A scream built in her throat and she struggled to contain it as she shattered. But as Ben shouted his release at the same moment as her, she lost the battle. She cried his name, dragging it loud and long over a span of many seconds, ending with another scream that joined his shout.
Chapter 9
Even though he’d collapsed against Lia, his hips continued to piston into her, dragging more cries from deep in her chest as he moved, prolonging her climax the way no man, no immortal ever had. She dug her heels into the mattress and clenched her butt, lifting to pull him deeper. His heart thudded against her breasts; he groaned his ongoing pleasure into her ear.
As she circled back to earth, a low chuckle rumbled in his belly, teasing her. He licked his tongue along the tendon in her neck. “You are indeed fucking awesome at fucking.”
Her reply was cut short as the door to her bedroom burst open. Shelly hurtled into the room, her eyes glowing unnaturally in the dim lighting, arms up and palms out as if she was ready to hurl lightning bolts at an intruder.
Pinned under Ben, Lia couldn’t do anything but scream. “Shelly! Get the Hades out of here.”
“I heard screaming and groaning and—” Her words ground to a halt as her frightened glare landed on the sight of Ben’s ass between Lia’s legs. Eyes shooting wide open, her cheeks flared a florid shade of red. “Oh, my goddess! I’m so sorry. I thought you were being attacked.”
For the first time, Lia saw laughter fill Ben’s eyes, turning them to turquoise. “And God, it hurt so good,” he mumbled as he slipped his dick free of her body and scrambled for the covers they’d kicked to the end of the bed.
Lia helped him pull the sheet over their bodies, lowering one knee so he could roll away from her. Keeping the pale peach cotton clutched over her chest with one hand, she waved her other at Shelly. “As you can see, we’re fine. Would you wait for me in the kitchen?”
The woman’s white-blond hair whipped around her shoulders as she whirled around and left the room. The door clicked softly behind her.
With a groan, albeit softer this time, Lia dropped back against her pillow. The bed shook under the force of Ben’s laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she groused. “This will go into a report to Mars today. And Zeus, my dad, is copied on all these reports. I can just see it now. Upon investigation, a sexy dimpled ass was discovered working between the subject’s legs. The man had a pretty fine backside as well.”
Ben’s laughter got louder.
“I can’t believe you. You haven’t laughed once since I met you, and suddenly, this is funny. This is embarrassing.”
“Sorry.” Like hell he was sorry. Still laughing, he pulled himself up next to her on the pillow. “Surely she was embarrassed enough to keep our secret.” He stroked the back of his knuckles over her shoulder and down her arm. A thrill rattled over her nerves as he grazed his fingertips over her breast.
Biting her lip, she shook her head. “Did you see her eyes? They glowed. She activated, which triggers an alert in SecCom at Olympus. We’re damn lucky an entire battalion of centurions didn’t come charging out of the Hollow to rescue me.”
Ben tilted a hand along her jaw, turning her to face him. As he pressed his mouth against her lips, he used his arms to slide them lower in the bed. He angled his chest over hers and kissed away her embarrassment. Sipping away at her ire, he licked her closer to the mindless oblivion she’d been immersed in before they’d been interrupted.
He held her in place with a hand on her belly, his calloused palm heated against her bare flesh. Flexing the fingers of his other hand on her shoulder, he continued to kiss her. The corners of his mouth remained lifted in a smile. She loved feeling the curve of his mouth over hers, since he’d so rarely smiled in their brief acquaintance.
She registered a telltale tightening of the atmosphere, announcing another immortal had just materialized somewhere in her house.
He drew away, and she reluctantly released his mouth, but pressed her hand over his on her stomach. “I probably should go out and talk to Shelly. And whoever else just popped in unannounced.”
He dragged his arm out from under her and rose up on his elbow. “Is that the compression I felt? Someone else coming in? It’s not your dad, is it?”
“No, his entries are more concussive. Your head might ache when he arrives. In a bad sinus headache kind of way. This is probably Stewart, my partisan.”
