Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (103 page)

“What makes you think I’m afraid?”

He laughed softly. “You’re too intelligent not to be.”

She didn’t want to be pleased by the backhanded compliment he hadn’t meant to give. But she was. He could see it in her startled eyes, in the way she tried to hide them by looking away.

She sniffed. “I’m not hiding anything. I have a gun and I know how to use it.”

“So brave.”

“Says the man whose ass I saved.”

He laughed and for a moment she seemed fascinated by the sight and sound of it. Her stare made his muscles tighten all over again. He wanted to touch her. He wanted more than that.

“So that’s it?” she asked in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “You zip in, round up demons, kill them, and fly away home, wherever that is? What does that make you? A hellhound exterminator?”

His smile faded in the face of his true circumstances. “Well, right now I’m an outlaw.”

From her expression, he guessed that she hadn’t yet considered the impact of what he’d done, fighting one of his own to protect her.
Killing
Jared. He could scarcely believe it himself, but Alex had been enraged when Jared had attacked her. His brain had disconnected and all he’d been able to think of was Lilly.
Protecting
Lilly.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh.”

She placed her hand on his chest, palm soft against his bare skin. Could she feel how hard his heart was beating?

“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Why did you take such a risk?”

“I don’t know.”

It was an answer that didn’t satisfy either one of them. She began to pull away and he stopped her, covering her hand with his.

“I couldn’t let…I wanted to keep you safe.”

She heard the truth in his voice. It made the lavender in her eyes turn gray and solemn.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, because clearly something was. “Why did that make you sad?”

She looked away, but Alex turned her face back. Her fake smile made him shake his head.

“I’m not sad,” she said, adding a lie to her ruse. “It’s just…it’s… I haven’t had many protectors in my life. Thank you.”

The words sank deep inside him, a pearl falling to the soft sediments of his soul. He hadn’t had many protectors either. He was glad he’d been one for her.

“You realize that I’m the reason you needed protection, right?” he teased.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t belittle it.”

Her shoulder lifted in a small, meaningless gesture. Except right then, it was filled with meaning. About what he’d done…about what it meant to her…about the current that raced through him whenever she touched him.

He wanted to look into her face. He needed the cues of expression, of eyes to understand this deeply layered conversation. But she’d be the one to see too much. She’d know what it meant, the yearning inside him. The desire to pull her against him and make her his.

The idea of it was crazy. He was not meant for this world or this woman. Creatures of the Beyond didn’t mate like humans. They fornicated—of course they did. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do with Lilly and he knew it.

The thought led him down a dangerous path he shouldn’t tread.

She sighed, as if hearing his thoughts, and stepped away from him. He forced himself to let her go, but he didn’t want to. Silently, she stepped to the table where a box with a red cross on its lid sat.

“How do you feel?” she asked, not looking at him.

He should be grateful that she’d changed the subject, that she’d moved them both to safer ground.

But he wasn’t.

“I feel like I’ve been chewed up by a pack of hellhounds.”

She almost smiled as she reached for a small bottle and shook two capsules out. “Take these and sit down so I can check your bandages.”

“What are they?”

“Roofies.”

“What?”

“Just kidding. Amoxicillin. For infection. I don’t know if you need a rabies shot. Probably it’d be a good idea once the snow clears to find a doctor and get one. Sit.”

He took the pills and sat down at the table so she could change his bandages. He tried not to feel the soft brush of her fingers against his skin, but he’d have had better luck trying not to breathe.

“No bleeding,” she said, golden head bent. “That’s good.”

He was glad she thought so, but it hurt like a bitch.

She worked quietly, pulling off the old bandages, cleaning the wounds with something that stung, before covering them again with clean gauze.

“Who were the men you were with, Alex?” she asked, still not looking at him.

The question was soft. Lilting. She didn’t expect an answer from him. But she hoped. He heard it in the way she rushed the words, her voice so low that he almost missed it.

