Stephanie Draven - Poisoned Kisses

Her thighs parted and their eyes locked as he sank all the way into her. She’d done this to comfort him and sate his needs—but it stoked a fire inside her, too. She loved his thickness and the way she stretched to accommodate him. She loved the feel of his muscles as his back arched. She arched, too, to meet him.

He was looking into her as she looked into him; he was inside her just as she was inside him. There was nowhere to hide—and for one magical moment, she was certain that he knew her, that he saw her true face, that he saw her for herself.

But then he closed his eyes.

Gods above and below, she loved the feel of this mortal. The scratch of his beard, the light scrape of it on her cheek that reminded her he was man and she was woman. She loved the rough texture of his scars. How must it feel to have marks that so boldly told the story of his pains right there on the surface of his skin? And she loved his strong arms. Arms long enough to wrap all the way around her. Arms that made her feel as if she were not too wild to fully embrace.

She’d had many lovers before. She’d worshipped the perfect bodies of ancient gods. She’d admired the well-oiled muscles of Olympic athletes throughout the ages. But for some reason, Marco’s body, battle-hardened and scarred as it was, suited her perfectly. He fit with her, and every time he pushed inside her, the sensation of completion was renewed.

She wanted to make him come—fast and hard. She wanted to move her hips in just the way he liked, and make him forget everything else. But as they moved together, it was her arousal that spiraled higher and higher, out of control. The couch scraped against the floor, his chest scraped hers, and it went on and on, as if every stroke exorcised some demon. As if every caress were a confession. She kissed him as they strained together, a kiss broken finally by her own gasping climax. Flickers of light danced beneath her eyelids and she couldn’t believe it had happened so quickly or so intensely. His followed soon after, a groan at the back of his throat. He buried his face against her chest as his body convulsed in orgasm, his legs straining between hers. Beneath him, Kyra lay nothing short of astonished.

Afterward, her body tingled with sensation, every single hair seeming to stand on end. They were quiet, her hands stroking the hair from his damp face as he nuzzled her breasts. It’d been a quick release of tension—and now he seemed to want more. She did, too, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex this tenderly. At least, it’d been tender by Kyra’s standards, and tender wasn’t her way. Somehow, she and Marco had connected. Maybe it was because they were so much alike.

Or maybe it was because she was pretending to be someone else.

The thought was so sobering, so unsettling, that she stopped the trail of his lips down her stomach. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Everything was wrong. What’s more, his bandage had peeled away just enough so that she could see the crudely stitched wound. The threads looked frail and tattered as if the poison was eating them away. What if even a little bit of his blood dripped onto her skin again? Just being this close to him, she was taking her life in her hands, and yet, why did she suddenly fear it was her heart most in jeopardy? “It’s just…”

“You regret it,” he finished for her.

No. She didn’t regret it. And that was the problem. “It’s just—I’m not sure I’m the kind of woman who does this.” What she meant, of course, was that she wasn’t the kind of nymph who did this. She took lovers, certainly. But this encounter with Marco had the potential to be so much more. And that frightened her out of her wits.

As the silence stretched on between them, his shoulders tensed in the firelight. She could see she’d angered him, broken the thread of tenderness between them. When he spoke again, it was guarded. Sarcastic. “What, Ashlynn? Are you afraid I’m not going to respect you in the morning?”

“Maybe,” Kyra said, but that was a lie. She was afraid that, in the end, she’d be just like all those silly, sentimental nymphs who mistook sex for something more, and lost themselves in the bargain. “You wouldn’t be the first man to judge a woman in the morning for doing exactly what you wanted her to do the night before.”

“I’ve had too many one-night stands to judge you,” he said. So he meant this to be the only time. Kyra wasn’t sure why this should’ve bothered her, but it did. Her disappointment must have shown, because he said, “Look, I know I said some unkind things when we broke up…”

In spite of herself, she was desperately curious about how Marco parted from his ex-lover. “Like what?”

“Don’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you remember what I called you. And I’m sorry. You were lonely when I went overseas and you were inexperienced. He took advantage of that. You were an innocent and I blame him not you.”

An innocent? Kyra made a mental note never again to impersonate someone like Ashlynn Brown.

She couldn’t pull it off. In fact, she’d better cut off this conversation quickly. Any trip down memory lane was likely to mess her up. She didn’t share his memories and she wasn’t the woman he was reminiscing about, but she wasn’t sure she could bear for him to realize it so soon after the tender intimacies between them. “Well, we’re different people now.”

“We are. And though I’m sure you don’t like to think of yourself as the kind of girl who gets down and dirty in the middle of the living room…if you ask me, a little naughtiness suits you.”

“So you’re saying that you like me better now than the way I was?”

If only he hadn’t paused to think about it. If only he’d given her any real answer at all. But what he said was, “I’m not sure my opinion matters. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

“Charming.” Kyra tried, and failed, to keep the acid from her tongue. “Is that how you are with your other women? ‘Hey, thanks for last night. Let’s order some pizza!’”

Marco arched a brow. “My other women? “

“Weren’t you just bragging about all your one-night stands?”

His brow arched even higher. “Are you jealous?”

“Should I be?”

“I just take fleeting pleasure where I find it. I don’t deserve much more than that.”

“That’s not true.” Now she knew that he wasn’t an arms dealer for the cash or for the power. He was a crusader; he had the idiotic notion that what he was doing would help people.

She ached a little at the break in contact as he withdrew from the tangle of limbs and couch cushions, but she liked looking at his body in the firelight. He was as hard and scarred as an ancient legionary, with dark hair that trailed down his chest and thinned out on his belly. She wanted to rub her face against it, and her arousal frustrated her. Meanwhile, he found his towel, wrapped it around his waist and padded barefoot, apparently intent on foraging for food. “I’ll cook us something.”

She opened her mouth to stop him, tried to spin some quick lie to explain why the fridge was empty, but she was too late. He threw open the door, then looked at her from across the countertop that divided the living room from the kitchen, incredulous. “Don’t you eat?”

“I told you—I just moved in.”

His eyes narrowed. “You keep saying that, but I don’t see any boxes.”

“They’re still back at my old place,” Kyra quickly lied.

That’s when he flung open the freezer and found the food rations she’d stored when she’d planned to lock him in the dungeon. She hadn’t planned to starve him, after all. “What the hell?”