Richelle Mead Dark Swan Bundle: Storm Born, Thorn Queen, Iron Crowned & Shadow Heir

by Richelle Mead

  He leaned slightly forward. “Well, then, here’s honesty. I was really happy when I saw the empty seat by you. I think you’re beautiful. I think seeing the bra underneath your shirt is dead sexy. I like the shape of your neck and the way those strands of hair lay against it. I think you’re funny, and I think you’re smart too. After just five minutes, I already know you don’t let people screw around with you—which I also like. You’re pretty fun to talk to, and I think you’d be just as much fun to have sex with.” He sat back in his chair again.

  “Wow,” I said, now noticing I’d put on a white shirt over a black bra in my haste. Oops. “That’s a lot of honesty.”

  “Should I fuck off now?”

  I played with the rim of the bottle. I took a deep breath. “No. Not yet.”

  He smiled and ordered us another round.

  Introductions seemed like the next logical step, and when his turn came, he told me his name was Kiyo.

  “Kiyo,” I repeated. “Neat.”

  He watched me, and after a moment, a smile danced over his mouth. A really nice mouth too. “You’re trying to figure me out.”

  “Figure you out how?”

  “What I am. Race. Ethnic group. Whatever.”

  “Of course not,” I protested, even though I’d been trying to do exactly that.

  “My mother is Japanese, and my father is Latino. Kiyo is short for Kiyotaka.”

  I scrutinized him, now understanding the large dark eyes and the tanned skin. Human genes were exquisite. I loved the way they blended.

  How cool, I thought, to have such a solid grip on your ancestry. I knew my mother had a lot of Greek and Welsh, but there was a mix of all sorts of other things there too. And as for my deadbeat father…well, I knew no more about his heritage than I knew anything else about him. For all intents and purposes, I was very much the mongrel the keres had called me earlier.

  I realized then I’d been staring at Kiyo too long. “I like the results,” I finally said, which made him laugh again.

  He asked about my job, and I told him I worked in Web design. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I’d majored in it and in French. Both areas had turned out to be completely irrelevant to my job, though Lara swore having a Web site would drive up our business. We mostly relied on word of mouth now.

  When he told me he was a veterinarian, I said, “No, you aren’t.”

  Those smoldering eyes widened in surprise. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because…because you can’t be. I just can’t see it.” Nor could I imagine telling Lara tomorrow: So I was in a bar last night and met this sexy veterinarian… No, those concepts somehow didn’t go together. Veterinarians looked like Wil Delaney.

  “It’s God’s truth,” Kiyo swore, stirring his margarita. “I even take my work home with me. I have five cats and two dogs.”

  “Oh, dear Lord.”

  “Hey, I like animals. It goes back to the honesty thing. Animals don’t lie about how they feel. They want to eat, fight, and reproduce. If they like you, they show it. If they don’t, they don’t. They don’t play games. Well, except maybe the cats. They’re tricky sometimes.”

  “Yeah? What’d you name all those cats?”

  “Death, Famine, Pestilence, War, and Mr. Whiskers.”

  “You named your cats after the riders of the apocal—wait. Mr. Whiskers?”

  “Well, there are only four horsemen.”

  We talked for a while after that about whatever else came to mind. Some was serious, some humorous. He told me he was in town from Phoenix, which kind of disappointed me. Not local. We also talked about the people around us, our jobs, life, the universe, etc., etc. All the while I kept wondering how this had happened. Hadn’t I just been noting how I lived outside of society? Yet, here I was, talking to a guy I’d just met like I’d known him for years. I barely recognized the words coming out of my own mouth. I didn’t even recognize my body language: leaning into him as we talked, legs touching. He wore no cologne but smelled like he looked: darkness and sex and heat. And promises. Promises that said, Oh, baby, I can give you everything you’ve ever wanted if you’ll just give me the chance….

  At one point, I leaned toward the bar to slide an empty bottle across it. As I did, I suddenly felt Kiyo’s fingers brush my lower back where my shirt had ridden up. I flinched as electricity crackled through me at that slight, casual touch.