It was another way to ask who he was, information he knew better than to give her. He’d told her he wasn’t human. He’d told her he wasn’t a man. She should be hiding under the bed instead of teasing him with her feather-light touches and elusive scent. She glanced up and he found himself falling into the blue of her eyes. Eyes that spoke to him, to some different version of him. One he wanted to be.

“Caleb was a friend. Jared, a fellow soldier. I never trusted Jared.”

She dabbed at the cut on his forehead where Jared had slammed the hilt of his machete into Alex’s temple.

“I’m part of an army, Lilly, and I just killed someone on my own side. Others will come looking for me.”

She gave him a somber look. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Jared had issues with humans. Always did. He never missed an opportunity to punish them. I couldn’t let him hurt you, though. Not after you’d saved my life.”

“Do you have issues with humans, Alex?”

He hadn’t seen the question coming and he had no idea how to answer it. Did he? It wasn’t a simple yes or no. Humans had freedoms that he’d never known. Choices he’d never had the chance to make. But did he harbor resentment because of it?

He cleared his throat. “No issues,” he said.

Lilly’s eyes called him a liar, but she didn’t say the word aloud, nor did she put into words any of the questions he saw lurking in the blue depths.

“I just need to be sure I’m gone before they come looking for me. I don’t want you involved any more than you already are.”

He took her hand in his. Her fingers were soft, small in his grasp. It felt overwhelmingly intimate to be touching her like this, but Alex didn’t understand why. Hands shouldn’t be so sensitive, so…personal.

“You can’t talk about what you saw today, Lilly. Not to anyone. Not ever.”

“I understand.”

She held his gaze for a moment, her fingers moving against his. A lump had formed in his throat. Alex swallowed and released her hand with reluctance.

After a moment, Lilly asked, “Will you confess or will they already know how your people died? When they find you, I mean.”

The question was a good one, but he hadn’t decided how to handle it when the time came. They’d been told that as beings of the Beyond, they were under constant surveillance. But Alex had always had doubts.

She took his silence as an answer and met it with another question. She had them stockpiled, it seemed. “So this army you’re in …did you sign up or were you drafted?”

“It’s not a choice. We’re bred to protect the Beyond.”

She didn’t like that answer. Her full lips drew into a flat line.

“We are promised afterlife if we die in glory,” he tacked on, as if that would make the truth of it any better.

She cast him a disparaging glance that told him it didn’t. “But they can’t see you—your people or leaders or whatever you call them,” she said. “They’re not omnipotent, like God?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“So for all they know, you’re down here fighting the good fight. Your two friends will still get afterlife, right? They died in their own kind of glory, fighting for what they believed in.”

She was right. Alex was hazy on the logistics of how such things as the afterlife worked, though. He had a comical vision of a bearded being with a checklist and an inventory of deeds waiting at the gates. No matter how it was written, though, both Caleb and Jared had died doing their duty.

For now, that’s all anyone could know.

He looked at Lilly. “So what are you, a war analyst?”

She flashed a smile. “I’m a marketing advisor for a small health store chain.”

He stared at her for a moment, too surprised to respond. It seemed so ordinary, and Lilly…Lilly was the opposite of ordinary.

“Health food?” he disparaged. “Does that mean you don’t eat meat?”

She shook her head guiltily, adding, “Not veal, though.” Like it was for bonus points.

She smoothed the edges of the last bandage and stood. Alex stood, too. He should move away. And now. Because having her in touching distance seemed to be destroying all of his common sense.

“The longer I stay, the worse it will be,” he said, trying to infuse the words with the power to make him leave.

“Who are you trying to convince, Alex? You or me?”

“You’ve got a smart mouth,” he said. “You know that?”

“It’s a gift.”

A gift. One he wanted. She stared at him with those lavender-blue eyes and all he could think of was tasting that smart mouth. One kiss, that would be enough, he told himself.

But she met him halfway as he leaned closer and he knew it was a lie.

Slowly, Alex kissed her. He’d meant to be quick. A small sample and then walk away. But lips and breath and tongue combined to shut down his brain. Her taste was like a drug that spread rapidly through his system. Suddenly, not touching her everywhere seemed like the worst choice he could make.

