Drowning in Fire (23 page)

That was the way it was with him. Griffin, the unmovable Ofarian leader with the iron gate pulled down over his life, who’d been frenzied and borderline harsh when they’d fucked in exactly the way she’d demanded, was the very same Griffin who could smooth his hands down her skin in the way he touched the mist right now.

For a brief moment in time,
she
had been his element.

No matter how strongly she told herself to look away from him, she couldn’t. That lack of control took large bites out of her concentration.

“All right,” he said, pulling back his hand and letting the mist close. He removed his pack and vest and carefully set them at his feet, but did not sit. “I can use the waterfall to power some of the magic while we take a break. Won’t drain as much energy from me.”

With a simple Ofarian word, the mist veil arched up to merge with the waterfall. It domed outward to encase the tumbling water and the wet rock ledge on which they stood.

Keko stared at him and his beautiful magic like an idiot. A weird, unwelcome emotion bubbled up from inside her, and it had nothing to do with fire.

She couldn’t believe that the two of them were standing alone together near a hidden Hawaiian waterfall. She couldn’t believe that Griffin Aames had come here specifically to keep her from doing what she most wanted to do, but then had sworn on his beloved stars to give her information to help her move forward. He was far too beautiful and far too frustrating for her own good. And even though she desperately wanted to, she still shouldn’t trust him.

Mighty Queen, this was all so fucking confusing. But nothing more so than the fact that she still wanted him.

She remembered the day he’d stalked into the garage in Colorado, how suddenly and powerfully he had made her
feel
again after three years apart. How she’d tried so hard to shove her want and need aside, to project an air of steel toughness, and what the aftermath of that rejection had made her do.

This man was like war to her: dangerous and exciting, strong and deadly. He carried emotion on his back like a weapon, hitting her with blow after blow. Sentiment weakened her, weakened all Chimerans. She couldn’t afford that. Not now.

With a nod to the shallow pool frothing at the base of the waterfall, she said, “You mind if I take a quick dip? I think it’ll wake me up.”

Something shifted in his expression, and she recognized it for the desire inside herself that she was really shitty at hiding. She’d never been one for pretending, for covering things up. In the Chimeran valley you said and did what you wanted, and the outcome of those words or actions made you what you were.

But Griffin . . . Griffin threw everything out of whack.

Wanting or needing to fuck was one thing. Carrying around a soul-deep passion, a severe longing, for another person—and not just their body—was so foreign to her. By the look on his face, maybe it was strange to him as well.

He was pretending, too.

She flicked open the snap on her frayed jean shorts. Griffin’s eyes dropped to the motion, his jaw tightening.

“I still can’t be too far away from you to keep up the spell,” he said.

“Then sit right there on the edge of the pool. Turn your back if you want. Or don’t.”

She let her shorts drop. Griffin’s expression turned pained, his eyes squeezing shut as he turned around. “I know what you’re doing.”

“You’re a smart man. I’m sure you do.” She pulled off her bloody and tattered tank top no longer remotely resembling white, then reached over her shoulder to rip off the bandage.

Naked, she stepped down into the pool and sank into it, surrounding herself with his element. Loving the coolness of the water as it lapped against her hot, hot skin.

“I’m in,” she said, lowering herself enough for the water to make a wet line across the tops of her breasts. “You can turn around now.”

He didn’t.

ELEVEN

Conflicting thoughts battled inside her head.

I want you.

I doubt you.

Go home.

Stay.

Turn around and watch me.

To drown them out, she threw water over her shoulders and dragged it down her arms, scrubbing off the dirt and sweat, making her fingertips hurt.

Griffin sat cross-legged, facing away from her, on the lip of the rock. His wide back heaved with a sigh. The damp black T-shirt pulled tightly across his torso, and she could see nearly every muscle delineated underneath.

“It bothered you,” she said, taking a chance with this topic of conversation, “to find me in that garage naked.”

