Tempted (26 page)

Amazed, she rose on limbs weaker than she wanted to admit and crossed to him, running her hand through the same space he just had. The candles flickered again and then the image reformed. “You can cast illusions? Wow.” She looked up at him. “Can you teach me how to do that?”

He smirked, that easy grin he’d shown her yesterday at the beach, the same one that transformed his face from intimidating to gorgeous in the span of a second. “Party tricks are one of my many talents. I can’t cast a protection spell worth shit, but if you need candles, I’m your guy.”

He reached for the fruit, but her hand on his forearm stopped him. She waited until his eyes ran back to her before she said, “I think you have a lot of talents. And I know without them, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Something soft flickered behind his eyes. Something she wanted to reach out and hold on to forever. But he didn’t close the distance between them, and this time she wasn’t going to make the first move. He’d brought her back here instead of insisting they go home to Argolea. For tonight, at least, she was going to be patient and see where this went.

He cleared his throat and reached for the food again. “You should eat.”

He set a plastic plate of fruit and fish in front of her. She tried not to curl her lip in disgust but knew she wasn’t successful when he chuckled at her side. “When you get home, you can have whatever you want. Here.” His big hands slid around her waist and he lifted her to sit on the table with ease. Warmth gathered beneath his hands and inched its way up and down her rib cage. But his touch was gone way too soon, and he put the plate in her lap and stepped back before she could think of something to say to stop him. “What will you ask the cooks to make for you when you get back?”

She fingered an apple slice on the plate. “A steak. A nice big juicy one.” As she sank her teeth into the apple and chewed, she imagined a rib eye instead. “With Cookie’s good garlic mashed potatoes and a side of asparagus. And chocolate cake for dessert.” She glanced his way. “What will you ask for?”

His lopsided grin faded as she ate. With one arm braced against the table, he looked down at his own food. “I don’t know.”

A strange foreboding trickled through her chest. What wasn’t he telling her?

He ate a few bites, and when he noticed she wasn’t eating much herself, took her plate and set it to the side. Neither of them, obviously, had much of an appetite. Her eyes followed as he moved around the table. “Lie back.”

She glanced down at the blankets beneath her. “Why?”

He lifted the buckets he’d brought in with him when she awakened and said, “I thought you might want to wash your hair. It’s too late to head down to the river, but I heated some water upstairs in case you wanted to clean up.”

Her heart thumped in her chest. Candlelight flickered over his bare chest and the angles and planes of his muscular body. He was wearing the same low-slung black pants he’d worn for days, frayed at the edges and ripped in the knees, but he was no longer sweaty and dusty, as he’d been earlier. He’d obviously dunked himself in the river when she was asleep, and then he’d brought more water back here for her.

Tingles erupted in her breasts, in her abdomen, in her thighs as she nodded and swallowed back a rush of emotions. “I…I would. Thank you.”

“Lie back then. And scoot toward the end of the table.”

She did as he said, realizing the blankets were positioned to soften the hard surface. When her feet were hanging off one end and her head off the other, she looked up to see him peering down at her with an intense expression she couldn’t name.

“Close your eyes.”

Warm water flowed over her grimy hair, dripped down to the stone floor at his feet. She closed her eyes as he poured liquid over every strand, then relaxed into his touch as he began to massage suds into her scalp.

“Where did you get shampoo?”

“Same place I found the toothpaste.”

She smiled. “Mm.”

“Like that?”

Yeah, she liked it. So much. His hands were like heaven, rubbing, touching, massaging, and every one of her muscles relaxed as he worked. He poured more water over her hair to rinse away the lather, then carefully dried her short locks with an extra blanket.

“How did you heat the water?” she asked. “All we have are plastic buckets.”

“Achilles’s helmet is metal.”

Her eyes grew wide. “You heated water in his helmet?”

“I don’t think he’s using it. Wish I hadn’t?”

No, she wished that helmet was the size of a hot tub so she could climb into it with him and he could work his magic fingers over the rest of her body.

He set the damp blanket on the table at her side and used his fingers to comb the tangles from her wet hair. Then he slid his hands under her shoulders and pushed her up to sitting.

She brushed the wet hair back from her face and tried to think of something to say. His hands tugging at the hem of her filthy tank top stopped all thought. “Lift your arms.”

Her heart picked up speed but she did as he asked. The tank slid up over her arms and dropped to the ground out of sight. Water sloshed behind her. Anticipation curled in her stomach. Then his hand landed gently on her bare shoulder, followed by a warm damp rag running across her back.

A sponge bath. He was giving her a sponge bath. The erotic implications of that puckered her nipples and arched her back.

“Too hot?”

“No, no. It’s fine.” More than fine. Better than fine. It was…paradise. She closed her eyes as he dragged the rag over her shoulders, down her spine, to the curve of her lower back and up again. Warmth gathered in her center, spread lower until she ached.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said softly.

“Hm?” He slid the rag down her neck, over her left arm. Water dribbled down to her fingers.

“What happened to your mother? We’d been told her party was ambushed.”

