I shrugged. “I guess. Maybe I’ll watch TV or something.”
“Okay,” he said. “Uh, we should be able to get down the mountain tomorrow. Even if they don’t plow the roads, we can take the snowmobiles and get the heck out of here.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’re eager to get away from me?”
I furrowed my brow. “Why would you say that?”
He rubbed his wet hair some more, looking at the floor. “I pushed, and I shouldn’t have pushed. You’ve made it really clear that you don’t want to have sex with me, and I should have respected that. I was a dick.”
I considered. “You are a dick,” I agreed. “But whatever almost happened between us, it was mutual. Right then, I wanted it. I wanted you.”
He raised his gaze to meet mine. “But you don’t anymore.”
I squared my shoulders. “I… I don’t know. I don’t think I should do anything until I do know.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” He heaved a sigh. “I get it. I won’t… I’ll back off, okay?”
He would? Who was this guy, and what had he done with Naelen? And why did I feel a rising panic when I surveyed him and realized he was serious? I shoved the sensation aside. I needed to get away from him, that was all. I inserted the key into my room door, and it opened. “Good night, Naelen.”
“Good night,” he said.
I started inside my room.
“Maybe it’s better anyway,” he said quietly.
I stopped and turned to look at him. “What’s that?”
“When we get home, if you’re going to be with Logan, then I think it’s better that we didn’t… I think it would be worse if you were with him after we’d been together.”
“So do I,” I said.
His face twisted. “You are going to choose him.” It wasn’t a question.
Logan. Thinking about Logan made me feel… “I know you don’t like him—”
“I don’t really know him,” he said. “I thought he hurt you. I thought he made you sad. I don’t understand what you even see in him.”
I smoothed my shirt. “There’s a lot of history between us. That counts for something, you know?”
He didn’t say anything, just studied his fingers.
“Good night, Naelen,” I said again, going inside my room. I shut the door behind me. I leaned back against it, and my breath was coming in gasps.
Abruptly, I wrenched the door back open.
Naelen was disappearing into his own room.
I went after him, stopping his door just before it closed.
He turned to me, startled. “Clarke?”
I pressed my body into his, pulled his neck down and sealed my lips over his own.
He kissed me, but his movements were confused and unsure.
I pulled back, stepping away from him, hugging myself. What the hell was I doing?
“What was that?” Naelen’s voice was unsteady. “You were just now talking about how you and Logan—”
“Could we stop talking about him for two seconds?” I said, sinking my fingers into my hair.
“Okay,” said Naelen.
I stepped closer, and I reached for him. “Maybe we could stop talking entirely,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “You mean…?”
I kissed him again. I ran my fingers over his solid chest, letting them trail lower and lower until I halted them just below his belly button.
He hissed. “Why are you doing this?”
“Do you care?” I said. And I reached down and tugged my shirt over my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
We didn’t talk much. I hit the light switch as I led him back into his room, and we climbed onto the bed together, bathed in darkness.
I lay on my back, and I pulled him on top of me.
We kissed like that for a long time.
The kisses felt good, the way kissing Naelen always did, but he seemed to be holding back somehow. He was only kissing me, he wasn’t doing anything else. He was usually edging us forward, trying to get me to go further, and he wasn’t doing that at all.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I didn’t want to think. I wanted it to be dark. I wanted it to be warm and close and pleasant. I wanted something good after all the coldness and harshness and death we’d just experienced.
So, I started undressing him.
I tugged his shirt over his head, and he let me. I traced the outlines of his muscles on his bare skin, and his breath hitched when my fingers moved. I let my hands go lower, my palm flat against his hard stomach. I eased my fingers under the waistband of his sweats and searched for him.
“Clarke,” he whispered.
There. I wrapped my fingers around his girth and gently squeezed.
He grunted.
I started to stroke him.
His breath changed, grew more labored. He rested his forehead against mine. “Why are you doing this?” he managed.
“Why are you asking me that?” I breathed. “Does it matter?”
“I think it does,” he said. “I think…”
I quickened my pace.
He sighed. He didn’t finished what he was saying. He just panted a little. And then he started to kiss me again. His mouth was more urgent against mine, full of something pent-up, almost as if there was a ball of fire inside him, trying to burn its way through.
I pumped him, feeling eager, feeling tingly and excited and wicked.
He grunted again, and he kicked his way out of his sweats.
I shed my pants too. We were both naked in the darkness.
His mouth left mine. He kissed his way down my neck, over my clavicle, my shoulder, and then further down my body. His mouth found sensitive places.
I bucked against him, losing my grip on his erection, losing myself to the pleasure he was giving me. I surrendered to it, and any doubts I had about it were wiped out in white-hot sweetness. He kissed me, nipped me, tasted me… and he did it everywhere, until I was limp and wet and screamed out from the heights of ecstasies that he’d taken me to.
