by Selena Scott
“Fine,” he grated out. “Bed. Going to bed.”
He was up and striding out of the room, Martine staring confusedly after him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Martine emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown just a few minutes later. Arturo stood with his arms crossed on the other side of the room, staring out at the black night. She was a little irritated that he’d left halfway through the movie. She’d wanted to see the rest of it, but she wasn’t about to leave him unprotected while he slept. He was vulnerable then and she wasn’t leaving him alone. No matter how cute that actor had been, slanging those muscles all over the place, squinting for the camera and growling in that deep voice.
She frowned at Arturo’s back. He winced and grabbed his head. She wondered if he had a headache.
“Those bastards,” he muttered.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again. He seemed completely agitated. Jumpy, like the wrong word from her would send him fleeing from the room. Well, she couldn’t say that she hadn’t been expecting this. Personally, she’d thought that convincing Arturo to sleep in her room would have taken a lot more convincing than it had. She’d been surprised when he’d come along with so little fight. But maybe the fight was just a few days late.
“I’m fine,” he said curtly, his back to her. He wore his jeans and no shirt. The lighting in the room was dim and she couldn’t ever remember seeing so many shadows play over him. Realistically, she was certain that she had. She’d seen him naked in so many situations. Strangely, though, in some ways it always felt like the first time.
“You were the first man I ever saw naked,” she said. The words just slipped right out, because she was thinking them, because they were true, and perhaps most incredibly, because she was comfortable around Arturo.
He finally turned from the window. “What?” his shadowed face asked her. “When do you mean?”
“All those years ago. When we first met. Back in the old country.”
Arturo looked pained and whether it was because of the reminder of his mortal life or if it was because they were talking about her seeing him naked, she wasn’t sure.
“It was just after we’d all come together as a group. You and Amelia hadn’t fallen in love yet. Edmund and Victoria had just done their whole sweeping romance thing. Charlotte and Benjamin were already married.”
“How did you see me naked?” He looked equal parts pained and fascinated.
“You were bathing in the same stream that I was. You didn’t see me, though, when you came splashing down. I hid.”
“It’s a good thing I hadn’t seen you,” he admitted. “I probably would have slipped on a rock and drowned. This whole situation would have ended very differently.”
“Why would you have slipped on a rock and drowned if you’d seen me naked?”
“Because you’re basically Helen of Troy, Wings.” He said this in a tired, almost defeated voice.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It means I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. And if I’d seen you naked and bathing when I was a mortal I would have bitten my own tongue off.”
“Oh!” She flushed with surprised pleasure. She’d known that he was attracted to her, his various erections that she’d encountered were proof enough of that. But to hear him lay it out so baldly, in such stark lighting, well… it buoyed her, filled her with a sparkling, organic chemical she’d never encountered before. A question bloomed within her. “You thought that… even then?”
Arturo took a long time to answer. He looked angry at himself when he finally did. “I loved Amelia, Martine. I truly did. I also thought you were unbelievably, devastatingly gorgeous. But unapproachable. Like a goddess or an angel on high. There was something so untouchable about you. And that was before we even knew you were a shifter. Or about the energy. Even when I thought you were human, I still…” He trailed off and the tense, angry look folded into something softer, something lined with questions. “Why did you hide yourself from us, Wings?”
She sighed and stepped back so that she was sitting on the bed. It was a question she’d asked herself over and over again. Since the day Arturo had sacrificed himself, she’d been berating herself with that very question. “Because I thought it would be better if I fit in with you all. The middle ages was a different time!” she insisted. “There was every possibility that you all would fear me or even try to hurt or kill me if you knew I was a shifter. So I just pretended that I was a human like the rest of you. Only…” she fiddled with the silk that kissed over the tops of her feet. “Only, I’m not very good at blending in as a human. So you all knew there was something off about me. And I ended up distanced anyways. Which meant that I couldn’t adequately protect all of you.” She sighed. “That’s why I came clean about being a hawk shifter immediately with this group. And why I showed them my energy shifting as well. I don’t want what happened before to happen again. Even so, there’s still a distance between me and them. I’m not human. I never will be. I just hope the distance is small enough this time that I’ll still be able to keep them safe from the demon.”
Again, that night flashed before Arturo’s eyes. The night all those centuries ago that Arturo sacrificed his life to the demon. He remembered it clear as day. The demon had struck twice that night. Once several hours before and Martine had shifted to her hawk form to fight him. She’d held him off long enough for the group to stumble back through the Forest of Dean. She’d answered all of their incredulous questions. She’d answered them honestly. It had been there that Arturo’s beliefs were finally confirmed. That Martine was on some other level above other women. She was as close to a god as his mortal body was ever going to get.
And then she confirmed the worst. That she was going to kill the demon. And she would die when the demon did. Her life for his. It was, in her calm eyes, exactly how it was supposed to end.