Her eyes floated open to focus on a candle on the floor twenty feet away. He continued washing her arms, her back, her sides as her mind drifted. She knew what the Argonauts had been told, what everyone had been told. Thirty years ago, before the war with the daemons had picked up in intensity, her mother had taken a group of chaperones—soldiers from the Executive Guard and her own personal assistants—into the human realm for a “mini-vacation.” A shopping trip, her father had called it. Andromeda had been as fascinated by human culture as the king, and every now and then he’d allowed her to cross over, so long as she was well protected. While there, they’d been overrun by a pack of daemons, and before the Argonauts had even been alerted, it was over. None had survived. But that wasn’t what had really happened. That was simply the lie her father had told to cover up the truth.

“You know about my sisters, so I guess it’s no big secret now. My father was never faithful to my mother. Three hundred years is a long time to be bound to one person, and when that person can’t give you the one thing you want more than any other…” She shrugged, hating that she sounded so bitter but unable to keep it from her voice. “I guess he decided to move on.”

Demetrius moved around to stand in front of her, and though she knew she was naked from the waist up and should be embarrassed, she wasn’t. “A son. That’s what he wanted.”

She didn’t meet his eyes, focusing instead on an inch-long scar under his left pec. “That’s what he’s always wanted. She was pregnant numerous times, but they all ended in either a miscarriage or stillbirth. Except me.”

“What happened to her?”

Isadora sighed. “I think she finally had enough. She must have found out about his affair with Callia’s mother. At the time, I didn’t know who he was seeing, just that it was someone else. It was always someone else. Usually it was a female outside the castle, someone of lower status. But his own personal healer? That would have rocked my mother to her core. Especially since she and Anna were friends.”

She couldn’t help remembering how sad her mother had been the day she left. The way she’d hugged Isadora and said good-bye as if it was forever. “She didn’t go into the human realm on a shopping trip. She didn’t take any chaperones with her. She just disappeared. As if she’d never existed in the first place. And my father never searched for her. He made up that story about her being killed as an excuse to go on with his life, and he never looked back.”

She glanced at her hands. Hands that were petite, just like her mother’s had been. “I thought about looking for her. More than once. But my father…he forbade me from doing so.” Her voice trailed off. Because, yeah, what was she ever going to be able to do? “I look like her. More than I do him. Aside from the fact I’m female and the only one of their children who survived, my nose is too small, my eyes the wrong color, and I’m timid, just like she was. That’s never helped the situation with my father. In fact, I’m sure that’s simply made it worse.”

He didn’t say anything, and she figured that meant her little sponge bath was over. She shifted and reached for the edge of the blanket beneath her legs to cover herself, disappointed she’d gone on in the first place instead of sidestepping his question. Even more disappointed she’d let the hurt get to her all over again.

Why did she let her father do that to her? Especially here?

He pushed the blanket from her hands. Surprised, she looked up into soft, warm eyes as the cloth fell against the table again. “I think your nose is perfect. And your eyes match your determined personality.”

“Determined? No one’s ever called me that.”

A half smile curled his mouth. One that supercharged her blood and brought that ache back tenfold. “How many times have I tried to put distance between us? And how many times have you closed the gap? I’d call that determined.”

Her heart stuttered. And in the silence she knew if she didn’t ask the question, she’d spend the rest of her life wondering. “Is that what you want? Distance? Between us?”

“No.”

She drew in a breath and held it as he twined one arm around her back and tugged her closer to the heat of his body. Her legs opened, sliding around his hips until his sweet male scent surrounded her and he was all she felt.

“And for the record,” he said as he dipped the rag in the bucket at his side and trailed the warm, wet cloth across her collarbone so water dripped down her naked breasts, puckering the nipples to stiff peaks, “I don’t think you’re timid. Not anymore, at least.”

His face was an inch from hers. His breath hot and minty and so intoxicating it left her light-headed. As he brought the rag around her right breast, she tensed, wanting his hand on her skin, his lips on her mouth, his length deep inside her as it had been last night. Except this time she wanted him controlling the pace, the mood, bending her body any way he wanted. “If I’m not, that’s because of you.”

“No, it’s not. It’s because of you.”

She held her breath as his lips met hers. Once. Twice. As gently as if he were touching glass. She moaned as he kissed her again, as his soft and supple lips swept over hers. Bringing her hands up to his chest, she felt the corded muscles beneath his skin, the power, and tilted her head to give him more. He took the invitation and opened, sliding his tongue into her mouth to tangle with hers until she went a little mad at the taste of him again.

“Ah,
kardia
,” he mouthed against her lips.

“I love it when you call me that.”

He dropped the rag, wrapped both arms around her waist, and lifted her from the table. She responded by kissing him more deeply, sliding her legs around his hips and her fingers into his hair as she’d wanted to do from the first moment he stepped into the room. He carried her from the table, across the floor, and laid her out on the pile of blankets in the corner of the room, then peered down at her with eyes that weren’t nearly as soft as she’d thought before.

No, these eyes were shimmering shards of onyx, filled with desire and yearning. And they were staring at her as if she were the only thing in the world he wanted.

She wasn’t sure what had changed between this morning and now, but she wasn’t about to ask.

“I want you to tell me what you like,” he whispered. “What you want.”

She ran her hands up his muscular arms and eased up to kiss him again. “I like you. I just want you.”

He kissed her deeply and eased down into the vee of her body, and her heart filled when the hard length of his shaft pressed through the cloth separating them, right where she wanted it most.