Drowning in Fire

ELEVEN

Conflicting thoughts battled inside her head.

I want you.

I doubt you.

Go home.

Stay.

Turn around and watch me.

To drown them out, she threw water over her shoulders and dragged it down her arms, scrubbing off the dirt and sweat, making her fingertips hurt.

Griffin sat cross-legged, facing away from her, on the lip of the rock. His wide back heaved with a sigh. The damp black T-shirt pulled tightly across his torso, and she could see nearly every muscle delineated underneath.

“It bothered you,” she said, taking a chance with this topic of conversation, “to find me in that garage naked.”

His dark head dragged slowly back and forth. “You have no idea.”

“Because everyone could see me?” And here’s where she took an even greater chance: “Or because you still wanted me?”

Another sigh. “Both.”

“For a long time, I thought it was hate.”

“No.” A quick response. “Not hate. Never hate. Confusion, though. Confusion over why you were there, why you were being so hostile to me when I had no idea what was going on.” He barked out a cold laugh. “And a hell of a lot of frustration. Because you’d never left my mind in three years. Because I never expected to see you again, and suddenly there you were. Captive. Taken by one of my own behind my back. Naked and angry and all up in my face, exactly how I remembered you. I gave you my coat because I couldn’t stand looking at you. You were too much for me, for my senses, after all that time away. You instantly kick-started everything back into high gear, the way it once was. For me at least.”

Keko hadn’t realized she’d stopped washing until he finished, completely frozen by his words. When her hands resumed movement over her body, they worked slowly, as though pushing through mud.

He turned his head, giving her his profile. “And you?”

Her arm paused over her chest as she considered how to answer. “I felt vindicated at first. Seeing you proved I was right about you and your people.” She scoffed at herself. “At least in my own head, for a time. I remember being so mad at how good you looked, how you never took your eyes off me, how you made me put on the coat like you owned me or something.”

“But you did it. You put it on.”

“Because I thought that if I did, you’d continue to think you had power over me, when really it was me trying to turn the tables. And because”—oh boy—“for the first time ever I was aware of other people looking at me, and I liked your eyes on me the best. Yours were the only ones I wanted, even after the way we’d ended, and that realization made me insane. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to react.”

Slowly, gracefully, he leaned back on his hands, his triceps and lats making all sorts of gorgeous waves under the thin layer of the T-shirt. The mist above rained down sparkles in his nearly black hair.

“This is the first time we’ve talked about it,” he said. “I didn’t think we ever would.”

Beneath the water she rubbed at her legs and feet, because she didn’t know what else to do or say.

“So I understand your behavior in the garage,” he said, “but I still don’t get what happened right after. The war and all.”

Two months ago she’d been so sure he’d been finagling his way into the Senatus by capturing and using her. She’d been positive that he was orchestrating a war between Ofarians and Chimerans. Her soul had been shattered by his callousness with Makaha. Her heart had been destroyed by his coldness to her after they’d left the bonfire, and then three years later in that garage.

“I think you do get it,” she said. “I let myself want you, and when you didn’t want me in return I came back at you the only way I knew how: fighting, war. I’m not saying it was right. Standing here now, looking back at how I’d been trained to think, it feels so foolish. So dangerous. I deserved my punishment.”

“Who said I didn’t want you?” His voice rose. “I knew what I was to you in the very beginning and I didn’t care. I went into it willingly.”

“And what do you think you were to me?”

Another humorless laugh. “Come on, Keko. I’m a man. I may be horny as all fuck when I’m around you, but I still like to think I can cling to a chunk of my brain when I’m inside you. You already told me I was a challenge to you in Utah, someone for you to do to pass the time. Something forbidden. Maybe even something to secretly get back at the chief for making you watch me.”

“All that is true.”

“It was true, in the beginning. But that last night in the hotel room? I thought I might’ve become something special to you, if only for a little while.”

“You were.”

He went perfectly still, a half-drawn breath exaggerating the deep V of his torso. She’d never been so attracted to a man’s back before.

“Were?” he asked.

“Were,” she said. “I don’t know what you are now.”

It occurred to her that maybe he was baiting her as much as she was baiting him. Each trying to pry out information from the other without revealing their own hands. Maybe she should grab on tightly to that and not let other, more physical, demands try to steer her in other directions. Except that those demands were making her thighs tremble with need beneath the water, and she couldn’t resist slowly running her hands up and down them.

“What are you doing?” For someone who could transform himself into rain, his voice sounded so very dry. “To your body. Right now.”

