Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(12)

She turned and stalked around him, considering. He pivoted backward in a slow circle that met her pace. He angled his head to match the tilt of hers and came close so that they were nose-to-nose with each other, two predators mature in Power and engaged in a sizing-up showdown.

Unafraid? Yes, he was unafraid, but that was not the emotion she sensed that tugged at her memory. Fascination? Yes, he felt that too, but that was not what she tried so hard to remember.

This gryphon called himself Rune Ainissesthai. Rune for glyph, a sigil that was a stroke on a page, but more than that, rune for mystery, magic. Ainissesthai was old Greek for speaking in riddles. The mysterious magical riddle.

“Rune Ainissesthai,” she whispered. “What is the riddle?”

His expression flared with electric light. Oh, I’ve got your attention now, don’t I, Wyr? She smiled. Did you think everyone had forgotten the meaning of your name?

“You know better than to ask a question like that,” Rune said. His voice had dropped to a low gravelly murmur that prowled across her skin.

“Rune Ainissesthai,” she whispered a second time, and the Power she wielded made the sound of his name reverberate between them like the singing of a Chinese Buddhist bowl. “Why do you come to me?”

“I come to pay my debt,” said Rune, and the cry of the eagle echoed in his reply.

“Rune Ainissesthai,” she whispered for the third time. “Will you do my bidding for the measure of one favor to pay that debt?”

“You know I will,” the gryphon replied, and the growl of the lion was in his voice.

She struck the reverberation between them a single blow with her Power so that it rang like a gong against the stone walls of the great hall, and the magic writ was cast. She smiled. “The bargain has been struck, and answered.”

Now he was bound and he truly had no choice but to do her bidding. You are mine, she said silently to his tall strong form. Mine to do with as I wish. For this moment in time, I own you. And what shall I have you do, you easygoing, proud, insouciant alpha male? What task shall you complete before you take your leave from me and go back to your unending life?

What did someone who was dying do with a rare and extravagant gift such as this?

The smile faded from her lips. The predatory impulses in her darkened and grew invisible fangs. Her dark eyes glittered with a carapace like obsidian glass, and the line of her mouth hardened.

She said, “Kneel.”

She felt his surprise as her command jolted through him.

But then he did a thing that surprised her in return. He raised his eyebrows, gave her that easygoing insouciant grin of his and said, “Okey-dokey.”

With a flourish he went gracefully down on one knee in front of her.

What was this? He was down on the floor, his powerful broad shoulders dipped in subjugation. He even bowed his head. He gave every appearance of submission, and performed flawlessly to the letter of her order, but . . .

Deep in the axis of that fierce remarkable soul, the alpha male still reigned. She circled behind him and stepped close to his broad shoulders to put her lips near his ear. She whispered, “You’re not really kneeling inside.”

He cocked his head to look at her over one shoulder. His reckless gaze laughed at her. He whispered back, “You didn’t order me to do that. It would require an entirely different bargain for me to really kneel to you.”

Caught in the unknown riddle, she asked, “What bargain would that require?”

He gave her a slow smile. “You must give me a kiss.”

The sleek arch of her eyebrows lifted. “Just a kiss?”

“Just that.”

“The bargain is struck,” she said.

“And answered,” he growled.

Carling put a hand onto his shoulder as she prowled to stand in front of him. Then she slid her hands along the warm sun-bronzed skin of his jaw. She tilted his handsome wild face up to hers and he let her. Then she bent to place her cool lips on his hot carved lips.

Her body moved in the impulse to breathe again, and she allowed it. His masculine Power enveloped her, and it was spiced with sensuality and warmth as it caressed her like a sun-filled breeze.

She lifted her head and stared down at him. She narrowed her eyes. She said, “You’re still not really kneeling inside.”

Tap, tap, went her bare foot.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“What else did you expect, Carling?” he replied. “That wasn’t a real kiss.”

THREE

Her eyes narrowed further. “What do you mean, that wasn’t a real kiss?”

Rune drew back a few inches to consider her more closely. She had to know, didn’t she? She was far too old and sophisticated not to. She had, after all, spent her youth in humankind’s earthy past. She must have taken countless lovers. The lion in him bared its teeth and hissed at the thought.

Sparks of temper had begun to flicker in those long almond-shaped Egyptian eyes of hers. Rune widened his own gaze. He was greedy to suck in every detail of this gorgeous deadly woman. He didn’t want to blink and miss a moment.

Somehow Carling managed to make the concepts of beauty and perfection seem mundane. He took in the long glossy dark hair that swung free to her slender waist. It had rich auburn glints in the sun, as though she burned with a deep internal fire. He contemplated the graceful length of her neck, plunging as it did to curvaceous collarbones that spread outward toward shapely shoulders like the wings on a dove. He sensed the ripe fullness of her unbound br**sts moving underneath the loose black caftan, and snap, the shutter in his mind took him back to the river when he had stared at those bare round voluptuous globes, striped with white scars and crowned with dark ni**les standing erotically erect, and when he had looked at her, he had felt a need so stark it had become a physical pain and a spiritual torment.