Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,92

me. Once upon a time, I’d have been intimidated by that look, but not anymore. As long as he was in control of himself, he would never hurt me, and he was firmly in control. I crossed my arms and gave him my best stubborn, implacable look.

He closed his sitting room door. It wasn’t quite a slam, but it was close.

“Yes, she was pissed off,” he said.

“Did she hurt you?” If she had, he was okay now, but that didn’t stop my blood pressure from rising at the thought.

He rolled his eyes. “Of course not. But she tried to go looking for you even though I told her you weren’t in the house.”

That didn’t sound good. “Maybe she didn’t understand you.” I still had trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that Sita understood anything people said to her. How the hell did a tiger learn English?

I shook my head at myself. I had to stop thinking of Sita as a tiger. That was the form she took, but that wasn’t what she actually was. She was magic, and who knew what her limits were?

“She understood,” Jamaal said grimly. “I wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to pick on someone else to punish me, so I put her away. You have to keep your distance, Nikki. It’s not safe to be around me.”

I heard the hint of bitterness in my own laugh. “I think safe is a thing of my past. In the last couple of months, I’ve been beaten, bitten, kidnapped, murdered—twice!—and threatened with fates worse than death. I doubt I’ll ever feel safe again.” I shivered, suddenly chilled by my own recap of what I’d been through. I was lucky I wasn’t as insane as Emma by this point.

Jamaal took a step toward me, and I think he was planning to give me a hug, but he stopped himself and clenched his fists at his sides.

“The closest I’ve come to feeling safe,” I continued, and this time I took the step forward, “was last night when I was in your arms. When you kissed me, I forgot the rest of the world existed.” I reached out to touch his chest. The fabric of his shirt was thin enough that I could feel the ridges of his scars beneath it. I looked up into his eyes. “I need to forget for a while. Please.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Jamaal said, but he didn’t move away from me, and his eyes were dark with desire. “Sita—”

“Is going to have to learn to live with it. And if she can’t, then you’ll just have to go back to coping with your death magic the old-fashioned way. You managed to do it for a century before her.”

His face hardened. “If you can call what I did ‘managing.’ You remember that long list of bad things that have happened to you? Who was it who beat you?”

I’d thought Jamaal had forgiven himself for that. Apparently, I was wrong. “Even when your temper flared, you wouldn’t have done that to one of your friends,” I said. “You thought I was the enemy. Look, I don’t like it when you go off like a powder keg, and I know fighting the death magic made you miserable, but if using Sita to vent it means you have to live your life in complete isolation from the rest of us, then it isn’t worth it. I’d rather deal with your temper.”

Jamaal shook his head. He opened his mouth to argue, but I reached up and put my fingers on his lips to stop him.

“You deserve to have a life,” I told him, caressing the fullness of his lower lip with my thumb as I closed the last remaining distance between us. Almost against his will, he put his arms around me. There was a look very like fear in his eyes, and I was determined to extinguish it. I raised up on my tiptoes and kissed him, and a small sound of need escaped me.

“This is a bad idea, Nikki,” he said against my lips, but the sexy rasp in his voice and the way his hands gripped me tighter said he was in as much of a mood to be bad as I was.

I breathed deep, taking in his scent of smoke and cloves and something else I suspected was hair product. And underneath was the scent of him, of the man who could chase all other thoughts from my mind with the lightest brush of skin against skin,