“Partisan?” He cocked his brow and toyed with a lock of her hair as he waited for her to explain.
“Kind of a bodyguard. You saw him last night. But I didn’t know he was assigned to me until this afternoon.” Lia crawled from the bed and strode across the room.
“Lia?” He stopped her just as she felt the cool crystal knob under her fingers.
She tipped her head and waited for him to explain.
He gestured to her bare-naked body. “You might want to put some clothes on before you go out there.”
She glanced down, then back up at him. “Ben, I’m eight-thousand years old. So are they. They’ve seen it before.”
His brows lowered mulishly. “But now, I kind of consider that wonderful, delectable body mine. At least until this challenge is over.”
His? He considered her his…what? Lover, girlfriend—soul mate? Warmth seeped into the age-old spot she’d held in reserve through all her incarnations. The miniscule portion of her that screamed her need to belong to one man through eternity. She licked her lips as she scrambled back into the clothes she’d thrown haphazardly around her bedroom in her rush to fall into bed with this sexy man.
Breath stalled in her lungs as she accepted that she was truly his, heart and soul.
Shelly sat at the vintage red Formica and chrome kitchen table, head in hands, color still high. Lifting her head as Lia approached, Shelly flared her eyes wide, then slammed them shut an instant before she buried her face in her arms.
Lia moved further into the room and spied Stewart leaning against the counter nearest the stove. “’S’up, Stew?”
He shrugged and lifted one brow. “Oh, you know. Got a 911 blast when your resident partisan thought you might be dying.”
“She was freaking screaming. What the hell was I supposed to think?”
“I wasn’t screaming that loud.” Lia plopped onto the chair across from the embarrassed guard.
“You were. Loud and freaking long, like someone was carving you open,” Shelly argued.
Stew snickered. “The sex must have been pretty damn awesome for it to be loud and long.”
“It was.” Ben snuck up behind Lia and dropped a kiss on the crown of her head. He claimed the seat next to Lia. His chest and feet were still bare but at least his jeans were zipped and buttoned. “But, that was a private moment. Now, what do we need to do to fix whatever report you send to minimize the fact that I made my girl shatter like a platter?”
“Ben!” Lia slapped her hand over his mouth.
He promptly tried to nip her fingertips, but she jerked away. Catching her wrist, he held on and lifted his foot to her chair, tucking his toes under her butt.
“I’ve already fixed the report. Filed an addendum to indicate we were in drill mode and oops, we forgot to inform them.” Stewart turned to pour himself a cup of coffee from the pot he must have started while waiting for Lia to appear. “Zeus will never know his daughter was indulging in the baser side of her nature.”
“Do you know how many bastard brothers and sisters I have roaming the halls of Olympus?” It wasn’t like Zeus had ever refrained from planting his seed in any willing belly.
Stewart joined them at the table. He tapped his iPad to life and called up his browser. “You need to look what I just got from Ian Sommers. Demeter Sciences has been watching some fresh water fish hatcheries that have been reporting caustic algae blooms. It’s wiped out the entire new brood in two plants. He’s also noted Colony Collapse Disorder has become widespread in beehives in Europe and North America.”
Ben g
rabbed the tablet, a frown creased deeply into his forehead. His voice was pained when he spoke. “This isn’t good. Crops are failing all over, and any chance of re-seeding will be ruined if there aren’t enough bees to pollinate new fields.” He swiped the screen up, his frown growing darker as he continued to read.
“Ian mentioned the western honey bees are most impacted by the blight or disease or whatever.” Stewart leaned forward and read the screen upside down, his coffee forgotten.
Lia watched the cloud gathering on Ben’s face, knowing something more than the disappearance of some bees was troubling him. She grabbed Stew’s coffee and took a gulp, the dark, dark roast searing her taste buds.
A loud crash against the sliding glass door leading outside jolted her from her study of Ben’s expression. Another crash quickly followed the first.
