She glanced away, keenly aware of every molecule of space between them. If she pushed upright, she’d be sitting as if ready to kiss him. If she rolled the other way, onto her back . . .
“What time is it?” Distraction seemed like a good idea.
He didn’t bother checking the clock or his watch. “Very late. Or very early.” His gaze fixed on her. So much for distraction. “I was getting ready for bed. I heard you.” His voice, already low, trailed off.
Apparently, since he’d lost his T-shirt, getting ready for bed meant getting at least half naked. The dark hair across his chest and the demon mark on his arm stood out in bold relief against his skin. At least he still had the flannel pants. She forced herself not to look, to see if anything there stood in bold relief.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” she said.
“I can’t stop myself from listening. I can’t stop this thing between us.” Violet hazed his eyes, as if he were ready for an attack. From her?
She didn’t understand the depths of his agitation, but she sensed its source. At the hot musk of aroused male, her heartbeat ramped up again, and her skin tingled as if thawing after hours of playing in the snow. Jumping off a cliff might be fine in a dream, but she knew better in real life.
Didn’t she?
“It was just one night.” Was she trying to convince him? Or herself? “We did what we had to.”
She eased up onto her elbow, a half step to scooting away from him. He tensed, eyes sparked brighter as when he’d plunged into the wood after the feralis. The tightening of his every muscle echoed in her own.
If she ran, he’d chase. If she stayed utterly still, he’d say something, probably something she didn’t want to hear.
On one of the pages flattened under her hand, she’d read about taking the initiative, pressing the advantage, never letting the opposition catch his breath.
So she coiled her knees against him, threaded her fingers behind his nape, and pulled him down to her kiss.
It was doubtful this was what those stuffy old historians had meant. She shoved the books off the bed.
“Sera,” he said against her mouth, “I don’t think—”
“I just read, upon the twenty-first repetition, an attack sequence becomes rote muscle memory.” She traced the upper line of his lip with her tongue. “Don’t think.”
He groaned and pulled her tight against his bare chest so she sprawled half across his lap. His body was hot enough to melt snow angels through concrete. She closed her eyes and let her head tip back so he could run his teeth up the column of her neck.
She wrapped her fingers around the iron-honed muscles of his arms and held on against the sensations threatening to send her out of her body. He’d pulled so far away after the last time, she wanted to remember his every touch, forget the chill of her father’s rejection, forget the terror of the feralis fight, think only of the warmth of breath on skin.
She’d gotten the impression, for all Archer’s talk of sin, that the pleasures of the flesh were few and far between.
She let her hands roam up his shoulders, reveling in the strength. The faint tremble at her touch became a shudder as her hands drifted back down his narrowing flanks to his hips.
He sank his fingers into her hair, thumbs at her temples, and almost painfully drew her upward to meet his gaze. “Sera, what are you doing?”
His voice was harsher even than his touch.
“I can draw you a diagram,” she said. “Hold on. I’ve got a notebook here.”
His eyes narrowed, searching hers. “You’d mock me now?”
She stared him down. “I would kiss you now.”
His eyes widened. She knocked his grip away and set her lips hard against his. He breathed faster than he had after the fight, his hands fisted in the hem of her T-shirt. The salty musk of his arousal filled her head. She tasted him deep in her mouth.
When she rose up onto her knees, he skimmed his hands inside her shirt, grasping her waist when she rocked on the mattress. He looked up at her, fingers pressed against her hip bones, neither reeling her in nor pushing her away.
She’d seen that wary look from him before, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he wanted. He reached for her without flinching only when he wanted her to destroy a demon.
She bent over him, so that his head hovered near her breast. The pendant stone swung over him, but she wasn’t interested in that particular mystery at the moment. “Touch me,” she whispered in his ear as she trailed her fingers down his back. The muscles beneath her palms flexed and jumped. “That’s why you came over here, isn’t it?”
“You cried out.”
“You told me you don’t lie.”
“You made a sound.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare.”
He was silent a moment. “You laughed in your sleep. I wanted to see . . .”
The prowling huntress in her faltered. The bold talyan warrior quivered at her touch. She should have exulted at the thought. Instead, she felt as if she held something fragile in her grasp, a delicate crystal that might shiver apart.
She leaned back a fraction. His hands dropped to her hips, and though she kept her gaze on his, at the bottom of her vision she saw the sinuous lines of the reven.
Violet haze scudded across his eyes like eerie storm clouds.
She leaned over again and pressed her lips, gently, to his forehead. “I dreamed of flying, and of snow angels.”
“Angels don’t fly,” he said with great seriousness. “Not in this realm.”
“Maybe in their dreams too.”
“Maybe.” He enclosed both her hands between his big palms. He raised their clasped hands to his lips. His breath fanned over her knuckles, sending a shiver down to her knees.
When he looked up, his eyes were dark and half hooded. “I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
The shiver went deep freeze. She slipped her hands out of his. “But—”
“I brought you through the possession, which no doubt rouses feelings of connection—”
“Couldn’t have been the great sex that did that.” She jumped off the bed.
“But any lasting bond could be our doom.” He still sat with his hands folded penitently. “I almost got you killed tonight. I knew the feralis was hunting us, and still I was thinking about you.”
About her? A treacherous warmth softened the stiffness in her spine. “No harm done. And you said together we banished the demons so thoroughly, we didn’t leave any pieces.”
“I don’t know exactly what you—what we did, but it was more dangerous than any tenebrae I’ve fought.”
The nascent warmth in her snuffed out. “It didn’t feel dangerous. When you touched me, I knew everything bad about the malice and the ferales didn’t have to be that way, didn’t have to be at all, and then it was gone. It felt . . . right.”
“You think right makes it harmless?”
She lifted her chin in challenge. “You felt it too.”
His pupils constricted, lost in a sudden flare of violet, as if she’d struck some terrible blow. “If I die in battle with a demon, the stain on my soul is at least lightened. But if I take you with me . . . I am already damned, but I won’t be twice damned.”
“My life and my soul have nothing to do with yours.” She wanted to stamp her foot, but he was already treating her like a child. “You’d fight with a man, with Zane or Ecco.”
“I hunt alone. I always have.”
“Which doesn’t mean you always have to.”
“Yes, it does.” He stood. The thin flannel made it obvious he wasn’t impassive to her touch, but from his expression, harder yet, she knew he’d never give in.