Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(63)
Dag had contributed the ever-so-uplifting suggestion of either the dinner or the keynote being merely a decoy. The Hierophant and other nocturnis would never enter the room, but would lure the attendees inside, seal the space, and then set the whole thing on fire. Demons, apparently, found souls equally appetizing after a little charbroiling.
Every day, Kylie kept the theories in mind as she dug deeper and spied harder, trying to sift through metric tons of data for the few little kernels of truth that might or might not be buried in the drek. It became the kind of mind-numbing, backbreaking work that she’d always sworn to avoid, the very idea of which had made her devote all her free time to her own interests and eventually drop out of college so she would never have to do the grunt work.
The fact that she’d taken this all on not only voluntarily but for free made her an extremely grumpy Koyote. More often than not, Dag turned out to be the thing that dragged her out of her moods and made her remember that grump was not her natural default setting.
Feeling the tension building to critical mass one Thursday afternoon, Kylie pushed away from her computer and went in search of a distraction. These days, nothing proved more distracting to her than descending the stairs to her basement and watching Dag swing giant pieces of medieval-looking weaponry around his sexy head.
When he practiced in his human form—shirtless, of course—was her favorite, because she wasn’t stupid, and hello that was a pretty sight; but oddly enough, she found watching him train in his natural form equally compelling. It might not make her fantasize about sex the same way (no way was anyone that big getting near her with what she knew darned well was proportionally sized genitalia), but his lethal grace and immense power still left her in awe.
Deciding it would be unbecoming to have drool already drying on her chin when she got downstairs, she forced herself to think of work on the short trip to the basement. Fat lot of good it did her, because her dry mouth lasted less than five seconds.
Dag had already stripped off his shirt and worked up a fine sheen of sweat when he appeared in her line of sight. Sucking in a breath, Kylie let her knees buckle the way they wanted to and plunked her tokhes down on the bottom of the stairs to watch him train.
His muscles glistened under the fluorescent lights as he flexed and stretched and spun in an intricately choreographed dance of battle. His lean hands wrapped around the shaft of his favored weapon, a massive war hammer Kylie had been unable to move, let alone lift, when she’d curiously touched it.
Unlike other hammer weapons she had seen (yes, she had Googled the things after her first glimpse of Dag in action with one), this one didn’t look like an ice axe with one blunted end. In fact it seemed to have more in common with the type of weapon Thor carried in those superhero movies. Its huge, heavy head was bigger than both Dag’s fists put together, and instead of one end tapering to a point, this weapon saved its spearing for the end of its long handle. Kylie had seen Dag send the head swinging through the air with lethal force and immediately follow with a graceful twirl that had him burying the end of the handle in some imagined foe’s black heart.
She had to admit, it might have made her panties a little wet. Did that make her a bad person?
Now she watched the Guardian move through his paces in a warm-up routine he said helped to calm and focus him before his real training began. To Kylie, it looked like the katas she’d seen in movies and documentaries about the martial arts. Only, you know, with more giant iron weaponry.
When Dag finished his warm-up, he set the hammer head on the floor at his feet and turned to look at her, his expression intent and unexpectedly … hungry. She felt her eyes go wide.
“Um, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she offered, trying to keep the squeak out of her voice. “I just needed a break. From the screens. You know. I, uh, I can go if I’m disturbing you.”
She couldn’t call his expression a smile, but his face shifted and his mouth eased at the corners, while a slightly softer light entered his eyes. Right alongside the glint of lust.
Ei! Ei! He’d already pounced on her once this morning, before she even got out of bed. Could he really think either of them had the energy for another round? Had he never heard of chafing?
She squirmed against the hard wooden stair tread, realized what she was doing, and bounced to her feet. “Right. I’ll just, uh, let you get back to it.”
He was on her before she could turn, closing the distance between them with a speed that only proved how inhuman he really was underneath all that yummy human muscle. His hand closed over hers and tugged her toward him. Standing on the bottom of the stairs, she didn’t have to crane her neck, but she still had to look up to meet his gaze.
“You have no need to hurry away, little one,” he rumbled in the voice she had come to think of as the big sexy. Ever since she slipped up and told him it made her shiver, he’d begun throwing it around with shameless regularity. “I have completed my warm-up, as you call it.” He leaned down to nibble on her shoulder. “Should I show you how warm I am?”
She wasn’t sure her heart could take it. She lifted a hand, intending to push him away. After all, she hadn’t come down here for this. No, really, she hadn’t. But her fingers ended up smoothing over his hot, damp skin of their own volition. Darned things could no longer be trusted. Traitors.
“I really don’t think that’s—ah!—necessary,” she mumbled, gasping when he closed his teeth gently over the tendon in her throat and swiping her skin with the flat of his tongue. “I’m fine.”