He pulled back and stared into her eyes. She looked startled and aroused, wary but very willing. She listed forward, her face turned up, her hands warm on his bare chest and Alex couldn’t have denied what he wanted any more than he could turn back time.

In an instant, the decision was made.

Had been since he’d first held her in the woods. Maybe everything he’d done since that moment had been a way to get to here. With her.

His forehead touched hers, noses aligned as he stilled, letting her breath become his, giving it back with his own. So intimate, the sharing. Exotic, unexpected, addicting. Thunder and lightning that struck at ancestral instincts that he didn’t know he possessed. She pressed against him, his briefs a thin barrier to the hardness straining to be released. Every part of him tuned in to her actions, reactions, the way they spurred his own.

What did it mean that he’d brought his hands to her face and found skin so soft he had to brush his lips over it? Press his nose into its sweetness? What did it say that he thought he could stand there and kiss her for hours and never grow tired of the way she felt, the way she tasted?

She seemed to be seeking something. A touch? A word? He wanted to give it to her, whatever it was, and the thought pulled him back. Her eyes glittered bright blue and diamond-like from between her thick lashes. Her hair was messed up, her cheeks chilled, but she felt like a flame in his hands. Fluid. Dangerous.

Make her choose you…

The thought felt ancient, a rumbling drum down a sacred mountain. It urged him to coax, to crowd, to
claim
.

He tried to tell himself he didn’t want that. But his body had ceased to listen to his brain.

He kissed her while her breath was shallow. Her breast lifted in welcome, her hands in his hair, on his throat. His chest felt tight. Locked up with sensation. He’d forgotten how to breathe at all.

Where was his survival instinct? Lost in the sexual haze that drove him?

Nothing made sense but the way she felt against his skin. Her arms went around his neck and she arched closer.

No, this would be nothing like fornication.

He walked her to the bedroom, his lips on hers, holding her so close that his bare thigh brushed her damp heat with each step. The mattress bumped the backs of her legs and Lilly pulled him down on top of her.

He made a sound deep in his throat that was both primal and vulnerable at once. It exposed the churn of his unexpected emotions. Lilly met his eyes and for a moment indecision gleamed in the breathtaking blue of her gaze. He shook his head, needing to banish it.

She wanted him and he wanted her. There was no room for indecision.

It seemed she heard him and,
hallelujah
, she agreed. She raised her arms so he could pull off her shirt and then wrapped them back around his shoulders while he kissed his way to the white bra that held her soft breasts. He unfastened it and cupped them in his hands while he took her mouth again in a kiss intent on stealing her will to resist. He had only a short time here. A day, maybe two, if he was lucky. He’d dreaded this journey. Now he didn’t want it to end.

“Alex,” she breathed against his mouth.

“Don’t say no,” he breathed back. “Please, don’t say no.”

She laughed. “I don’t think I know that word anymore.”

Relief made him dizzy, desire made him rush when he wanted to linger. He tugged off her pants, hooking her flowered panties with his thumbs and drawing them over her silky legs. In seconds, he was stripped as well.

For a moment, he could only stare at her. She was naked and perfect in every way imaginable. The winter light turned her skin to pearl and caressed the enticing curves and dips. Her blonde hair spilled over the pillow. She was pink in places that seduced him. She shocked his senses and addled his brain until the only thing Alex knew for certain was that whatever he did next, he needed to make sure she’d want him to do it again.

Her arms were open—open for
him
. His heart raced as he sank into her heat. Sank into her body. She didn’t look away. Neither did he—not even when it felt like she might be able to see into his soul.

Tomorrow he’d be gone, but right now he was here, on fire. He felt consumed by her lavender-blue eyes and that smart mouth he’d never tire of.

He felt powerful, braced above her, skin to skin, chests moving fast, hearts moving faster. He felt defenseless, turned inside out. He wanted to slow down, but her hands urged him on, her knees rising to frame his hips, her mouth restless beneath his. Nothing else mattered.