“I’m okay,” she said against his chest. Her body was warm. Her breath a soothing wind across his overheated skin.
He eased down to sit on the hard earth. Seconds later, a massive crashing sound echoed from the rubble and they both jerked around to see the marble slab she’d been hiding under collapse into the hole.
“Gods.” He pulled her back in tight and just held on.
Seconds passed in silence during which he worked on regulating his rapid-fire pulse. If he’d been any later…If his magick hadn’t worked…If he hadn’t moved those rocks first…
“I’m okay, Demetrius.”
Yeah, but he wasn’t. Not even close.
He pushed back so he could see her face. Dust covered every inch of her skin except where it had rubbed off one cheek that had been pressed against his chest. Her sun-kissed skin shone through to remind him she wasn’t the ghost she appeared to be. She was real, alive, whole.
“I’m not hurt, Demetrius. I’m fine.”
He wasn’t entirely sure how that was possible. “What were you thinking?”
Her brow wrinkled to form deep lines in the powder. “What do you mean?”
He swiped at the dust on her forehead, her cheeks, her gently sloped, perfect nose. “Down there. With Hades. Don’t you know what he can do to you?”
Fire flashed in her eyes. “Oh, I know. But I’ve finally wised up. He can’t go against the natural order. When I’m dead, then he can do whatever he wants to me. But not while I’m alive. And he can’t kill me to get me there faster.”
Just the thought of her dead left a hitch in his gut. He motioned to the rubble behind her. “What the hell do you call that?”
She looked over her shoulder, then turned back to him. “A temper tantrum?”
He wasn’t in the mood for jokes. His heart couldn’t take it right now. “Isadora—”
“Okay, yeah,” she said seriously. “He can cause natural disasters and send his minions after me if he wants, but he himself can’t kill me. He can taunt me and show me what he plans to do to me when I cross over, but you know what? I’m not afraid of him, Demetrius. Not anymore.”
“He offered you your soul back. And you said no.”
“You heard that?”
“I heard everything.”
A wary expression passed over her face, but she covered it quickly by glancing down at his chest. “Some souls aren’t worth saving.”
He tipped her chin up with his finger. “Yours is.”
“No one’s is. Not in spite of this.” She lifted her hand, opened her palm. He sucked in a breath at the Titan symbol sparkling up at him.
The power of the earth element radiated from her hand and seeped into his skin even though he didn’t touch it. As she turned the diamond in her palm, the confrontation he’d overheard between her and Hades rushed through his mind all over again. Even when she was trapped she fought. And not just for herself—she fought for her race. For people she didn’t know and would never meet. For her sisters, for her warriors, for him. And sitting there on his lap, covered in a layer of grime from head to toe, she’d never looked more the queen she would one day become.
“Kardia—”
“I thought you didn’t care, Demetrius. That’s what you told me. What you’ve told me more times than I can count. And yet here you are. Whenever I need you, here you are.” Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Tell me you don’t care.”
His heart picked up speed under her mesmerizing gaze and one by one, though he’d fought it for so long, he felt the last barriers of his restraint shatter and break.
“I do care,” he whispered. “I care too much. That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem.”
Her gaze roamed his face so long he tensed. “You hurt me.”
Regret stabbed like a hot, sharp knife. But he deserved it. That and so much more. “I know.”
“Don’t ever do it again.”
He swallowed hard. Didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Just as he couldn’t tear his eyes from hers.
She braced a hand on his shoulder and pushed up to her feet. Warmth gathered beneath her fingers to trail a line of heat straight to his abdomen. He wanted to reach for her, pull her back into the circle of his arms, but stopped himself.
She took a wobbly step, caught herself from going down, and shot him a look before he could jump to her rescue. “I’m fine.”
Not fine. She was weaker every day, and this situation with Hades and Apophis hadn’t helped.
She took several steps down the dirt path, stopped, and looked back. “Dusk will be here soon. Aren’t you coming?”
It took seconds to figure out what she meant. But when he realized she meant back to the ruins, instead of home to Argolea, he glanced at the rubble. At what was, technically, the holy ground they both knew they were looking for.
He had to take her home. It wasn’t even a question. And yet…
And yet she obviously didn’t want him to. And he wasn’t nearly as ready as he thought he’d be. Now that they were faced with reality, he wanted more time. Just one more night to make up for all the shitty things he’d done and said to her over the years. She deserved that much, didn’t she? If he took her home now, he’d never have the chance again.
He glanced back at her and knew the choice he made now would change his life. Once he gave himself to her freely, there was no way he could go back to pretending he didn’t care. Knew also, because of who and what he was, if he made this choice, he was most likely sacrificing any kind of future he had with the Argonauts forever.
He pushed to his feet and stopped when he was inches from her. She craned her neck back to look up at him. “Ready?”
He scooped her into his arms and reveled at the gasp of delight that stole from her lips. “Yeah,” he said as he moved down the path with her in his arms. “Yeah, I’m finally ready.”
