Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)(37)
“Well?” Yael asked me, his eyes drilling into mine with a scary amount of force. “Do you have several good reasons?”
Aros and Siret were pressing in, moving until their body heat warmed along both of my sides—but they weren’t touching me. They weren’t dragging me into their arms in relief. They were waiting for my reply; waiting to find out whether they needed to attack Cyrus or not. Someone really needed to teach them that attacking every person who wronged them wasn’t the best way to deal with conflict. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to teach them anything, because I seemed to be adopting a similar approach. Hard surfaces wronged me all the time, and I still attacked them at least once every sun-cycle.
“As tempting as it is to have everyone fight over me for a few clicks,” I started sarcastically—interrupted by Siret’s soft snort beside me. “He helped to get me here. And tried to help keep me alive.”
“Harder than it sounds,” Cyrus muttered from behind me.
“Don’t talk like you know her,” Coen snapped, his eyes growing cold and flicking over my shoulder.
“I know she’s a pain in the ass,” Cyrus snapped back, his tone growing impatient. “And now I’ve delivered her safe and sound. Mostly dressed. I would say that I have fulfilled my end of the deal.”
I knew that he had disappeared again because Rome stopped his heavy-breathing exercises and started swearing instead, while Yael and Coen exchanged suspicious glances.
“What deal?” Aros asked me, his arm snaking around my middle.
He pulled me into his chest just as Siret reached over, his hand grabbing onto my other side, forming a cross over my stomach as he started to pull me away from Aros. Yael stepped in closer, and I felt the air brush across the back of my neck. Rome.
They were all starting to close in, but there was only one of me, and the fingers gripping either side of my waist were already starting to dig in stubbornly. I would be a mess of bruises if I managed to survive the mess of a hug that was threatening to happen. I twisted my body to the right, dislodging the hold that Siret had of me, before ducking out of Aros’s arms and quickly skipping off to the side.
“One at a time?” I suggested lamely, holding my hands out as though I could caution them all to stay back with the force of my bare palms. “It took a lot of effort to get here in one piece. I’d like to stay in one piece.”
Coen rolled his eyes up to the sky, and Siret laughed. The others wore blank expressions, though there was a twitch in Rome’s—a twitch that bordered on frustration.
“We separate for a few sun-cycles and she’s already back to being scared of us,” Rome noted, the words grunted out.
I glared at him and stopped backing away, my hands falling back to my sides. His bright green eyes seemed to have lightened, the sunlight slashing over his features. For half a moment, the breath fled my body, and I turned away from him in a bid to get it back. Aros was beside him, so I focussed there, until his golden eyes began to narrow in challenge, and my heart started to beat too fast. I diverted my attention to Siret, who seemed to have forgotten that he was finding me funny, because all the humour had been wiped out of him. His hair was a mess, and he pushed the mess of golden-black strands from his forehead, watching me so intently that my reaction to them grew even worse. My palms started to sweat. I turned to Yael almost desperately, but he had taken on the amusement that Siret had lost: his mouth was turned up at the corners, his eyes darkening as he watched me. It was almost lazy, the knowing in his expression. I could have sworn that he knew about the breath that rattled in the back of my throat, and he liked it that way.
“That’s enough,” Coen said calmly, drawing my eyes to him.
His chest was suddenly right in front of my face, and his hands were at my hips, his fingers tightening around me until I could feel the bite of his grip as he pulled me up and into his body. My feet couldn’t reach the ground anymore, so I wrapped my legs around his waist and quickly circled my arms around his neck. He smelled clean and warm and not at all like he had been kept as a prisoner in the sky for however many sun-cycles they had been up there. I lowered my head onto his shoulder, breathing him in, and I could have sworn that he took a deep breath as well. His hand tangled in my hair, bunching it up to where he had tucked his face into the crook of my neck, and I felt the pull of his breath all through his body. He released it on a soft groan, his other hand tightening where it still gripped my hip, and then I was being pulled away.
The disentanglement of limbs was a confused, hazy process. It almost seemed to happen in slow-motion, with Coen’s eyes opening and connecting with mine just as I was turned and pressed to another body. I knew from the smell that it was Aros, and while it shouldn’t have been so easy to turn my attention from one of them to the other, as soon as he pulled me in, my head was full of him, and only him. His hands were so warm I could feel the burn of him against my skin, making me suddenly painfully aware that I was half-naked, once again. He also seemed to be painfully aware, because he made a sound as soon as I was flush against him, and he captured my hands before I could return his hug. He passed me off to Yael by the wrists, his jaw clenched as he watched me go, and suddenly I was crushed in a fierce, breath-stealing hug.
“I’m so happy you’re safe and back with us again, Willa-toy.” The words were murmured into my shoulder, his arms banded right across my back, almost bending my body into him. “Right where you belong.”