Poisoned Kisses

by Stephanie Draven

  He was just like her—trying to do the right thing, and making every conceivable mistake along the way. He was all but naked and she could read it on his skin. He carried inside him a terrible grief, and not just for the mother he’d lost to madness or the father he’d buried today.

  She wished she could take it away, make it hurt less somehow. The cords on Marco’s neck were tight with emotion and Kyra couldn’t stop herself from tracing his chest with her fingers. He watched the path of her touch as if mesmerized, and it encouraged her. Her heartbeat picked up the pace of his. Kyra stroked the scar on his bare shoulder, knowing a bullet fragment was still there in the bone. And yet, that bullet had caused less damage than the things Marco had done, and the things he’d failed to do. He wanted someone—anyone—to understand. And she did. He was only a mortal, so she couldn’t imagine how they were so much alike. But there was no denying it. He was a reflection of her. It made her want him.

  And why not? She could give him pleasure without having feelings for him, she told herself. She’d done it with countless mortal men before. She was a nymph of the underworld; she could use her skin to soothe his pain. It didn’t have to mean more than that.

  She drew his hand to her and kissed the still-angry scar. Her lips upon the sensitive skin made him twitch. “Don’t,” he finally choked out. But Kyra stepped closer and kissed the scar on his shoulder, too. At first, he was still as a stone, but the heat of his skin and the soft hair of his bare chest against her cheek reminded her he was no statue. “I have an open wound,” he whispered. “I’m not safe to touch.”

  No, he wasn’t safe to touch. And that, in itself, held a powerful allure. “You’re bandaged. It’s not dangerous to touch your skin, is it?”

  “No,” he admitted, sheepish longing in his eyes. “I just…don’t want to hurt you.”

  Mortal men never wanted to hurt nymphs, but they always did. And yet, Kyra couldn’t turn away from him. Not when he needed her. “Your kisses aren’t poisoned, are they?” she asked, lips trailing up to his mouth, achingly soft. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever kissed a man so softly. But the scent of his clean skin and the taste of salt upon his lips made her sigh. He’d been holding his breath, and now his lips parted as he exhaled into her kiss. She took that breath into her with all its stain and sorrow and kissed him again, giving that breath back to him cleansed with her inner light.

  Then it happened all at once.

  The way he groaned. The way he took her hands, clasping them at the small of her back. The way he crushed her against him, his teeth scraping along the hollow of her throat. It was the grief that drove him, she thought. Mourners often sought solace in physical connection, as if to prove to themselves they were still alive. But she didn’t mind. She knew how to make her body malleable for a man’s pleasure.

  She let him pull her onto the sofa in front of the fire where he laid his body atop hers, pulling her clothes off piece by piece. There was some fumbling with his wallet on the end table where he’d left it, and he sheathed himself in a condom. Then it was all skin and sweat and sighs.

  The feel of his arousal hard against her sent little shocks along her skin. The sudden forcefulness of his body as he pinned her wrists over her head made her senses spark like the fire in the hearth. Kyra was no shy maiden nymph in the face of a man’s need. No coy Daphne, to flee from Apollo’s lust. This was a threshold that Kyra wanted to cross.

  Her thighs parted and their eyes locked as he sank all the way into her. She’d done this to comfort him and sate his needs—but it stoked a fire inside her, too. She loved his thickness and the way she stretched to accommodate him. She loved the feel of his muscles as his back arched. She arched, too, to meet him.

  He was looking into her as she looked into him; he was inside her just as she was inside him. There was nowhere to hide—and for one magical moment, she was certain that he knew her, that he saw her true face, that he saw her for herself.

  But then he closed his eyes.

  Gods above and below, she loved the feel of this mortal. The scratch of his beard, the light scrape of it on her cheek that reminded her he was man and she was woman. She loved the rough texture of his scars. How must it feel to have marks that so boldly told the story of his pains right there on the surface of his skin? And she loved his strong arms. Arms long enough to wrap all the way around her. Arms that made her feel as if she were not too wild to fully embrace.