***
The warm sun, the heat of Demetrius’s body, and the gentle rocking motion as he walked the path back to the ruins all coalesced and dragged Isadora toward sleep. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out, but when she awoke she was back in the Hall of Heroes, lying on the makeshift bed. Groggy, she sat up, rubbed her eyes, then gasped at the hundreds of flickering candles spread out around the room.
Her heart beat slowly at first, then picked up speed. The stone table in the center of the room was covered in a layer of blankets that were folded in half to lie across the middle, overhanging each side. Food was laid out over one end: a collection of fruits and berries of differing shapes and sizes, and more fish. Candles sat on the other end.
She heard footsteps to her right and Demetrius appeared at the bottom of the steps, holding two plastic buckets in each hand.
His face lit when he saw her, a reaction that warmed her deep inside. “You’re awake.”
She couldn’t stop the smile on her lips, didn’t even try. “I must have heard you coming down.” She motioned to the room. “What is all this?”
“Oh.” He looked toward the middle of the room, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw his cheeks turn just the slightest shade of pink. “Trickery, really.” He set the buckets on the end of the table and waved his hand through a nearby trio of candles. The image flickered and faded as his arm moved through, then solidified again when he was gone. He shrugged. “Optical illusion.”
Amazed, she rose on limbs weaker than she wanted to admit and crossed to him, running her hand through the same space he just had. The candles flickered again and then the image reformed. “You can cast illusions? Wow.” She looked up at him. “Can you teach me how to do that?”
He smirked, that easy grin he’d shown her yesterday at the beach, the same one that transformed his face from intimidating to gorgeous in the span of a second. “Party tricks are one of my many talents. I can’t cast a protection spell worth shit, but if you need candles, I’m your guy.”
He reached for the fruit, but her hand on his forearm stopped him. She waited until his e
yes ran back to her before she said, “I think you have a lot of talents. And I know without them, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
Something soft flickered behind his eyes. Something she wanted to reach out and hold on to forever. But he didn’t close the distance between them, and this time she wasn’t going to make the first move. He’d brought her back here instead of insisting they go home to Argolea. For tonight, at least, she was going to be patient and see where this went.
He cleared his throat and reached for the food again. “You should eat.”
He set a plastic plate of fruit and fish in front of her. She tried not to curl her lip in disgust but knew she wasn’t successful when he chuckled at her side. “When you get home, you can have whatever you want. Here.” His big hands slid around her waist and he lifted her to sit on the table with ease. Warmth gathered beneath his hands and inched its way up and down her rib cage. But his touch was gone way too soon, and he put the plate in her lap and stepped back before she could think of something to say to stop him. “What will you ask the cooks to make for you when you get back?”
She fingered an apple slice on the plate. “A steak. A nice big juicy one.” As she sank her teeth into the apple and chewed, she imagined a rib eye instead. “With Cookie’s good garlic mashed potatoes and a side of asparagus. And chocolate cake for dessert.” She glanced his way. “What will you ask for?”
His lopsided grin faded as she ate. With one arm braced against the table, he looked down at his own food. “I don’t know.”
A strange foreboding trickled through her chest. What wasn’t he telling her?
He ate a few bites, and when he noticed she wasn’t eating much herself, took her plate and set it to the side. Neither of them, obviously, had much of an appetite. Her eyes followed as he moved around the table. “Lie back.”
She glanced down at the blankets beneath her. “Why?”
He lifted the buckets he’d brought in with him when she awakened and said, “I thought you might want to wash your hair. It’s too late to head down to the river, but I heated some water upstairs in case you wanted to clean up.”
Her heart thumped in her chest. Candlelight flickered over his bare chest and the angles and planes of his muscular body. He was wearing the same low-slung black pants he’d worn for days, frayed at the edges and ripped in the knees, but he was no longer sweaty and dusty, as he’d been earlier. He’d obviously dunked himself in the river when she was asleep, and then he’d brought more water back here for her.
Tingles erupted in her breasts, in her abdomen, in her thighs as she nodded and swallowed back a rush of emotions. “I…I would. Thank you.”
“Lie back then. And scoot toward the end of the table.”
She did as he said, realizing the blankets were positioned to soften the hard surface. When her feet were hanging off one end and her head off the other, she looked up to see him peering down at her with an intense expression she couldn’t name.
“Close your eyes.”
Warm water flowed over her grimy hair, dripped down to the stone floor at his feet. She closed her eyes as he poured liquid over every strand, then relaxed into his touch as he began to massage suds into her scalp.
“Where did you get shampoo?”
“Same place I found the toothpaste.”
She smiled. “Mm.”
“Like that?”
Yeah, she liked it. So much. His hands were like heaven, rubbing, touching, massaging, and every one of her muscles relaxed as he worked. He poured more water over her hair to rinse away the lather, then carefully dried her short locks with an extra blanket.
“How did you heat the water?” she asked. “All we have are plastic buckets.”
“Achilles’s helmet is metal.”
Her eyes grew wide. “You heated water in his helmet?”
“I don’t think he’s using it. Wish I hadn’t?”
No, she wished that helmet was the size of a hot tub so she could climb into it with him and he could work his magic fingers over the rest of her body.
