Chapter Ten
Kiss me again.
Damn it, Irowen. Please.
Okay, he’d managed not to actually say it—beg it?—like that, but barely.
Barely.
It hardly mattered, once he concluded the plea with a glottal grind that betrayed every molecule of sensual misery in his cells, anyhow.
He could’ve pretended he didn’t sound that bad, except the fast blowout of her pupils gave him no mercy on that front.
Dear fuck, her pupils . . . like huge islands in the middle of her aroused, entrancing green irises . . .
Olympus help him, he was going to plead with her, anyway.
The supplication was there, burning higher up his throat, invading his tongue, stunning his mind.
What the hell? This was insanity.
He was the radiant one, the god of the sun, the protector and healer, the ultimate Amazonius.
He didn’t beg for anything from any female, let alone a mortal.
Not that dancing in the sheets was any less fun with them than the nymphs of Olympus.
Being with humans was . . . well, enjoyable.
Simple. Like enjoying a three-a.m. candy bar after closing the club. Available, sweet, convenient.
Nothing about Irowen Steed was convenient.
Not the hypnosis of her eyes nor the spell of her mouth.
Certainly not the wizardry of her fingertips, sliding to the center of his chest and pressing divots of inescapable heat there.
Not the way he craved for her to keep going until she got inside, grabbed his whole heart, and ripped it straight from him.
The pain had to be less than what she made him endure now.
Being this close and not touching. Feeling all of this and knowing it wasn’t permanent.
Because, in her roundabout way, she was right.
It wasn’t like they’d hung out in the Lux because of an actual date.
Even if they had, no way would she have “grabbed his number for later”.
He was imperious, intense, and committed to his cosmopolitan freedom.
She was used to her own version of the same.
But if they got naked and horizontal right now, both their safety gates would go up in flames.
The longer he locked gazes with the woman, who’d gone so noticeably still, he knew it. And then sensed, solely from her quickening breaths, that she did too.
Damn it, her lips.
And yeah, her breathing.
The way all that air shook her shoulders. Trembled in her chest. Dissolved even the strength in her fingertips.
Then the same fortitude from his body.
As soon as he dropped all the way to his knees, he forgot about imploring her for the kiss again. He went ahead and seized it for himself.
Yes, right then. Damn straight, right there. Precisely five-point-five seconds after he’d composed the don’t-touch-the-mortal treatise in his head then burned it with the match strike of his mouth on hers. The brush fire of his lips brutally parting hers.
Then the nuclear blaze of his tongue, finding and sliding along hers.
She gasped into his mouth. He groaned into hers.
After digging one hand into her hair and wrapping the other around her ass, he claimed her even deeper.
Yet not deep enough. Would it ever be? Her spirit .
. . it had a taste. An essence, like the nectar crushed only for Acropolis ceremonies, that went beyond the physical sensations on his tongue.
There was magic in her essence, musky rose and sensual cedar filling his nostrils.
There was even more sorcery in her energy, despite its layers of yes-against-no conflict.
I know, sweet little Mothra.
I know, and I’m just as confused.
Because what if she hadn’t just been feeding him a line? The part about her attraction to him strictly as a man and not an Olympian?
What if they’d really just met at Eve and Aphrodite’s speed dating circus, and their bullets and arrows had been symbolic instead of real, and she did end up asking for his phone and punching her contact card into it? What if this connection had hit that fast and violently?
Just like a couple of mortals hit by spectral-level lust.
Just like the memo his dick took, in bold and beautiful ink, as they kissed harder and longer. Like every awesome affirmation his instinct shot out, rejoicing in her tightening nipples and groaning, accepting mouth, as the note got longer and lustier . . .
Zeus’s fucking testicles.
Screw that. He liked what the note dictated to his testicles instead.
It was erotic praise yet electric reprimand.
Enticement and punishment, enervating yet crippling.
But that was only where it began. The sensations were living things in his psyche too.
In the spirit he’d shut down so long ago, having thought he was done with shit like this.
Thousands of years into an existence, it didn’t feel safe to trust words like connection and magic and truth anymore.
What had they gotten him but dreams he couldn’t have?
Lovers who were forbidden or killed or both?
Spreadsheets and business plans had become the safer—and seemingly sexier—choice, with his acumen earning him riches in every dimensional currency there was.
An equally empty paradise.
Gold drachma, Underworld soul tokens, newly minted dollars, or decades-old yen. So many names, all standing for the same shit that was cold company at the end of each day. So many damn days . . .
None of it ever worth the fight.
Treasures that didn’t come close to the sheen of this woman’s skin, especially as he laid her flat and pulled down the zipper of her tattered battle jacket.
Pitch decks that didn’t rivet him by half this carnal concentration, split between the gorgeous curves he revealed and his inner order to take this as slow as he could.
Savoring her beauty, but also trying to figure out his sanity . . .
Or was he already too late?
What the fuck was this baffling, beautiful mortal doing to him?
“Apollo.”
Especially now, with the whine that tinged her sweet little plea. An insidious aphrodisiac of sound, like cotton candy woven with rave fest X, housed in the body of a take-no-prisoners badass—
“Apollo. Damn it. Please.”
He sweated like her actual rave partner as she dug all ten fingernails into his shoulders. When she clenched her thighs around his waist with the same feral force, she might as well have slipped him a shot of vodka laced with top-shelf nectar.
The floor tilted. Every color in the room strobed. As she undulated under him again, it was like riding the ocean after Poseidon dipped in his trident. Gleaming and dizzying. Voltaic and hypnotic. He surged and pulsed and buzzed . . .
No.
That was his phone.
“What the—”
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
“Shit. Wait. Th-That’s not the phone.”
Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
It was someone at his front door.
“Ignore it.” Irowen was once more the tiny tyrant who’d cracked the whip on eight precision soldiers. He now understood why those boys obeyed like Cleopatra’s own palanquin porters. “If it’s a package, they can drop it,” she blurted. “And the Scouts sell cookies and popcorn online now.”
She was so serious, which gave him room to chuckle. Not hard and not long, but the break his senses needed to help him rock back on his haunches. There, with his cock freshly constricted, he managed a coherent thought.
“Hard to convince any delivery service that an address in Hell isn’t a joke, Monster,” he drawled before pushing to his feet. “Though I wouldn’t put anything past those little girls pushing for the sales patches.”
Her small but acceding groan hit his backside like a dart of disappointment. “All right, all right.” And then something worse than that, as soon as she mumbled, “It’s probably for the best, anyhow.”
No, damn it.
It wasn’t for the fucking best.
But he ground his teeth and stayed his tongue while stomping to the front door. The revolt had to be from his lingering hard-on, not the larger lobes of his brain that acknowledged the logic about her hesitation just fifteen minutes ago.
Fifteen minutes.
Nothing changed an entire interpersonal dynamic in that amount of time.
He should know. He’d been alive much longer than that.
Nothing took him by surprise anymore, and that sure as hell included all the logic behind their lust dust for each other.
It was a cocktail of the primitive basics: fate and danger, high stakes and low lighting, golden arrows morphed into golden cocktails over a small speed dating table . . .
Yearning to kill her and craving to fuck her were along the same damn logic line. This time, the psychological package was just messing with him in different ways.
All right, at least he understood the quagmire a little better now.
Until he got to his front door and yanked it open.
And instead of the Acropolis messenger or booty call demon he expected, there was the one visitor capable of impaling him with equal parts fury, fascination, shock, and rapture inside the same three seconds. But only three.
After that, he found his voice again. And used it well.
“Rizon. What the fuck?”