My Darkest Passion (19 page)

She smiled and walked in, looking around. “No problem.”

She wore jeans and a snug gray vee-necked shirt over a longer lacy white one that rose considerably closer to her collarbones than the gray one. The white sleeves extended past the gray ones and hid the tops of her hands. A popular style among her age cohort. He hadn’t thought she’d ever pass for normal, and here she was, looking exactly like what she ought to be.

“Something to drink?” he asked.

She surveyed the suite. “Wow.” Her eyes came back to him. They were hazel, not blue. Normal human eyes. “Yes, please. Got any good beer?”

“We’d have to go out to find anything good.”

“Oh well. Water?”

“Sparkling or still? Have a seat. Or look around if you’d rather.”

“Sparkling.”

He unmuted his phone while he got a bottle of sparkling water from the pantry. “You were saying, Maddy?”

When he came back, she took the glass from him with a smile. While he finished up the call, she wandered in front of the living room window. He’d spread out in the dining room, and he returned to the table were he’d left his laptop and a few papers. Eventually, after a lot longer than he’d intended, he hung up.

She poked her head in from the balcony. “This place is amazing.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Oh, hey.” She waved a hand. “No problem.”

He ended up standing by the couch feeling like he hadn’t had good sex in about twenty years and here was his one and only chance for the next twenty. She cocked her head, and he got even more wound up. Was he fourteen again?

“This is swanky. Bigger than my whole apartment. Can I see the bathroom? Is there a spa? Okay if I go upstairs?”

“Yes.” He watched her walk up the stairs.

She stopped halfway up and turned around. “Could we have room service instead of going out?”

“Of course.” She didn’t like going out, he knew that, and to be honest, he wouldn’t mind staying in himself. He found the room service menus and took them upstairs.

“This shower is amazing.” She walked out of the bathroom, hand out for the menu. She scanned it. “Pasta Pomodoro.”

“Dessert?”

“Anything that comes with whipped cream is fine.”

He picked up the phone by the bed. She flopped onto the mattress while he was ordering and lay on her back. When he hung up she rolled over, weight on her forearms.

“Your hair grew back.”

“You were right about that.”

Her hair was a darker blond than he expected, and there was a lot of it. Two inches at the bottom were dyed neon blue, but that sort of nonsense was the fashion among women her age, wasn’t it? “Don’t you forget it.”

“I used to have curly hair. Before.” She shrugged one shoulder. “It grew back like this.”

“Blue?”

“Ha, ha. Straight. Could I have more water?”

“Is that good, bad, or indifferent?” They walked downstairs, and she headed for the bottle of sparkling water he’d left in the pantry. “The hair.”

“I don’t know,” she said when she’d refilled her glass. “You?”

“No thank you.” She was not the traumatized woman he remembered, and that was good. It was good to see her doing so well.

“It’s just…not the same. Like everything else.” She ran a hand along one side of her head, fanning out the blue tips of her hair with a sideways look in that direction.

“‘Like everything else.’ Talk about an understatement.”

“Nothing understated about me.”

“You look good. Blue hair and all.”

“Thanks. You, too. Except, no blue hair.” She grinned at him and riffled her hair again. “You like?”

No. No he did not. He was glad they weren’t sharing even a low-level psychic link. Blue hair was ridiculous, and that was just plain fact.

“My hair is fucking awesome,” she said.

“I don’t recall suggesting it wasn’t.”

“You didn’t need to.” She walked back to the living room and sat on the couch. Her legs were long, and she caught him looking, but worse, his eyes wouldn’t stop, didn’t stop until he was at her chest and that was just crude beyond belief. She crossed her legs, and he managed not to look.

“I was thinking of pink.” She touched her hair again. “Or purple. Too bad they don’t have glitter dyes. I would totally do glitter.” She grinned, and it made her look heartbreakingly young. “I’d get a glitter tat, too. If they had that. A skull and crossbones on my rear. In glitter.”

“Glitter.”