“This time you’re not going to be fighting him alone, Martine,” he told her, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“If I recall, I didn’t fight him alone all those years ago, either,” she replied quietly.
In each of their mind’s eye, the memory of Arturo flinging himself at the feet of the demon flashed.
The moment wasn’t tense or tight, though. It was velvety sad. Until she patted the bed beside her and innocently looked up at him.
“Let’s just go to bed.”
He stared at her hand as it patted the bed. His eyes slicked sideways and landed on the dark valley of cleavage in that fucking black nightgown. What he wouldn’t give to actually crawl into bed with her. He wanted to taste the back of her knee. He wanted to pull her hair and make her eyes dilate. He wanted the cold night air in through the windows so she trembled and clung to him. He wanted to punish both of them for all these years of pain.
It didn’t make sense. He breathed roughly and viciously blocked out the stereo sex feelings that were still beaming in from all three of his comrades. He wasn’t having sex tonight. And he wasn’t ever having sex with Martine. The demon was going to come, they were going to kill that motherfucker, and then he and Martine were going to die. The end. The fucking end.
She patted the bed again, her hair tumbling over her forehead.
He cracked.
“Martine, I can’t take another night of this. I don’t care. I’d rather lay myself on a silver platter on the demon’s dinner table than take another night of that.” He pointed toward her white bed, which seemed to glow a little bit in the dim blue light of evening.
“Oh.” She immediately cast her eyes down. “I understand.”
Arturo nodded then strode toward the door of her room. He paused at the threshold and turned to her, his hand knotted up in his hair. “Wait. What exactly is it that you’re understanding? Because something tells me you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”
He was really going to make her say it out loud? She smoothed her warm palms over her thighs and took a deep br
eath. “Because a man wants only to lie beside a woman that he feels something… special for. And I’m not exactly a normal woman. You don’t like being close to me. In that way.”
“Jesus Christ.” Arturo pinched the bridge of his nose and slammed his eyes shut. He kicked the door closed behind him and paced the length of the room. “You really think…”
She watched him fill the space with his agitated pacing. His intense energy had the effect of making the room seem to shrink. She stood up and stepped toward him.
“Martine,” he turned to face her abruptly and immediately his eyes swept over her in an agitated way. He took her in from head to toe. Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders and he marched her backwards so that she was, again, sitting on the bed she’d come to think of as theirs, though she’d never say that out loud now.
He strode all the way across the room and pressed his back to the windows, as far from her as he could possibly be.
“That is the opposite of what is going on,” he finally told her, his black eyes burning and his hair messy from where he’d been grabbing it.
“What do you mean?” she asked, carefully choosing her words so that she’d be able to understand.
“I mean that I can’t sleep here because—” He let out a frustrated groan and knocked his skull backwards against the window a few times. “Because I want you so fucking badly it is torture to lay next to you and not touch you.”
She ran the words through her mind again. And then another time when they didn’t make any more sense the second time. “You…”
“Want you.”
“Want me.”
“That’s right.” He was grabbing his hair again and looking at her so hard, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he could see right through her. “This is a complete surprise to you?”
She thought for a long time. Was it? “I wasn’t sure what was happening. I’ve never…” she trailed off and watched as his eyes darkened further, harder, ruthlessly dark. “I didn’t think for sure that you’d want me. Considering I’m not exactly human.”
He laughed humorlessly, almost as if his last reserves of calm were about to be used right up. “Wings, you wake up every morning literally glowing for me. How could I not want that? You?”
She smoothed her nightgown over her knees, trying to keep up. “So, you want me. Which means that you’re going away from me? You won’t stay here with me?”
“I can’t trust myself.” His words were simple but they didn’t clear anything up for Martine.
“Being close to me causes you pain.” She was desperately trying to clear everything up. Arturo had come to mean so much to her over the course of her existence, and she could feel her relationship with him balancing on a knife’s edge. She didn’t want to push him away simply because she wasn’t understanding what exactly he was saying.
He knocked knuckles against his forehead. “Pain might be a little melodramatic. But yeah. Being this close to you is… uncomfortable. Because it’s close enough for me to catch your scent. Feel the heat of you. When your feet brush against me in the night—” He cut himself off with an unholy groan.
Understanding finally bloomed, and it brought with it a healthy heat just underneath the surface of her skin. Her pulse picked up and she could feel her glow begin. “Ohhhhh. You mean that you can’t stay here because you want to be even closer?”
In her mind, that was the easiest problem of them all to solve.
He nodded curtly and pushed off the windows to stride across the room. “Which is why, risk or not, demon or not, I need to just go back downstairs and sle—”
“You can touch me.”
He froze as if someone had pushed a button and stopped time. He swore that even the blood in his veins just sort of paused. She was an innocent, he reminded himself. She’d just admitted to barely even being able to recognize attraction for what it was. She had no idea what she was actually offering him.