Stewart leaped out of his chair and raced across the room before Shelly had vacated her seat. Ben grabbed Lia’s hand and pulled her up, thrusting her behind him. The protective gesture might have pleased her, except she was the immortal, endowed with gifts to shield them from harm. She held her tongue.
Shelly scuttled around the table, taking up a defensive position in front of the pair. The slider rattled in its frame as another bang erupted.
Light flooded Lia’s backyard when Stewart snapped the switch by the door. He stumbled back as a black bird slammed into the window, then fell to the ground. It joined two other birds flopping helplessly, while a fourth lie dead, its neck twisted at an awkward angle.
Screeches, closely resembling a banshee’s shriek, sounded from the trellis of late autumn roses on the edge of the patio. Hunger perched precariously on the thorny branches, her legs partly covered in skin, part still striated avian flesh. The bird’s blue eyes were rimmed in red and it had eyelashes. Tiny hornlike protrusions jutting from each side of her skull resembled newly formed ears.
Hunger screeched again, flapping her wings and dropping feathers at the base of the trellis. Behind the magpie, in the flowering crab tree Lia loved, a flock of crows squawked and fluttered their wings.
Stewart reached for the door handle and lifted one hand in the air as if he meant to place a thrall on the bitch.
“Wait!” Lia yelled. “If you open the door, she might take it as an invitation.”
Stewart clenched his fist. “Lia, she isn’t a vampire. She doesn’t require an invitation to cross your threshold.”
“Aw, fuck me! Vampires are real, too?” Ben tossed her a worried look.
“No. But I don’t want that bitch thinking she can come in. I’m tired of this shit.” As if on cue, Hunger lifted her tail feathers and plopped a fat bird turd on the concrete below. “That’s it.”
Lia squinted her eyes and imagined a steel wire snaking through the rose branches, sizzling with electricity. In her imagination, she visualized the electrode creeping up behind the bird, then darting forward to connect with Hunger’s back. Where Lia jabbed the dangerous thought, a bright blue light danced on the now-smoking feathers. Squawking and cawing, Hunger lifted off her perch and flew from sight. A rush of flapping wings accompanied Hunger’s frantic flight. The birds in the tree lifted off after her, like the bitch was the queen bee and every other bird chased her, wanted to be her.
Racing forward, Lia jerked open the sliding door and shook her fist at the retreating magpie, wishing with all her might she had the time to summon an energy ball to hurl after the bitch. “And don’t come back!” She slammed the door closed, rattling the picture on the wall adjacent to it. She flipped the lock.
“Feel better now?” Stewart leaned his shoulder against the door and crossed one ankle over the other. His smirk said it all.
“Yeah, that was childish. But she had it coming.” She cringed at the petulant, spoiled timbre of her voice. “I wish I had fire to hurl at her. Or the gift of conjuring. I’d have imagined a gilded cage with a starving cat inside and wrapped Hunger in it so fast her head would spin Exorcist fashion.”
Ben came up behind her. His body heat filtered into her as he laid his hands on her shoulder, instilling calm. “You’ll get her next time, tiger.” He rubbed his thumbs into her neck, easing some of her tension.
“Where do you keep your trash bags?” Shelly asked. “I’ll go take care of the crows. The dead ones, anyway.” She stared at the fallen birds, shuddering when another touched down and began pecking at the carcasses, as if starved for a meal.
Lia gestured to the cabinet below the kitchen sink.
Stewart studied the patio for a minute, then returned to the table and retrieved his iPad. “I need to report this attack to Mars. I’ll leave out the bit about the other attack.” He sniggered her direction, and she flipped her middle finger at him. He started to mist out to the Hollow and paused mid-shift. “You have a meeting with Ian and Demeter the goddess, not the company, tomorrow at one. Don’t be late.”
“Wait.” Ben lifted his hand. “Is Emma okay?” His body tensed as he voiced his concern for his sister.
Stewart’s cobalt aura swirled around his partially materialized form, his yellow center pulsed in time with a green glow at the top of his head. Lia enjoyed the visual of the brain and heart working in tandem during immortal communication while in the Hollow, or partially there in Stewart’s case. The result was fascinating and mesmerizing.
