“Nice try,” he replied, circling her, that hard light in his dark gaze. “My balls actually dropped a long time ago. You’re not going to insult me into rushing you like a dumbass.”
“I haven’t trained in weeks,” she reminded him, never shifting her gaze from his. They were both deadly as hell. They were brothers. The question was, which one of them was more lethal? She’d wanted to answer that question definitively for a decade. She particularly wanted to answer it right now, with all this temper and hurt pounding through her veins, hand in hand with the adrenaline surge she loved and had missed during her forced inactivity. “I’m soft and weak. Maybe this is the one time a rush would work.”
He laughed and struck in the same moment, lashing out with a lightning fast side kick. She dodged the kick and turned while she did it, using his body weight and momentum to throw his ass across the clearing.
It was satisfying. Maybe a little more than satisfying.
Riordan landed hard, rolled to his feet, then laughed again.
“You just proved my point,” he said, all that laughter making his voice as bright as the clearing around him, which hit her like another punch. And this time it was a little more dizzying. “And you’re welcome.”
“Oh, right,” she murmured, pityingly. Mocking him. “You meant to do that.”
She was still in her crouch, waiting for him to stop talking and come at her for real this time, when she heard his name. Then hers. Called from some way down the hillside, in a baritone that could only be Dimitri’s.
Riordan’s stance shifted instantly, and she followed suit, standing up straight and dropping her hands despite the simmering fury and the need to draw blood still swimming through her veins. Their eyes met, then they each did a quick sweep of the other.
“Do something about your hair,” he told her, his voice sounding particularly distant after the last few minutes.
“Your shirt,” she replied, through lips that felt stiff because they wanted nothing more than to form insults and force a confrontation. She ran her hands over her hair, pulling out twigs and a few leaves. “Pull it down in back.”
And when he turned to start down the hillside toward Dimitri with his costume back in place, she had no choice but to shuffle her feet, keep her hands to herself, and follow. Like the good compliant woman she wasn’t.
But it wasn’t as if they left the tension between them behind on the mountain.
They walked back down the steep hill to the caravan with Dimitri, who had come to find Riordan—and Eiryn too, he said with a smile because he was actually a decent man, but they’d all known that was only him being polite—to help push the caravan a bit farther off the road to a flatter part of the shoulder.
“Lang thinks he can fix it,” Dimitri shared. “But it will take the better part of the afternoon, so we’re making camp here tonight.”
They hiked back down to the road, the descent taking a much, much longer time than it had taken Eiryn and Riordan to climb up. Eiryn made herself slip. Once, then again. The third time she pretended to be so incapable of maintaining her balance that she threw herself at Riordan’s back, slammed a pointed elbow into his kidneys, then giggled—yes, giggled, like a simpering mainland idiot—when he was forced to turn and pretend to help her stand rather than clocking her one as she deserved.
She shouldn’t have done that, she reflected when they rejoined the rest of the group. The laughing part, not the overdue fighting at the top of the ridge. Because it made it all seem as if it was okay when it wasn’t.
You have nowhere to hide, baby, he’d said.
It was like ice water down her back.
Riordan helped all the men do their manly things that Eiryn could have helped with, given that she was stronger than most males, but this was the compliant mainland. She stood around with the other women and pretended she was interested in Gretchen’s baby as more than a curiosity. She even forced herself to make the cooing noise the other females seemed to make naturally. But once the caravan had been moved onto the flatter area and set up so Lang could work on it again, she saw no particular reason to hang around with everyone when inside she was still a heaving mess of bloodlust and fury, deep bruises and that hollow feeling that told her Riordan had landed more punches with his mouth than his fists. More than she wanted to admit to herself.
She kicked off her boots and stowed them. Then she crawled into their bunk—a hand-over-hand crawl when she could have simply swung herself up, but that would have been betraying her true level of agility. Once on the mattress she sprawled out, reveling in all the room she had without Riordan’s enormous body taking up every available inch of the space. Theirs was a top bunk, which meant she could look out their little sliding window and see nothing but the green tops of the evergreen trees and the blue sky around them. She pulled the curtain shut and tried to make her mind quiet. She tried to block out all the things he’d said. She tried to keep herself from turning it over and over in her head.
It didn’t work.
Eiryn had always been the brooding type, she was sad to admit. This was no different and it was dangerous here, with no outlet. She couldn’t spar. She couldn’t train. She had to just . . . sit in it. She scowled at her own stupidity and sat up, running her hands over her face, then her arms, then her abdomen, noting each place there was a swelling or a tender place that would turn into a bruise. If any were visible, she’d have to come up with a story—
But the idea of stories disappeared entirely when the curtain was pulled back.
Riordan stood there, a curiously intent look on his face.
And she was so sick of that face of his, it gnawed at her. It raked sharp claws through her gut. He never got the slightest bit less beautiful, no matter what. The afternoon sun spilled in from their window and lit him up, sending golden light slipping and sliding all over him, highlighting the lean and powerful lines of his body, packed into trousers and one of his thermals. But it was like a love song to his damned face.