The fire inside him had spilled out over both of us. It was dancing over my skin, over his skin. It was between his lips and my body, flames rushing back and forth between us, sparks leaping between our bodies.
And then, finally, he was pressing against me between my legs. This time there was a condom, and this time I was out of my mind with how good it felt, how wonderful and sweet.
I angled my hips, and it was done.
He was inside me, and he was gloriously immense and thick.
He made a strangled noise in the back of his throat.
I moaned.
“Clarke.” His voice had a funny catch in it.
“Naelen,” I said, running my fingers over his shoulders. I liked it this way. I liked us joined. It felt good. I opened my eyes to look at him, and found him wide-eyed, gazing at me. It was dark, so I could barely make out the shape of him, and I couldn’t quite interpret his expression, but he was looking at me with huge, earnest eyes, and I felt engulfed in those eyes, the way I always did, even though it wasn’t light enough to see that they were blue.
He began to move in me, still holding my gaze.
All at once, it was so intimate that it was almost uncomfortable. I resisted, tensing, wanting to close my eyes against it, but being unable to do so.
“I love you,” he said, and it was as if he was just realizing it, as if he hadn’t been sure, but now he knew, and he was mystified by the revelation.
“Naelen…” I should tell him to stop. I should…
He kissed me. “I love you,” he whispered again, and this time, he was savoring it, slowly thrusting into me, claiming me.
It was so sweet, the way he fit inside me, and the tension I felt began to ebb away as my hips caught his rhythm. I didn’t fight. I let it happen, and I was rocked with fierce goodness, with hot flames of pleasure that tore i
nto me—into my soul.
It was intense.
Because we fit. He fit in here, in me. He belonged. I felt… complete.
And so I clung to him, and I didn’t want to let go, because I knew that I couldn’t deny that I loved him too.
And it was that thought that sent me into the throes of even sweeter ecstasies, that made me fall to pieces as he slowly battered against my defenses and I cried out against his mouth, releasing everything in a shower of crescendos.
* * *
Later, I awoke in the darkness to Naelen shaking me.
“What?” I said, coming awake at once. “Danger? More dragons?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said. He turned on the bedside light. He was fully dressed, sitting on top of the covers.
I felt exposed, even though I was under the blankets, and no part of me was visible. “Okay, then, why’d you wake me up?”
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I’m going to be up, maybe in touch with some people about work, the business, that kind of thing. I thought you’d be more comfortable back in your own room.”
“Oh,” I said.
He wasn’t looking at me.
“Why can’t you sleep?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes it happens. I get thinking about something, and I can’t turn my brain off. Better to just get up and do something productive.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay, cool,” he said. “Well, you should go, then.”
I should go? He was kicking me out of his bed? True, he was doing it under the guise of something considerate, but it didn’t feel that way. He seemed different. Closed-off. Cold. I’d never seen him this way.
No, wait.
That wasn’t true, I realized like a knife-twist in my gut.
I had seen him like this. The morning back in Highpoint, when he was dismissing that woman who he’d slept with? He’d been exactly like this.
“Uh, here are your clothes.” He handed me a neatly-folded bundle. He’d already gathered them up for me. “I’ll go into the bathroom while you get dressed.”
“Not interested in seeing me naked anymore?” I said.
“I’m not really on that wavelength right now,” he said. “I was only trying to be polite.”
“Right,” I said. I snatched the clothes away from him.
He got off the bed and strode across the room to the bathroom.
I clenched my hands into fists and released them. What the hell had just happened? I had gone to sleep in his arms, and I had felt as though we’d been melded together in some kind of cosmic collision of perfectness, and now he wasn’t on that wavelength? He was dismissing me?
But he’d said…
I felt a sob forming in the back of my throat, and I forced it down.
I got up out of bed and struggled into my clothes as quickly as I could. I ran for the door. I needed to get away from him.
I threw the door open.
And then I stopped. I pulled the door shut.
I waited.
He poked his head out of the bathroom and was surprised to see me there still. “Oh, sorry. I thought you—”
“You said you loved me,” I said. “You said it twice.”
He fidgeted, his gaze flitting away from mine.
“What was that?” I said. “Was that a lie? Because it sounded like you meant it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Naelen?”
He spoke to his fingers. “Can we talk later? I’m busy right now. It’s important things for my business.”
“You didn’t care about your damned business two hours ago. You kept telling me that working with me was more important, and that you wanted to help people.”
“No, I know. I just…” He still wouldn’t look at me.
The answers settled into my bones with a kind of awful certainty. “You were lying about that. You said whatever you thought you should say to get me into bed, didn’t you?”
He raised his gaze to me then, furrowing his brow.