After a short nod of his head, Stewart addressed Ben. “She’s fine. Her guard said there is no sign of immortal activity around her apartment. At my request, he vaped in for a second. She’s sleeping soundly. Says he really likes her Hello Kitty jammies.”
“Tell him he better not touch my sister,” Ben growled.
Stewart laughed as he finished his transition into the Hollow.
Ben turned to Lia and asked, “What now?”
“We do our best to get a good night’s sleep.” She seized his hand and looked toward Shelly. “Please consider yourself off for the rest of the night. No need to investigate any strange noises.”
As she led Ben from the room, Shelly snapped open the trash bag she held, the sound barely masking her embarrassed grumble.
Chapter 10
“Ben, why did Stewart’s report last night about bees bother you so?” Lia asked before popping a handful of Cap’n Crunch into her mouth. Shelly said good morning, but declined breakfast, misting out for a briefing at Olympus.
“You know if you poured a little milk in a bowl with that cereal, you could almost call it nutritious.” He continued to work on separating a yolk from an egg, planning to fix an all-white omelet. Dropping the broken shell back in the carton, he spared a glance at Lia, who’d perched on the counter next to the stove.
“Not a milk fan, and you’re avoiding the question.”
“With reason.” It was a hard tale to share. A story that had shaped him into the man he’d become as a grown-up. “I don’t really talk about it.”
“It?”
“My past. Mine and Emma’s.”
“I want to know. I’d like to know everything about you.” Lia dropped a fist full of sugary food back into the box and dusted her hands. “Unless you’re going to confess that you were a male stripper and got stung by a bee on an unfortunate location on your body.” She swept her gaze to his groin and back, smiling sweetly.
Ben rolled his eyes. He whipped the thin liquid in the bowl into froth as he considered his words. “When I was a boy, my dad was a commercial beekeeper. It was our only source of income and it wasn’t all that lucrative. I remember counting the number of colonies, or hives, he had one summer. Over three hundred.”
“Lot of honey there.”
Until disaster struck the year he’d turned eight. “By the end of that summer, a blight had spread to all but ten of them. The bees died off, which destroyed the pupae, making the following year look like a bust as well.” The eggs sizzled when he dumped them into the pan. “Things were tough that winter. There was barely enough money to put any food on the table, and my old man was too proud to live on the county dole. Ref
used any help. I was okay. Mom enrolled me in the school lunch program, meaning I had at least one good meal a day. But she would take food off her plate at dinner for Dad and me.” The memory panged uncomfortably, of his mom’s sunken cheeks as she encouraged him to take her meager slice of bread. Ben shuffled the eggs around in the skillet.
“Sounds like something a mom would do.” Lia shoved the box away and leaned forward.
“She shouldn’t have. She was pregnant, and every morsel she gave me stole much needed nutrition from Emma. Mom’s generosity took a toll, and she went into premature labor. Emma was just under three pounds when she was born.” Damn, she’d been tiny. Not even the size of a cabbage. And the tubes, and bandages, and masks. He suppressed a shudder. “There were complications.”
“Is that why she’s deaf?”
“According to the doctors, yes. Watching her in the hospital bassinette, seeing my mom withering away before my eyes was… My dad, who I’d never seen cry, sobbed most nights when we left the hospital. He aged twenty years in one month.”
“Ben,” she paused, as if weighing her words carefully. “Has anyone ever examined Emma to see if her hearing can be restored?”
“My parents looked into cochlear implants, but without insurance, there was no way.” His mother had cried in front of him for the first time when the surgeon mentioned the expense. Even now, a woman in tears still shook him to his core. He crammed the memory back in the box it had sprung from. “Last year, Emma found an experimental surgery, that might possibly have restored hearing in one ear, but she didn’t qualify for the study.”
Lia slipped off the counter, sneaking under his arms, wrapping hers around his back. Calm and peace filled him from the point where her hands rested on his body.
Hunger: Goddesses of Delphi Page 9