“You’re asking for the impossible, my lady!” He shouted, slamming a palm against his chest. “I won’t have you see me die! Allow me my pride . . . my warrior’s honor. I wish you to remember me as vital and strong and, gods help me, at least passably handsome, in my own perverse way.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He blinked back at her. “I don’t understand. You know precisely what I mean.”
She shook her head vigorously. “You wouldn’t turn me away, not for this. Something’s not adding up here. With as much as you hurt when I left you, you’d never try and push me away like this unless there was something else. Something more than male vanity.” She squared her shoulders. “Like you said, we’ve never had secrets between us. So tell me, Leo.”
He wouldn’t tell her the rest, couldn’t—his growing awareness of all that separated them, not just their age difference. The darkness he’d been exposed to and carried with him when she was all that would ever be pure and lovely. If she wouldn’t listen to his more immediate objections, she definitely wouldn’t heed those. But it was more than that, too. He didn’t even want to dishonor her by speaking of the things he’d lived and seen.
Daphne stood in the bath, facing him. Waiting for him to explain.
When he kept silent, she sighed wearily. “All I have ever lived for was to grant your desires. It’s been my nectar for more than a thousand years, my sustenance. But no longer; not in this.” Her eyes were sad as they met his. “You’re in too much pain for me to stay away any longer, my lord.” She shivered slightly, drawing the towel about her a little more tightly. “I refuse to obey your order. Refuse to serve your need to protect me.”
“You do not know of my pain,” he ground out accusingly. “You cannot fathom my suffering.”
“I know every ounce of it, Leonidas,” she countered with just as much resolve. “You forget what I am.”
He trembled. A demigoddess. He loved and cherished and desired a woman with the power of Olympus in her veins. “It is easier to forget.”
“Oh, and why is that?” She tossed her hands in the air. “Because then you can forget me? Is that how it is?”
“Because then my love for you, already so terrifying, is at least something I can reason with.” Because then I can pretend I might be worthy enough of you, one day.
Backing against the counter, he continued using his palms to cover his manhood like some pitiful fig leaf, but what he most wished to hide from her was his face.
“You honestly think I haven’t come to you before now?”
“You wouldn’t have betrayed my wishes,” he said, his hands trembling. What if she’d already seen? Already known how far gone he was? For all he knew, she’d witnessed him flailing around on the ground earlier today, had seen his pathetic helplessness. “Daphne, tell me you’ve not come to me when I plainly asked you to stay away.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe you’d have done that to me.”
“You know me very well.” She glanced away, pain written across her features. “I have used my power to feel your pain, to know your heart and mind. But I have stayed away as you asked, my king . . . mostly.”
“Thank you.”
She tossed her black hair over her shoulder defiantly. “You were cruel to ask it, however. And I never thought you a cruel man . . . until this. Until you drove me from you. Now I know that you do have a fault, and it is this terrible, unfeeling part of you that would torture me thusly.” She sobbed, bowing her head, still averting her gaze. “And yet I love you for your pride. For your strength. For being willing to do what I could never have done . . . drive you from my presence.”
He forgot all about propriety, rushing to the edge of the tub. “Daphne. Love. My dearest. You do not understand my motives.” He splashed water wildly as he stepped toward her, needing to be right at her side. She turned away, sliding to the edge of the tub; he settled next to her, facing her back. Now she was the one hiding her face, turning away. He liked it even less than having to push her out of his life. She released a horrible, choking sob. With tentative fingers, he reached to stroke her hair away from her nape.
“Daphne, I’m sorry. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t have asked—”
“Don’t. Leonidas, please. You have your pride? I have mine as well.” She sobbed again, her small, delicate shoulders heaving. He slid his arms about her waist, wrapping her tightly within his grasp. The rough fabric of the towel shifted slightly as he embraced her, drawing her right up against his chest. He pressed his mouth against the top of her head, loving the scent of her, the silky feel of her black hair against his face.