I was shaking. “You’re nothing but a liar, Naelen Spencer. You gave me all that noise about how you never promised a woman anything, that it was all one-sided on her part. And then when I said I wouldn’t fuck you unless there was something more to it, you manufactured that. You pretended to care about me, all to get between my legs.”
He drew in a long, slow breath, and then let it out, and when he did, his whole body sagged.
“Deny it,” I whispered.
He hesitated. “It wasn’t like that,” he muttered to the carpet. He looked up at me. “Really, I thought…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought it had happened, that I’d actually fallen in love with you. I thought you’d changed me. But… I guess I tricked myself too. Because now that we’ve… uh, consummated this little flirtation, it’s… I feel…”
“What are you saying? That you got what you wanted and now you don’t see me the same way?” My voice had a little sob in it, and I hated that.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “That’s it exactly. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.”
I gaped at him. “You lying prick.”
He grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize now. Not after all this. After tricking me.”
His voice was monotone. “I guess you were right about me all along. I really am a bastard.”
I couldn’t speak. My whole body was starting to shake in fury.
“I wish it could have gone another way,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I spat at him. “You don’t get to say things like that.”
“Is there any way we could… still work together?”
“What?” I was incredulous.
“No, I’ve ruined that.” He laughed softly, bitterly. Then he squared his shoulders. “Probably better this way, though. I really am sorry, Clarke. I feel… very, very badly about this.”
“Very, very badly?” I repeated through clenched teeth.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I am.”
I opened the door again. I backed out and then I slammed it as hard as I could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I paced my room, feeling shaky and angry and confused and hurt.
How had this happened? How had I gotten myself to this place, this place in which I had expressly sworn I would not let myself get to?
Why had I slept with him?
I went over and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I’d see a woman with a face contorted in rage, but I only looked small and sad.
“Why did you sleep with him?” I asked my reflection.
I don’t know.
That was insane. I had to know. People didn’t do things for no reason. There was a reason there. What was it?
I love him.
No, I couldn’t love him. I couldn’t.
It didn’t make any sense, that was the thing. Making love to him had been beautiful, truly wonderful. I’d had really good sex with Logan, but I didn’t know if it had ever been quite like that. Quite so… transformative, as if Naelen and I had… merged or joined or…
Fuck.
When he said he loved me, I had been so sure he meant it.
How could he fake that?
I whipped out my phone and I dialed a number.
It rang.
“Clarke? You okay?”
“Hi, Logan,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m just trapped in a ski lodge with no way home.”
“What about Naelen?”
“Fuck Naelen,” I said.
He was quiet. “Did, um, something happen with you and Naelen?”
“No.” There was a hysterical note in my voice. “Nothing happened. I want to leave, though. I don’t want to stay in this place for one more second. Come and get me.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I can do that. You tell me where you are, and I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”
I swallowed. “Good. Good, that’s what I w
ant. I want to be with you. I want us to be together.”
“We will,” he said. “Nothing can keep me away from you.”
* * *
“Clarke, answer the damned door,” said Naelen. It was late. He was outside my hotel room, pounding on the door, and I was ignoring him, like the other four times he’d come by. Those times, he’d knocked and knocked and then given up and gone away. He’d do that this time too. I had positively no interest in talking to him. Ever again.
I knew that there was no way Logan could be here until after nightfall. He was traveling now, of course, but he was stone, and he wouldn’t wake up until it was dark. It was practically dark now, and I wasn’t coming out for anyone except him.
More pounding. “Come to the door, damn it.”
I wondered how long it was going to take him to give up this time.
“Okay, fine. I’m coming in.”
What? He was coming in? How was he planning on doing—?
The door opened, and there was Naelen.
I was sitting on my bed. I gaped at him.
He held up a key. “Got this from the front desk. I wasn’t sure if you were dead or not.”
“I’m not dead.”
“I see that,” he said.
I turned away from him.
“You’re angry with me,” he said. “I understand that. You have every right.” He was coming into the room. “But we can get down to the airport this evening, and I figured you’d want to get home as soon as possible. Then you won’t have to see me anymore, which is what I guess you would want.”
“Of course it’s what I want,” I said. “In fact, I’m so adamant about not wanting to see you that I’m not going to get on a plane with you.”
“What do you mean?”
I turned to him. “I’ll find my own way home.”
He sighed. “Clarke, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous. I’m staying away from you. This will be easier for you, too. Now, you won’t have to look at me anymore.”
“But I don’t mind looking at you,” he said.
I scoffed.
“Look, I know I screwed up,” he said. “But, to be fair, you were the one who jumped me last night.”
I gaped at him. “Are you serious? Really? You’re blaming this on me?”
“I was trying to let you go,” he said. “You were the one who… who…” He folded his arms over his chest.
Embers (The Slayer Chronicles Book 2) Page 19