Seduce Me in Flames

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “There was no other choice. And when I say that, I mean I would have chosen no other for the spot—not that you forced my back to a wall. I could have found other ways of dealing with my uncle. I am much smarter than he appears to give me credit for.”

  “Be careful you don’t make the same mistake in return. Balkin planned that little outburst on a moment’s notice, taking advantage of quickly presented conditions. He set a trap, one I neatly walked into I might add.” His frown told her how furious he was with himself for that.

  “Be easy on yourself, my fine Tarian brute. In an instant you find yourself elevated in a way that no alien before you has ever achieved here in Allay.”

  “Only because, as you say, you are smarter than your uncle.” He smirked at her and she laughed. She had to switch hands so the Lady Eirie could continue to remove her complex adornments.

  Ambrea reached to run gentle fingertips over the ridge of his shoulder. “Are you all right?” They had not had an opportunity to speak since the incident. She had not been free to show her concern. Perhaps she was being reckless doing so even now while there were others in the room, but she fully trusted Suna and wasn’t worried about Lady Eirie. The lady had seemed very protective of her during the earlier scuffle and had proven herself valuable these past couple of days when it came to courtly advice from a woman’s perspective. Besides, Ambrea needed at least one place to be free and to be herself. If not her private quarters, then where?

  Rush must have agreed with her assessment because he enclosed her hand in his and lifted it to the brief, almost invisible brush of his lips. Anyone who had blinked would have missed the caress. But for Ambrea, the way it sent skips of energy up her arm made certain she would never have missed anything about it.

  “The medics did what they could with it in the brief time I allowed them. I wasn’t about to leave you alone and exposed while they poked and fussed at me. I wasn’t going to take the chance that it was exactly the opportunity Balkin was looking for.”

  “You need to find someone you trust in the Imperial Guard, Rush. You can’t watch over me every second. Surely you sleep?”

  Ambrea had been so overwhelmed with her new duties and with dancing over the hot coals of her court that she hadn’t even thought about her exposure during sleeping hours.

  “He sleeps at the foot of your door,” Suna tattled on him, her lips turning up with amusement when Rush gave her a dirty look.

  “Rush!”

  “What do you want me to do?” he demanded when she tried to scold him. “Leave you in trust with those fools who stood around today trying to figure out which direction they ought to go? I like that one guard well enough, the one from the wet rooms you had me promote. I’ve put him on night duty. But still.”

  “But still you watch me yourself because you really can’t trust anybody.”

  “Do you trust anybody?”

  “I trust you,” she said.

  “And I,” he said as he touched the tip of his finger under her chin, “am only trying to be worthy of that trust you are putting in me.”

  “You already have done so,” she assured him.

  She watched as his eyes shot quickly to the other women in the room, then he let his eyes drift over her face in such a way as she could almost feel the touch of his hand against her skin.

  “We need to discuss where we go from here,” he said, his voice suddenly deeper, more intent. “I have ideas for the retraining of your guard. What happened today was unforgivable and can’t ever be repeated. They ought to have been between you and your uncle instantly. And if it was an offense for me to put my hands on royal blood, they ought to have at least come between me and Balkin. But at least I showed the restraint not to draw a weapon. Your uncle was not so circumspect.”

  Ambrea gave him a whimsical little smile as she realized he was couching other desires in the guise of official business. She could tell he was more reluctant than ever to expose the physical relationship between them. Rush was always afraid of what the Allayan public would think of her if it became wide knowledge that they were lovers. But the fact was, it was impossible to hide in such a public court and a life under so much scrutiny. Still, if it was what he wanted, then she would oblige him.

  “Lady Eirie, I thank you for your service. Will you attend me in the morning? There are many questions I still have, and you have been a great resource.”

  “Of course, madam. I am at your service in all things,” the beautiful young woman said with a deep and graceful bow. “But if you will permit me before I am dismissed. I made you this tonic. It will help you cleanse your mind, body, and soul and help you to relax and sleep tonight. You will awaken refreshed in the morning.” Eirie turned to retrieve a Delran platinum serving cup, holding it in both hands and offering it to Ambrea.

  “Later perhaps,” Ambrea said, waving away the offer.

  Eirie bowed again and put the cup aside on an ornate little table. Then she and Suna made their respectful exits, leaving Ambrea alone with Rush.

  The moment they were gone, it was as if a barrier between Rush and her had been thrown aside. She moved forward and suddenly his hands were there catching hold of her. She expected him to pull her close and tight, but instead he reached to touch his fingers to her face, caressing the shape of it slowly even as he breathed heavily and looked into her eyes with a fierce craving that could not be mistaken. At first Ambrea didn’t understand, but then she stopped trying to assess his actions, closed her eyes, and simply reveled in the tenderness of the touch. But there wasn’t just innocence and purity to his needs, she quickly understood as his opposite hand fit into the curve of her waist and slowly slid down over her hip. His fingers fanned out wide, sliding over her backside and gripping hold of her as he finally drew her in tight to his body and locked her against him. She had always felt so gangly and full of sharp, bony angles while she had grown through her adolescence and deep into womanhood. But in his arms she became everything light and feminine, everything graceful and soft. The perception took such solid hold because he looked at her as though she were all of those sweet and gentle things. He looked at her as though he were completely convinced of her preciousness. And because he was convinced, she became just as certain of it.