“Do you think it would hurt much if I bedazzled my ass?” She snorted. “It shouldn’t be so easy. Sit down, Harsh.”

“Your hair is blue. That is not a normal color.”

Something flickered behind her eyes, and that made him sad, a first glimpse of what made her different. “I’m not a normal person, am I?”

“No.”

She looked around the suite. “I’m glad I got to see this. How the other half lives. I can see how it would be addicting.”

“Come to work for Nikodemus, and all this could be yours.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“I have to try from time to time.”

“Fair enough.”

From there conversation ranged from subject to subject. Politics, sports, what he’d thought of China while he was there. His very frustrating time in Africa. Before much longer, their meal arrived. Harsh gave the busboy a twenty when he was done setting up in the dining room.

Harsh held a chair for her. She sat and his fingers brushed the tops of her shoulders. He might as well have put his hand around his cock. The buzz of arousal was invigorating.

The busboy had put out the plates cater-corner to each other. Changing that arrangement would call attention to the very thing he hoped they could continue to ignore, so he took his seat. “You’re doing well. That’s good.”

“I am. Most of the time.” She had big eyes. He remembered thinking back then that her eyes were an artifact of her ordeal, that they’d looked so big because she was skinny and bald, but apparently not.

They ate and managed to make small talk for a while, and what he discovered was that they were perfectly fine, the two of them. The tension remained, but instead of him feeling it break over him like a goddamned tidal wave, this was more like the gentle push of lake water. More than once he caught her watching him. There was such assurance in her gaze that he couldn’t help but be interested.

She picked up her glass of water and moved it two inches to the left. He didn’t miss the haunted look that flashed across her face. Well. Nothing was the same for her, was it? And never would be. Like any of the kin, she looked normal, but she wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have said anything. To you or Kynan. On the phone, I mean.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” She didn’t look up from her study of the water glass.

“Kynan cares about you.”

“I know that.” She glanced up, and her eyes were old. No woman her age should have such ancient eyes. “I care about him, too. But I didn’t mean for you, anyone really, to come all the way down here just because I was freaked out.”

“You may not be sworn to Nikodemus but he feels you’re his responsibility. That makes you my responsibility.”

“How much does that millstone around your neck weigh?”

“We’re concerned, all of us, that you are alone here. Your family, in this regard, does not count.”

“Yeah, I know.” She picked up the salt shaker and pushed it in tiny circles on the table. She looked around and lowered her voice. “I’ve been a lot more sensitive lately. To others like me. Us.”

“Bound to happen.”

“Yeah. That’s what Kynan said, too. Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep—that’s most nights now—I get in the car and I drive around until I find one of us, and it’s all I can do not to get out and tell them all that I am fucking here and I will
not
be ignored.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I can feel it, you know? Building up, and I can’t make it stop.”

He made sure he maintained a neutral reaction, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Kynan had known she was so close to taking action. “What you’re describing is a natural response for someone like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She wasn’t accusing. Not in the least.

“You’re a warlord, Addison. Whether you’re passing for human or not, that’s a fact.” He, too, lowered his voice. “It’s natural for you to react to unaligned kin like that.”

She reversed direction with her salt shaker circles, and then leaned back and looked around the suite. “I’ve always wanted to stay in a swanky hotel.”

“That can be arranged.” The words were out before he realized how wildly suggestive they were. Jesus fuck, what was wrong with him?

She pushed away the salt and slid over the pepper and started a new set of circles. Her concentration smoothed over what would otherwise have been an awkward pretense of her not understanding he was coming on to her. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t. One disaster was enough. After a few more circles, she glanced up, and there was nothing coy there, just grown-up, adult woman. “I would really, really like that, Harsh.”

20

S
he knew Harsh wasn’t going to make the first move. Things had gone too wrong between them the last time for her to believe he’d go there again without unambiguous encouragement from her. The way he looked at her said he still liked what he saw, and that was incentive enough for her. He was worth the risk to her ego if he didn’t want this.