His dark head dragged slowly back and forth. “You have no idea.”

“Because everyone could see me?” And here’s where she took an even greater chance: “Or because you still wanted me?”

Another sigh. “Both.”

“For a long time, I thought it was hate.”

“No.” A quick response. “Not hate. Never hate. Confusion, though. Confusion over why you were there, why you were being so hostile to me when I had no idea what was going on.” He barked out a cold laugh. “And a hell of a lot of frustration. Because you’d never left my mind in three years. Because I never expected to see you again, and suddenly there you were. Captive. Taken by one of my own behind my back. Naked and angry and all up in my face, exactly how I remembered you. I gave you my coat because I couldn’t stand looking at you. You were too much for me, for my senses, after all that time away. You instantly kick-started everything back into high gear, the way it once was. For me at least.”

Keko hadn’t realized she’d stopped washing until he finished, completely frozen by his words. When her hands resumed movement over her body, they worked slowly, as though pushing through mud.

He turned his head, giving her his profile. “And you?”

Her arm paused over her chest as she considered how to answer. “I felt vindicated at first. Seeing you proved I was right about you and your people.” She scoffed at herself. “At least in my own head, for a time. I remember being so mad at how good you looked, how you never took your eyes off me, how you made me put on the coat like you owned me or something.”

“But you did it. You put it on.”

“Because I thought that if I did, you’d continue to think you had power over me, when really it was me trying to turn the tables. And because”—
oh boy
—“for the first time ever I was aware of other people looking at me, and I liked your eyes on me the best. Yours were the only ones I wanted, even after the way we’d ended, and that realization made me insane. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to react.”

Slowly, gracefully, he leaned back on his hands, his triceps and lats making all sorts of gorgeous waves under the thin layer of the T-shirt. The mist above rained down sparkles in his nearly black hair.

“This is the first time we’ve talked about it,” he said. “I didn’t think we ever would.”

Beneath the water she rubbed at her legs and feet, because she didn’t know what else to do or say.

“So I understand your behavior in the garage,” he said, “but I still don’t get what happened right after. The war and all.”

Two months ago she’d been so
sure
he’d been finagling his way into the Senatus by capturing and using her. She’d been
positive
that he was orchestrating a war between Ofarians and Chimerans. Her soul had been shattered by his callousness with Makaha. Her heart had been destroyed by his coldness to her after they’d left the bonfire, and then three years later in that garage.

“I think you do get it,” she said. “I let myself want you, and when you didn’t want me in return I came back at you the only way I knew how: fighting, war. I’m not saying it was right. Standing here now, looking back at how I’d been trained to think, it feels so foolish. So dangerous. I deserved my punishment.”

“Who said I didn’t want you?” His voice rose. “I knew what I was to you in the very beginning and I didn’t care. I went into it willingly.”

“And what do you think you were to me?”

Another humorless laugh. “Come on, Keko. I’m a man. I may be horny as all fuck when I’m around you, but I still like to think I can cling to a chunk of my brain when I’m inside you. You already told me I was a challenge to you in Utah, someone for you to do to pass the time. Something forbidden. Maybe even something to secretly get back at the chief for making you watch me.”

“All that is true.”

“It was true, in the beginning. But that last night in the hotel room? I thought I might’ve become something special to you, if only for a little while.”

“You were.”

He went perfectly still, a half-drawn breath exaggerating the deep V of his torso. She’d never been so attracted to a man’s back before.

“Were?” he asked.

“Were,” she said. “I don’t know what you are now.”

It occurred to her that maybe he was baiting her as much as she was baiting him. Each trying to pry out information from the other without revealing their own hands. Maybe she should grab on tightly to that and not let other, more physical, demands try to steer her in other directions. Except that those demands were making her thighs tremble with need beneath the water, and she couldn’t resist slowly running her hands up and down them.

“What are you doing?” For someone who could transform himself into rain, his voice sounded so very dry. “To your body. Right now.”

