Malaya gasped for breath with each rough jostle and suggestive movement, unwittingly rubbing her lips across him in a tease of a kiss. He was so overwhelming, in both his intensity and his sheer body mass, she felt like she couldn’t breathe in the face of it. The position of her leg at the outside of his hip allowed him to settle directly between her legs, the hard leather and the cold metal buckle of his weapons belt making intimate contact with her.
“Guin! Get off me!” she ordered him, squirming as she looked for a route of escape.
“But you haven’t kissed your brother yet,” he mocked her smugly. “Isn’t this what you want? Aren’t you willing to live with this for century after century of your life?”
“Fine!” she hissed in temper.
She reached up and seized his head between her hands, curved her body upward, and kissed his mouth hard. Malaya was so intent on teaching the superior jerk to behave himself that she gave it everything she had. She felt him jolt in surprise, but she would be damned if she’d let him pull away. Instead she turned her kiss into slow, seductive work, her determination to get his goat making her lick her tongue over the seam of his lips with exquisite technique. Her sexual instructors would have been damn proud.
Chapter Two
Guin was torturing himself every second he lay close to all of that flawless, sweet skin of hers, the aroma of lavender and jasmine wafting up warmly to envelop him. He knew he was being abusive in his actions with her, but meanness was the only way he could think of to get through to her. Unfortunately, making his point and pretending to be the unaffected “brother” she always expected him to be was testing his mettle to the extreme.
Then she grabbed hold of him and kissed him so unexpectedly and with such aggression, he jolted in shock and instantaneous panic.
No! No, no, no, no, no!
His conscience screamed the denial through him, trying to act as a swift barrier of protection against the idea of being somewhere he had worked so hard at training himself to believe he would never find himself. Could never find himself.
After all, she had kissed him before. Not a lover’s kiss, but those warm, sisterly ones that told him how she felt about him. Exactly how she felt about him. Guin convinced himself this would be no different, that, in fact, it would prove his point splendidly. So he let her do her worst.
But her worst shifted suddenly into her best and then that sultry slip of her tongue…
When Guin grew furious, he often saw a haze of red all around his vision. In this moment, however, that haze was white like deadly light. It was the start of a flash fire that couldn’t be stopped. He even rode it like a wave, tightening himself against her as he did, and suddenly—
Guin opened his mouth and locked his lips tightly to hers, his tongue chasing for hers with a severity of need for her taste that she would never comprehend. After all, how could she ever understand just how long he had wanted this? She was clueless as to how he had struggled with his need and his desires for years. Now, five decades of illicit fantasies, of wanting to know what it would be like to really kiss her, rode free and wild into the opportunity of the kiss. He felt Malaya playing into it for just a second, thinking it was still a game or a lesson to be taught, but the power of the emotion and passion being unfurled behind his aggression quickly taught her otherwise. For a moment she froze and tried to balk, but then…by some miracle of the blessed Darkness, she went soft and willing beneath his mouth.
But after so much time, soft and willing wasn’t going to cut it for Guin. He had seen too much, felt too much…knew too much. He knew what she hid behind her carefully sensual self—even if she didn’t.
Malaya felt Guin’s hand closing around her face and throat, tilting her with an ungentle tug until he could suddenly start to devour her in deep, drugging kisses. At first she was just overwhelmed and tried to keep up, but then she began to feel what he was doing to her. She had always thought that a truly wildly passionate kiss would hit like a blast of heat, just like any lustful kiss, only stronger. But instead it was a devious, underhanded simplicity that sent a harmless hum of awareness all down the entire length of her body.
Then it exploded. Like a well-laid minefield, her body caught on fire in explosive bursts, starting at their tightly joined mouths and cascading down her throat, chest, breasts, belly, and on all the way to her toes. Now she became sharp to her senses, letting the taste and smell of him start to invade and arouse her. So familiar, the scent of leather and sword polish, but there was more. The undefinable essence that was purely Guin, except this was an entirely different Guin than the one she knew, and so his scent changed appropriately into something dangerous and richly attractive. His tongue tangled hotly with hers, his heartbeat like thunder against her chest, and she could taste the masculine spice of him flushing through her. She swallowed the hot flavor of him and found herself eagerly trading her own in return.
Guin lost all control of himself. He gave no half-measures and held nothing back. He simply immersed himself in the bliss of dropping the reins. She was oh so sweet, so soft and exquisite, the taste of her like ambrosia to his starving senses. Just knowing she was getting her very first taste of him as a true male, a male with the potential to fire her naturally hot blood—it had the ability to arouse him beyond measure. Suddenly the kisses weren’t enough. Who knew how long insanity would rule? The rules could change before he had taken the slightest advantage to taste of his one forbidden fruit.
He broke from her mouth, catching her hands and pinning them down near her shoulders as he swept down to kiss her breastbone in its center. Then like the reverence of touching your tongue to cotton candy for the first time, he touched his to her and felt the glorious melting sweetness invade his senses until he was dying to make a feast of her. He wondered if she realized how profound this was for him, but he pushed the thought aside because it came with ones he did not want intruding on the moment. Guin licked and kissed her voraciously, sliding down to her fit, tight belly. Just before he reached her bejeweled navel he went very still for a moment as his sense of smell alerted him sharply to the exotic scent of Malaya’s arousal.
