Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,94

her past nightmares, now it thrummed hard with meaning, sending magic-touched blood to her extremities to make them tingle.

His words danced like butterfly kisses in her mind, a salve on her spirit she’d ached for, yearned for and desperately needed for fifty years. She’d been told she was special by others. But she realized then, in the moment his voice kissed her conscience – and his lips kissed hers – that all along, she’d really needed to hear it from him.

Anna felt she was in some sort of wonderful dream where she couldn’t see the face of her dream lover, but he seemed to know exactly what to do to her. His hand around her throat manipulated her pulse, and his thumb brushed along the line of her chin, and his lips, gentle at first, tender with care, pressed in harder, opening her up to him.

His other hand was suddenly running along her waist, a hot band of strength that made her feel secure even as it made her feel kept. His fingers slipped beneath her sweater and splayed across the muscles of her abdomen, gripping her tight to press her harder into his chest. There was no give in the man, no malleability. He was in control, the one with all the power, and that knowledge was a duality of frightening and intoxicating to Anna.

She was always the one with control, the power. Sometimes she felt she alone had all the power in the multiverse – and the responsibility to make the hard choices that came with it. She was so tired of being in control. She was so tired of being the one to make the decisions.

So when Ares claimed her mouth with his tongue and she felt the sharpened points of his incisors with hers, the pleasure of just giving in, giving up, and submitting flooded through her hot and hard, and it was all she could do to stifle a moan of sudden longing.

There was a knock at the door, the sound of knuckles rapping on wood, and Ares went very still above her. Slowly he pulled away, breaking the kiss that had nearly been her undoing. But his grip on her didn’t let up one bit.

A deep and decidedly confident voice said, “I’m not interrupting anything of vast, momentous importance, am I?” as if it knew damn well that was exactly what it was doing and found it slightly amusing.

Ares stared down into her eyes for several long beats, drawing the moment out into a kind of forever as his now fully-glowing eyes re-claimed her soul. For the first time in fifty years, she felt she was in the right man’s arms. “Ares…” she whispered, and reached a hand up to cup his face. Feel that he was real.

He was. He was real from his strong, sculpted lines to the stubble on his chin. She smiled, barely containing laughter that wanted to bubble up out of her throat. “So I guess you weren’t kidding about how to break the spell.”

Ares matched her smile with one of his own, rakish and absolutely perfect. Then he slowly turned away from her to look up at the man who stood in the door frame, his arm braced against it, his body leaning slightly into the closet.

She knew who the man was. She had heard about him, and she knew he was the head of the Monsters clan. But the only other time in her life she’d had occasion to see him would have been in the alley when Antares had… taken her aside. And all she’d been able to make out that night had been Ares, Sterling, the chaos of a magic battle stirring in the alley and V-twin engines sounding out a warning all around them.

So this was the first time she’d ever seen Cain’s face.

Yet even so, she would have recognized the man anywhere, any time, no matter what. Because what they said about him and the kind of power he exuded was absolutely true.

“Cain,” greeted Ares. She felt an unease come off him, and his grip on her had yet to let up.

Cain nodded in return, but his eyes were skirting across the shelves in the room, and his expression was one of mild bemusement. “Well Mace… I have to say, this actually explains a lot about you.”

Anna almost laughed. But then several realizations hit her at once, and she understood the wariness Ares was experiencing. One, Cain was there. He’d breached the wards around