“No blue?” he murmured, rubbing his nose against the crown of her head, locking her tight in his bearlike hold. Her delicate shoulders slumped and she bowed her head, still crying.
“I only ever wore my hair streaked for you, my king. Gone from your presence, I could not continue to do so.”
He reached a hand toward her cheek, although he couldn’t see her face. Not with the way he held her from behind, nor how she kept her head bowed. But he felt the dampness of her tears along his scarred hand; he’d forgotten and used his left. The dampness burned his skin like a guilty accusation. How he’d broken her, he realized, perhaps for the very first time. He’d been so afraid of losing her, so afraid of hurting her by dying, that he’d speared her with the greatest pain of all. His neglect and banishment.
“I am a selfish bastard,” he murmured against her ear, still trailing his gnarled hand across her cheeks, wishing he could stanch her tears. Heal the pain. “I love you. Daphne, with all that has ever been in me or ever will be, you must know how much I love you.”
“You keep me away,” she said, sniffling loudly, and emitting a staggered sob. “Love, Leonidas, does not do that.”
He froze. Did she truly doubt his feelings for her? Could they be that far gone, the two of them, because of his choices? In his heart, he knew it to be impossible.
“You know why I told you we could not be together. You once told me the same, in order to protect me. That’s why I’ve broken things off between us. Not because I don’t care about you.”
“It should have been my choice.”
“You didn’t let me choose when you ended things.”
She twisted and struggled in his grasp, but he pinioned her hard against his chest. “I’m keeping you here right now,” he said forcefully. “Until we are clear.”
“You make the rules. You say when and how,” she cried, squirming more, but he only tightened his hold. “Quite the king. And how like my own brother and father you are in that!”
The words were cold water on his face and he instantly released her. “I’m . . . you don’t mean that.”
She pivoted to face him, staring up at him with blazing, tear-filled eyes. Holding the towel tight about her chest, she stared at him with true fury in her blue gaze. “You are exactly like them, at least if you intend to keep me from you for another hour, another day. Because you know how much I love you . . . therefore you know how it’s killing me to stay away from you . . . especially when you—” She sobbed, bowing her head.
He reached his good hand and slowly tilted her chin upward, forcing her to look at him. “Especially when I what, my love?” he whispered gently. “Please tell me.”
She winced, pressing her eyes closed tight. “When you’re in so much pain. I’ve felt some of it, but Sophie told me more. The full extent of your suffering. About your knee . . . your body.” She looked at him then. “It’s not just aging, but it’s all your war injuries, isn’t it? They’re manifesting.”
All at once, her anger vanished, replaced by the sweetest, most loving look of compassion that he’d ever seen in her eyes. She reached both hands to his face, cupping it, stroking it slowly as if she were appreciating a fine work of art. She trailed her right thumb along his bearded jaw and he flinched, knowing how snowy it had become, but she didn’t stop there. She dragged that thumb over his lower lip, rubbing the ruin
ous scar that split through it. Smiling, she sighed, holding his face in both palms.
“I love this face,” she said worshipfully. “It is so beautiful. You are so beautiful.”
He blushed so thoroughly, she must have felt the heat of it beneath her fingertips. “I am . . . not very handsome, my lady. You see me with your own eyes. You always have.”
“No.” She shook her head with a determined expression. “No. You are as you’ve always been. Gorgeous. Magnificent.”
He forced himself to hold her gaze with strength; she might as well face the unabashed precision of his transformation. His chest rose and fell with heavy pants, his whole body tightened with need and crashing lust for her, but he would not fall victim to his needs. This was their moment. She had to see the truth.
She reached her palm toward his abdomen, slowly rubbing it. Only then did he recall his nudity, but too late—she kept stroking him, lingering lower with that hand until it was tangled up in his pubic hair. “All black hair here,” she murmured, teasing him with her strokes. “As sinful as midnight, as tempting and lovely.”
