“Jason?” Wounded eyes, blue and wet. “You’re leaving?”
“I told you I couldn’t stay.” Couldn’t give her his heart.
Fist clenching in the sheet she held to her breast, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I thought . . . when you kept returning . . .”
He’d been so young then, very good at his job, but far behind his peers when it came to emotions, to relationships. He’d thought that long-ago lover had understood he spoke the na**d truth, never realizing the secret dreams brewing in her heart. A heart he’d broken without meaning to, without even knowing he held the power to do so. It had soon healed for she’d been young, too, and he thought that she might no longer even remember the black-winged angel she’d once pleaded with to stay with her.
But he’d never forgotten the lesson, and he wondered if Mahiya had truly heard what he’d said to her the night before or if she, too, harbored dreams of fixing the broken pieces of him. The truth was, no matter how she compelled him, she would soon realize what was shattered in him was nothing that could be healed, the damage done at such a young age that it had become part of his very psyche.
Yet instead of backing off, he did a selfish thing then. Lowering his head, he claimed the lush intoxication of her kiss, his hands thrusting into her hair to tumble black silk over his skin. She opened for him with a sweet sensual generosity that enticed without design, made him want to caress her every secret pleasure point until her desire was a shimmer across her skin and he knew her like no other man ever would.
“Jason? You’re leaving?”
Tugging back her head with the hand fisted in her hair, he forced himself to release lips swollen from his kisses. “Open your eyes.” It was a harsh order.
Thick lashes rose to reveal tawny eyes hazy with passion. “I see you, Jason.”
“And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.
Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”
Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”
Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”
He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.
The gut-deep sense of connection was an intense shock that made his nerve endings burn. He had never felt more real, more a part of the world.
Breaking the kiss only long enough that she could gasp in air, he slanted his mouth across hers again, licking and tasting and sinking into the carnal pleasure. Her nipple was a hard point beneath the fabric of her tunic, and when he squeezed it between forefinger and thumb, she jerked, pulling away from his touch.
Folding back wings that had become fully unfurled, he watched her attempt to resettle her breathing. “Not here,” she said at last, her chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. “Will you come to my bed?”
It was such a polite invitation, and yet her lips were wet from his kiss, her cheeks flushed with sexual need. “Yes.”
* * *
He’d said yes, but Jason left after escorting Mahiya back to the palace, having received a message on his phone he had to follow up on at once. Sensual frustration tearing through her veins, she decided to take care of a task of her own and headed to Vanhi’s apartments using busy internal passageways. If she was a target, it’d make it difficult for anyone to cut her from the herd.
Vanhi was reading when she arrived. Mahiya bent down to kiss her smiling cheek before taking a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs in the vampire’s living area. “I’m disturbing you.”
“You know you are always welcome.” Vanhi slid an intricate metal bookmark between the pages and put the book on the coffee table. “It worries me, Mahiya, the look I see in your eyes.”
“Vanhi—”
The vampire held up her hand. “I know you too well, my dear. I rocked you when you cried as a babe and when Arav shattered your heart as a young woman.” Sighing, she reached out to take one of Mahiya’s hands in her own, squeezed. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to love someone, my sweet girl. I don’t want you to squander the power of that beautiful heart on a man who will not value such a gift.”
“I understand him, Vanhi.” Never would she forget the terrible sorrow she’d tasted in his tale of Nene and her Yavi, until it hurt her to imagine the cause. “I’m not expecting anything but what he can give me.”
“You say that, but you’re deeply vulnerable to kindness, to any indication of care.”
The emotional blow stung. “You make me sound like an abused pet.”
Rising to her feet, Vanhi walked over to the dining area to pour two glasses of wine. “I do not begrudge you happiness.” Care in every syllable as she retook her seat, having handed Mahiya the second wineglass. “I just don’t want you hurt again.”
Mahiya gave the other woman a crooked smile. “If the hurt is an honest one, I will survive.” Perhaps she had spent her life waiting for someone to love, and Jason . . . he needed to be loved, as a wildflower needed sunlight.