  She’d had many lovers before. She’d worshipped the perfect bodies of ancient gods. She’d admired the well-oiled muscles of Olympic athletes throughout the ages. But for some reason, Marco’s body, battle-hardened and scarred as it was, suited her perfectly. He fit with her, and every time he pushed inside her, the sensation of completion was renewed.

  She wanted to make him come—fast and hard. She wanted to move her hips in just the way he liked, and make him forget everything else. But as they moved together, it was her arousal that spiraled higher and higher, out of control. The couch scraped against the floor, his chest scraped hers, and it went on and on, as if every stroke exorcised some demon. As if every caress were a confession. She kissed him as they strained together, a kiss broken finally by her own gasping climax. Flickers of light danced beneath her eyelids and she couldn’t believe it had happened so quickly or so intensely. His followed soon after, a groan at the back of his throat. He buried his face against her chest as his body convulsed in orgasm, his legs straining between hers. Beneath him, Kyra lay nothing short of astonished.

  Afterward, her body tingled with sensation, every single hair seeming to stand on end. They were quiet, her hands stroking the hair from his damp face as he nuzzled her breasts. It’d been a quick release of tension—and now he seemed to want more. She did, too, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex this tenderly. At least, it’d been tender by Kyra’s standards, and tender wasn’t her way. Somehow, she and Marco had connected. Maybe it was because they were so much alike.

  Or maybe it was because she was pretending to be someone else.

  The thought was so sobering, so unsettling, that she stopped the trail of his lips down her stomach. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Everything was wrong. What’s more, his bandage had peeled away just enough so that she could see the crudely stitched wound. The threads looked frail and tattered as if the poison was eating them away. What if even a little bit of his blood dripped onto her skin again? Just being this close to him, she was taking her life in her hands, and yet, why did she suddenly fear it was her heart most in jeopardy? “It’s just…”

  “You regret it,” he finished for her.

  No. She didn’t regret it. And that was the problem. “It’s just—I’m not sure I’m the kind of woman who does this.” What she meant, of course, was that she wasn’t the kind of nymph who did this. She took lovers, certainly. But this encounter with Marco had the potential to be so much more. And that frightened her out of her wits.

  As the silence stretched on between them, his shoulders tensed in the firelight. She could see she’d angered him, broken the thread of tenderness between them. When he spoke again, it was guarded. Sarcastic. “What, Ashlynn? Are you afraid I’m not going to respect you in the morning?”

  “Maybe,” Kyra said, but that was a lie. She was afraid that, in the end, she’d be just like all those silly, sentimental nymphs who mistook sex for something more, and lost themselves in the bargain. “You wouldn’t be the first man to judge a woman in the morning for doing exactly what you wanted her to do the night before.”

  “I’ve had too many one-night stands to judge you,” he said. So he meant this to be the only time. Kyra wasn’t sure why this should’ve bothered her, but it did. Her disappointment must have shown, because he said, “Look, I know I said some un kind things when we broke up…”

  In spite of herself, she was desperately curious about how Marco parted from his ex-lover. “Like what?”

  “Don’t do that,” he said, shakin
g his head. “I know you remember what I called you. And I’m sorry. You were lonely when I went overseas and you were inexperienced. He took advantage of that. You were an innocent and I blame him not you.” An innocent? Kyra made a mental note never again to impersonate someone like Ashlynn Brown. She couldn’t pull it off. In fact, she’d better cut off this conversation quickly. Any trip down memory lane was likely to mess her up. She didn’t share his memories and she wasn’t the woman he was reminiscing about, but she wasn’t sure she could bear for him to realize it so soon after the tender intimacies between them. “Well, we’re different people now.”

  “We are. And though I’m sure you don’t like to think of yourself as the kind of girl who gets down and dirty in the middle of the living room…if you ask me, a little naughtiness suits you.”

  “So you’re saying that you like me better now than the way I was?”

