept, dreaming of nothing at all.
“Medusa,” I whispered before I even thought about what I was doing.
In answer, she wrapped one long, lean leg around my thigh, and together, we fell into a deep and restful sleep.
When Apollo’s steeds kissed the horizon line the next morning, I was already long gone. But I returned to her the next night. And the night after that. And before I knew it, she and I slept together every night.
And when she would open her arms to me, I fell into them like a man saved from death’s clutches, and something terrifying but wonderful began to burn brightly in me again.
Chapter 57
Poseidon
“Sister,” I drawled, staring at the delectable Hera as she stood up from the bathing pools of her bedchambers.
Water dripped off her perfect nipples, and I smirked. Her eyes glittered with heat and other naughty imaginings too. Zeus, of course, knew I slept with his wife. It was not like the bastard cared. He’d not touched the gods in some time now, a century, at least.
He quite hated his wife. I, on the other hand, rather enjoyed Hera’s inventiveness in the bedroom. Her passions equally matched my own.
After grabbing a plush towel, she dabbed at her flat belly as she stared at me with heat in her eyes. “Lover?”
With a hot growl, I shoved up off my seat and rushed to her. In less time than it took to blink, I was as nude as she, and we were panting and moaning. It’d been weeks since I’d fucked her as I’d wished to, and she made me pay for my lack of attentions.
She was stabbing at me, literally, with her claws, drawing blood and licking her now blade-length nails with just the tip of her bright-pink tongue. Her flesh gleamed like mother-of-pearl from drinking of my blood.
My cock stood ramrod stiff, ready to sink again and again into her wet, tight channel. The air smelled of dew, sweat, and us.
Moaning as she swallowed the last bit of my blood, she slowly, torturously sank down on my cock until all I could do was moan with blind lust. Covered in tears and my own blood, the floor crawled with sea life birthed from our lovemaking. They would soon die if they did not get to water, not that I cared.
She rode me like a hot mare, up and down, flexing her hips and making me moan with wild abandon. I covered her perky breasts with my large palms and squeezed them almost to the point of pain.
Hissing, she tossed her head back, and I grinned as I memorized the pretty image of us.
“What is that you wished to know, Poseidon?” she asked even as she rode me hard.
My voice rough with desire and passion, I gritted out from between my teeth, “I worry about my nephew. He is seldom on Olympus anymore and never at night.”
Her hands dug into my chest, making me hiss, and she stopped moving, her quicksilver eyes staring intelligently into my own. “Have you been following Ares, brother?”
I shrugged and adjusted her so that she would begin her slow, torturous movements once more. We both moaned the next time she flexed her hips.
Her skin was dewy and flushed, and I would never understand Zeus’s fascination with mortal women. There was no finer specimen in all the worlds than a sexually satisfied goddess.
“I have noticed my son’s absence and have keenly felt his pain. He takes Aphr
odite’s betrayal hard. I would kill Hephaestus for what he’s done if Zeus wouldn’t be furious at me for it.”
I shook my head even as I shoved deep inside her soaking-wet pussy. Her muscles fluttered around my engorged cock, and I moaned at the same moment she did.
“Fuck me,” she hissed.
“Patience, my love,” I promised, and she moaned prettily. “But in truth, I wanted to know if you knew where the boy spent his nights. I am his uncle, and you know how much I love the brats.”
“Poseidon.” She laughed lightly and slapped at my chest. If anyone knew the truth of me, it would be Hera. She and I were cut from the same cloth, we were so similar. But she didn’t know everything. Still, she was my confidant as I was truly hers.
And we both knew that neither of us could fully trust anyone, not even each other. We would sell each other out if it advanced our agendas. Still, neither of us seemed to be able to quit the other, so we simply dealt with our issues as they arose.
“He sheaths himself in his shadow so that not even Hypnos can find him.”
I snorted. “Earth, then. It’s the only place where he could do so.”
She shrugged and wiggled just a little on me. My blood ran like hot lava through my veins, and biting down on my bottom lip, I clamped down onto her hips and speared upward. She screamed. The sound was perfectly haunting, then she growled, and we were once more fucking like animals on her bathroom floor.
Once we’d both come, she lay upon my chest, swirling her fingers through my chest hair.
“You know, Poseidon, you should follow him. See what that child is up to. I gave him time enough to get his feelings out. I’ll be damned if Hephaestus takes what doesn’t belong to him. Figure out who he’s with at night and then… take care of things. Whatever the distraction might be.”
I stretched a brow upward. “Kill it?”
She shrugged and pouted as though we spoke of nothing more consequential than ending a bug’s life. “If it’s distracting him, it doesn’t deserve to live. I want my grandchildren. It was prophesied. And not even he can deny them to me.”
The Greek Gods of Romance Collection Page 71