  “Here’s more honesty,” he said in a low voice. “I like this tattoo. A lot. Violets again?”

  I nodded and sat back in my chair, but he didn’t remove his hand. That tattoo was a chain of violets and leaves that spread across my lower back. A larger cluster of the flowers sat on my tailbone, and then smaller tendrils extended outward on both sides, almost to my hips.

  “Violets have sort have become my patron flower,” I explained, “because of my eyes.”

  He leaned forward, and I almost stopped breathing at how close his mouth was to mine. “Wow. You’re right. I’ve never seen eyes that color.”

  “I’ve got three more.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Tattoos.”

  This got his interest. “Where?”

  “They’re covered by the shirt.” I hesitated. “You know anything about Greek mythology?”

  He nodded. A cultured man. Cue swooning.

  I touched my upper right arm. My sleeve covered the skin. “This one’s a snake wrapped all the way around my arm. It’s for Hecate, the goddess of magic and the crescent moon.” What I didn’t add was that Hecate guarded the crossroads between worlds. It was she who governed transitions to the Otherworld and beyond. This tattoo was my link to her, to facilitate my own journeys and call on her for help when needed.

  I moved to my upper left arm. “This one’s a butterfly whose wings wrap around and touch behind my arm. It’s half black and half white.”

  “Psyche?” he asked.

  “Good guess.” He really was cultured. The goddess Psyche was synonymous with the soul, which the butterfly represented in myth. “Persephone.”

  He nodded. “Half black, half white. She lives half her life in this world and half in the Underworld.”

  Not unlike my own life. Persephone guided transitions to the world of death. I didn’t travel there myself, but I invoked her to send others across.

  “She governs the dark moon. And back here”—I tapped the spot behind me where my neck connected to my back—“is a moon with an abstract woman’s face in it. Selene, the full moon.”

  Kiyo’s dark eyes held intense interest. “Why not one of the more common moon goddesses, then? Like Diana?”

  I hesitated with my answer. In many ways, Diana would have served the same purpose. She, like Selene, was bound to the human world and could keep me grounded here when I needed it. “The others are…solitary goddesses. Even Persephone, who’s technically married. Diana’s a virgin—she’s alone too. But Selene…well, she doesn’t get a lot of press anymore, but she was a more social goddess. A sexual goddess. She opens herself up to other people. And experiences. So I went with her. I just didn’t think it’d be healthy to be marked with three goddesses who were all alone.”

  “What about you? Are you alone, Eugenie?” His voice was velvet against me, and I could have drowned in those eyes. They were like chocolate. Chocolate is an aphrodisiac.

  “Aren’t we all alone?” I asked with a rueful smile.

  “Yes. I think in the end, we all are, no matter what the songs and happy stories say. I guess it’s just a matter of who we choose to be alone with.”

  “That’s why I come here, you know. To be alone with other people. There’s isolation in a crowd. You’re hidden. Safe.”

  He looked around at the buzzing, moving sea of people in the bar. They were like a wall surrounding us. There but not there. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here too?”

  He glanced back down at me, his expression a little less sexual and a bit more pensive. “I don’t kno
w. I’m not sure. I guess maybe I’m here because of you.”

  I didn’t have any quick retorts for that, so I started playing with the bottle again. The bartender asked if I wanted another, and I shook my head.

  Kiyo touched my shoulder. “You want to dance?”

  I was pretty sure I hadn’t danced since high school, but some force compelled me to agree. We stepped out into a crowd of very bad dancers. Most were just sort of floundering around to a fast song with a heavy beat that I’d never heard before. Kiyo and I weren’t much better. But when a slower song came on, he wrapped me to him, pressing us together as close as two people could be. Well, almost as close.

  I couldn’t ever remember anything like this happening with a guy I’d just met, a desire for someone I actually wanted and not just someone who was available. His body felt hard and perfect against mine, and my flesh kept concocting ways to touch his. I was already picturing him naked, imagining what it would be like to have his body move against and inside of mine. What was going on with me here? The images were so vivid and real, it was a wonder my feelings weren’t written across my face.