Her hands froze halfway up her thighs, water sloshing around her chest and upper arms. “I’m washing.”

“Where?”

The urge to touch her own nipple with one hand and push the other between her legs nearly sent her underwater. For a moment she could have sworn she felt him in liquid form sliding over the part of her that was quickly going slippery. Or maybe that was just her imagination, her fantasies, breaking through the barriers of reality.

“Griffin . . .” It came out plaintive. Hot. An entirely different sound than she’d wanted to give him.

It meant the balance of control had shifted again. He’d unknowingly taken over and she was slipping. He was affecting her, turning her on, and . . . Brave Queen, she didn’t want him to stop.

He pushed off his hands and shoved them both into his hair so hard she thought he might be digging into his skull. “God, I know. I know. Don’t answer that.”

With terrible effort, she lifted her hands from the water, the dripping as it hit the surface loud and strangely sexy. She’d started this—this advanced form of flirting that got her naked within four feet of him—but now she wasn’t entirely sure how to finish it. Or even if she should.

Because no amount of sex was going to erase what she was feeling. How dumb she’d been to ever have thought that a physical release could drive away unwanted and burdensome emotion.

Cupping water in her palms, she poured it over her shoulder, trying to focus on getting her wound clean, but instead only noticing the slow, cool tease of the narrow streams as they trickled over her skin—as they made dancing paths down and around the swells of her breasts. She pressed her finger to one lazy droplet, tracing it downward, until she grazed her nipple.

A tiny moan of pleasure leaked from her throat.

A louder one rumbled from the chest of the man sitting on the rock. “Ah, fuck it. Just tell me.”

Turn around. See where my hand is. Where I want yours.

But to say it felt far too intimate, which was odd since her mouth was trained for boldness.

“I’m trying to wash my back.” She was fully aware of how dumb that sounded, how romantically manipulative, but since she’d been conditioned to own what she said, she let it hang there.

His back straightened. “Don’t strain yourself. The wound could open up again and bleed. Here, let me help.”

Yes. Her hand tightened on her breast, the nipple hard in the center of her palm. She held her breath, wanting him to turn, to strip out of those clothes, and slip into the water right in front of her. Wanting his hands on her. Her eyes drifted closed with the fantasy, with anticipation.

Then something did touch her—something cool and wet and refreshing—but it wasn’t Griffin.

Her eyes flew open to see the waterfall pulling away from the rock face, defying gravity. Scant droplets turned to a steady shower as the small waterfall poured over her spot in the center of the pool. She stood up, rising above the surface, and let the water rain down, flattening her hair down her back and sluicing over every inch of her body. It beat down upon her, cleaning her and making her feel impossibly dirty within the same second.

She felt Griffin’s presence within the water that cascaded over her, even if it wasn’t him exactly. Smiling, catching a mouthful of water, she looked over at him. He sat motionless, his back still to her, hands on his knees. His magic literally surrounded her.

Just like when he used to move inside her, and she and her magic had surrounded him.

“If you can’t see me,” she said, “how do you know where to send the water?”

“I can always feel you. Remember?”

Oh yes. She remembered.

The thought of it pulled her out from under the enchanted waterfall and sent her feet sliding across the slippery stones at the bottom of the pool. Toward him. The surface of the water only touched her mid-thigh, and when she reached the edge of the pool, she was markedly aware of her nakedness. She was Chimeran, where the body in all its faults and beauty was revered and never shamed, but just then, standing behind a clothed Griffin as he stared ahead at the curtain of mist enclosing them, she wanted to be noticed. By him and only him.

Standing this close, she observed things about him she never had before. The series of short white scars above his left elbow. The freckle above the neckline of his T-shirt. It nestled in a paler strip of skin that seemed to have been exposed by a recent haircut.

The urge to reach up, run her hands over his scalp, twist his head around, and claim his mouth with hers was so powerful she had to clasp her hands behind her back.

“I’m done,” she said.

He jumped and swiveled, only to see her standing naked and dripping not two feet away. The magic waterfall slapped back against the rock, sending a brand new splash across her bare back. The mist veil wavered. He pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand and made a face like he’d been kicked in the gut.

“Didn’t meant to scare you.” She cocked her head. “I thought you could feel me.”

As his hand dropped, he looked into her eyes. “I thought I might’ve just been imagining you getting closer.”

“Because you wanted me to be?”

His Adam’s apple made a long, slow undulation in his throat. “Yes.”

To his credit, he never once looked away from her face, and she found that more erotic than almost any brand of touch or kiss or dirty word.

