My Forbidden Desire

by Carolyn Jewel

  Kynan’s eyes flickered through shades of brown and gold. He gave a fake grin. Right. Because Kynan was saving all that magic to take off Xia’s head. Right now, the warlord didn’t give a shit about Alexandrine. “You’re cured, witch,” he said. “No more magic. Go forth and rejoice. I won’t stop you.”

  “Thanks. That’s so touching.” She shifted a bit but kept the knife under his chin. “Now, I want your word you won’t harm Xia.”

  “I promise.”

  “Liar.” Alexandrine moved the knife to the side of Kynan’s throat, keeping the blade edges close to his skin. She nicked him, a little deeper than necessary for the oath she was going after, but she didn’t know the knife the way Xia did; she didn’t know its responsiveness, the way the charged metal reacted to living skin. He knew each and every lethal surface of each and every blade. Alexandrine didn’t. Kynan was lucky she hadn’t sliced his jugular, and the warlord knew it.

  The portion of the talisman’s magic that remained in her flipped on like a light in the dead of night. She breathed deep, and so did Xia.

  “Swear it, Warlord,” she said, slowly, bending down.

  Xia smelled Kynan’s blood, too. He and Kynan both felt her desire to taste blood as if she were one of the kin. The warlord’s blood was a rich, dark narcotic. No way could she resist. Not ever. Not with the talisman’s magic in her. Not with this connection going.

  “Xia’s a lucky bastard to be free of you.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Right. I’m lucky, too. Being free of you and all that.” She touched the blade to the underside of his chin. “Swear, Warlord. Or my face is going to be the last thing you ever see in this world.”

  Kynan’s magic about boiled the room. Alexandrine twitched, tight with the talisman’s remaining magic. She was pulling like she was one of them instead of a witch. Nothing very scary, but damned if she wasn’t pulling magic like one of the kin. Which made a scary kind of sense. Kynan had cut her off from her own magic. The magic she could pull now could only come from the talisman.

  “I swear, witch, I will not harm Xia.”

  “That’s good.” Her voice was soft, raspy still. Very sexy. She leaned over Kynan, clutching the knife, and sealed the deal with a taste of the warlord’s blood. Kynan’s eyes closed, and his hand came up to grab the back of her head and hold her there.

  Xia felt every moment of it, the way she responded, Kynan’s response, the oath taking hold. The warlord had it bad for her. The guy was hot for the witch. Xia returned to his human form and crouched by the two of them. He swept a finger through the slice in the warlord’s neck and licked away the blood.

  Kynan growled and rolled, crushing Alexandrine to the floor. Her eyes were unfocused, because she’d had a taste of Kynan Aijan.

  Alexandrine already had the knife up. “No.” There wasn’t anything unfocused about her eyes now. “No way am I letting you touch me. Not like that.”

  “You poor bastard,” Xia said to Kynan. He was getting a full-on dose of the warlord. “Witches do it for you, don’t they?” He grabbed Kynan’s shoulder and pulled him off Alexandrine. He got a flash of a woman’s face—Alexandrine’s friend Maddy—right before he cut off their connection. “Leave her alone,” Xia said.

  “What for? She’s a witch.” With a growl, Kynan got to his feet.

  Xia reached down and offered his hand to Alexandrine. Which she took.

  “I didn’t promise not to harm your little witch, Xia,” Kynan said. “Or any other witch.”

  “Get out of here, Kynan. Go home.” He grabbed Kynan’s upper arm. “Maybe I did something I shouldn’t have, but I’ll deal with the consequences, all right?”

  “What’s your witch going to say when she finds out?” Kynan asked.

  “I said I’ll deal with it.” He leaned in. “Nikodemus won’t be happy if he hears what you did, Warlord.”

  “He won’t be too happy with you, either.”

  “I did what I had to.”

  The corner of Kynan’s mouth lifted. “Given any thought to what that means, witch hater?”

  Xia fought down the urge to clock him one and won. He wasn’t wild about ending up in a fight with Kynan Aijan. He pressed three fingers to his forehead and bowed. “You got out of control, Warlord. I made sure she didn’t die.”