  So I didn’t really mind when he slid his hand up the back of my neck and brought his mouth down to kiss me. It wasn’t a tentative kiss either. No first-date kisses here. It was the kind of kiss that meant business, the kind of kiss that said, I want to consume every inch of you and hear you scream my name. I’d never really made out in a public place, but it seemed kind of a trivial concern as that kiss burned between us, our tongues and lips exploring the contours of each other’s mouths.

  But when his other hand slid up and cupped my breast, even I was surprised. “Hey,” I said, breaking off slightly. “There are people around.” Amusing, I thought a moment later, that I was less concerned about him doing it than being seen doing it.

  He kissed the side of my neck, just below my ear, and when he spoke, his words heated my skin. “People only notice if you make a big deal about it.”

  I let him kiss me again and didn’t say anything else about the hand that continued to stroke the curve of my breast and tease my nipple into hardness beneath the shirt. His other hand slid down to my ass and ground me closer to him, letting me feel exactly what was underneath his jeans. The fact that we were doing this in public suddenly made it a lot sexier.

  I let out a small, trembling sigh and then broke away from the kiss again. Only this time, it wasn’t because of any prudish feelings. It was from need. My body’s suddenly urgent and excruciating need.

  “Are you staying next door?” I asked, indicating the hotel adjacent to the bar.

  “No. Out at the Monteblanca.”

  I let surprise show on my face. That was in the region near where I lived, in the Santa Catalina foothills. “That’s not a hotel. That’s a resort. A really nice one. Veterinarians must make a lot.”

  He smiled and brushed his lips against my cheek. “You want to see it?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I certainly do.”

  Chapter Four

  We were on each other before we even made it to his room. If our actions on the dance floor had been racy, our grappling in the elevator was downright X-rated. Fortunately no one else rode up with us, which was a good thing, considering the disheveled state of our clothing when we finally made it inside.

  All the while, some reasonable voice in my mind kept whispering, You don’t do this kind of thing. But I was. And I wanted to, very badly.

  It was a nice room, not surprising in such a nice hotel. A king-size bed offered comfort in the moonlit room, and beyond it, a sliding glass door opened out to a balcony that overlooked the desert. I didn’t have time to admire the view because Kiyo pushed me down onto the bed, pulling my shirt off at the same time. I’d already done a fair job at undoing his pants in the elevator, so I had an edge in the race.

  When we were both naked, I saw him sit up and lean over the side of the bed, fumbling with the grocery store bag on the floor. We’d had to make an unromantic—but necessary—stop for condoms. I was on the pill, but even in the heat of passion, I wasn’t so foolish as to trust going into unprotected sex with a stranger, no matter how charming. Kiyo’s eager hands practically tore the box apart, causing the little packets to scatter on the floor. He picked one up and opened it, and I helped him put it on.

  I smiled both at his reaction to my touch and the fact that the condom was a deep scarlet. When it was on, I admired him for a moment. Everything about him was perfect: the shape of his body, the sculpted muscles, the tanned skin. His eyes were dark and demanding in the dim lighting, black depths that wanted to wrap me up. There was an intense quality to him, something primal and feral. He regarded me in a similarly scrutinizing way just before pulling me down onto the bed with him, laying his body across mine.

  All he did was kiss me at first. Everywhere. He tasted my lips again and then my neck, tracing its shape with his tongue. My breasts held his attention for a long time after that, but then, breasts occupied most guys’ attention as a general rule. He held them and kissed them, biting the nipples, keeping his eyes locked on mine the entire time. For me, it was like traces of fire shooting under my skin, like his touch was some kind of drug my body needed to survive.

  When his face moved between my legs, it was only to nuzzle against the sensitive skin down there, to run his tongue along the place where my thigh connected with the rest of my body. He inhaled deeply, burying himself against me as though he needed to take more of me in.