It had been a long thirty seconds since she’d spoken—or since he’d taken a breath—so he inhaled hard and turned to her. “Martine.”
“You don’t want to touch me?” She cocked her head to one side and watched him with those big, green eyes. The shadows dipped into her cleavage lovingly and he could see the golden glow beginning to form a sheen over her skin, like sweat. She couldn’t have possibly known how wildly exciting he found her. How devastatingly sexy she looked.
She was killing him.
“I want to touch you but it’s not right, Martine.” He couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. He deserved an Olympic medal. He deserved a Nobel prize. He deserved a yacht in heaven for this.
Why oh why did he have to go and grow a conscience now? He’d been the right-hand man to the devil for the last four hundred years. Would it kill him to act like it? Four hundred years of evil-doing and still his conscience couldn’t even let him defile a virgin when she was asking for it?
“Why isn’t it right?”
“You’re an innocent.”
She considered that for a minute and then, to his equal horror and elation, she rose from the bed and took a step toward him. “You could kiss me.”
She did that head-cocking thing again. He was holding his breath again.
“I’d still be an innocent if you just kissed me, right?”
“I—” Where had all the English gone? It had fled his head like water from a holey bucket. Meanwhile she was getting closer and closer. He could scent her. Her eyes filled up her face.
“I’d like to kiss,” she told him sweetly. “Kissing feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he told her gruffly. She was standing close enough to touch, her exhales gently swirling over his face.
She looked up at him, her head tilted back and his tilted down.
“Don’t you want to make me feel good?” The question was seductive by nature but asked so innocently. The combination of those two things had something deep within Arturo cracking in two.
She leaned up on her toes and took a sip from his bottom lip.
He held dangerously still for the longest three seconds of either of their lives. Then his hands clamped around her back and his teeth came out, biting at her lower lip, pinning it in place so that he could taste and taste her.
He released her lip and kissed her with an open mouth.
“Flowers,” he muttered to himself, twisting his face away from hers to breathe. And then his mouth was back again. He licked the seam of her lips, swallowing her gasp. “No. Fresh cream.”
Impatiently, one of his hands gripped her chin and held her in place ruthlessly. He grunted against her mouth and dipped inside for taste after taste. “No. What is that? Coconut? Jesus, what the hell is that flavor?”
He asked that last part with his eyes half an inch from hers, their noses jammed together and his chest sawing up and down. Martine, fascinated, aroused, terrified of breaking his mystifying mood, just held perfectly still and stared right back at him.
Apparently deciding that standing was too much of an impediment to getting to the bottom of whatever the hell that flavor was, Arturo walked them backward toward the bed. He didn’t stop their inertia even when the backs of her knees caught on the mattress and there was nowhere for her to go but flat on her back. He prowled over top of her, slipped one palm around the back of her neck, and tipped her head back.
His tongue was in her mouth again, dipping and tasting and he growled once more. “Almond? Vanilla? Ambrosia? Jesus fuck, what is it that you taste like?”
His weight was deliciously hard over top of her, pressing her into the mattress. He seemed obsessed with getting to the bottom of her taste as he licked and licked into her. He was restless and agitated and obviously aroused.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she tentatively, finally, met his tongue with hers, pressing softly for just the shyest second.
As if she’d set some sort of spell over him, all at once, he softened at the touch of her tongue. His manic
energy dissipated and his tongue no longer swept through her mouth in hot arcs. Both of his arms slid under her back, clasping her tightly, but his tongue had become impossibly chaste.
They kissed each other with the softness with which one strokes the petal of an orchid. She felt as if she were a wild animal he was coaxing out of a forest. Every shuddered breath of his that broke across her cheek reminded her that he was a great beast of a man and he was being so soft with her. The thought had her glowing and heating and liquefying. She’d tasted his desire for her in their first clash of mouths. But this was something else.
It was such an intoxicating mixture of power and restraint, heat and withholding. She strained against him, needing something, everything, but not knowing exactly how to get it. She glowed intensely gold, and found that if she didn’t rub against him immediately, she might just dissolve into thin air.
She struggled to get her legs out from under him, but he held her pinned tight.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he growled, giving her even more of his weight.
“What?” she gasped, nearly whimpering when he lowered his mouth and kissed the pulse at her throat.
“We’re just kissing, Martine. I’m not letting you wrap those fucking legs around me and sweep me away into infinity, all right? You’re going to lay very still, and kiss the hell out of me, and then we’re going to bed.”
She kept wiggling her legs. “Why?”
“Because I said so,” he snapped, lowering his head to hers again.
But that was an assholish thing to say and he wasn’t the only one in charge here. She pressed two fingers into the soft place above his collar bone and zapped him brightly with a tiny, golden lightning bolt.
Arturo gasped and tightened and she easily rolled him over to his back. She found herself spread across him in the same way she had been that first night in the dirt. The needy place between her legs was pressed flush against him and she shivered with the sheer rightness of the feeling.