The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (34 page)

Her whole body shivered, nose
wrinkled in revulsion, lip curled as he pushed the argument, determined.

‘And what if it turns out you
are everything they think you are?’ he pressed. ‘You expect me to hand you to
them, spread-eagle, sacrificed on a platter?’

‘You said so yourself, the
chances that I am anything to them, let alone this mythical baby mamma, are
slim to none!’ Her fingers tangled in the ends of her hair, braiding her
nervous tell. ‘And even if I am, I think I’d like the truth on my terms,
preferably with little to no bloodshed.’

‘Are you prepared to die for
your curiosity?’ He gritted out the words.

‘For curiosity, crossing the
street, gang attacked by a frenzy of wolves come next full moon ...’ Her
shoulder lifted, a twitchy half shrug. ‘It seems a lot of ways this could go,
I’ll die.’

His growl cut her with ice.

‘Happy note though, you bite
me and I go crazy, the psych treatment wouldn’t have been a waste.’ Her light
laughter sounded forced to his ears. ‘If I turn into a serial killer, I trust
you to take me out.’

‘Jesus Christ Ash! You say it
like it’s nothing, like I could just put a gun to your head and ...’ And what?
Put her down, like the innumerable, faceless, black-nailed souls that haunted
his nightmares? He’d sooner rip out his own heart. The tremor in his hand
rattled the gunmetal against the wooden surface of the sideboard.
He
was
rattled. Not by the sordid reality of what could happen to her, but by the
revelation that it mattered to him. In the few days he’d known her, this girl
had chipped away at the hard-encrusted defences of a lifetime spent at war and
burrowed herself deep into a part of him that hadn’t breathed for centuries.
His eyes fell to where her fists clenched a spasm at her sides.

‘It is not nothing, Connal.
It is a little boy in the hands of monsters who want me. I have to try. A
child’s life is in the balance.’ Her face was set, determined. ‘I’m going
whether you say so or not. If you leave me behind, you better damn well know
I’ll be following you there. You can’t stop me.’

He glared at her, but a hand
coasted down over the back pocket of his jeans, shaping the metal cuffs he’d
tucked away when she was out of the room. He could stop her, and he would.
‘Infuriating woman,’ he murmured.

‘Does that mean you’re going
to bite me, Big Bad?’ she asked provocatively.

‘No, Little Red. I have no
intention of sinking my teeth into you.’ His fingers toyed with the ends of her
hair where they curled down her shoulder, and his gaze was drawn irresistibly
to the milky white column of her throat. This infuriating woman could lead him
to hell with all his good intentions. The register of his voice had dropped to
a gravelled whisper when he spoke again. ‘Clear your head of that foolish plan.’

Her head would not be
cleared. Foolish had taken root and it was teasing her. There was the silence
again, he shut down and she couldn’t promise to drop it just to ease the quiet.
It would be a lie. Heaving a perturbed exhale, she moved from his touch, even
the threat of it on her skin scrambling her brain with desire. Hair a shield,
it hung loose around her face as she paced the room, gathering more arguments.
Her lashes shut out her peripheral vision. Ash didn’t want to see him packing
those weapons into the black bag at his feet, it meant she hadn’t convinced him
enough. He was still going. Tracking the pacing lines his heavy booted feet had
left behind in the thick pile of the rugs, she took a turn around the room,
breathing anxious irritation into the air.

It was a lie she kept telling
herself. That she could easily go in there, risk death and dignity to save a
child because what did she have to live for? Ice maiden just wasn’t a good
description of her nowadays. He’d got inside her, like flames in a Redwood,
lighting her up from within with a violent emotion. Ash couldn’t imagine never
seeing him again without her heart constricting like she had a python in her
chest. He’d become the air in her lungs and the blood in her veins in mere
days. She’d wither, become frozen again without his surly ass to infuriate her.

Fuck, Ashling, you are not
thinking that word. We can’t have that, not now. We latch on, and it will hurt
so much more when we are cut off.
As
much as she knew that, the word still floated, drifting around, looking for a
good place to land while other parts of her mind turned over a plan to get him
to bite her. She couldn’t not try, when all the outcomes could save Josh. It
was just getting to the biting that was problematic.

Leading her blind tumult of
decisions around the room through touch, her fingers played over lightly dusted
figurines and thick tomes of old. Every item was known, had come to belong to a
place she was starting to call home. A blanket lay haphazard, hanging seemingly
in mid-air, tossed after one of her late night movie sessions, when dreams
prevented sleep. She reached to fold it without a second thought. Touching
corner to corner, the quilted blanket revealed cold stone under its warm
colours as it slipped from its perch.

‘Oh wow, I’d forgotten about
you ...’ Whispered words but Connal was suddenly a radiator of heat behind her,
large palms spread out on her hips to hold her when she would have startled at
his silent approach. Ash let her weight rest into him, nuzzled the bristle of
his jaw, fingertips carefully moving into the carved grooves of the ancient
sculpture. She’d thought it exquisite when she’d first seen it, but on second
look, it was more than that. It was flawless, an ethereal sculpture of a woman,
round and heavy with twin babies that had been etched into her stone womb.
Ash’s nail scratched gently at the lighter coloured babe, its body impressed
with fragments of Mother of Pearl, surrounded by the darkness of a precious
Obsidian embrace. Its twin was also its opposite, a small body of Obsidian in a
pool of Mother of Pearl. The style of the mother’s knotwork-patterned skin was
strikingly familiar.

