Kinked (Elder Races, #6)(24)

She shifted the hand from his throat to grip the back of his head.

He knocked her hand away and snarled against her lips, “Don’t touch me.”

Her eyes flashed. She bit his lip hard, and he reared his head back. A thin, warm trickle tickled his skin. She’d drawn blood.

“What’s the matter with me touching you?” she asked. Her gaze turned challenging. “Do you like it too much?”

She was too accurate. She saw too much.

She was a demon, Lucy Ricardo on crack.

“Hate sex,” he said. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.

Get it out of his system. Exorcise her from his mind and body.

Fuck yeah.

“You want it,” she said.

He became aware of what they were doing. She had wrapped those long legs of hers around his waist so that their pelvises aligned through the layers of their clothing. She had wrapped her Power around him too, and it felt hot and keen like a slicing, summer wind. They were rocking together in a pagan rhythm that echoed the coursing in his blood. He had palmed one of her breasts, gripping the slight, high mound through her sweater.

His eyes narrowed. “You want it too.”

Her expression mocked him. “Don’t let it go to your head. Just your penis.”

He almost laughed, but the verbal sparring had brought his thinking back online and he remembered his rage instead. He thrust away from her with a muttered curse. Her legs loosened from around his waist, and he rolled to his feet.

Aryal stood too, shaking off the snow from her back and stamping her boots. He watched as she walked over to a clean patch of snow and scooped a little into her hands. She gritted her teeth as she washed the blood from her fingers. The cuts were already closed, but they looked angry and red, and she moved her hands like they pained her.

Served her right. Driving her talons through a metal door? He shook his head and strangled the impulse to be impressed, as he swiped at his knees, knocking snow off too. Some had melted, and his jeans had two wet patches that felt cold and clammy. She would have wet patches all down her back.

Then he anchored his hands on his hips. Instead of murdering her, he had determined to actually try to have things out with her once and for all, but by gods, she didn’t make anything easy.

“I’m back to my original question,” he growled.

“Are you?” The glance she gave him was full of indifference. “That’s probably not very pleasant.”

“What the f*ck? Seriously, just answer me. You owe me that. For so long you have been riding my ass every which way you could. When I finally say screw it and tell you what you’ve been angling to hear all this time, the only response you’ve got is to say, ‘meh, don’t care.’ All of this is after making so much racket about me being a career criminal. Believe me, I’m used to you being crazy, but that has a disconnect that makes no sense even for you.”

“Not at all,” she said. She finished cleaning her hands, shook off the snow and turned to face him, mirroring his stance. The thing was, when he looked into her eyes, the whack-job harpy appeared to be quite lucid. At the moment she looked amused again. “You being a criminal—that was important, because that was how I was going to trap you. I don’t actually care that you broke the law, Quentin. I don’t actually care much about the law, period.”

He raised his eyebrows skeptically. “You have a funny way of showing it.”

She twitched her shoulders, as if shaking off an irritating fly. “What I care about is whether or not you have endangered the Wyr demesne. Smuggling some high-dollar luxury items? So we didn’t get some tax revenue we should have gotten. Big f*cking deal. If you go after Dragos—if you do anything to actively try to hurt any of the people I care about—that’s when I will come after you, and I won’t stop until I hurt you bad, or you end up dead, or maybe even both of those things. That’s my bottom line. It’s really quite simple.”

He spun away from her sharply to stare out over the abandoned area without really seeing it, his explosive rage easing back down to a simmer. One way or another, it always came back to Dragos. She would hate to know what he had done last year, and he had no intention of telling her.

“Why Dragos?” he murmured, almost to himself. “He and the Wyr demesne are two different things. Dragos could die and the demesne would go on.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m speaking theoretically.”

“Some form of the demesne would go on,” she said. She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same. And it wouldn’t be as strong. I will never forget what Dragos did when he united the Wyr. No one else could have done it. I’m well aware that you don’t like him, but whatever else you may say, no one else can do the job he does. He’s got the strength, the ambition and ruthlessness, and he’s got the financial acumen. Forcefulness and prosperity. That’s a hell of a combination. Hell, you were there this morning too. We’re two of the best Wyr fighters in the world, and he stomped our asses.”

That he had.

Somehow they had managed to move away from the craziness, the violence and the sex, and they were almost having a rational conversation. Quentin wasn’t sure what to make of it, except he was a long way from trusting it, or her. He rubbed his aching jaw where she had punched him and laughed under his breath.