Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(71)

For a moment he balanced on the knife edge between a passionate affair and mating. He clenched his arms around her and shook with the conflicting forces inside of him. He felt like he had slammed into some kind of crisis and he was being torn apart inside. Then somehow he managed to yank himself back from that final place.

I cannot mate with you, Rune thought as he kissed her temple and cradled her delicious, addicting body against his. I like you so terribly much, so much more than I ever thought I would, and I am even growing to love you, but I cannot throw my life away on something that cannot last, that has nowhere to go.

She sighed and leaned her face against him, and he steeled his still racing heart.

I cannot, darling, because you would never need me as much as I would need you. Your desire is beyond lovely, but it isn’t enough. I need to be needed. And I cannot become a supplicant to that kind of inequity and hope to survive.

Several minutes later, Rune let go of her to tuck himself back in his jeans and stand. Unself-conscious in her nudity, Carling curled like a cat on the floor and watched him. He prowled into a bedroom and returned with a complimentary hotel robe, which he handed to her. She sat, dragged it on and belted it.

Rune watched her with a moody expression but kept prowling restlessly around the room. She studied him thoughtfully. It was an interesting reaction to . . . well, to what she thought of as mind-blowing sex.

If she recalled right, and it had in fact been quite a long while, most men yawned, rolled over and went to sleep. Or they ran away. But what had just happened—both here on the floor and before, in the lobby—was beyond anything she had ever known. Since Rune was neither running away nor sleeping, she wasn’t actually sure she had done things right. She knew at the most mundane of times she got a bit too fierce for most people, and nothing of what had just happened between her and Rune could be called mundane.

And then something had happened to him, something profound and disturbing. His laughter had died away, and a strange conflict had raged through him. He was a man of intense emotion anyway, and both the intensity and the emotion were increasing, along with the flare-ups of aggression. Sometimes he looked at her and felt torn, and for the first time in a long time she regretted that age had turned her into a succubus, because no woman wanted to know her lover felt such things when he looked at her.

Maybe she should ask him what was wrong. Maybe she should tell him to go away.

Maybe the wisest thing she could do was wait, to see if he would tell her what he was feeling in his own time.

She rubbed her forehead and turned away to hide any sign of what she was thinking. Insecurity was vulnerability, even more so than desire, and the moon was no longer complicit in hiding her secrets. Unkind daylight exposed everything it touched, and the shy mist outside was burning away in the sun’s immolating light.

She looked around to take stock of her immediate life. “So much to do,” she muttered. “So little time.”

Didn’t that have a wicked ring of truth to it.

Outside the living room was a filigreed wrought-iron terrace, the city’s skyline clearly visible against a bright blue sky. The suite was elegantly decorated in muted gold and cream, offset with a blue couch. While the furniture was modern, the claw-foot design to the legs and the brocade cloth gave it a hint of old-world charm. A vase of fresh-cut flowers adorned a nearby dining table.

While pretty, the suite did not have the most durable of design themes. The angle of her mouth twisted as she remembered how she, her entourage and Tiago had trashed the Regent Hotel in Chicago. Perhaps the Fairmont would fare better.

She picked up the shreds of her caftan. There wasn’t even enough intact material to tie together in a temporary covering like the last one. She sighed, tossed it aside, and went to the couch where Rune had tossed their bags.

Rune stopped pacing. Sensing his scrutiny that was as intense as a physical touch, she kept her face averted. She hadn’t thought to stuff any clothes into her leather bag along with the journals, sketches and other items. She should have at least grabbed a change of clothes when she was at home, and now she had no personal servant to think of such matters. At least she’d had the forethought to tell them to send over some of her things. She pulled out Rune’s duffle.

“I have nothing to wear until Rufio sends my clothes over,” she said. “Literally nothing. We have things to do. We have phone calls to make, a medusa to consult, and I have a Djinn to summon, and God only knows what else we’ll have to do after that or where we’ll have to go.”

She jerked open his duffle bag and started to rummage through the contents. She pulled out a Ziploc bag filled with several green packets. She peered through the plastic. Wrigley’s chewing gum, spearmint flavored. She tossed the bag of gum onto the couch, reached into the duffle and dug out a book. Stephen King’s Christine. She threw that on the couch as well. What did he have in this bag that made it weigh so much?

Suddenly the wide expanse of his bare chest was in front of her. She tried not to notice or care, but with one thing and another, she hadn’t had enough time to give that bare chest the kind of close, leisurely attention she really wanted to. She kept her head lowered as her gaze wandered over the broad expanse of his muscled pectorals. His suntanned skin was a warn inviting brown, his darker flat ni**les surrounded with the crisp hair that sprinkled the rest of his chest and arrowed down that long, ripped torso to disappear into the top of his zipped but still unfastened jeans. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. She knew how warm his body was, and she was beginning to crave it like she craved the vivid warmth of a fire.