by Nalini Singh
Page 24
The physical reminder of his deadly possessiveness did nothing to throw cold water on the conflagration that threatened to consume them both. Kaleb wasn’t cold now, his skin hot enough to burn, the arm he’d braced over her head trapping her in a prison she had no desire to escape.
Thrusting her hands into his hair, she held him to her, sinking her teeth into his lower lip in a feral act of passion that should’ve shocked her.
It didn’t. Not in the madness.
His hand tightened the barest fraction on her throat before he echoed the act, and she wanted to scream at the electric burn the primal caress ignited over her body. Too much, this was too much too soon, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t bear to let him go. The sound of something crashing to the kitchen tiles made her jerk back, chest heaving. “Kaleb?”
“It’s nothing. ” His mouth was on hers again the next second, the muscled width of his shoulders hiding the rest of the room from her view . . . but she felt it when something hit the wall with enough violence to make the house vibrate.
Wrenching away her mouth, she shoved at his chest.
He didn’t budge, the look on his face leaving her uncertain if he was rational in any way, his eyes gleaming a black so deep, she’d never seen it in nature. Only in the darkest, most twisted recesses of the labyrinth.
Chapter 18
“KALEB, SOMETHING IS wrong. ”
His expression didn’t alter, the flush of passion on his cheekbones and the perspiration that glimmered on his shoulders in the morning sunlight doing nothing to soften the hardness of him. Even the hair she’d mussed with her fingers only made him appear more dangerous, a predator who’d removed his mask to reveal the harsh truth.
Breath still short and shallow, she pressed her fingers to his lips when he would’ve claimed her mouth again, the addictive heat of him pressed up against her breasts. It took a level of self-control that was staggering in its intensity—this man, he could make her his slave, her body his to command.
“Kaleb. ”
Stroking his thumb over her pulse once more, he finally released her and turned to face the room.
Sahara looked around him, felt her eyes widen.
The room was trashed.
It had been the sofa smashing into the opposite wall that had finally broken through the desire that had had them both in its grip. The piece of furniture had created a hole in that wall, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Every single window in the room, aside from the one on which she’d leaned, was spiderwebbed with fractures so deep it felt as if a breath would cause the shards to fall, while the floor was rippled, and a large table lay in splinters near the wide doorway into the kitchen, as if it had been thrown at the doorway and not made it through.
“A kiss,” she whispered, staring at Kaleb’s profile as he took in the damage done by his telekinetic strength with a clinical eye. “One kiss. ”
Kaleb, his upper body gilded by the sunlight, angled his face toward her. “I’ll have to refine my shields—they failed against the intensity of the contact. ”
Sahara released a shuddering breath, her breasts heavy and almost painful. “Are you safe on the PsyNet?” If his shields failed on the mental plane, his mind would become as vulnerable as hers had been before he’d extended his shields to protect her. “If any of what we’re experiencing leaks—”
“There’s been no breach. ” A pause before he shifted to face her, one of his hands lightly cupping the side of her jaw, his eyes a black inferno. “I want more. ”
Caught off guard at the realization that his arousal hadn’t been tempered by the interruption, Sahara’s lips parted in a gasp. Kaleb took the silent invitation, his mouth on hers as he pressed her back to the glass, his erection pushing into her abdomen in hard demand. Moaning, she sucked on his tongue as his hand came up to cover her breast . . . and the world turned to shards of glass, the windows exploding in a glittering shower of deadly snow.
* * *
KALEB had Sahara out on the terrace before she could be hit by a single splinter of glass. Her eyes huge, she watched the glass collide in the middle of the room before the shards fell to the floor in an oddly musical crash. Ignoring the sight, Kaleb found his gaze locked on the slick wetness of her lips.
A single thought and he could have them in the bedroom, could have her naked, the skin-to-skin contact total.
“You’re bleeding. ” Sahara’s fingertips skated over his shoulders, where he’d been hit by a few stray splinters.
Blood. She had bled more than he’d thought possible.
The cold whisper of memory succeeded in doing what the glass hadn’t, reminding him of the damage that could be done by an out- of-control Tk. Forcing his fingers to release her arms, he turned away to look out through the bars of the railing and into the gorge, the air cool against his skin, the sun not yet at full strength.