The waterfall splashed and gurgled behind her, a soft, tantalizing sound.

“Your turn to get in?” she asked. “I promise I won’t look.”

His eyes searched her face for two seconds, and then three, and then she lost count.

Suddenly he popped to his feet, towering high above her, her eyes level with his knees. Quickly, nearly frenzied, he whipped off his shirt, not caring that it landed in a puddle. Keko felt her breath catch, her fire flaring in response to the sight of the stunning, sweat-streaked chest above. Then he pushed his hands into the waistband of his shorts and shoved them and his underwear down. They pooled around his ankles and he just stood there, gloriously dirty and naked.

And undeniably hard.

With the tiniest of shrugs, it was as though he dared her to take him all in. He seemed to say: See what you do to me?

“How very Chimeran of you,” she said.

The excitement of seeing him again in this way swept through her body, cranking up her desire to a wild blaze. Heat pulsed below her skin and small tendrils of steam curled around her body. The sight of the steam made his nostrils flare and she couldn’t deny how much she enjoyed his reaction.

Before, three years ago, they’d grabbed each other and fucked whenever they’d had a moment alone. A swift attack, hands everywhere, quick and furious penetration. Intense, fiery orgasms. Now, however, they were just . . . looking.

He threw a pointed glance at his erection. “The second I get in that cold water, this’ll die.”

One corner of her mouth curved upward. “I can help with that.”

She turned, sinking shoulder deep into the water and resting her back against the rock. Taking a Chimeran breath, she stoked her inner fire and released all of it through her skin. The water instantly warmed, but she had to keep feeding it heat because of the waterfall.

She lifted her face up to Griffin. “Bath’s ready. You don’t want to touch me though, unless you want to get burned.”

“Maybe I do.”

But as he stepped down into the pool, he gave her a wide berth. To remain true to her word not to look, she gave him her back and set her forearms and elbows on top of the rock.

She wouldn’t look, but she would listen. And she would imagine.

The sound of him moving through the water, the rasp of his hands over his skin and the stubble on his face, the trickle of his element through his hair, made her desperately want to be Ofarian. To give up her fire just for a minute. She would swirl all around him, tease him, taste him in new ways.

Maybe that was exactly what he was doing to her now, because the easy touch of the water surrounding her body suddenly felt different. Controlled. Absolutely sensual. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to it, imagining that it was actually Griffin’s liquid fingers slowly coiling like rope around her ankles and calves. Moving up, up, up to the parts of her thighs that made her quiver with want. Running back and forth across her clit. It was Griffin’s liquid hips that lapped against her ass. It was Griffin’s liquid hands that slid around her ribcage and stretched for her nipples.

The water promptly stilled, as no churning pool of water below a fall ever should. The seductive ebb and flow over her body receded, and she bit back a small sound of anguish in the wake of its absence. The mist still shifted and shimmered overhead, but it was the complete silence, punctuated only by Griffin’s harsh, ragged breathing, that had her spinning around in the water.

He was a hard statue made of bronze and dripping with the element he owned. Any tease or denial had vanished from his eyes. His mouth was set with clear intent.

“Turn off your fire,” he growled. “I’m coming for you.”

• • •

Griffin couldn’t stand it any longer. Being this close to Keko, seeing her body and the way she gazed up at him with longing and magic and heart in her eyes, had shoved him right up to the edge and finally tipped him over and off. Now he was falling, and the only thing to stop him from crashing was her.

There would be no talking himself out of wanting her. There would be no rationalization. No thinking about why he’d come to Hawaii in the first place. Only her. Only Keko, and the torrent of desire and emotions she sent rocketing through him.

If she told him no, if she pushed him away now, he would go, but she’d never been one to tease. If she wanted something, she went after it, and right now he was sure she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

He stood there, waist deep in the pool, as she slowly turned around in the water. The dreaminess in her eyes slayed him, because he knew he’d been the one to put it there.

He gave his order. He told her his intent.

That mouth—that gorgeous, lush mouth—parted. He watched the rose glow painted over her skin start to fade as she toned down the Chimeran fire within. He didn’t want it too dampened, though. He loved her heat. He wanted her hot. So he reached out and grabbed her, yanking her away from the rock and up against him. Against the hard-on she hadn’t let die.

Pressed together, shoulders to knees, slippery and naked, one phrase played on a loop over and over in his mind:

I missed you.

I missed you.

I missed you.

The look in her eyes, the surrender drawn over her face, claimed the same. And this time she wasn’t trying to cover it up or push it aside. Neither was he. Not now, with her in his arms again.