He set the damp blanket on the table at her side and used his fingers to comb the tangles from her wet hair. Then he slid his hands under her shoulders and pushed her up to sitting.
She brushed the wet hair back from her face and tried to think of something to say. His hands tugging at the hem of her filthy tank top stopped all thought. “Lift your arms.”
Her heart picked up speed but she did as he asked. The tank slid up over her arms and dropped to the ground out of sight. Water sloshed behind her. Anticipation curled in her stomach. Then his hand landed gently on her bare shoulder, followed by a warm damp rag running across her back.
A sponge bath. He was giving her a sponge bath. The erotic implications of that puckered her nipples and arched her back.
“Too hot?”
“No, no. It’s fine.” More than fine. Better than fine. It was…paradise. She closed her eyes as he dragged the rag over her shoulders, down her spine, to the curve of her lower back and up again. Warmth gathered in her center, spread lower until she ached.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said softly.
“Hm?” He slid the rag down her neck, over her left arm. Water dribbled down to her fingers.
“What happened to your mother? We’d been told her party was ambushed.”
Her eyes floated open to focus on a candle on the floor twenty feet away. He continued washing her arms, her back, her sides as her mind drifted. She knew what the Argonauts had been told, what everyone had been told. Thirty years ago, before the war with the daemons had picked up in intensity, her mother had taken a group of chaperones—soldiers from the Executive Guard and her own personal assistants—into the human realm for a “mini-vacation.” A shopping trip, her father had called it. Andromeda had been as fascinated by human culture as the king, and every now and then he’d allowed her to cross over, so long as she was well protected. While there, they’d been overrun by a pack of daemons, and before the Argonauts had even been alerted, it was over. None had survived. But that wasn’t what had really happened. That was simply the lie her father had told to cover up the truth.
“You know about my sisters, so I guess it’s no big secret now. My father was never faithful to my mother. Three hundred years is a long time to be bound to one person, and when that person can’t give you the one thing you want more than any other…” She shrugged, hating that she sounded so bitter but unable to keep it from her voice. “I guess he decided to move on.”
Demetrius moved around to stand in front of her, and though she knew she was naked from the waist up and should be embarrassed, she wasn’t. “A son. That’s what he wanted.”
She didn’t meet his eyes, focusing instead on an inch-long scar under his left pec. “That’s what he’s always wanted. She was pregnant numerous times, but they all ended in either a miscarriage or stillbirth. Except me.”
“What happened to her?”
Isadora sighed. “I think she finally had enough. She must have found out about his affair with Callia’s mother. At the time, I didn’t know who he was seeing, just that it was someone else. It was always someone else. Usually it was a female outside the castle, someone of lower status. But his own personal healer? That would have rocked my mother to her core. Especially since she and Anna were friends.”
She couldn’t help remembering how sad her mother had been the day she left. The way she’d hugged Isadora and said good-bye as if it was forever. “She didn’t go into the human realm on a shopping trip. She didn’t take any chaperones with her. She just disappeared. As if she’d never existed in the first place. And my father never searched for her. He made up that story about her being killed as an excuse to go on with his life, and he never looked back.”
She glanced at her hands. Hands that were petite, just like her mother’s had been. “I thought about looking for her. More than once. But my father…he forbade me from doing so.” Her voice trailed off. Because, yeah, what
was she ever going to be able to do? “I look like her. More than I do him. Aside from the fact I’m female and the only one of their children who survived, my nose is too small, my eyes the wrong color, and I’m timid, just like she was. That’s never helped the situation with my father. In fact, I’m sure that’s simply made it worse.”
He didn’t say anything, and she figured that meant her little sponge bath was over. She shifted and reached for the edge of the blanket beneath her legs to cover herself, disappointed she’d gone on in the first place instead of sidestepping his question. Even more disappointed she’d let the hurt get to her all over again.
Why did she let her father do that to her? Especially here?
He pushed the blanket from her hands. Surprised, she looked up into soft, warm eyes as the cloth fell against the table again. “I think your nose is perfect. And your eyes match your determined personality.”
“Determined? No one’s ever called me that.”
A half smile curled his mouth. One that supercharged her blood and brought that ache back tenfold. “How many times have I tried to put distance between us? And how many times have you closed the gap? I’d call that determined.”
Her heart stuttered. And in the silence she knew if she didn’t ask the question, she’d spend the rest of her life wondering. “Is that what you want? Distance? Between us?”
“No.”
She drew in a breath and held it as he twined one arm around her back and tugged her closer to the heat of his body. Her legs opened, sliding around his hips until his sweet male scent surrounded her and he was all she felt.
“And for the record,” he said as he dipped the rag in the bucket at his side and trailed the warm, wet cloth across her collarbone so water dripped down her naked breasts, puckering the nipples to stiff peaks, “I don’t think you’re timid. Not anymore, at least.”
His face was an inch from hers. His breath hot and minty and so intoxicating it left her light-headed. As he brought the rag around her right breast, she tensed, wanting his hand on her skin, his lips on her mouth, his length deep inside her as it had been last night. Except this time she wanted him controlling the pace, the mood, bending her body any way he wanted. “If I’m not, that’s because of you.”