Apocalypse Happens (27 page)

“Touch me,” I repeated. “Now.”

“That’s not a good idea. I wanted—”

I tried to brush him with my elbow, but the chains rattled and gave me away. Maybe. Since this was Sawyer, he’d have no problem scooting back faster than any movement I made. If he were even in the room in the first place.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You want me to forgive you for changing sides? For fucking my mother? For—” Fury bubbled in my chest, so hot I was half-afraid my skin might start to glow as hers had. “Whatever the hell else you’ve done?”

I yanked on the chains again, hissed at the pain, threw my legs once more in his direction, and this time I flipped half off the bed, landing hard on my knees, my upper body still attached. I wrenched my back, and my breath caught.

“Nice job,” I muttered. Now I ached all over, and I still hadn’t managed to brush against Sawyer at all.

“You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“You think?”

He gave a half laugh that sounded almost like a sob, and I stilled.

“You aren’t Sawyer,” I said.

I sensed movement in my direction, and since I didn’t want to be skewered while lying half on and half off the floor, my back to my attacker, I scrambled and twisted, pushed off with my legs and threw myself onto the bed.

The only way I could detect an approach was a slight shift in the air current, the increase in that scent that was so maddeningly Sawyer’s. What creature could imitate his voice, his smell, his very essence? I had no idea.

I waited, tense and ready, until the telltale lifting of the hairs on the arm, the crackle at the back of my neck that shrieked,
Run!
became too strong to ignore. Then I scissor-kicked my legs—bam, bam—right where a face should be.

I didn’t hit anything, but I didn’t fly off the bed this time either. Only because this time, hands grabbed my calves, shoving me back onto the bed as a heavy, hard, all too familiar body pinned me down.

“Get off!” I shouted. “You’re not him.”

“What is wrong with you?” Sawyer growled, and when he growled, he actually growled. His beast—which one, I wasn’t quite sure—was very close to the surface.

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
What was wrong? Let me make a list.

“I’m captured, chained, and in the morning I have to prove myself to my psychotic nymphomaniac mother, who just happens to be a shape-shifting Egyptian firebird. I’m the leader of the forces of light, but I can’t lead. A seer who can’t see. Jimmy hates me. I’m a vampire. You’re—” My laughter died. “What are you?”

“I’m me.”

“Prove it,” I said. So he kissed me.

It was good proof. No one kissed like Sawyer.

He tasted of salt and sugar; I liked to lick his teeth. When I did, his tongue flicked out and tickled the base of mine. I felt it all the way to my curling toes.

There were things I did with Sawyer that I’d never done with anyone else. With Sawyer there were no
rules, no boundaries. When he kissed me—now and always—every thought disappeared, every memory, every hope and dream, leaving only the burning desire to kiss until kissing wasn’t enough, then to get naked, sweat-slicked skin sliding along sweat-slicked skin, plunging within, over and over until at last the burn went away.

A thought meandered through my lust-laden brain. I was supposed to be doing something.

Seduce him.

At least I was right on track.

I arched, wiggling in the hope he might touch me as I’d ordered. I forgot my hands were tied and nearly tore them off at the wrists when I tried to run my palms over his back. Instead, I wrapped my ankles around his, opening my legs so that he lay cradled between. I immediately deduced the seduction was working.

His mouth trailed down my neck; then his breath traced the moisture left behind, and I shivered. My nipples hardened, and he suckled me through my shirt and bra; the sensation of tongue and lips and teeth, along with the friction of the material, made me moan.

The sound snapped me out of the lust coma I’d nearly fallen into. I had to keep my wits from melting along with my body. I needed information.

“Does she have the key?” I asked. Talk about sexy murmur. My voice was so low and hoarse I got excited myself.

“Mmm,” Sawyer answered, the sound buzzing along my breast like a vibrator.

Was that mmm, mmm good? Or mmm as in yes?

“She does?”

He lifted his mouth; his face was so close our breath mingled. “You shouldn’t have come. I had it under control.”

“Had what?” I frowned. “Are you saying you infiltrated ahead of us?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“And I’m supposed to . . . believe you?”

“Why do you think I came here tonight?”