His cock jutted upward at the words, brushing against her palm. His groin tightened in reaction, which only caused his erection to leap again. Slowly she rubbed her thumb across the tip until a bit of dampness formed. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise, then she bent lower, amazed as she kept stroking him. “I’ve never touched any other man intimately. You are mightily formed . . . amazing.”
He seized hold of her hand, forcing it away from his groin. “Stop,” he commanded.
“You liked my touch, didn’t you?” She blinked up at him, looking uncertain and worried. “Did I hurt you? Was that why you leaked?” With as long as she’d been around the Spartans, and as highly sexed as most of them were, she’d never been privy to this kind of intimacy. And when they’d made love, it had been in the water.
He barked a laugh. “Lovely Daphne, that was my seed. Yes, I loved your touch, but it was wrong, too.”
“It couldn’t be wrong if you liked it.”
He pressed her hand against his chest. “I was making a point.”
“So was I.” She smiled wickedly, but he refused to be diverted. He rubbed her palm across his pectorals, fanning it over the wiry chest hair that blanketed it. “Even my chest is now peppered with silver,” he told her harshly. “See for yourself. Touch this hair that you might finally see the truth.”
She obeyed, languidly stroking her hands over the thick hair that curled all across his chest, then moving to caress first his right nipple, then his left. Both drew tight with arousal, and his heart inside that chest absolutely hammered with craving for her.
“All body parts are clearly in very youthful, working order, Leo,” she declared, smiling. “I fail to see what point you wish to prove. Except that you want me as much as you ever did, perhaps—I swear it seems—even more.”
He swallowed, his throat tight as a bowstring. Forcing her palms to his face again, he managed, “See the lines about my eyes. Don’t you?”
She peered up into his face, and somehow, some way, she moved much closer as she did so. He didn’t have time to stop her. All at once, she’d settled herself upon his lap, wrapping her thin arms tight about his neck. The position put her above him and she bent lower, seizing his mouth in a frantic, plumbing kiss.
Leo surged out of the water, holding Daphne in his arms, and had to smile—maybe she was right, maybe he was still young enough. And as he carried his love across the slippery bathroom floor, both of them soaking wet, then on to his massive bed, his body definitely responded with pulsing, youthful vigor.
His erection bobbed with every step he took, as if cheering him onward to the bed. The pool at Eros’s had been a wonder, their first joining sensual and otherworldly, but the thought of taking Daphne in his own bed, here in his chambers as he’d dreamed of doing for months, was even more intoxicating.
Daphne reached upward, stroking his beard. “I want you,” she said. “More than at Eros’s, more than any time before.”
Leo growled, lowering her onto the bed. His simple linens were white, but he indulged in soft sheets . . . the truth was, he’d ordered them especially for Daphne months ago, hoping for this moment. As for himself, he’d have been just as happy sleeping on the hay out in the barn, but he wanted Daphne to be treated like a queen.
He wouldn’t think of marriage now, not of the future that he didn’t believe they would have. Nothing but this moment existed, and there was no reason that they shouldn’t live in it.
Daphne rolled onto her back, sliding beneath the sheets, and he sat in bed and indulged in studying her body. She flushed, brushing wet tendrils of hair away from her damp cheeks. She could’ve been a painting, some sensual Baroque rendering of a Greek goddess. With her alabaster, creamy skin, touched with pink, her black lustrous waves.
He laughed. “You could be a heroine from some classical, sweeping painting.” He bent down and began kissing one ripe breast. “Except, what would Caravaggio have made of your blue streaks? Or the crimson for that matter.”
“He’d have begged to paint you, too. Like this, with me. The two of us wrapped about each other.” She arched back into the mattress, and he reclined beside her, hungry. “The great Leonidas with his lover,” she finished. “Imagine the scandalous showings.”
He captured her mouth in a kiss, sucking on her lower lip. “There would have been rioting in the streets, like after Rites of Spring,” he murmured. “Only it would be the gentlemen, riding a tide of envy that you were mine.”
She giggled, threading her hands all through his hair. “Oh, help me, but you’re even sexier now, Leo.”