  If only he hadn’t paused to think about it. If only he’d given her any real answer at all. But what he said was, “I’m not sure my opinion matters… I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “Charming.” Kyra tried, and failed, to keep the acid from her tongue. “Is that how you are with your other women? ‘Hey, thanks for last night. Let’s order some pizza!’”

  Marco arched a brow. “My other women?”

  “Weren’t you just bragging about all your one-night stands?”

  His brow arched even higher. “Are you jealous?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I just take fleeting pleasure where I find it. I don’t deserve much more than that.”

  “That’s not true.” Now she knew that he wasn’t an arms dealer for the cash or for the power. He was a crusader; he had the idiotic notion that what he was doing would help people.

  She ached a little at the break in contact as he withdrew from the tangle of limbs and couch cushions, but she liked looking at his body in the firelight. He was as hard and scarred as an ancient legionary, with dark hair that trailed down his chest and thinned out on his belly. She wanted to rub her face against it, and her arousal frustrated her. Meanwhile, he found his towel, wrapped it around his waist and padded barefoot, apparently intent on foraging for food. “I’ll cook us something.”

  She opened her mouth to stop him, tried to spin some quick lie to explain why the fridge was empty, but she was too late. He threw open the door, then looked at her from across the countertop that divided the living room from the kitchen, incredulous. “Don’t you eat?”

  “I told you—I just moved in.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You keep saying that, but I don’t see any boxes.”

  “They’re still back at my old place,” Kyra quickly lied.

  That’s when he flung open the freezer and found the food rations she’d stored when she’d planned to lock him in the dungeon. She hadn’t planned to starve him, after all. “What the hell?”

  “Doesn’t everybody love Salisbury steak?” But she couldn’t keep the guilt off her face, and she pulled the blanket tighter around her, anticipating a truly horrible confrontation.

  To her surprise, he laughed. And it wasn’t one of his dark bitter laughs, either. This one was rich and warm and it made her fingertips tingle. “Ashlynn, you have about twenty trays in here. It’s bad enough that you’re subsisting off craptastic frozen dinners, but every single one of these is the same!”

  So she wasn’t caught, after all. “Variety makes me nervous,” she chirped in relief.

  “I remember that about you.” He pulled two boxed dinners out of the freezer and tossed them on the countertop. “This is all congealed gravy and high sodium—you keep eating this stuff, and it’s going to kill you.”

  No, she thought. There was only one thing in this world that could kill her and that was him. “Marco…I’ll take care of dinner if you want to clean up. Your bandage—”

  It was the wrong thing to say. His hand quickly went to his cheek as awareness dawned in his eyes. For a few moments he’d given pleasure, taken pleasure and laughed. For just a little while, he’d forgotten he was a monster.

  Now, she’d reminded him again and it seemed to turn him to stone.

  Chapter 8

  Marco checked his bandage, relieved to find that he wasn’t dripping blood. How could he have been so damned reckless? What if his cut had opened up again while he was on top of her? What if he’d poisoned her? He was usually so much more careful about this. But somehow when their bodies were joined, Marco had forgotten about his poisoned blood. He’d forgotten about wars, he’d forgotten about Africa, he’d forgotten about his many faces, his mother’s madness and he’d even forgotten his father’s death.

  And that was all because of her. Because of Ashlynn Brown. The same woman who couldn’t even wait until he’d come home from his tour of duty to return his engagement ring and run off with another guy. Ashlynn had wounded his pride, but that was all. He’d been so young that he’d already fallen out of love with her—if he’d ever been in love with her to begin with. Or is that just what he told himself? Because if he’d really stopped having feelings for Ashlynn, how could he explain what just happened?

  He couldn’t explain it, or maybe he just didn’t want to. Furious with himself, Marco riffled through the bathroom cabinets to find a clean bandage. He’d been surprised at Ashlynn’s rather well-stocked medicine cabinet. Not just your standard aspirin and Band-Aids, but a full first-aid kit and some pretty heavy-duty sleeping pills. He couldn’t help but wonder what kept her up at night.

