Jessica Andersen - Nightkeepers

That and the altar. The mirror. The pounding promise of sex.

She slid her hands from beneath his and turned around, and as she did, he moved back a pace but kept his hands on the altar, giving her room but bracketing her with his arms, as though he meant to keep her from escaping. But escape was the last thing on her mind as she hiked herself up onto the altar so they were eye level with each other.

‘‘Leah,’’ he said. Only her name, but with a warning growl in his voice.

She didn’t know if he was warning her not to tease, or not to give in when they both knew it wasn’t just the two of them in the room. There was power, too, the golden glory of it binding them, bringing them together until their lips hovered just a whisper apart, until she could feel the rasp of his harsh breathing as if it were her own, feel her heart thunder in time with his.

Then the distance was gone and their lips touched. Brushed. Clung.

Held.

His mouth fused to hers. Their tongues touched. And something clicked inside her, a feeling of, There you are; where have you been?

It was their first kiss. And yet it wasn’t.

She remembered his taste and feel from her dreams and newly regained memories, but all of those encounters seemed like fantasies, cushioned in the gray-green fog of unreality. Now, though, he was here. This was reality. This was real.

He moved into her, stepping between her legs so they aligned center-to-center, hard to soft, and she felt complete, united, whole for the first time since . . . well, since ever. Leaning into him, she slipped her arms around his waist, then higher, so her breasts pressed against his chest. Deep within her, a poignant ache gathered and grew until it became a compulsion, an almost painful need to bind herself to the man she’d dreamed of, the warrior she’d made love to but barely knew.

She wrapped her legs around him, drawing him close, holding him fast as kiss flowed into kiss. She worked her hands under his shirt and higher, desperate to touch him, to bind herself to him. Groaning, he rocked against her, hips pistoning as he got a hand under her shirt and cupped her breast, shaping her, pleasuring her until she bowed against him and shuddered.

Then he broke the kiss and dropped his forehead to her shoulder, pressing his hot cheek to hers. His chest heaved with deep, gulping breaths, moving them both with a rhythmical surge as he withdrew his hand from her shirt and gripped the edge of the altar on either side of her, his muscles so tight they’d gone to cords beneath her fingers. ‘‘We have to stop.’’

It took a second for the words to penetrate, another for Leah to comprehend. ‘‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’’

‘‘No. I can’t do this. We can’t do this.’’ He pulled away from her and straightened, stepping off the mat and backing to the doorway, so there was a gap separating them.

Irritated—and ridiculously needy, damn him—she dropped down off the altar and stood facing him, hands fisted at her sides. ‘‘News flash, Ace. We’ve already done it at least once. Twice, if unreciprocated oral counts as ‘this’ in your book.’’

‘‘Don’t,’’ he said softly, his face etched with strain. ‘‘Don’t make it less than it was.’’

‘‘Okay, but apparently I made just now into more than it was supposed to be. Want to explain the difference to me?’’ Her volume was climbing, both with embarrassment that he’d turned her down, and with self-directed anger because she knew better, damn it. Hadn’t she warned herself against him only the night before? Hadn’t she decided to get her ass out of there as soon as she had a lock on Zipacna and some sense of what she could do to take him down? She was a walking relationship disaster, and as usual had picked the most complicated guy possible to get interested in. Yet she’d done it again, wrapping herself around him, offering herself to him.

And he’d turned her down.

‘‘It’s—’’

‘‘If the next word out of your mouth is ‘complicated,’ you’d better be ready to race me to the bedroom for the MAC, because so help me, God, I’ll shoot you.’’

He clamped his mouth shut.

‘‘I thought so. Do better. I think I deserve at least that much.’’ She hated that her voice shook, hated that all this mattered way more than it ought to.

He took a long, deep breath, then said, ‘‘There’s a prophecy.’’

‘‘Right. World’s going to end. Got that.’’

But he shook his head, his expression tight. ‘‘The end-time prophecy is something every Mayan knew about. I’m talking about a different set of them, called the Nightkeepers’ prophecies. There were thirteen of them handed down by the god Kauil; they were a way of tracking the progress of the spiritual end date. We’re up to the last one, lucky number thirteen.’’

Leah took it down a notch, realizing this was something more than, It’s not you, it’s me. ‘‘What does it say?’’

‘‘To paraphrase, in the last five years before the zero date, the king will have to perform a great sacrifice in order to prevent the Banol Kax from coming to earth and starting a series of events that will lead to the apocalypse.’’

A touch of cool air tickled across the back of Leah’s neck, bringing gooseflesh. ‘‘What sort of sacrifice? Like human sacrifice? You?’’

He nodded. ‘‘I think so. My father thought so, too. We all figured he’d still be king when the time came, which is why he . . . did what he did. He believed the ‘greatest sacrifice’ meant he’d have to put my mother, sister, and me under the knife. He was trying to save us by making an end run around the thirteenth prophecy.’’

And he led his people into a massacre, Leah thought with a wince. ‘‘So you think . . .’’ She trailed off, making the connection. ‘‘You think the dreams mean we’re supposed to fall in love, and then you kill me.’’

‘‘It’s more than that. I think you were supposed to become a Godkeeper at the solstice, and then we were supposed to fall in love and become a mated Nightkeeper/ Godkeeper pair. That way, when the time comes, I wouldn’t just be killing you.’’

‘‘You’d be killing one of your own gods,’’ Leah said, her lips feeling numb as they shaped the words.

This was crazy talk. It made no sense, didn’t align with anything she’d grown up believing about the way religion worked. Yet there was a terrifying sort of internal logic to it, and the things she’d seen had been too damn real for her to dismiss anything at this point.

‘‘That’s why I sent you away,’’ Strike said, his voice gone raw. ‘‘It’s why I made you forget. Red-Boar said you didn’t have any connection to the heavens. He said you were clean.’’

‘‘Zipacna doesn’t think so,’’ she said, knowing that was why Itchy had taken her prisoner a second time.

‘‘Neither do I. Not anymore.’’

‘‘Which leaves us where?’’ she asked, though she already knew the answer was something along the lines of, ‘‘Up Shit Creek.’’

‘‘I’d send you away if I thought you’d be safe.’’ His expression went hard. ‘‘Since I can’t do that, I think it’d be best if we don’t spend much time alone.’’

Leah lifted her chin. ‘‘You’re assuming that if we have sex, we’ll fall in love. News flash, Ace. My relationships have an automatic end-time of their own: three months from date one. I’ve never made it past that, and the hotter the attraction the shorter it lasts. Given the sizzle, I give us three weeks, tops. So why not just do it and get it out of our systems?’’

He pushed himself away from the door frame so smoothly he was inside her personal space before she realized he’d moved. He stood too close, making her feel crowded, making her feel wanted. ‘‘Because it was more than sex and you know it,’’ he said, his voice a low rasp. ‘‘Because I think we’d be good together, and not just in bed. And most of all, because I. Don’t. Fizzle.’’