Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,23
times when we couldn’t find more exciting activities to pass the time with. It wasn’t any kind of love affair. It meant nothing more than momentary physical satisfaction to either of us.”
Was that all our passionate tumble into bed had meant to him too? I didn’t know if I wanted it to have meant more. The encounter had certainly been off the scales in the physical satisfaction department. And now I was remembering the sear of his kiss and the literal flames that had flowed between us, which wasn’t exactly helping my focus, so maybe I shouldn’t have brought up the subject after all.
“Well, it’s good that you should know your way around her in a bedroom,” I said in a breezy tone, and Omen shot me a look so scorching it made me want to feel his kiss again for real.
Whoa there, hormones. I had three other monstrous lovers who weren’t watching my every move for signs that I was going to incinerate all life in both realms. No need to be greedy. Or stupid.
We walked through a few more of the ornate rooms that smelled faintly of jasmine. Omen slowed coming up on the next doorway.
A voice rang out from the room beyond in the same sharp, droll tone I’d heard rising up from Omen’s phone at the start of this recent mess, the effect amplified when it only had to travel through air. “Here you are at last, Omen. Come on then. Don’t tell me you’ve gone shy.”
“Only perhaps a little more cautious,” he said, sauntering in.
I followed him into a room so full of splendor it took everything I had in me not to start gaping again.
Two lamps lit the space, catching on the masses of gold that coated the walls and ceiling. There was enough of it around us to buy one of those collectors’ mansions back home, gilded across delicate filigree-etched borders and painted in with the pinks, blues, and greens of intricate floral patterns. Between two more crystal chandeliers, a massive gold canopy rippling with sculpted leaves protruded from the wall, flowery curtains falling from its edges to frame an immense bed. The jasmine smell had thickened, adding to the opulent atmosphere.
If this was how royalty lived, sign me up to start a dynasty of my own.
Somehow, the figure lounging on the silk covers of the bed managed to top her surroundings in extravagance. Tempest would have been a difficult figure to miss even without any special trappings: she had to be at least six feet tall and built like an Amazon, both muscular and buxom. Her bronze-brown hair gleamed as brilliantly as the gold around her, twisted into waving locks that lifted and swayed around her face as if they had minds of their own. Like some kind of Medusa—Omen had said she liked to take on different roles.
True to the lion-ish aspects of her nature, her shining eyes held cat-slit pupils, and there was something feline about her prominent cheekbones and flared nose as well. Definitely not a face you’d easily forget. The fabric draped across her voluptuous figure had the cut of a bathrobe, but hardly the kind you’d pick up at Target—this was a bathrobe fit for a queen, scarlet and violet satin strung through with gold embroidery.
Over that magnificent bathrobe, she’d draped so many golden bangles heavy with emeralds and sapphires that I wasn’t sure she could sit up straight under it all even if she’d wanted to. Good luck walking under all that weight of riches. Although she looked perfectly happy sprawled as she was.
What made the biggest impression, though, and not one I could poke fun at even in passing, was the sense of power that wafted off of her like the wind off a stormy ocean, chilly and razor-edged. Omen might have cultivated his ice-cold bastardom to a T, but the energy that thrummed off him still held his natural heat. Tempest was a bastard down to her bones.
Annoyingly, in the midst of the awe and uneasiness I was already trying my best to tamp down, a jab of jealousy pricked at me too. The hellhound shifter had been so close to this woman, even if he disdained to call her so much as a friend now, even if he said their “fucking” hadn’t mattered at all. She knew him in ways I likely never would, considering he now saw me as only slightly better than a ticking time bomb.