His brown skin looked like dark honey and his cheekbones seemed to glow almost as bright as his dark gaze. His beard did nothing at all to conceal the perfect cut of his tough jaw and she’d never understood how a man with a mouth like that, so lush and inviting, could ever appear as hard as he did. Yet he did.
The worst part was, she didn’t miss his braids at all. She liked that there was absolutely no impediment to gazing at him and marveling at all that masculine prettiness, out there on display with all these compliant people milling around and acting as if anyone, anywhere, looked like him.
Two things occurred to her simultaneously. One, that she was sitting there staring at him, and he was certainly aware of it. Even amused by it, if she could read that enigmatic expression of his at all. And two, the intent way he was watching her reminded her that they were no longer on the top of that ridge, alone.
Everything that happened down here in this caravan was public, more or less. There were people outside. People in the living area. It meant she had to stay in character no matter what happened—something that felt a lot harder to do after her little vacation from compliant Eiryn.
“Leave me alone,” she said. Or rather, she mouthed it, so no one could possibly overhear her. “This is private time.”
But Riordan grinned, slow and dangerous, that intent expression he wore only deepening. Eiryn should have hit him a hell of a lot harder on the way down that hill. She regretted that she hadn’t maimed him.
Her heart was less conflicted. It kicked at her, hard. Then slowed into something much worse, syrupy and disastrous.
“No such thing, babe,” he replied, with all the ease in the world.
And then he swung up into the bunk with a swift, graceful movement that should have announced to the entire caravan that he wasn’t what he claimed he was, and also made her feel alarmingly weak. He ignored her hissed, near-silent protest and kept coming, throwing himself down on the bunk between her and the edge of the bed. Between her and any potentia
l escape. Trapping her.
Eiryn eyed the distance between her and the floor and imagined simply diving out of the bunk, flipping midair so she could land well. But that, too, would announce that she was hiding something if anyone happened to see it. And it wasn’t as if Riordan was likely to lie there placidly and let her do it.
His dark eyes gleamed. “Try it.”
When she didn’t move—when she sat there frozen, her heart clattering at her ribs and her throat too dry to swallow—he reached back and pulled the curtain around them, shutting them off from the rest of the bunks. All it did was separate them from the rest of the caravan’s view. It couldn’t hide any noise they made. It didn’t really give them any privacy at all.
The afternoon sun beamed in through the window, warm and bright. The bed was wide enough that they could both almost lie there side by side, if she was dumb enough to lie down with him, were it not for Riordan’s enormous shoulders. He was brown honey, hewn from chiseled stone and still so beautiful, and she hated him more in this moment than she had in years.
She told herself that was what it was. Hate. Because it had to be. It was the only thing she understood.
“I wasn’t done with our conversation,” he told her.
She didn’t hide it when her fists clenched, and she didn’t like the way he grinned at that. Or she liked it too much, because the ache of it slid through her and settled in her pussy like a lick of flame. “Neither was I.”
“Only one way to work it out now,” he said, his voice rough. It kicked up sensation everywhere, making her feel restless and edgy. Making her come a little too close to shivering.
“A silent rumble?” she asked archly, if softly. “A quiet brawl?”
“Something like that.”
Riordan reached up and curled his big hand around her neck, and she knew what he was going to do. She told herself she couldn’t stop him, but the truth was, she didn’t try. He let his hand rest there—proving to them both that he wasn’t forcing her into anything, because Riordan was nothing if not fully aware of how best to beat her at her own game.
Eiryn felt all the emotions she’d worked so hard to keep at bay in that clearing flood her then. Dark, twisted, terrible. Too big and much too unwieldy. Too gnarled and tangled up to stay inside of her—but she only knew one way to handle her shit, and she couldn’t fight him while they were pretending to be compliant. She couldn’t force her feelings onto the edge of her blade and make her steel do her work for her.
All those dark feelings sat there, squatting on her, making her eyes feel glassy and her chest too tight.
Riordan didn’t look away. She braced herself, waiting for him to gloat, but he didn’t. His mouth was set in a hard line, something very nearly grim. And worse, there was a knowing light in his eyes.
She wanted to shout at him. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would, but she was terrified it wasn’t a shout that would come out at all, but something far more like a sob.
And it would kill her. She was breathing too hard, suddenly, as if it had already started.
Riordan simply tugged. He pulled her closer to him, tipping her over and forcing her to find her balance stretched out on top of him. She tried to tell herself she was in the power position. She tried to feel that, deep in her bones, the way she would have if he really was some kind of farmer.
But he was Riordan. He kept that hand on her neck, sliding his fingers into her hair and holding her there while his other arm wrapped around her hips and put her where he wanted her. He was beneath her then, his big body hot and hard. His chest was like a stone, his thighs were immense, and between them she felt his cock stir to life. Then grow.
He waited as his cock hardened and pressed against her belly. Then he waited until she lost the battle with the shudder that rolled through her, making her a liar to herself all over again.
Only then did he pull her head down and claim her mouth with his.