  Kynan touched his forehead, too. “My apologies, fiend.” He said it straight up. Confessed his sin like the warlord he was. No excuses. Even though he had a good one. Just not good enough, in Xia’s book.

  All the former magehelds sworn to Nikodemus were major misfits, explosions waiting to happen as they coped with freedom and the weight of their past. Kynan had been Magellan’s mageheld. His personal killer and fuck buddy. He’d lived with Carson Philips, snatched her from her parents, been with her every day, watching what Magellan did to her. Everyone at the Tiburon house knew Magellan had sent Kynan after Carson with a kill order and permission to do whatever he wanted in the process and that he’d gotten more than a start on that, too. Now Xia knew what Kynan had wanted from Carson and that he’d tried to get the same from Alexandrine.

  Xia bowed his head again, three fingers to his forehead. “Warlord. You should go home.”

  Alexandrine didn’t say anything until Kynan was gone, but she looked relieved when Xia closed the door after the warlord. Relieved to have him gone; then she tensed again. Right. With just the two of them here now, they stood in the living room in an awkward silence that kept getting bigger and wider. Xia turned on his heel and stalked into the kitchen. She stayed there, alone in the other room, while he opened the fridge and grabbed a La Guillotine Ale. He didn’t get the shakes. No gut-wrenching need to have her near him. He kind of missed it, though.

  He studied the inside of the fridge. He didn’t have any food, but he did have those La Guillotines. He grabbed another, one for him and one for her, and then remembered Alexandrine didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, or talk dirty. Well, sometimes she talked dirty. He stayed in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the remaining ale, his plastic jug of copa-laced infusion, and a shriveled orange. Shit. They were going to starve.

  He heard her walking toward the kitchen. At least this wasn’t that freaky tether like before. He wasn’t panicking at being apart from her; sure, he was glad she was coming in, but not unnaturally so. Aside from the anticipation racing to his balls, he didn’t give a shit that she was going to be here in a minute. Well, not really. He was looking forward to being in the same room with her, because she was hot. Aside from that, he was neutral about her. Shit, this was fucked.

  Kynan was right. She was going to hate him when she found out what he’d done. To her. To them both.

  Here. Now.

  He put back one of the bottles.

  “Xia.” But his name came out in a raspy whisper, and the sound got to him. She cleared her throat and tried again. Louder. “Xia. I think we need to talk.”

  He shut the fridge and faced her with his La Guillotine in his hand. “This okay with you?”

  “It’s your house. I can deal with you having a beer.”

  He popped the top with his thumb and drank about half of it, feeling like a bastard the whole time. He shouldn’t drink in front of her if she didn’t like it. On the other hand, he really needed a cold one.

  “So,” she said when he walked to the counter and leaned against it, his La Guillotine hidden behind him. “I’m not completely clear on what happened.”

  “You faced down a warlord, that’s what.” He didn’t like what he was feeling. If there was anything about this he could blame on magic, he’d be the first one on that boat. But magic had nothing to do with him wanting her in his arms, and nothing at all to do with the way he wanted her to be with him. Rasmus Kessler’s daughter.

  “Yeah.” She bobbed her head. “Yeah, I did. I’m clear on that. But my magic is gone.” She frowned. “Not gone, but blocked off. I assume because Kynan did what he said he would.”

  “Uh-huh.” He reached behind him for the al
e and took another pull. Lying to her wasn’t good. But how, exactly, was he going to tell her?

  “But I still feel you.”

  “That so?” He was hot for her. More than hot. Shit. He had a lot of nerve giving Kynan a hard time about liking witches. He had his own little case of interspecies fraternization going on here, didn’t he?

  “Why is that?” she asked. She walked right up to him so that they were less than an arm’s reach apart. “If Kynan has control of my magic, why do I feel you and not him?”

  “Easy answer,” he said. Here came the part where he had to break some bad news to her and lose any chance he had of being with her the way he wanted. He prepared himself. “Kynan doesn’t own you; I do,” he said.

  “Hardy har har.”