  His fingertips caressed her lips slowly, provoking her to catch the pads of his fingers individually between her teeth in light nips, her lips cradling them erotically in tongue-touched kisses. Rush took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, never once letting his gaze fall away from hers.

  “I can feel my blood heating up already,” he breathed. “Soon my touch will burn you.”

  “I believe you can keep that from happening even without the aid of water,” she said to him, her hand coming up to touch his wounded shoulder, trying to seek information through the snug Skintex fabric. But if there was a flaw, she couldn’t find it. It had killed her to see him hurt, especially while defending her from the venom of her uncle. He would never know what it had taken for her to keep from falling against him with worry and concern, from tending to him herself. Did he know that at all? Did he understand just how much he had come to mean to her in such a short while?

  “You’re always so sure,” he marveled. “Never a moment of doubt. Never any hesitation—not since the first time you paused before taking my hand in the wet rooms.”

  “I can’t afford it any longer. I have hesitated and prevaricated all my life. Now I refuse to do so. And I believe, with all my heart, that all your hesitations should also come to an end.”

  “And what if you’re wrong, Blue Eyes? Then you will be burned.”

  “And if I hesitate for even a moment now, I could lose my life and all of Allay. What if I had taken too long to think today, when faced with you in cuffs and an act of high treason dangling over your head?”

  “But you didn’t,” he said softly, almost sensually as he bent to brush warm, dry lips over the rise of her cheek. “Your mind works with such lightning brilliance, sees paths and solutions
so damn quickly that I can’t ever hope to keep up.”

  “Then don’t try to keep up,” she urged him breathlessly. “Simply trust me. Simply believe in me. And believe in yourself.”

  “I have never lacked faith in myself.”

  “Except when it comes to this one thing. Except when it comes to the fire inside you. In all other things you have command and control, you see your way perfectly clear. I believe you can do the same with your fire.”

  “If it means I can touch you freely without being drenched in water, then I want to believe it too,” he said with vehemence. “I want to make love to you in a bed, to have that one act of normalcy. If only for a moment. And I want to do it safely. But you can’t ask me to use you as heprap might be used in a laboratory. You aren’t an animal to be callously tested on.”

  “I think we have gone well beyond that,” she pointed out to him. “Everything we have done has been testing, daring, and taking risks. To the outside eye anyway. But I believe that it’s your will that controls your burn, my fine Tarian brute. If you do not wish to hurt me, then you won’t.”

  “I already have,” he reminded her softly.

  “Only because you were taken by surprise. But we are familiar lovers now,” she whispered against those still-stroking fingertips. “And now you are very aware of what you’re doing. But do let’s take things very, very slowly if you are that worried.” She drew out each word like a sultry invitation, tempting him as she finally closed her lips around his thumb and took it into her mouth, letting her tongue stroke over it slowly. When she released it, she felt it wet against her lips. She smiled at the way he was breathing, as though he had run some sort of endurance race. “See?” she tempted him. “See how aroused you are, and yet I remain un-scorched?”

  “Give it time,” he growled in a low rumble of words as his hands came up suddenly to cradle her face. There was a heightened awareness, both of them knowing that any one of his touches could be the one to burn her, but Ambrea refused to let it paralyze her. Instead she was determined to seek it out, determined to see how far she could push him before it became too much for him to control.

  She literally wanted to play with fire.

  Ambrea knew it could all backfire on her at any moment, that it was a supreme test of faith, a test of what she was willing to put on the line. She reached up for his hands and, holding each one firmly in hers, began to slowly draw his touch down over her body. Her outer court dress had been removed, leaving the thin under dress, the silken material alleviating all friction as she guided his large palms and widespread fingers. She drew him over her neck, against her upper chest and shoulders, then down over the fullness of her breasts. She didn’t have to move any farther than that before he came alive all on his own, his fingers and palms turning to mold and massage the weight of her over and over again. The heat that instantly burned through her body had nothing to do with any fire inside him other than the fire of passion playing against the sensitive nerves of her quickly distending nipples.

  Rush ran his thumbs roughly over her, holding nothing in reserve, although he should have been doing just that. It was almost as though he wanted to prove her wrong, to shake this crazy faith she seemed to have in him. Perhaps if he burned her again, then she would want to put distance between them, and it would help him to rein in the wild, headlong feelings he was swimming in. Perhaps … perhaps he could force her to control what he could clearly not control in himself. Every time he told himself to put a healthy distance between them, every time he felt that they were going places he simply could not, should not go, he failed miserably and seemed to fall even faster into the headlong rush of it all.

  But as much as his burgeoning feelings for her intimidated him, he could not truly use that to justify hurting her, even in the slightest way. And in spite of the push-me pull-me emotions swirling through him, there was still a clarity at his core that he had never known. At least not while testing the strength of his ability to suppress the fire within him while toying with the fire of his desire.

