Kinked (Elder Races #6)(23)

“Bah,” she said in disgust. “How pathetic.”

All that obsession, all that work. For what?

She forced her stiff fingers to open and wiggled them out of the holes her talons had torn into the door. Letting go of his wrists as she backed away, she shook out her aching hands and inspected the cuts on her fingers. They stung, but they weren’t too bad. They would heal soon enough.

Quentin pushed away from the metal door immediately and didn’t stop moving until he was several yards away. All the time he stared at her with narrowed eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s your whole reaction—‘how pathetic’?”

She gestured impatiently. “I don’t care about any of that shit.”

Hands on his hips, he angled his head, the perfect image of a man who had been pushed too far. In a very quiet tone of voice, he said, “You. Don’t. Care.”

Was it something she said? She curled a nostril at him. “No, I don’t.”

He detonated.

SIX

Quentin’s wrath took him outside of his body until he felt as if he hovered in the open area, an invisible spirit looking down at the two figures from above.

He roared, “What the f**k do you mean you don’t care? What have the last two hellish years been for, IF YOU DON’T FUCKING CARE?

Aryal stared at him as if he were a lunatic. “Well, I didn’t know what you’d done, did I? You’re a dangerous man. You proved that when you became a sentinel. I knew you did something, but I didn’t know you did just that.” She threw out her hands as she spoke, making a throwaway gesture. “I can’t believe I wasted all that investigation time on a petty thief.”

He was airborne before she had finished speaking the last words. In one giant leap, he was on her, his hands fastened around her throat again. The flying tackle knocked her flat on her back on a snowy patch of pavement. He sprawled on top of her, instinctively shifting so that he trapped her with the weight of his body.

He had never felt this way before, about anything or anyone. Someone was growling. Belatedly he realized that someone was him. He pounded her head on the pavement. “All. That. Time. All. That. Time.”

He was vaguely aware that she had grabbed him by the throat too, the tips of her talons poised at his jugular. He should probably care about that.

She said in a choked voice, “In retrospect, we should have talked about this while I still had you pinned.”

“You would make a paciflstic saint homicidal,” he panted.

She burst out laughing.

He was strangling her. And she laughed.

Incredulity wormed its way into his rage-soaked brain. He stared down at her.

Her angular face was suffused with color, those stormy gray eyes dancing. Her black hair spread out in a sulfurous fan, gleaming dark against the white snow. She didn’t care that his tightening fingers cut off her air supply any more than he cared that her hand was poised to tear out his throat.

His gaze focused on her mouth. She had a kind of strong femininity that was completely unlike the bright artifice and colors that so many modern women employed. No makeup, no jewelry, no fancy stuff done to her hair, and no floaty, flouncy clothes. Nothing about her looks took after conventional beauty, but her mouth was exquisitely formed, the bold lines of her lips softened by generous, curving flesh.

We all recognize something of our own wildness in you. Who had said that? Grym. Her lover.

“You and Grym can’t be mates,” he growled. “Someone would have said something if you were.” She would have been much more stressed at the thought of a month’s banishment from New York. Mates did not thrive well without each other.

If anything, she laughed harder. “You’re still an idiot.”

He had to do something to shut her up, or he really was going to kill her. The pure, hot flame of his fury shifted. The extreme emotion had torn him wide open, and a maelstrom of sexual aggression screamed in. The muscles in his body felt paper-thin, barely able to contain the emotion.

Shifting his hands to fist them in the thick, silken hair at the back of her head, he lunged down to conquer her reckless, anarchistic mouth.

He felt the surprise jolt through her body as his lips locked over hers. She lay flat underneath him where she belonged, and he didn’t coax, tease or entice as he would have with any other woman. He took. Breathing heavily, he forced her mouth open and plunged deep inside with his hardened tongue. His body, his mind, were all on fire. Dimly, a small part of him, the cool intellectual part that wasn’t wholly driven by his internal whip, grew a little thoughtful about his lack of control.

Aryal growled, a husky wild note that shuddered over his skin and went straight for his cock, and she kissed him back savagely. They ate at each other as if they were still fighting.

Their surroundings could hardly be any worse. It was chill, damp, and they were sprawled on the hard pavement and out in the open. Anyone could come along and see them at any time.

None of it mattered. Images ran through his mind like molten lava. He wanted to flip her over, get her in a head-lock and hold her there, strip down her jeans and take her in the ass.

Hard and rough, baby. No holds barred, no ritualized courtesy and no safe word, just pure animal rut. He wanted to dominate the shit out of her and make her scream while she lost everything to her own climax.

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