Nalini Singh - Archangel's Enigma

“I get to have a sword as a weapon. You get bare hands.”

He shrugged. “That’s fair.” What it was, was suicidal on her part. She could have ten swords and he’d still be inside her guard in a heartbeat. “Is that your sword in the corner?”

“How did you see that?” she asked. “It’s in the shadows.”

He didn’t say anything, just watched her until she broke eye contact and walked to pick up the sword she’d propped up neatly against a wall. It was in its scabbard and when she drew it out, he saw it gleamed. Either Galen had drummed it into her to clean her weapons, or this weapon had never actually been used in any kind of serious combat. She probably just used it as part of her routine with the flowing, patient stretches.

He snorted under his breath.

“Ready?” she asked, taking a wide-legged stance across from him, enough distance between them that she probably thought herself safe.

“Yes.”

“In that case, three, two, one!”

Naasir lunged, not holding back his speed or agility. All he had to do was put her on the ground and this ridiculous exercise would be done and he could leave and his mouth would stop watering at the intoxicating scent of her. The air whistled past his eyes, the world so slow in comparison to his speed, the stars blurring together—

“Grr!”

He snarled as he came down on his feet, looking in disbelief at his upper arm. There was a thin line of red across his biceps. Shaking his head, he looked again but it was still there. It healed before his eyes, the wound superficial, but the blood remained behind to mark the spot. “You cut me,” he said to Andromeda.

Heart a racehorse and breath coming hard and fast, Andromeda wondered if she knew what the hell she was doing. She hadn’t meant to challenge him, but he’d been so horribly, unnervingly polite that her mouth had opened and the words had tumbled out. He’d clearly decided he didn’t like her, and for some reason that infuriated her.

Now he was looking at her through narrowed eyes of glowing silver, his hair hanging over his face before he shoved it back. “How did you cut me?” A demand.

She was the one who shrugged this time. “I cheated.”

A long, slow blink. “Cheating’s not allowed.”

“Yes, it is. You’re bigger, faster, and far better trained than I am. If I don’t cheat, we’ll have no fun.”

Another slow blink . . . and she realized he was moving, and she was moving instinctively in response, the two of them circling one another. Going into that space inside her head where she was one with the blade, she reacted on instinct again when he moved, and scored him across the hard ridges of his abdomen. Only he didn’t stop in surprise this time but kept going.

She’d never worked harder with the blade in her life.

He still pinned her to the ground in under three minutes, his body heat on her front a stark intimacy. Knees on either side of her hips and hands gripping her wrists above her head, rendering her sword useless, he leaned down until his breath kissed hers and she could look into those astonishing eyes at a proximity she’d never expected.

They were clear, so clear, and utterly beautiful. The silver glowed in the night, the striations within the irises a darker silver. “You cut me seven-and-a-half times,” he said, his voice holding a gritty, growly undertone.

Chest heaving, she tried to shrug again, as if she wasn’t trapped under an unfriendly predator. “Pretty good for a scholar.”

He moved even closer, until his nose was a bare whisper above hers. “You have secrets,” he said slowly. “You wear another skin, too.”

Andromeda went motionless, the game suddenly dangerous. “No,” she said through a hoarse throat. “I don’t have secrets. I’m exactly what I seem.” At least for her final fifteen days of freedom, fifteen days where the people she respected still believed in her, still trusted her.

“A scholar who wields a sword?”

“Have you never heard of a warrior-scholar?”

He continued to watch her with those clear silver eyes that made her imagine she could see galaxies within. “You have spots on your face.”

“What? It must be dirt from when you took me down.”

Shifting her wrists to one strong hand, he touched the rough-skinned pad of a finger to her nose and her cheeks on either side. “Spots.”

She glared past the shiver that wanted to ripple through her. “Those are freckles!” A sprinkling of them across the bridge of her nose and on the tops of her cheeks that had only become more entrenched with time, until she’d given up all hope of ever pulling off cool elegance.

Ignoring her, the predator holding her captive began to count her “spots.”

“Naasir.”

He looked up, expression suddenly dead serious. “Cutting me after fooling me with your outside skin wasn’t nice. It wasn’t civilized.”

“I didn’t promise to be civilized,” she said, then wanted to clamp her mouth shut. She’d spent most of her immortal lifetime being civilized and well-behaved and not an addict of sensation driven by her base needs.

Naasir snapped his teeth at her.

When she jerked, he laughed and stretched out on top of her, one hand still gripping her wrists, and his warm, masculine scent in her every inhale. “Then I’m not going to be civilized either.”

It was odd. She’d only met him hours earlier, and yet his words made something in her unknot, untwist. As if she’d lost something but managed to win it back again. “I only asked you to behave for a minute ,” she found herself saying when she should’ve been telling him to get off. “You were aggravating me.”

His fingers flexed on her wrists but he didn’t release her. “I wasn’t hurting you,” he said with a scowl.

“No,” she admitted, the words from the letter stark against the landscape of her mind. “I was angry about something else and I yelled at you. I’m sorry.”

Those astonishing eyes held hers again as he closed the distance between them. “I want to lick your skin.”

That skin prickling with something that was very much not fear, she tried to buck him off. Of course she failed. He was significantly heavier. “I can’t breathe.”

“You’re an immortal.”

“My wings are squashed.”

He raised himself off her. “Spread them out.”

She did, easing the strain, but when she tugged at her wrists, he held on tighter and brought his body right back down on top of hers. “Now your wings aren’t squashed anymore and we can talk.”

Given that she could feel his arousal, hard and thick against her abdomen, Andromeda didn’t think it was talking he had in mind. She had the idea that if she gave him a single ounce of encouragement, she’d be naked with him inside her in a matter of seconds. “No,” she whispered, and for the first time in her existence, she felt regret for the choice she’d made.

He tilted his head to the side. “No?”

“I’ve sworn a vow of celibacy. It wasn’t done on a whim, or without thought.” It had been a hundred years in the making. “The vow is part of my honor, part of what makes me Andromeda.” Not Charisemnon’s grandchild. Not Lailah’s daughter. Not just another jaded princess of the court. Andromeda. Scholar and warrior.

A low, rumbling sound in Naasir’s chest, silver eyes burning above her. “Rutting isn’t dishonorable.”

Her cheeks burned from within. “It is for a woman who has vowed not to indulge in it.”

He shifted to rub himself against the juncture of her thighs. Her breath caught, her inner muscles spasming on aching emptiness as the place between her thighs went damp. Nostrils flaring, Naasir leaned in close enough to nuzzle her throat. “You want me.” It was a satisfied purr of sound.