I arched my back, pressing my pelvis into his erection. “The usual reason.”

He snorted, his breath a sharp puff of heat against my face. “I’ve got more sex than I can handle.”

“That’ll be the day.” I had a sudden flash of the Phoenix giving him a blow job in the foyer. “So what was the plan? Fuck her until she told you the truth?”

“It’s worked in the past.”

Sawyer had whored for the federation before; sometimes I wondered if he did much else.

I should talk. I’d planned on doing the same thing.

“How’s it been working on her?”

“Not quite as well,” he admitted.

“What have you found out?”

“Nothing.”

“If you were still on our side, you’d share what you know.”

“I would, if I had anything to share. She’s a little leery of trusting me.”

“Join the club.”

“There’s something you should know,” he said.

“There’s a helluva lot I should know.”

His chest lifted and lowered, pushing against me, then flowing away. I was reminded that we were on a bed, body to body, my hands tied above my head. He could do anything he wanted, or at least try. Why did that make my nipples tingle again?

“Get off me,” I ordered.

“Not yet.”

He rolled to the side, sliding a hand into the pocket
of his jeans. He came up with a key. A few clicks later and my hands were free; the golden chains clattered to the floor.

“I can’t leave,” I said.

“And I can’t let you.”

He still lay on top of me. I waited to see where this would lead.

“Do you remember the first time you touched me?” he murmured.

I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. I’d touched him when I was fifteen, but as little and as gingerly as possible. He’d tried to teach me so much, and I hadn’t been able to understand most of it. Then I hadn’t known what he was, what I was. I’d only known that he frightened me.

When I’d returned ten years later I was Ruthie’s heir. I could hear her voice on the wind revealing the names of the supernatural creatures that walked through our world.

She’d whispered, “Skinwalker,” and I’d touched him, then seen the aeons of his life. Or at least what he’d wanted me to see.

Not long after that I’d touched him in the night, become a part of him and him of me, and discovered a way to channel my power, to control and increase it.

“Which first time?” I asked.

“When I let you see my mate.”

Ah. He’d lived as a wolf, mated as one, loved and then lost her. The devastation I’d seen . . . It was one of the most human behaviors I’d ever witnessed in Sawyer, and he hadn’t even been human at the time.

“I remember,” I murmured. “You loved her very much.”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m sure you had a good reason.”

“For loving her?”

“For killing her.”

“I didn’t kill her.” His voice was so calm, so reasonable. You’d never know I’d just accused him of killing the only wolf he’d ever loved.

“Then—?”

“How did I get my magic?”

“Yes.”

He stood abruptly, and I tensed. Sawyer might sound calm, but that didn’t mean he was. He could easily reach over and break my neck just to shut me up for the few seconds it would take to heal.

Instead, he sat again, hip brushing mine, the scent of his skin washing over me and making me remember all the first times that had come before. I had to resist the urge to press my face to his flat, hard belly and taste.

“Touch me,” he whispered. “Touch me and see.”

CHAPTER 28

I kept my fingers clenched. He’d hidden his past from me before, shown me only what he wanted me to know. Now he was inviting me in, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. Knowing Sawyer, the blast of his past might just short-circuit my brain.

“I can make you,” he said.

I was so tired of being pushed around, threatened into doing things I didn’t want to, ordered by angels and demons and ghosts to kill that, fuck this, save everyone. I was supposed to be the boss of this side of the Apocalypse, but you’d never know it.

“Break my fingers,” I said tightly, “crack my wrist, force me any way that you like. You’re the one who taught me to block the view. If I don’t want to see, Sawyer, I won’t.”

“You keep on believing that.”

Then he was touching me, his dark clever fingers gentle yet sure, cupping my breast, thumb stroking the nipple back to a tingling peak. He ran his other palm over my ribs, tracing each and every one before inching beneath the waistband of my jeans, then the lacy strip of my panties, and stroking me where I was still wet from before.

I couldn’t help it; my legs fell open, my breath
coming fast and hard, as my hands splayed wide, fingers reaching for . . . him.

“Touch me,” he whispered again.