  After he’d redressed the wound on his cheek, assuring himself that he wasn’t going to bleed on anything, he looked for something dry to wear. A towel wasn’t going to cut it. He went into her bedroom. The bed looked as if it’d never been slept in, but Ashlynn had always been a neat freak that way. He opened the closet and found two bathrobes hanging on the back of the door, neither of which looked as if they’d ever been worn. Also, to his extreme shock and surprise, he found a pair of shiny silver handcuffs.

  He actually did a double take, pulled them out and tested them. Yep. Real handcuffs. What the hell kind of life was Ashlynn living now that her bedroom closet contained bathrobes and handcuffs but hardly any clothes?

  Something about this house was so wrong, and under any other circumstances he’d have marched to the kitchen and demanded an explanation. But did he really have a right to ask? This was his high-school sweetheart he was dealing with here and he had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he was intruding in her private space.

  Leaning against the door frame, he listened to the wind howling outside. The temperature outside was dropping, and every tree was slowly being trapped in ice. Just like him. Trapped here in this damned house with a woman who was as familiar as a lover, and as mysterious as a stranger.

  The last time Kyra had cooked, microwaves hadn’t been in vented, so she opted for the oven and set a timer. Not long after, Marco came back from the bathroom wearing one of the bathrobes the real estate agent had left there as a welcoming gift. He tossed his bloody bandage—as well as the towels he’d used—into the fire.

  “Does that get rid of the poison?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “Hopefully.” He didn’t look up at her—just stood there watching everything burn. “You know, I’m not sure that I really believed any of it until I changed faces in front of you. Until I showed you, I thought maybe it was some madness. Now that someone else knows…”

  It had been a reality check. She could see that it was all hitting him now in a way it hadn’t before. It had never occurred to Kyra that he kept this monstrous secret from everyone. She’d always thought a friend might have known, or his family, or even some of the men who worked for him. But of all the people in the world, he’d shown her. He’d told her everything. He’d trusted her.

  No… He’d trusted Ashlynn. And now she was going to have to keep abusing that trust to keep him out of her father’s clutches. It made her sick.

  Marco used the poker to push the burning tow
els farther into the flame. The smell of his blood as it burned was not pleasant, but it seemed to bother him more than it did her. “Ashlynn, when I changed faces in front of you, why didn’t you scream?”

  The question startled Kyra. “What?”

  He leaned against the fireplace. “I showed you something that should’ve frightened you, repulsed you, and yet…you reached for me.”

  She’d reached for him because he’d needed her, and it’d been a long time since anyone had. But that truth cut too closely to the bone, so she smiled and said, “Well, there’s a storm and I didn’t have a phone to call the police, so sleeping with you seemed like my only other option.”

  Clearly, it was the wrong joke to make. He looked as if her words had dealt him a body blow. He set the poker aside and motioned toward the rumpled couch where they’d been intimate. “So you slept with me because you’re afraid of me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I’m not afraid of anything, she told herself. Except for her father. And some of the other war gods. And of Marco’s blood. And of the emotions swirling inside her now… “Marco, if I was afraid of you, why would I come anywhere near you?”

  “It happens all the time. Women end up in bed with men that scare them.” Marco’s mind seemed somewhere else. Somewhere like the Congo. “Sometimes women find themselves trapped in a bad situation. Maybe they find themselves captured by enemy soldiers and they think it’ll be worse for them if they resist.”

  Oh, the horrible things he’d seen. The images, the experiences of war, really had poisoned him. “But it wasn’t like that between us, Marco. I kissed you—”

  “So what? Sometimes in Africa, those same women seduce those same dangerous soldiers in the hopes of some gentleness. It’s a survival instinct.” His voice was getting colder. More clinical. “They take a horrific circumstance and turn it into something familiar, something over which they have some semblance of control. It doesn’t make it any less wrong to take advantage of it.”