Chapter 19
R hode had fought in countless battles, uncovered secrets from enemies who’d sworn against their souls to never reveal, and there he stood, arm shaking beneath the slight weight of the photo booth’s curtain as he held it open for Neela and wondered what the hell had possessed him to offer such an invitation.
He and Neela, alone in a box with barely enough head clearance for him, never mind the enormity of what she’d shared . . . and what he’d offered.
A photo. Together. Next to each other. Possibly even?—
“Are you going to come in?” Neela asked, poking her head out and eyeing him curiously through the gap in the curtain he still held open. The bulk of her flaxen curls dangled over one shoulder and swayed enticingly in the empty space between them, as if offering a bridge toward some great beyond he’d yet to cross but which Neela had already conquered.
Conquered. Now that was a word far too keen for the circumstances. He hadn’t meant to conquer anything beyond the guilt that had gnawed at him for his behavior—behavior he alone would have disemboweled any angel in his legion for displaying. Yet somehow, guilt had turned to pity, which had then morphed into some harsher grip of anguish.
What Neela described was far too close to a predicament he’d previously seen no way out of.
Loneliness.
Owing one last look around the arcade to ensure they were still by themselves and marking their coats and various game prizes exactly where they left them on top of the air hockey table, he swallowed past his apprehension and slipped inside.
“Why do I feel like I’m in a coffin?” he asked as he took a seat on the hard bench next to her.
“Because this is where party fun goes to die?”
He barked out a sardonic laugh. “Then why do the mortals even have such a thing?”
Neela craned her head back and started reading the instructions on the screen in front of them. “I think so introverted people can have an excuse to get away from the crowd they were societally forced to be a part of while still documenting the fact that they actually attended the event.”
“Again, why attend at all if it only causes them discomfort and shame? Seems like a ridiculous price to pay for misery.”
Neela pushed some buttons and smiled at him. “Misery loves company. Now smile! It takes three frames, and then it should give us a printout.”
Rhode snorted, then shifted against the seat, hoping to keep certain parts of him far and away from certain parts of her. Perhaps it was an excuse to avoid the camera lens, but as the flash went off in quick succession, something about her words struck him. When the slip of photo paper shot out from below the screen, he understood what it was.
Neela’s smile was all wrong. His ornery face aside, each of the three photos revealed a stiff, artificial sort of forced happiness in her that he instinctively knew had no place in an arcade photo booth meant to capture delight and laughter. Though the corners of her lips lifted on command and neat rows of teeth stood at photogenic attention, there was no true joy in it. Her golden eyes didn’t sparkle, despite the camera flash’s best intentions to capture it. Even her shoulders sat just below her ears, wrinkling the fine cashmere of her sweaterdress’s top to awkwardly mash her figure into an unappealing shell that was far from accurate.
Where was the petal-pink flush to her cheeks that had last lit her features when she’d scurried to name all those damn trees at the arboretum? Where was the sunglow’s radiance in her eyes that flashed her excitement when she’d first seen the arcade’s lights fire up?
This artificial bland visage wasn’t the memento he’d promised her, nor was it the explanation he felt he owed her.
No, that was, as she’d so keenly pointed out, misery, pure and simple.
Misery in the form of a required yearbook photograph taken of the student who had no means to pay for the keepsake.
And it pissed him the fuck off.
“Something’s wrong with you.”
Neela’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not happy.”
“I’m not not happy,” she hedged, gesturing toward the photo booth’s screen. “It’s fine. It’s great. I’ve got my photo, and it’s something I never thought I would have. Not really, at any rate.”
“But you’re not happy .” Then he snatched her hand from the air, and she gasped when the groan that came out of him surprised them both. Rhode’s eyes fell closed as he remembered the last time his hands were on her.
And his mouth.
One by one, he kneaded the pads of her fingers, relishing the way her pupils pulsed as she watched him and how the blood beneath her skin ebbed and flowed back to his touch in eager increments.
Mages, even her fingertips were warm, where his body had only ever known icy savagery.
It wasn’t fair to have all that heat wrapped up in such a delicate grasp, not when the fire within his core punched against the cage of his body as she began to curl her fingers around his.
Fuck. They were only hands, for god’s sake, but blood was blood, and he couldn’t help but track the pale blue of her veins as they tunneled down her palm and beneath her sweater’s soft cuff.
The booth was too hot, too stifling. Oxygen had become a rare commodity as he sucked in precious little of the stuff. Clarity, whatever had remained, quickly turned to necessity. Fire roared beneath his veins, and an urgent part of him wondered—no, needed to know whether Neela was just as hot as he was.
His lips, eager explorers as they were, descended onto the soft skin of her wrist. One kiss, then another, then a curious swipe of his tongue charted her vital lifelines and told him everything he needed to know.
“You are hot,” he rasped out, straining to speak for fear that if he parted his lips from her for too long, he’d never remember the way back.
“It’s hot in here,” she said, though she surprisingly didn’t pull away from him. “The booth is, uh, stuffy.”
“Too hot?” Another press of his mouth against her skin and his cock punched at the zipper of his slacks.
Soft puffs of her encouragement tickled the hair on the top of his head.