With each breath came another piece of reason. Both his PsyNet and personal shielding, he saw when he checked on them, were over half-gone. They hadn’t collapsed—they had exploded one by one, going outward from his core. Not a fatal failure, three of his outer shields holding firm . . . but close. Closer than he’d come since he was a child.
A few more minutes and his abilities would’ve gone rogue.
“This is dangerous. ” Sahara came to stand beside him, but she didn’t attempt to touch, leaving enough distance between them to prevent accidental contact. “For both of us. ”
Already rebuilding his shields, Kaleb reached out to grip the iron bars, his arms spread wide.
“You were never at risk. ” The obsidian shield he’d placed around her was impregnable.
That very impermeability was the reason he couldn’t go obsidian himself. It would leave him cut off from the data streams of the Net, a deadly blindness. Now, his renewed shields fractured before reaching maximum strength, Sahara’s proximity problematic. Fixing an isolated location in his mind, he said, “I’ll return in an hour,” and teleported out.
* * *
SAHARA didn’t attempt to stop Kaleb, the glitter of glass when she turned to look into the living room proof enough of why he needed to distance himself from her. Staring at the sunlight as it was refracted by the shards, creating beauty out of destruction, she leaned her back against the iron bars that encircled the terrace.
“You were never at risk. ”
“Wasn’t I?” she whispered, thinking of the madness of her surrender. Even after recognizing how far he walked in the darkness, even after hearing the chill inhumanity in his voice, even after seeing the calculation in his gaze before he kissed her, she had given in to the rage of need that lived inside her.
And in him.
Kaleb may have begun the kiss with a calculated motive—but he had been her partner in the madness by the end, his body as aroused as her own, his mind as enslaved as hers. Fingers trembling, she pushed back her hair and took a seat on the lounger, her eyes trained on the smooth wooden planks that made up the terrace. It wasn’t healthy, this obsessive need she had for Kaleb, not when her trust in him was born of a past she couldn’t consciously remember.
Even more, when she didn’t know who she was, who she’d become.
She was still there when Kaleb returned, walking onto the terrace through the doors of his study. It was clear he’d showered, washing off the blood and sweat both. His hair was in place, his suit pants a crisp black, the same color as the silk tie at his throat, a fresh white shirt covering his upper body.
He hadn’t folded back the sleeves as he often did at home. Instead, cuff links glinted at his wrists.
The mask was back in place.
“I’ve organized damage repair,” he said to her, sliding his hands into the pockets of his pants. “I’ll need to relocate you for a few hours tomorrow to give the human crew time to get the work done. ”
Sahara, her body in a kind of shock at the rawness of
what had passed, tried to find some hint of the same in Kaleb and failed. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll sell information about your home?”
“No. ” It was said with the brutal confidence of a man who knew he scared people far more than could be alleviated by any monetary incentive.
The tiny hairs on her arms rose in shivering warning, though the sun shone overhead. “I can’t think here,” she said, the glinting shards of glass continuing to catch her eye, the bars around the terrace suddenly stifling. “The beach. Will you take me to the beach?”
She kicked off her shoes the instant they arrived at the isolated stretch of water, the endless horizon unlocking the chains around her ribs. Sucking in gulps of the sea air, she rolled up her jeans and waded into the shallows, her thoughts calming and settling with each lap of the waves against her shins. It was a long time later, her decision made, that she came to sit beside him on the sun-warmed sand, taking care to make certain their bodies didn’t touch.
As she’d learned in the house, the ice that encased Kaleb wasn’t indestructible. And if he crashed through it again, she’d fall with him. Regardless of her reasoned, rational thoughts, one thing she’d accepted as she stood in the water: Kaleb was an addiction so visceral, she could never hope to control it. Not while the past that connected them remained a smudged mirage.
“I want to ask you for something,” she said quietly. “But first, I need you to tell me what’s happening in the PsyNet. ” It was critical she have that information if she was to enter the psychic network on her own in the near future.
* * *
KALEB had been primed to deal with the fallout from his significant loss of control, but this was one question he hadn’t expected. However, he didn’t even consider shielding her from the truth. Sahara’s strength was indisputable—she had survived seven years of captivity and, before that, she’d survived a monster and his apprentice.
“It’s being attacked on two fronts,” he said, the walls of his mind scrolling with images of a chipped blade as it sank into soft feminine flesh. “Pure Psy is the first and obvious aggressor, but the more dangerous one, long term, is a disease that’s causing the psychic fabric of the Net to rot and die. ”