  Rush lowered his head, rubbing his face against the rise of her chest, breathing deeply of the exotic perfume she wore and of the simpler, more natural scent of her body that teased him and told him she was aroused.

  “You should be with anybody but me,” he told her in a powerful exhalation of breath.

  Her fingers sliding into the crispness of his hair and holding on tightly told him that she disagreed. She rose up on tiptoe, in effect burying his face right between the softness and warmth of her breasts.

  “I don’t want anybody but you,” she told him as she shrugged off her under dress. As the thin straps slid down her upper arms, the top of her dress dropped down, boldly baring her breasts and nipples. It was a temptation that would truly test his ability to keep from burning her. But he didn’t see how he could possibly relax and enjoy her and yet remain in rigid control of himself at the same time. But the sound of her words in his ears had a fixating effect. Again there was that sensation of focus even as he rubbed his hungry lips over her breast and seized one of her nipples with his mouth.

  Ambrea’s fingernails dragged down through his hair, over his temples, and onto his face, scraping over his cheeks where he’d let himself become haphazardly unshaven. His whiskers crackled under her nails as the suction against her breast grew stronger and tighter. Heat swirled down through her like a lazy sort of cyclone, creating havoc with her senses, sending her equilibrium spinning. Then she felt him grab hold of her dress and pull hard at it. When he couldn’t strip it free of her easily, she felt him pause for a beat, and then watched him lift his head from her body to allow her the space to look down at his hands. As she watched, the fabric of her dress began to smolder, although there were no flames. He was careful that none of the fabric touched her, but in an instant it fell away from her body and fluttered in pieces to the floor.

  In the next instant his hands were back on her body and felt no warmer than they should. She looked at his face and realized he was so focused on gaining better access to her that he didn’t even seem to notice what he had done, the control he had just exhibited. He had used the ability like a second nature, a stunning advancement for him when he had done nothing but learn how to suppress that nature. It was like the light in the water. Ambrea was beginning to wonder if the nature inside him had found its own way of climbing free of his regimented control.

  And yet control remained, she thought, as his warm hands curved over her bare skin. A different kind of control. The instinctual one she had told him she believed was there. It was, she realized, a part of the fire he suppressed. And because he had fought so hard to suppress all that part of himself, he had unwittingly suppressed the safety mechanism inside himself that kept him from unintentionally hurting others as well.

  “Rush!” She reached for his wrists, her fingers trying to wrap around the thickness of them, trying to pull his determined, focused hands to a halt. “Rush, look what you did!”

  Rush stilled, blinked his eyes and looked, seeing for the first time the ashes that had once been her pretty little under dress.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered in immediate horror, “no, no, no!”

  “Yes! Rush don’t you see? Look at me. Look!” She had to pull his horrified gaze away from the remnants of the dress down around her feet and made him look at her unblemished body. “You did it without burning me. And then you touched me right afterward. Don’t you understand? It means you already have the control you are looking for! It’s as deeply bred inside you as the fire itself. It means I was right. If you simply let it come to the surface, stop forcing it down, it will regulate itself. Most probably with very little effort on your part.”

  “It was never like that when I was—”

  “Younger?” she interrupted. “A child? An adolescent? Show me any child or adolescent in balance with themselves with all the constant changes of growth and maturation. You can’t use your childhood as a barometer for what you can do now as a mat
ure, disciplined man. Anyone who can keep all of this volatility under such tight control must surely have the natural strength it must take to safely manipulate the gift you have. And yes, I said gift,” she spoke over him when he went to say something. “Just as sure as your natural ability to touch me in all the right ways without any training and teaching is a gift.” Ambrea took his hands and put them back on her bare skin.

  Whatever argument he had been gearing up for seemed to ease out of him the instant her warmth infused the tips of his fingers. And that was when Rush realized that he could actually feel the nuances of her heat. As a being impervious to fire and unable to be burned, he had also been unable to feel even the most extreme heat. But maybe this was part of what she was saying. He had forced himself to suppress his every natural and seemingly unnatural ability when it came to this mutation. Perhaps in the process of all that, he had numbed and dulled his own ability to feel things. Even these soft, exquisite things.

  “How is it you can know me even better than I know myself?” he asked her as he watched his fingers trail over the smooth perfection of her fair skin. “How is it you can take command of a country after a lifetime in exile and do it so brilliantly? How is it …” How is it you are so deeply entrenched in a man’s heart when he barely even knows what his heart is?

  “You were born to make fire, Rush, either with your bare hands or the explosives you juggle so well. Perhaps those things you mention are the things I was born to do.”

  His gaze jolted up to hers. She had not heard his thoughts, couldn’t have known what he was thinking, yet the truth rang no less clear in his head.

  Rush pushed away from her, stumbling back in his haste as confusion played havoc with his equilibrium. His heart was crashing around inside his chest as he tried to look anywhere but at her, at how beautiful she was, at how confused she was by his withdrawal just then. Then she tried to rally her courage, and he was forced to realize that though she made every appearance of being steady and sure, she was still just as delicate and vulnerable as she had been the day they met. The only difference was, now she pushed past her doubts and fears and forced herself to continue onward. She had learned that lesson while in his hands.