  He drank more of his La Guillotine. He kept his fridge dialed extra cold just so he could feel icy ale slide down the back of his throat. “How about I put this in terms you can understand?”

  “Why don’t you do that?”

  He looked into her eyes and waited until she was looking at him. “All your base belong to me, Alexandrine.” She was enough of a geek to understand the hacker joke about a server being controlled by someone on the outside.

  “No way.” She shook her head. “You don’t control me. I wasn’t freaking out when you came in here. No shivers. Not sick to my stomach.” She went back to the door, where she turned in a circle like she was showing off a new outfit. “See? Perfectly normal.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. She did the same, which was kind of funny. Jaysus, he wanted to have sex with her again. “Kynan fixed that before he went off the deep end.”

  “Pretend I don’t know anything, Xia. Spell it out for me. Baby talk if you have to. Tell me what else he fixed and how he did it.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “He severed you from your magic and then tried to make you demonheld.”

  “The way you were mageheld.” She nodded. Her shirt rode up, exposing an inch or so of her bare skin. “I thought it was something like that.”

  He nodded. “I got there in time to stop that, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Baby talk, remember?” She came back in. Her eyes were suspicious. She didn’t trust him right now. Not at all. Smart witch.

  “I took you from him. I went in without permission and took it all myself.” The sound of the refrigerator ticking was loud in the silence that followed. He stared down the neck of his beer bottle. “He would have killed you, Alexandrine. I could feel what he wanted to do to you. Maybe not right away, but he’s messed up worse than I am. Magellan fucked with him; you understand me? He’s not normal anymore. None of us are.”

  “Yeah,” she whispered. She pulled out a chair and sat with her heels on the edge of the seat and her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. She nodded. “I’m not the same anymore, either. Something’s different.” She released one hand to touch her forehead. “Here. Only I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s me,” he said. Hell, she wasn’t going to want anything to do with him after this. “I own your magic. I own you.”

  “What does that mean? If you give me an order, I have to follow it?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. What Kynan did wasn’t a ritual I ever saw Rasmus do. He’s a warlord. He can do things I can’t.” Hell. She was going to hate this. “There’s no question your magic belongs to me. I can feel it right now. Touch it if I want. If I want, Alexandrine, I can pull from your magic.”

  “Should be easy to find out, though. Right?” She gazed at him. “I mean, try ordering me to do something. If I was your mageheld or whatever you call it, I’d have to do it, right?”

  La Guillotine in hand, he cocked his head to one side. The air shimmered like the floor between them was a miniature Sahara Desert. His spine tingled, and a cold sensation settled in the back of his head. “Take off your clothes.”

  Alexandrine touched the top of her shirt and unfastened the top button. She did a second and was going for a third when she burst out laughing. “Psych,” she said.

  He tilted back his beer and drained the contents. The buzz in his head didn’t go away.

  She laughed. “You totally thought I was going to do it, didn’t you?”

  He laughed, too. “I totally want to see you naked, that’s all.” He shrugged. “That kind of shit worked for Rasmus all the time. It was worth a shot with you.”

  “That’s just heinous, no matter what.”

  She was still laughing, but Xia’s chest got tight, and he didn’t like what he was feeling. “You’re right,” he said. “I never should have done that. Not when it might have worked.”

  “Are you saying you care what happens to a witch, Xia?”

  Their gazes met, and there he was in her head. Overwhelming her without meaning to. He was there and in control of her magic. Just her magic, not her will, too, which was a relief. He pulled and got her magic, not his, and he had no idea how to use that kind of power. Her magic wasn’t like his.

  “Like this,” she said. And she did something he almost missed. But he saw how she would have pulled if she were able, and that was enough. He turned out the lights. With her magic. Alexandrine gasped once, and then he shut off his touch.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I felt that happen. Whoa. That was just freaky as all get-out.”

  “Sure is.”

  The silence got deep there in the dark. Bottomless deep. He owned a witch. One of the kin hadn’t been in control of a witch since the years were counted in three digits. His mouth went dry, and he swallowed hard to compensate. Didn’t help much. He grabbed his beer but the bottle was empty. Damn.