Right there in all that desperate sunlight, where she couldn’t hide from herself and, far worse, she couldn’t hide from him. She couldn’t even pretend. There was nowhere to go. There was his mouth, as greedy as it was sure.
And there was her response. Obvious and instant and right there on top of him in the brash light where there wasn’t a single thing she could do to stop it. To protect herself.
To keep herself safe.
Eiryn did the next best thing. She threw herself into it.
* * *
A kiss was as good as a sucker punch. Maybe better.
Riordan shifted, pulling her tighter against him and holding her there, fisting one hand in the fall of her thick, glossy hair and indulging himself. He got his tongue in her mouth. He held her captive and feasted on her smartass mouth at last.
She hadn’t kissed him. Not once. She’d kept her mouth away from him no matter how he took her body in the dark, and he’d let her, because he’d understood it. What they had to do was fucked up. Raiders celebrated sex. They didn’t hide behind curtains and get off to the sound of their neighbors doing the same, all the while pretending it was as uninteresting a daily chore as washing. It didn’t matter that he knew Eiryn enjoyed it more than she wanted to admit. He’d figured he could let her hide if she had to.
But that was before today.
That was before she’d called out his grief and used his past as a weapon.
So now he was taking everything.
He slid his hands down to the bottom of her shirt and pulled it up, nudging her to lift her arms when he got there. She tore her mouth from his and she was like every wet dream he’d ever had as she crouched there above him. Her lean thighs gripped him, her mouth was wet and swollen from his, her dark blue eyes were wild and unfocused, and those camp girl bracelets wound around and around her forearms.
His dick could have hammered through walls.
“You can’t . . .” She barely breathed that.
“Watch me.”
He tossed her shirt aside and then he tugged at the wool binding she wore, unraveling it with more blunt need than finesse. They never took all their clothes off here. It was too risky behind a curtain they couldn’t secure. They slept in shirts that covered their torsos and all their tattoos, and all he’d gotten was a furtive grope beneath hers, like one of those douchebags in the Louisville alleys. He didn’t want to examine why he couldn’t tolerate that any longer. He only knew he couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
Riordan pulled the last of the wrap from her body and his breath left him like she’d kicked him again. He made her sit back, her cunt damp through her jeans as she straddled his cock, and he was so hard he thought it might cripple him.
Oh yeah. He’d had this dream.
The sunlight poured in the window, setting her on fire even as it gave her no place to hide. Her long, dark hair flowed everywhere, brushing the tops of her tits and sliding over her cut shoulders. The light danced over the sigil above her heart that marked her a brother, beholden to the clan, and he let his gaze move over her other tattoos, marks of valor and service, brands to celebrate the dead, stamped deep into her skin. Making her that much more beautiful to him, because he could read the language of the marks she wore. He knew exactly what they meant, how she’d earned them, who she was.
Eiryn was a deadly confection, and he’d never touched her like. He never would. He ran his hands over her as if he was gentling her. As if anything could. He brushed her hair back over her shoulders and smiled when another set of goose bumps rose up, then shivered down her arms. He sucked her in like she was a killer drink beside a bonfire, tracing the intricate, swirling pattern that wrapped around her torso and ended just beneath her breasts. Her pretty little breasts, small and high, with sweet pink nipples that pulled tight under his scrutiny.
He held her still as he sat up a little, bringing her closer to him as he moved, and sucking one hard little point into his mouth.
She hissed out a breath, her hands wrapping around his forearms, but she didn’t push him away.
She didn’t try to escape. Eiryn arched into his mouth, feeding him her breast, letting her head fall back as he got a little greedy.
When he was done with one he tasted the other, making her rock mindlessly against him, her hard breaths the only noise she made.
And when his cock was about ready to punch its way out of his trousers, he pulled her down and took her mouth again, hungry and wet and intense. He threw himself into it, even while his hands were busy pulling open her jeans and briskly shoving them down her hips. Then further, until she was writhing against him, using her long legs to kick the jeans off and work them off her feet.
He didn’t know which one of them was breathing harder when she was finally naked, all that smooth skin of hers his to touch and test and taste. It was an overload. Eiryn was built like the blade she was, all that packed, lean muscle that made his mouth water, and then the round perfection of her tight ass.
God knew he had plans for that ass. But not here.
Riordan sat up again, lifting her so she’d wrap her legs around his waist. He gazed at her as he reached between them, grazing her soaking-wet pussy as he tugged open his trousers and pulled out his aching cock at last.
And for a minute, he played with her. He lifted her, then slid her down, running his hard cock through her slippery folds, getting some good friction going in all that scalding hot cream and need. He let his wide cockhead rub against her plump little clit with every little teasing stroke, and loved watching her flush red, then press her lips together to keep herself from making the kind of noise that would betray her.
Her eyes gleamed wet and he could see the blue in them, with all that light wrapped around her, exposing everything. Leaving nothing to the shadows. Leaving her entirely his, in case he’d had any doubts.
He might have, he could admit. Or he’d really, really wanted to. But his cock was a loyal fucker. It knew where it belonged.