Arousal. Because of him.
The satisfaction of the thought was fierce and driving. He surged up to look down directly into her eyes, making very certain they were open and equally certain that she was well aware of who it was that she was reacting so strongly to. It was a dangerous thing to do. It risked making her come to her senses. But when he saw the absolute shock and stunned wonder in her eyes as she stared up at him, he realized there was a very clear understanding there. It made him brave enough to speak.
“Malaya,” he whispered so very softly. “Oh, how I crave you, Malaya.”
Finally Malaya saw more than anger and reserve in those dark eyes of his. She saw so stark a need for her that it was mind-numbing and invigorating to her body. So much power behind it! So much…denial.
As he dropped slow, searching kisses on her shoulder and throat, Malaya realized that what he was feeling was not as new for him as it was for her. There was years of repressed urges behind every touch of his mouth and every sultry slide of his tongue. She went wildly electric in response to it, her nipples so tight it hurt every time the smooth leather covering his chest slid tauntingly against them.
Guin abruptly freed one of her hands and rose up to reach for the buckle of his weapons belt. The bulk of it impeded his contact with her, and he didn’t want anything to accidentally hurt her. But in the act of unbuckling the thing, he found her hot pussy up against the back of his working hand and she reacted with a sucked-in breath and a wriggle of her body. Guin couldn’t divest himself of the belt fast enough. Using his teeth, he unlatched and threw aside his arm bracer as well. Then he looked down at her, overwhelmed with the sensation of wanting so many things—things he shouldn’t want, as he had told himself so many times. This exquisite body that had unwittingly tortured and tormented him with its utter perfection, its grace, and its feminine power for
so very long. Now he could smell the pure scent of her. Now she moved in soft silky need beneath him as she waited to see what he would do next.
Why reality chose that instant to strike him, he would never know. How it had even managed to assert itself when his desires were running hot to the contrary, he would never comprehend. But it did so with ringing clarity and a simple, cutting phrase.
You are undeserving of her.
It was the clarion call that had kept him in his proper place for five decades. Why it had fallen silent for these instants he couldn’t guess. He stayed frozen and still where he was above her, trying not to absorb all the input her sweetly stirred body was emanating for him.
“Okay, Laya,” he rasped, his breaths hard with pain as much as with aborted passion. “You made your point.”
Malaya felt him leave as if she’d been suddenly stripped in public. One instant he was there, covering her and radiating his strong heat into her, the next she was barren of him and exposed. How someone so big could move so fast had always eluded her, but even more so now as she scrambled quickly to her knees to see where he had gone. She was in time to see him stalk out of the bath.
Panting for her breath and confused as ever she had been in her life, Malaya tried to understand what had just happened. Not just his unexplained exit, but all of it. She didn’t let herself worry about Guin for the moment. He clearly would not be going very far. But as she dropped her suddenly freezing body into the hot comfort of the bath, she searched for an explanation for the inconceivable concept of responding to the kiss of a man she’d never even considered. Then again, she wouldn’t. He was her bodyguard! They had to live in close quarters constantly and to start something up just because of a sexual chemistry was completely irresponsible. Guin had known that, obviously. He hadn’t given a single clue that he was attracted to her at all. Well, except for…
She thought about that erotic instant in the caverns during their escape near the end of the civil war, and then again to that moment when he had so boldly filled his fingers with her breast. Both times he’d been righteously hot with temper, and this time had started no differently. Malaya flushed as she thought she might have made far more of what she was feeling than he had. But she had seen the nearly desperate desire in his eyes. He had made certain she could see it.
Oh, how I crave you, Malaya.
Even replaying the words in her mind sent an erotic shiver through her until she moaned with the overload of the sensation. The urge to touch her burning, needy skin was so overwhelming, but if Guin returned she didn’t want him to see her. Autoerotic play was the one thing, besides sleeping, she could do without an audience, and she had wanted to keep it that way.
But what of the source of her discomfort? What was he thinking right then? What was he feeling and…what did he plan to do about it? He had left her, so it was clear what he wasn’t going to do. That was good, wasn’t it?
Yes. Things had just gotten a little…a little out of control. He was right. She had tried to make a point, though she wasn’t sure anymore what the point was.
“Light and damnation,” she breathed, running restless hands over her warm face. Who, exactly, was she trying to kid with all of this? There was really only one recourse.
She needed to talk to him.
He’d fucked up.
No, actually, he’d royally fucked up. The embellishment fit perfectly, but he couldn’t find it in himself to laugh at it. What in Light had he been thinking? Guin paced his bedroom, a room he rarely used, in a furious circuit. His hands were on his hips, making him all too aware of where he’d left his weapons and why he’d presumed to take them off in the first place. He stripped off his remaining leather equipment, finding very little use for it in the more secure environs of the palace. But his weapons. No. He never, ever divested himself of those until Malaya was well asleep along with the rest of the palace. And even then the sword lay close to his side and the dagger lived beneath his pillow.