  “Before I forget or chicken out,” she said, “I want to say thank you.”

  “For what?” He knew he sounded bitter. “Ruining your life? Turning you into a demonheld freak?”

  “Better you than Kynan.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, I do.” In the dark, she rocked on her feet.

  Xia said, “You okay with this?”

  “More or less. Depends.”

  “Carson is cut off from her magic, too. But she came out okay.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Magellan.” He shrugged. “Then she assimilated with a talisman, the whole thing. Even though you have a little of our magic in you, I doubt you can do what she does.”

  “Which is?”

  “Sever magehelds from the mage who holds them.”

  “Wow.” Her eyes opened wide. “Really?”

  He got a little thrill, thinking about the implications. “I don’t think you can sever a mageheld, but maybe I could—if you were close enough for me to pull your magic.”

  “You have something specific in mind?”

  “I could go after Durian instead of waiting for Carson. We could. The two of us.”

  She was quiet for too long. Just when he was thinking her silence meant no way was she working with him like that, she said, “The thing is, I’ve been standing here thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mmm.” Her voice stayed low. “I’ve been thinking, I don’t want to live like this for nothing.”

  The cut he’d made on her throat hadn’t healed yet, and she’d made some motion that got it bleeding again. His vision was on, because he was working close to the edge. Bright drops beaded along the wound in brilliant red. The scent hyped him up; it was his nature, and besides, he knew how good she tasted.

  He held out his hand. “Come here,” he said.

  She did. He got his fingers around her shoulder and drew her toward him to lower his mouth to her shoulder and taste. It was even better when he was like this, halfway to changing and wound up over whether she’d agree to have sex with him again. And she smelled and tasted and felt so good.

  “Fuck me, Alexandrine,” he whispered. He meant to add you taste good, but the words didn’t make it past his lips.

  Alexandrine went still. So did he, when he realized what he’d said and ho
w she must be interpreting him. He was pretty sure she was holding her breath. Interesting. She didn’t pull back or scream or slap his face. “I don’t own all of you,” he said. She couldn’t miss that he was turned on, considering he had her up against his body. “Just your magic.” He buried his fingers in her hair. “And, baby, that means I don’t need to be in control of you for us to do this. Not anymore.”

  “I can say no.” She wasn’t wondering out loud; she was stating a fact. No big deal at all.

  “Are you going to?” He was more turned on than he’d been in ages. She knew she could say no, but she wasn’t saying it. Not yet. So, how far did she want to go with him? He reached between them and popped the top button of her jeans. Did she want to have sex with someone like him? She knew what he was now and what was going to happen if she didn’t say no. “This okay?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he whispered back. He got his thumb and first finger on her zipper and pulled down. The sound was damn loud. Music to his ears. She stayed still while he unbuttoned her shirt. Two more buttons, and he was going to have her shirt off and his hands all over her. “So, tell me, Alexandrine. Am I gonna get laid again?”

  Alexandrine drew in a breath. “Well. Yes. I think you are. Oh, my, Xia.”

  He growled, and she didn’t even flinch. The sound was the kind of bloodcurdling growl that sent her ancestors fleeing to safety several thousand years ago. Shirt off. Bra next. He reached around her and fumbled the hooks. Shit. This was no time to be clumsy. He hoped she didn’t notice. But then hooks popped and everything came free. Bra. Gone. She stepped close and put her hands on the counter on either side of him while he got his hands full of her soft breasts.

  He leaned back and got a clear view of her body. His arm darted out and snagged her around the waist. She put a hand on his shoulder to keep her balance. Her skin was even softer than he remembered. “I’m going out of my mind here.”

  Her other hand got busy with the fly of his jeans. “That so?”

  She pushed his jeans down, and he stepped out of them, taking his boxers along for the ride. His shirt went, too. He changed form, and hell if she didn’t put her arms around him. Didn’t even hesitate, did she? The feel of her bare skin against his was a fantastic kink. Human skin against him, soft and warm, and she was willing. She pressed her mouth to his chest, found his nipple, and licked.