His eyebrows shot up when she swished her finger through the thick whipped cream on her mousse. The man was beyond aloof. Far too controlled to think he’d ever give in to dirty thoughts. He was probably feeling guilty for looking at her ass and her chest. Again. She put her finger in her mouth, and the flavors that burst over her tongue made her sit up.

“Wow.” She stared at the remaining topping. “
That
is the best whipped cream I’ve ever had.”

“Mascarpone.”

“Mascar-what?” He’d used that smoky voice. The one that sounded like gray and gold wrapped in pure sex. They were alone in this huge suite, with that huge, empty bed upstairs, and she had nowhere she needed to be, and she wasn’t the total wreck she’d been before. She knew what her triggers were, most of them anyway, and she knew she could have sex. Good sex. Great sex. If she and Harsh ended up in that bed, it would be about sex and pleasure and the two of them.

“Technically, a cheese. Very sweet. Italian. Easy enough to make.”

“That’s right. You like to cook.”

“I do.”

She took his hand and the poor man was almost as clueless as Kynan was when she was passing for vanilla. She was good at passing. Really, really good. He let her take his hand and turn it palm up. His fingers were long and slender. She scooped the rest of her Mascarpone off her mousse and dropped it on his palm.

He went still. Not so innocent now. Well, hello, if it turned out some of his buttons were easy to find.

She enjoyed his flash of arrested interest. What with him being Harsh Marit, right-hand to the demon warlord Nikodemus, the look was gone as quickly as it appeared. She relaxed her internal blocks so she no longer registered as vanilla human. Along that link, he’d know her psychic state, which, at the moment, was intimately bound up with her physical state.

“Addison,” he said.

She hadn’t even known just how much she liked men with his physical attributes: dark skin, black hair, muscles that gave him shape and heft. Not to mention everything that went with him being who and what he was. Complicated. Deep. So controlled she was dying to find out what happened if he let go. She dropped her head to his palm and when he didn’t pull back, she licked off the cheese. Slowly and with great relish, because: Mascarpone. Amazing stuff. After she looked up again, he was watching her with bedroom eyes, and it made her lightheaded.

For the first time in months, she wanted to get laid. She wanted to get laid by Harsh Marit. “Seriously, how do you not have women crawling all over you?”

“Why do you think I don’t?”

She pushed away from the table and walked to his chair. “I know you, Harsh Marit.”

“Really?” Which he said in that cool way he used to keep others at arm’s length. She recognized the tactic since she’d adopted the same response when she needed to protect herself from people who didn’t understand or know about her. In a way, the only difference between them was that he cared more about controlling his reactions than she did right now.

But he’d opened to her. For all that relentless control, they had a link between them and she got everything, all but that dark corner of himself that she wasn’t going to bother herself about. She had her own dark places she didn’t want to visit. Not herself and not anyone else.

What mattered right now was they were both thinking about sex. With each other.

He half stood, but she put a hand on his shoulder, and he sat down again, this time with his chair pushed out from the table. She straddled his lap and his hands went to her hips. He was big. Bigger than she remembered.

“I’ve been trying to make this work,” she said. “Passing. Going back to regular life. After Kynan, I tried dating normal guys, but it was awful. If I told them what happened, about being raped so they’d understand why I was having issues with sex and, hell, just being alone with a guy, it was just too weird for them. And for me. If I didn’t say anything, I’d end up panicking without any way to explain what the hell was wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Thank you for saying so, but we both know that’s not true.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I didn’t want them. Those guys. Not really.”

“Is that so?”

“I like different things, now, and a vanilla guy just can’t go where I need him to.” She held his gaze. “The one time I went ahead and did anyway, it was horrible for us both.” She stared briefly at the ceiling. “I don’t ever want to have sex that bad again.”

His fingers tightened on her, and the touch felt good. Very, very good. Cool water to the parched landscape of her existence.

“You were right. You tried to tell me.”

“What?” He stayed close, kept touching her. She wondered if he could feel her drawing from the oasis that was his hands on her, his warmth, his breath, the electric shiver between them.