  He moved back up so that we were face to face once more, his body again on top of mine. My own body was in agony, uncertain as to why we weren’t expediting things. I don’t know what look was on my face, but he smiled at me. It was a knowing smile, an animal smile.

  “There is nothing in the world,” he said in a soft, burning voice, “like the smell and look of a woman about to let you have her.”

  “‘Have?’” I laughed. “Are you calling me a possession?”

  “We’re all possessions during sex, Eugenie.”

  And then I felt him slide into me, slowly at first as though he would inch his way in and catch me unaware, and then plunging all the way. I thought the earlier delay around the tour of my body might have made him less hard, but if anything, he felt harder and bigger than when I’d put the condom on. He moved at a rough, fast pace that in any other man would probably have ended things in thirty seconds. Somehow I suspected that wouldn’t be the case here.

  It wasn’t.

  I dug my nails into his back, arching myself up as though I could drive him farther and farther into me. Already I was almost painfully full, but it was a good pain, the kind that danced with pleasure, making the two inextricable. He moved with long, rapid strokes, watching my face carefully to see how I reacted to every movement and shift of position. When he hit a spot that made my lips part and cries grow louder, he thrust harder and more fiercely. My cries bordered along the edge of screaming, and he moved his hands to hold my wrists and keep my bucking body from moving. The wrist that had been hurt with the keres complained a little, but it was lost to the building sensation between my legs, that burning liquid heat waiting to explode through me. Besides, I wasn’t being gentle either. I slipped my hands from his hold and clutched at his back, letting my nails dig in fierce and deep, almost hard enough to draw blood, I realized. That knowledge didn’t make me stop. If anything, I dug deeper until he snatched my wrists back and held me down again. It was the roughest sex I’d ever had. And probably the best.

  “Don’t close your eyes,” he told me.

  I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing it. Vision seemed a superfluous sense at the moment, compared to everything else I felt.

  “Look at me,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

  Our eyes locked as the pressure within me finally exploded, sending my body thrashing and shaking. My screams faded to one low moan, the only way I could give voice to the feelings coursing through me. One might have thought Kiyo would slow down after that, but he
didn’t. He kept up the same ardent pace, still holding me, and it was almost too much after that orgasm. I could see from his face that my reactions aroused him, drove him on further. I was his possession in that moment, just as he had said.

  My combative, fighter nature flared up just then. I decided that I didn’t want to be the possession anymore. Dominance and power ruled my days; it would with sex too. I moved my hands from his back to his upper arms and shoulders. Relying on the element of surprise, I rolled him over, using my legs to pin him down, wrapping them around his hips. Pleased surprise poured over his face. He hadn’t expected me to be so strong. He shifted as though he might try to throw me, and I shoved him down. It turned into a rougher motion than I intended, but he didn’t mind. If anything, it made the passion on his face grow.

  “You submit now,” I growled, pressing my palms down onto his chest.

  A smile twisted at his lips. “Sure.”

  I guided him back into me, exultant that I was the one in control now. I moved my hips up and down, leaning over so I could watch him slide in and out of me. My hair, long since freed from its ponytail, hung over him, grazing his skin. I have hair the color of cinnamon, a tawny russet not dark enough to be auburn, nor light enough to be strawberry. In this lighting, however, it was only a dark veil between us. He brushed it aside and rested his hands gently under my breasts so he could feel their movement as I rode him. Looking up through my hair, I watched his face now that I was the one controlling him. It was exquisite. I moved faster and harder, bringing him all the way into me, watching and adjusting as I did. I wanted to see him come so badly, see the look on his face when he lost control.

  I knew we were close when his hands dropped from my breasts to grip my waist and hips. His fingers clenched tightly into my skin, just as mine had earlier. He kept his gaze on me, bold and unafraid of me seeing him in climax. I moved more fiercely, urging him on, and then I heard a soft, ecstatic sound issue forth. His eyes never left mine, and his hands slid to the backs my shoulders, suddenly raking down my flesh as his body released itself into mine.