Her voice hoarse, she said, “That never would have worked if you had been any of the older sentinels. They would have known better than to try to trap me against this kind of door. It’s one of those things you learn. If you live long enough.”
He snarled wordlessly, his long, powerful body straining against hers, and it was every bit as glorious as when she sprawled on top of him at the sentinel party. Every bit, and more. He arched his back, pushing hard against the door so that fresh pain bloomed in her rigid hands, and he tried to knee her.
She wasn’t as vulnerable down there as a male was, and again, he couldn’t quite get enough purchase to knock her off of him. With an agile twist of her hips, she opened her legs and straddled his long, hard thigh as he shoved upward. He connected with her sex, not hard enough to bruise but enough to almost lift her off her feet.
She gave an almost soundless grunt and clamped her legs together on his thigh. He bared his teeth and shoved upward again. Even through the barrier of their clothes, the friction felt good. She didn’t need anybody else to tell her how twisted that was. But he was all there, too close and personal, his muscles bunching and flexing underneath hers. The sound he made was raw and animalistic, and he was all trapped, all hers.
They were both breathing heavily. She let her eyes drift half closed as she looked at the strong line of his tanned throat and imagined licking it while his head was tilted back in supplication. Sexual heat flashed through her, stronger than ever before. Instinctively she tightened her legs on his thigh. It increased the friction, and a jolt of intense sensation pierced her body so that she sucked air.
Quentin was staring at her, his face savage. A hard length grew against the jutting bone of her hip. She froze as the delicious, addicting smell of his arousal wrapped around her, as warm as a silken blanket and as inevitable as a python’s tightening coils.
Realization clunked her over the head. She had a feeling it had been trying to get her attention for a while now.
He was fighting the same unwelcome attraction for her as she was for him.
She laughed. Talk about twisted. There they were together, tied up in their own little knot. She whispered, “You know, we ought to just have some hate sex already, and get it out of our system.”
If she had thought his eyes were brilliant before, now they turned incandescent.
The erection pressing against her hip grew harder and longer. The air between them was so charged, they could light up the city for blocks around. It tingled across her nerve endings, raised the tiny hairs at the back of her neck.
Nobody had ever accused Aryal of having an excess of sanity. She deliberately pressed her hips against the hard length of his cock, causing friction for the both of them. They both hissed.
Quentin bent his head close to hers, his teeth bared. Even though she had him trapped, he was still very dangerous. She watched him warily. She knew he had some kind of magical training, and she held herself tensed for some kind of offensive spell.
But he didn’t reach for any magic tricks. Instead he growled, “You may have me pinned at the moment, but you’re trapped too. You can’t do anything with your hands locked like that.”
She twitched a shoulder. She could feel the blood pounding in his body. “I promise you, it’s worth it.”
He was breathing deeply, his gaze focused with laser intensity on her mouth. “I smell your blood.”
“That’s been worth it too,” she whispered. Her hands were going numb. At this rate, she was going to have to work at getting them unclenched again.
He roared, “WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO GET YOU TO BACK THE FUCK OFF!”
Stray floating strands from her tangled hair blasted back from her face. She let her head fall back, carefully arched away from him so he could not strike at her throat with his teeth, and she laughed again. “I dunno, maybe a confession?”
“A confession.” His gaze ran compulsively down the line of her throat as if he couldn’t help himself, but his voice was flat, disbelieving. Then something seemed to snap inside of him. He snarled, “You want a confession? Fine. I broke the law. I broke it more than once. I broke it lots. I liked breaking the law. Are you fucking satisfied now?”
He caught her with her mouth hanging open, and every word he spoke was the truth. She shut her mouth with a snap. “Goddamn it, I knew it,” she said softly. “What do you do, run a smuggling operation?”
“I don’t run a smuggling operation. I did. In the past. I shut it down last year. You won’t find any evidence, because there isn’t any. I’m that good. Everything that happened is locked inside my head. Shipping manifests. Dates, times. I never put any of it on paper. I worked with a double-blind system. Nobody knew the other parties involved. Most of them didn’t know they were smuggling.”
She picked apart every word he said with her truthsense dialed high. Her eyes narrowed, she asked suspiciously, “Why did you stop?”
His chest heaved as he gave an explosive sigh. “Something bad happened. I tried to do something. I wanted to help out a friend and had good intentions, but I almost got a couple of people killed. After that, I pulled the plug on everything except the bar.”
“So that’s it—that’s everything? That’s all you did?” Everything except the something he had tried to do, at any rate. She asked hopefully, “No espionage?”
He snorted. “No.”
She made a face. “No murder for hire? No spying?”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he snapped. “I made damn good money. That’s it.”
Good gods, he was telling the truth. She tried to disbelieve it anyway, but couldn’t muster any conviction. It was … disappointing. She pressed, “What did you smuggle? Drugs? Human trafficking? Guns?”
He glared at her in exasperation. “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic. Of course I didn’t. I smuggled in liquor for the bar, gold and diamonds, some artwork. High-dollar stuff. I might have dabbled in some magic items from time to time.”
She scowled. At the most he had cost the Wyr demesne some tariff money, and a whole lot of her time. “If that’s all you did, why the fuck didn’t you just say so earlier?”
He sneered. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She studied him, her mouth twisted with frustration. After all this time, that was it. He lost his temper bad enough to spit out the truth, and she didn’t give a shit about any of it after all. She said, watching him closely, “You really gave it all up. You don’t break the law in any way, anymore.”
“No.” Everything in his hard voice and face radiated the truth. “Not since before I decided to try out for the Games and committed to becoming a sentinel.”
“Bah,” she said in disgust. “How pathetic.”
All that obsession, all that work. For what?
She forced her stiff fingers to open and wiggled them out of the holes her talons had torn into the door. Letting go of his wrists as she backed away, she shook out her aching hands and inspected the cuts on her fingers. They stung, but they weren’t too bad. They would heal soon enough.
Quentin pushed away from the metal door immediately and didn’t stop moving until he was several yards away. All the time he stared at her with narrowed eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s your whole reaction—‘how pathetic’?”
She gestured impatiently. “I don’t care about any of that shit.”