“I’ll show you sexy, my young nymph.” He reached between her thighs. Slowly, one stroke, then another, he brushed a fingertip. Each time she grew more and more wet, so ready for him. Eager. Her small hips rising and pumping with his caresses, which grew firmer with each caress.
When she ground her hips upward and into his hand, he couldn’t wait any longer. With a growl, he pinioned her, climbing atop her. To hell with his knee. The salts had helped—he wanted to mount her, to ride these aching surges of hers to completion. Once he’d slid between her thighs, he levered his hips so he could position himself perfectly against her opening. She would still be tight, almost a virgin.
She reached between their hips, angling him perfectly. “I’m a worldly woman now, Leo. Take me. Now.”
He drove into her, harder than he perhaps should have, but he’d never needed to be inside of her more than tonight.
Leo lay flat on his back, slick with a sheen of sweat, still breathing heavily from the intense sexual release he’d just experienced. Daphne, sweet love of his life, curled against him, half-asleep already. He had no doubt that the past days had been torture for her, and casting a tender glance at her, was glad she could get the rest.
His heart hammered a harsh beat inside his chest. It had never taken him so long to recover from lovemaking, not in mortal life, not even the other day at Eros’s pool. A sudden pain in his chest caused his breath to catch. Leo leaned up slightly, and saw a fresh scar, ripped across his pectorals—and the hair there was almost entirely silver.
His hands . . . they began to shake, and he knew where he had to go. He dreaded it, didn’t want to know the truth, but his body was on a rapid-fire escalation right now. Perhaps Ares knew they’d made love, and this was the punishment. Why else would he feel his body becoming so much a stranger to him and right at this particular moment?
After struggling out of bed, he walked toward the bathroom. The man gazing back across the mirrored sink was not one he would’ve recognized.
Oh, gods of Olympus, his beloved deserved far better than what he’d become. Closing his eyes, he thought of her young, supple body. The way her skin had seemed to gleam with her goodness and Olympian power. Then he compared that image with his own ruined one.
He’d never been nearly good enough. And now? Her brother had written that fac
t across his face and body. If he left her now, he could protect her—save her—from suffering this end with him. Nothing had ever been more important to him than this one final act of devotion.
Chapter 28
Jamie and Mason had told Sable to take off for a bit. With their planned time for the raid in two hours, they didn’t want him lurking around outside the club, possibly tipping off Ares or Caesar or any of their minions. So, trotting down Abercorn, his hooves quite naturally led him toward Sophie’s carriage house. He’d been there so many times, there were probably grooved tracks forming a trail.
Maybe it was Leonidas’s veiled comment, but he couldn’t stay away from her, not if he’d tried. He’d failed in his plan to redeem his body—a scheme that had been doomed from the beginning, if only he’d not been too much of a nitwit to realize it. But he could still be worthy of her love. That was one area where he refused to let her down.
Trotting onto West Jones Street where she lived, he picked up his pace and his heart did, too. Because farther down the street, he glimpsed something that sent him into a tailspin of panic. Sophie was slumped on the curb, collapsed against her car, and appeared to be unconscious. He bounded into a gallop, reaching her side in only seconds.
“Sophie!” He bent low, trying to rouse her. She was pale, so very pale, and his heart lodged in his chest. Reaching for her wrist, he felt for her pulse; it was thready seeming, and didn’t do nearly enough to calm him.
Damn it. Sophie had done the one thing he’d hoped to prevent: she had healed Leo, he knew it then and there. The result had been that she was weaker than he’d ever seen her. More drained than after any of the times she’d healed Sable.
“My Sophie, why are you so determined to harm yourself?” he whispered gently, scooping her up into his arms and searching for somewhere to go.
He couldn’t squeeze his colossal centaur’s body through the tiny alley that led to her carriage house, and he wasn’t powerful enough to teleport them both there. Where could he take her until she recovered? He decided on nearby Monterrey Square, which was only a few blocks away. So long as she was in his grasp, his demon’s power concealed them both.
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