Chapter 13 #2
There was no question about it. He knew what she needed and was giving it to her. She hated him for it. It was easier to keep the past at bay when he was being an ass and using that cold, unaffected tone.
“All this just so you can try and kill me.”
He grunted but didn’t respond.
Without the distraction of battling verbally, Vessa was forced to focus on his touch.
She should tell him to stop, but part of her didn’t want to.
She tried to tell herself that it was because he was warming her up.
But the thing that had been waking inside her since she’d been confronted with him again came clawing out of its dark hole.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been touched.
And it felt so damn good. Had she ever been held like this? Handled like she was a precious thing in need of care?
But she knew the answer. Beyond fighting, she hadn’t been touched in any intimate way since meeting Kedar.
Why did it have to be him who made her aware of just how starved she was for such simple affection?
It was like she’d been without water all this time and just now felt the cumulative thirst of all those years.
Heat pooled in her core. Some carnal creature overtook her senses. She yearned to move, to create friction. Burn. Her lips parted on a silent gasp as his touch became firmer, his fingers sinking into her thighs more with each pass.
She ached. She craved. Gods, if she just moved…
Her traitorous hips shifted the barest amount. She swore his breath hitched, and his fingers came closer to where she needed to be touched by him the most.
Fuck!
“Don’t touch me,” she finally, belatedly, snapped. Her breathy voice betrayed her. “I may need you for warmth, but I don’t need your fucking hands pawing at me.”
His hands were off her in an instant. But the ghost of his touch lingered in a trail of warmth up the entire back of her legs.
Damn her if she didn’t regret her words.
The silence between them grew heavy with a tension that had nowhere to go. It was trapped between their bodies, in the exchange of heat, in his fist curled against the cavern’s floor.
What the fuck had she been thinking?
She almost jumped out of her skin when he spoke moments later.
“What was your count?” he asked.
“What?”
“Your kill count?”
The competition. She’d forgotten about it. With freezing and drowning to death and all. “How much is an ogg worth?”
“One kill is one kill.”
Vessa swore she heard a smile in his voice. This was at least safer territory. “Sounds like you’re just trying to ensure your victory. By your rules, I was at twenty-two, I think. By mine, I won the moment my raze sword went through the ogg’s eye.”
She stilled. Her sword. It had to be long gone now, drifting somewhere beneath the ice. Who knew how deep that water went? And she wouldn’t survive another round in that deadly ocean. Her blade was lost forever. One of the last reminders of home. Of who she used to be. Gone.
“Fucking Pits,” she hissed. Her eyes stung. She never cried, but this loss was almost unbearable.
Kedar shifted beneath her, his arm extending, leaving her own unprotected from the cold. “It went through to the hilt,” he said as he brought said hilt into her line of vision.
Vessa gasped. “How? It was gone. Beneath the ice.”
He shrugged beneath her. “So were you.”
Was he unwilling to say the truth of it? Kedar couldn’t have saved her and retrieved her sword. Not in the same dive. That meant he’d gone into that freezing water more than once.
For her.
Warmth bloomed in her chest. It couldn’t be helped. This was far more meaningful to her than even her life. “Why? You would have had to dive deep, why go through so much trouble for it?”
For her?
“The only way I care to fight a Seken is with her raze sword in hand,” he said. “This is the way of it. Unless you prefer to use the plasma dirk again?”
“No,” she murmured. “I will use my blade this time.”
Silence settled over them like fresh snow.
Was he thinking of when they fought? She’d been a mad woman, crazed.
Fighting with the plasma dirk he’d given her meant she had to stay in his strike range.
It was close and violent combat. Intimate.
By the time it’d ended, she had broken ribs, a cracked collarbone, and had lost a life-threatening amount of blood. Kedar fared worse.
There was nothing to say and so much to say all at once. It was twisted, sick, to feel anything other than hatred for him. Regardless of their shared past. Regardless of whether he retrieved her blade from the depths of a freezing ocean.
“I was at twenty-nine kills, by the way,” he said, “but the rest of the horde did run off once you killed the ogg. Therefore, his death should count for more.”
“Victory is mine,” Vessa whispered as she tightened her hold around her sword’s hilt.
“The reigning kill count queen,” he murmured.
Vessa hated this. The moment felt so right, but it was a lie. She needed to return to her life, be finished with him. Taking stock of her condition, she reasoned that beyond a bruised hip, sore chest and throat, and tight muscles, she would mend well enough.
She’d take his warmth. Rest.
Then, tomorrow, she would give him exactly what he wanted.