And then he felt it. The insistent yank on his silk collar. When he followed the tug, he was met with those golden eyes, blazing with wonder and unspoken questions—questions that would mirror his in another time, in another circumstance.
But there was no other time, and in the hushed privacy of the photo booth, nothing would have stopped him from devouring her mouth as she lightly, tenuously set her lips upon his.
There were reasons they were there, he was sure of it. Sound, logical reasons why he’d unlocked an arcade for the sole purpose of seeing her smile. Because if she was smiling, she wasn’t miserable. If she wasn’t miserable, she could work more adeptly at their reconnaissance mission, so he might finally access the information he needed to bring down Cyro.
All of that had gone right out the fucking window as he possessively groaned into her mouth, his fire beating an insistent rhythm to the pulse of blood thickening his cock. One of his knees dropped to the floor, then the second. He was a beast ruled solely by hunger after humanity had abandoned him long ago.
And then, like any beast, a ferocity took hold, one that a part of him roared to surrender to while the last remaining shred of his decorum shut the door on the scene and turned its back.
Good.
Approving murmurs vibrated through Neela’s mouth and shot straight down his spine, curling his hips against the hard frame of the bench. His hands dropped hers and slid to her hips, eager to grab onto something, to mold his grip to curves that contoured perfectly with his palms.
He dragged his mouth away from hers, tracing a trail of cashmere that ended inches from his lips, which tingled with the anticipation of another heat source entirely.
Neela’s thighs fell apart, and the sly woman gripped his hand, led it beneath her dress, and welcomed the backs of his knuckles to the damp cove hiding behind her underwear.
“Is this what you want, little demon?” he asked as he stroked her desire through the thin fabric. With each caress, his fire answered. An erotic call and response to a passion he never thought he’d experience.
“I want to be happy. Your touch, this . . . this . . . bond , whatever it is, I think it can do that. Do you want this, too? Would it make you . . . happy, as well? Is that what we’re doing here?”
Happiness. What a concept, and not one that had ever applied to him. Before he’d met her, he’d been imprisoned. Before he’d been imprisoned, he’d been at war. There had only ever been orders, schematics, actions, and actualities. Emotions were left for the celestial mages to manage, for the souls who’d entered the Empyrean under the sentinels’ supreme guard, for the mortals to indulge in for the few years they had available to them.
But it was never for him. Happiness had always been a private indifference. Something for others with more frivolous concerns.
Wasn’t that what they were doing, though? Wasn’t happiness the driving force behind this . . . carnal act, this tempting tryst?
Would it alter his course in any way if he indulged in the molten heat emanating from her slick desire that was doing a bang-up job of thickening his own?
His hands answered for him, followed by his mouth. Suppressing the harsher edges of a roar Rhode only ever reserved for battlefields, he pulled the drenched fabric aside and slid one finger, then a second into her glistening arousal.
Neela’s hands shot out to the walls at her sides. “Holy shit!”
But those were the last words he was interested in hearing. From there on out, he wanted only moans.
He sank his fingers farther into her, curving them sharply in the direction her soft pants and quivering muscles urged him to go. Mages, she was glorious. Peering over the soft mound of her curves, he smiled at her head thrown back, eyes pinched shut, and breasts heaving against their cashmere prison in time to his ministrations.
But it wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. Greedily, he hooked the backs of her knees over his shoulders, spread her even wider, and set his tongue upon her tight nub with a veneration he hadn’t known himself capable of. Neela bucked against him, desperately trying to squeeze her thighs closer together. Such a feat would impede his vision of her coming apart under his mouth, so he used the strength of his shoulders to stretch her legs farther and settled his hand against the delicate softness below her ribcage.
Her panting turned to prayers as he played the secret parts of her like the finest celestial instrument. Every slow crescendo and riveting note wrought by his tongue was mirrored by the desperate grips of her hands anchoring in his hair. The gentler his kisses, the softer her fingers’ caresses.
But he didn’t want gentle. He wanted fierce. He wanted fire.
Rhode added a third finger and sucked her clit until her magnificent hips roiled against his face in great undulating waves. Her cries were a symphonic flood of pleasure that preceded the burst of arousal exploding on his tongue.
Then, to his great surprise, his name came next. It was just one shout, one ecstatic declaration of the lover’s name who happened to negotiate her undoing, but it was his name and damn if he didn’t love how it reverberated through the arcade’s high ceiling, slamming around the building’s cluttered walls until the refrain hit his ears anew.
Neela’s legs gave a final shudder, and he gently lowered them to the floor but not before bestowing several kisses in secret places along the soft flesh of her inner thighs.
Once he’d righted her dress, the sight before him made him want to hike it up all over again. She was just as he thought she should be. High color in her cheeks. Genuine smile lines bracketing her mouth. A hungry fire in her eyes.
All of which he had put there.
“Are you happy now?” he asked, clearing the gravel from his throat but having little interest in removing his hands from her hips. “Or do I have more work to do?”
Neela laughed, the sound carefree and jubilant. “Oh, I’m happy.” Then she eyed his tented slacks and made to reach for him. “But I’d be a lot happier if?—”
An explosion shook the meager frame of the photo booth before thick gray smoke funneled into the arcade.