Her head tipped back as his
hand slipped from her hip to splay possessively over her stomach, dragging her
back against the rigid pulse of his erection. Her voice kissed words to the
underside of his chin. ‘Did you make this, Big Bad? It’s beautiful ...’

‘No, this isn’t one of mine.
It’s from before the,’ he hesitated
,
‘before the war that wiped out
the female population.’ He buried his face in her hair.

‘What does it mean? Are they
twins?’

Stubble grazed the sensitive
skin of her neck and the depth of his voice tickled the shell of her ear as he
spoke. ‘It’s a fertility symbol, a representation of a Fomorian female carrying
offspring sired by two different fathers.’ His free hand moved with hers,
tracing the curves of the elegant sculpture where the foetuses formed a
primitive yin-yang of shadow and light. 'Hence the symbolism of the black and
the white.'

‘Is that even possible?’ She
breathed, arching back into him, the curves of her ass circling a slow,
provocative grind against the hard ridge of his arousal.

‘Absolutely. It’s quite
common in canine species. Back then, males outnumbered females by as many as
ten to one, the taking of multiple mates evolved as a biological adaptation, in
order to maintain genetic diversity.’

Her brow creased. ‘Are you
saying they gang-raped their women? That’s barbaric.’

‘No, not at all. Sure, they
favoured rough sex and the biting, the chemical exchange of eitr is an
extension of that, but the Fomori were once a highly matriarchal society.
Multiple male sexual partners were the norm, but the female always held the
power to choose her mates, even if fighting amongst rival males was commonplace.’

She snickered softly. ‘Yeah,
I’ve seen the macho pissing contests. Wouldn’t they just tear each other to
pieces?’ She was about ready to tear him to pieces, if he’d just let her touch.
Ash curled her nails into the back of his hands, up on her tiptoes to press the
soft lines of her spine to the wall of his chest, nudging for more contact as
her brain looped, following threads of desire and conversation.

‘At first, in the dark days,
mating and birthing rituals were vicious. A male would rip a challenger’s
throat out rather than share a female.’ She felt his teeth graze her neck and
her heart rate spiked, the soft growl escaping his throat proof-positive that
those same, ancient instincts lurked just below the civilised outer surface of
her man. ‘They were even known to eat the young they did not sire themselves.’

She drew breath on a gasp,
could feel the animal at her throat, desire surging in heady anticipation of
his bite. In that moment, she knew she wanted to feel his teeth in her skin and
knew instinctively that on some primal level, despite his stubborn denials,
Connal wanted it too.
You need only push him over the edge.
Tilting her
throat in invitation, her hands reached back to grasp the solid columns of his
thighs, riding up with the intention of grabbing his ass through the worn denim
of his jeans. He got there first, diverting her hands from their path to wrap
their linked arms tightly around her waist. She stifled a groan of frustration
as he turned his attention from her thudding pulse and back to the carved
figure before them.

‘In order to ensure the
survival of their young, the females established the rites of Blood
Brotherhood, whereby male littermates born of different fathers were raised to
share a unique bond. They lived together as siblings, trained to fight side by
side, and when they reached maturity, they would fight a contest to establish
dominance. Then they were branded and sworn into sacred vows of loyalty,
félagi, brothers one to the other, until death. And when it came to mating,
they would share the same female, willingly, and accept all offspring as their
own. It was ingenious, really, a way of turning the natural mating bond between
male and female into a stronger knot of three.’ One hand broke free to touch
the patterns etched on the female form’s body. ‘These symbols, of the
triskelion, represent the sacredness of the three.’

He dropped a kiss to the
curve of her shoulder, where the oversized neck of his shirt exposed the inked
symbol in her skin. A stylized triskelion of ravens, it was a pattern she’d
been drawn to, without ever understanding why. The connection with the carving
sent a shiver down her spine.

‘You say these blood brothers
were branded? The wolf on your chest Connal. Were you ... do you ...?’ The
words were there but they wouldn’t come out. Lust knotted in her throat and
stormed at her centre, harassing her to choose between knowledge and the carnal
craving in her veins for only him. Hell, she couldn’t imagine how any female
survived being the filling to a brother-wolf sandwich. If she had two Connal’s
... Her knees threatened to abandon her at the mere thought and they weren’t
too stable when he was around anyway. She’d die, she was certain. And it
wouldn’t be a little death.

It didn’t escape her notice
that he chose that moment to tip her small train of questioning off its tracks
with a nip to her pulse that made her head spin. No words, only rabid, sharp
kisses blushing her throat the colour of passion and marking her with bruises
she couldn’t hide. He took control of the grind of her hips, their motion never
ceasing as conversation had kept on, a constant need pressing them ever closer.
His response was an animal growl of hunger, and she purred an answer as her
hand slipped back to stroke the iron length of his denim-caged erection where
it nestled to the softness of her ass. Two could play that game, a distraction
that earned her a snarl of potent possession.

‘No more talk of ancient
history, Ashling. We have four hours ‘til midnight and I want to live every
minute in the present, with you.’

Her beast was done talking.
Nerves leapt in a coil of heat to pool in her core with electric anticipation,
tightening her body as a little thrill of fear touched her spine. This could be
the last time they were together and that scared the living hell out of her.
She’d only just found her fire, and it could be extinguished. Arching her
spine, Ash curled her arms back, looping his neck as they danced to primal
beats. No, she would not go out in a puff of smoke. She’d melt and blaze and
she’d burn herself into his world. More than a scorch mark or a frostbitten
limb, Ash wanted him to still feel the heat of her ... emotion ... for him,
long after she was gone. Her kisses rasped her desire to his lips. ‘Fuck, I
need you, Big Bad.’ She craved him.