Her hands froze halfway up her thighs, water sloshing around her chest and upper arms. “I’m washing.”

“Where?”

The urge to touch her own nipple with one hand and push the other between her legs nearly sent her underwater. For a moment she could have sworn she felt him in liquid form sliding over the part of her that was quickly going slippery. Or maybe that was just her imagination, her fantasies, breaking through the barriers of reality.

“Griffin . . .” It came out plaintive. Hot. An entirely different sound than she’d wanted to give him.

It meant the balance of control had shifted again. He’d unknowingly taken over and she was slipping. He was affecting her, turning her on, and . . . Brave Queen, she didn’t want him to stop.

He pushed off his hands and shoved them both into his hair so hard she thought he might be digging into his skull. “God, I know. I know. Don’t answer that.”

With terrible effort, she lifted her hands from the water, the dripping as it hit the surface loud and strangely sexy. She’d started this—this advanced form of flirting that got her naked within four feet of him—but now she wasn’t entirely sure how to finish it. Or even if she should.

Because no amount of sex was going to erase what she was feeling. How dumb she’d been to ever have thought that a physical release could drive away unwanted and burdensome emotion.

Cupping water in her palms, she poured it over her shoulder, trying to focus on getting her wound clean, but instead only noticing the slow, cool tease of the narrow streams as they trickled over her skin—as they made dancing paths down and around the swells of her breasts. She pressed her finger to one lazy droplet, tracing it downward, until she grazed her nipple.

A tiny moan of pleasure leaked from her throat.

A louder one rumbled from the chest of the man sitting on the rock. “Ah, fuck it. Just tell me.”

Turn around. See where my hand is. Where I want yours
.

But to say it felt far too intimate, which was odd since her mouth was trained for boldness.

“I’m trying to wash my back.” She was fully aware of how dumb that sounded, how romantically manipulative, but since she’d been conditioned to own what she said, she let it hang there.

His back straightened. “Don’t strain yourself. The wound could open up again and bleed. Here, let me help.”

Yes
. Her hand tightened on her breast, the nipple hard in the center of her palm. She held her breath, wanting him to turn, to strip out of those clothes, and slip into the water right in front of her. Wanting his hands on her. Her eyes drifted closed with the fantasy, with anticipation.

Then something did touch her—something cool and wet and refreshing—but it wasn’t Griffin.

Her eyes flew open to see the waterfall pulling away from the rock face, defying gravity. Scant droplets turned to a steady shower as the small waterfall poured over her spot in the center of the pool. She stood up, rising above the surface, and let the water rain down, flattening her hair down her back and sluicing over every inch of her body. It beat down upon her, cleaning her and making her feel impossibly dirty within the same second.

She felt Griffin’s presence within the water that cascaded over her, even if it wasn’t
him
exactly. Smiling, catching a mouthful of water, she looked over at him. He sat motionless, his back still to her, hands on his knees. His magic literally surrounded her.

Just like when he used to move inside her, and she and her magic had surrounded him.

“If you can’t see me,” she said, “how do you know where to send the water?”

“I can always feel you. Remember?”

Oh yes. She remembered.

The thought of it pulled her out from under the enchanted waterfall and sent her feet sliding across the slippery stones at the bottom of the pool. Toward him. The surface of the water only touched her mid-thigh, and when she reached the edge of the pool, she was markedly aware of her nakedness. She was Chimeran, where the body in all its faults and beauty was revered and never shamed, but just then, standing behind a clothed Griffin as he stared ahead at the curtain of mist enclosing them, she wanted to be
noticed
. By him and only him.

Standing this close, she observed things about him she never had before. The series of short white scars above his left elbow. The freckle above the neckline of his T-shirt. It nestled in a paler strip of skin that seemed to have been exposed by a recent haircut.

The urge to reach up, run her hands over his scalp, twist his head around, and claim his mouth with hers was so powerful she had to clasp her hands behind her back.

“I’m done,” she said.