I sat up, then slowly placed my palm on his stomach where there were no tattoos. I didn’t want the distraction of the beasts when they called.

His skin was smooth, the muscles stone-hard; I flexed my fingers, drawing my nails along the plane, and he caught his breath, tightening the muscles even further. Closing my eyes, I reached with my mind, caught just a flicker before it was gone, so I dipped my thumb into his navel and gently scored the rim.

Bam. Flash. Light. Dark. I thought I saw his hogan, but—

“I can’t be sure.”

“You know what we have to do.”

I opened my eyes; his were right in front of me—silvery gray surrounded by a thin thread of black. So familiar yet so cool and distant. I had been as close to this man physically as I’d been to almost no one else, yet I hardly knew him at all.

“Just tell me,” I said.

He kissed me instead. I caught where this was headed. We’d been there before. The only way to truly open—for me and for him—was to give ourselves over to the power of our magic. For Sawyer, his magic was based in sex, and now mine was too.

So be it
, I thought.

I pulled him onto the bed, running my fingers all over his back, chest and arms, getting flashes of wolf, cougar, shark, interspersed with the silhouette of a bird in the sky—at night, dawn, noon.

He yanked off my shirt, nearly ripped my bra in two, filled his palms with my breasts and lifted them
to his mouth. His hands were so hard, yet clever and true. He teased my nipples with tongue and teeth, then worked his way downward, tracing my belly, tickling my navel as I’d tickled his. My pants fell on top of the golden chains as he meandered lower still.

I tried to focus, to see into the darkness of his mind, but his breath stirred the curls between my legs, hot, almost scalding, and I moaned, my fingers tangling in his hair, my thumb rubbing over the spike of his cheekbone, then tracing the curve of his ear. Hard and soft, so many contrasts in just one man.

His tongue flicked over me—once, twice—then he suckled, rolling me in his mouth. I tried to buck away.

“No, we should—”

I grasped at his shoulders, tried to pull him up and over, then inside, but it was like trying to move a mountain. He slipped his hands beneath me, grasping and lifting me, tilting me so he could feast.

My arms flopped limply to my sides as my legs first opened, and then, when he began to flick his tongue back and forth, back and forth, harder and faster, clamped around his shoulders and tightened.

He must have felt me swell, the bud of my clitoris going tight against his tongue in that instant before I came, because then he did rear up and over me, plunging within before going completely still.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Just . . . wait.”

I was on the verge, in that place where everything in the world narrows to the circle of body on body, body in body, body surrounding body. The very air seemed to pause; silence engulfed us. There
was
only us.

At last he moved, drawing himself against me so I could feel every inch of the slide. I was so wet, so
swollen, so ready that when he grew and jerked and spurted, it only took me a milli second to erupt.

I might have screamed if he hadn’t put his hand over my lips; as it was, I bit him. The taste of his flesh in my mouth, the salt of his skin, the promise of blood, made me come harder, and I clenched around him so tightly he froze, holding himself motionless as if he didn’t want this ever to end.

Eventually it did. Someone had to move, and that someone was him. He rolled to the side, then stared at the ceiling too.

“That was supposed to open me,” I said. “Or maybe you?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m not getting much of a news flash.”

“Wait,” he murmured.

“Sawyer, if you did me just to . . . do me, I’m going to—”

Suddenly, he rolled back on top of me, toe-to-toe, hip-to-hip, chest-to-chest. He pressed his forehead to mine, his eyes widened, the whites blazing like lightning through a clear midnight sky. The bed rattled; the windows did a thrumming dance.

He groped for my hands, drew them next to my head and then pressed down with his own, palm-to-palm.

I was drawn into the past with such force the breeze stirred my hair. In one-quarter of my mind I knew I was still on that bed in Cairo, but the other three-quarters was full of him.

He’s laughing, teeth bright white against the bronze of his skin, and he looks younger, but not because of any difference in his face, or his eyes or his stance. Perhaps it is just that he’s happy.

Have I ever seen Sawyer happy? I don’t think so, and I have to wonder why. Sure, our lives aren’t fit for
a Disney movie, but there should be a little joy somewhere; otherwise, really, what’s the point?