He was hot, his skin damp with sweat, and he knew it had nothing to do with the naturally cool environs of the underground city and everything to do with an incredibly hot female who’d so incidentally given him a painfully thorough erection. On top of it all, his entire being cried out in protest at being so far distant from her. He had spent many hours making sure he was only feet…most times only inches away from her. Even this distance of a room or two away felt unnatural, just as it had felt unnatural those weeks away from her when he had left the palace altogether. If Magnus had not given him a very crucial task that second week, he never would have been able to keep away.
Yet how was he going to step back into her sphere after what he’d just done? He’d shown her too much. He’d bared everything—or just about. His craving for her had been his secret, kept with perfect success for as long as it had existed. And it had probably existed for as long as he had known her. How could he have lost control like that?
Again, it was a bell that could not be unrung. The only thing left for him to do was damage control. Somehow he had to deceive her into thinking it had all been something other than what it was. Guin needed to force things back into his comfort zone. If she tapped into this weakness, Malaya would twist him into knots. To her it would be an amusement. A flirtation. A part of their constant battle of wills. To him it would be torture because he knew nothing would or could ever come of it. Even if she were to take him to her bed, she’d only be slumming for the fun of it or the advantage it would give her over him. She was on track for a noble marriage and a future filled with well-bred babies. And once she was wed, she would be forever out of reach. How could he possibly take so exquisite a taste on his tongue and then never know it again? Worse, to be inches away from her for fifty more years, watching her…
Guin all but choked on the thought, but he forced himself to finish it.
Watching her be loved by another man. Watching her grow round with his babies, and suffering with her as she suffered the pain that would birth them into the world. Or worse, seeing her miserable in a loveless life and watching her faith and her optimistic view of her world crumble away into the dust of unhappiness.
Oh, what he wouldn’t give to be selfish just then. He would walk away and never look back. He would spare himself all of what was to come and find a corner of the world worth hiding in. He could take up work as a mercenary; maybe join the war against the necromancers and human hunters who killed Nightwalkers just for the fun of it or to steal use of their powers. There was a network being formed, made of supernatural Nightwalkers of all breeds, from Lycanthropes to Demons, and being put into place to capture breed renegades and magic-users. He would fit in well in a role like that. Maybe constant hunting and the bloodlust of battle could finally purge him of this demon possessing him.
Except he wasn’t entitled to selfishness.
Because a very long time ago an angel had come to him in the worst moments of his life and had rescued him from an oblivion of crime and death and a drowning in moral ambiguity. She had restored his faith in the future of his own kind just by sitting with him and talking to him. He had never met anyone like her before, and he knew he never would again because she was utterly unique. Even her twin could not match the purity of her faith and the wondrous way she held it above the foulness around her—even through so many years of war. She had never lost faith. Not in her cause, herself, her people, or her gods. And she had never lost faith in him. There was something about Malaya’s powerful faith that made you crave never to disappoint her.
How could he not keep close to her? How could he not protect her when he knew he had the power to do so better than anyone else? To leave her in the hands of others was to sign her death warrant. He believed that with every ounce of his instincts. Malaya might be the precognitive, but this he was sure of just as clearly as if he’d had a vision himself.
He had meant what he’d promised himself, though. He would walk away if she let the Senate choose her husand for her. He could never watch
the one thing he held in his mind as pure and precious succumb to the disappointing realities of the world. Malaya had created her own realities for herself constantly, and it had all turned out so beautifully. If she lost that power, if that strength withered, it would destroy him even as it destroyed her. He’d rather remember her as she was now. Happy, beauteous, flushed with life and…
Flushed because of him.
No! No, that had been a forbidden and stolen instant and it should never have happened. He was better off not knowing what she looked like…smelled like…
Gods! He’d watched others make love to her, hating every brutal instant of it. He’d already seen and heard her at her most passionate. So much so that he could imagine her with perfection in his fantasies on the oh-so-rare occasions that he capitulated to them and allowed himself the pleasure of “what if.” Every sigh, every moan. He knew what each would sound like. He knew her scent. Her sensuality. The only thing he had not known was her flavor. And now he did.
“Stop it,” he hissed aloud to himself.
Think. Think of how to escape this resonating screwup.
“Whatever you did,” Rika hissed at Malaya in a rushed whisper as the Chancellor came out of her bedroom some time later, “you better fix it fast.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“He went into his bedroom and closed the door. I didn’t think he even knew how that door worked, considering I’ve never seen him use it before.” Rika chuckled, not realizing just how serious the situation was because she couldn’t see the storms of emotion on either of her friends’ faces. “You know, he’s only been back a week. Can’t you try not to piss him off for just a little while?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she agreed softly, walking immediately over to the closed bedroom door. She slipped inside quickly, closing it behind her even though Rika’s proximity made it very likely that she would overhear them anyway. She bearded the bear in his cage bravely, watching him turn sharply to face her mid-circuit of the path he was wearing into the flooring.