Three years spent poring over every minute detail of their time together. Three years of discovering that the moments that resonated loudest to him were those when she’d let emotion enhance how she used her body. Those moments when he’d opened himself up and allowed himself to feel something bigger than physical pleasure. They’d created promise together, and even though that promise had been severed, it had never truly died.

He meant to take her arms to bring them around his neck, but they were already sliding up his chest and into his hair. Her breasts were already pressed to his skin. She’d always seemed to know what he wanted, although at this moment he had conjured up no fantasies. No expectations. He just wanted her, in any way, shape, or form.

Keko held tightly to his neck and pulled herself up, wrapping her legs around his waist. She was so strong as she held him, as though he’d been the one trying to run away. All that skin, tying him up in a beautiful Chimeran ribbon.

His legs gave out, not from weight, but from the sheer force of desire that barreled into him. He sank into the water, taking her with him, shattering the magical stillness of the pool. Releasing his control over his element, little waves slapped over their bodies. There was a sharp dig in his scalp, her fingers grinding as she pulled his mouth to hers.

The word for what happened next wasn’t kiss. No. A kiss was way too delicate, way too passionless.

Three years of frustration were built into this. Three years of missed chances and disconnected promise. Three years of continual longing, building and building despite the mind’s orders to let it go.

She was trembling in his arms, and that might have been the most startling and most fantastic discovery of all: to know for sure that he affected her as much as she affected him.

He’d missed the sweet smoke on her tongue. He’d missed the pressure of her lips and the way she opened so wide for him. He’d missed the power of her body and how she barely knew her own strength when it came to him, because that meant he’d made her lose control.

He wanted her experiences to mirror his, for her to know exactly what she did to him in the way he fed his reactions back to her.

He had to be inside her. Now. No finesse, no preamble. They needed to take the edge off right now before it sawed them both in half. Later, he would show her with his hands and mouth and cock that when he thought of her, Makaha and the Senatus and a close call war didn’t exist. When he touched her, and claimed her mouth and body at this very moment, he wasn’t thinking of that exchange of information they were both dreading and wanting.

It was only about her. Only about them.

“Keko.”

He thought the name was only in his mind, but then it tumbled out with pure desperation and hard-driving need onto his tongue. He pressed the beautiful word back into her open mouth.

The water vibrated around them, their little liquid world gone to shaking. Desire rattled itself free from the cage in which he’d tossed it these long, long years, and his body joined hers in its trembling.

Keko’s body rolled, her spine rippling beneath his hands as she rubbed herself against him. Even in the water he could feel how wet she’d gotten for him.

Releasing his mouth, she pressed damp lips to his ear and whispered, “Get inside me.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. Holding her tightly, he pushed to his feet, the water making them buoyant at first, then giving them up to the air with massive resistance. He completely forgot he was supposed to be physically wiped out and mentally fatigued from lack of sleep. At that moment he was as strong as a tsunami. Keko was still wrapped around him, her tongue licking up his neck, making him see his beloved stars when she got to the shell of his ear. Legs pushing hard through the water, he veered them toward the rock ledge and sat her perfect ass on the wet stone.

Slowly she peeled away from him, her hands loosening from around his neck, the separation of their chests giving him a lovely display of water trickling over her skin. He watched the trails of his element as they made curved lines across her flesh. Watched how his blatant, hungry stare made her breath quicken and her back arch.

Leaning back on her hands, she made for a brilliant image. A light tease of flame crossed her lust-blackened eyes. Slightly dangerous, completely sexy. He touched her face just below her left eye, drawn by the flame. She pressed into his touch.

Unlocking her ankles from around his back, she slowly spread her legs, the muscles in her abdomen flexing magnificently. Everything about her movements was as graceful as a dancer. Her heels came to rest on the lip of the rock.

She looked up at him, his hand still pressed to her cheek. “Please.”

That was all she said. It was all she had to.

The hand on her cheek now curled around her head, past her ear, to clutch at the back of her skull. Pure possession. He came forward so the tops of his thighs grazed rock and the tip of his hard-on finally touched the hot, lovely place she was giving him.

Keeping a grip on the back of her neck—keeping her eyes on his—he used his other hand to draw a finger up the seam of her body, between her legs. Watched her shudder while trying to hold still, to be strong and resistant. She was beyond swollen, more slick than he ever thought possible.

He started to slowly push inside. Every centimeter made her eyelids flicker. Every centimeter coated him with surmounting pleasure. Then, as he finally drove all the way in, her eyelids fluttered closed and her inner muscles clenched him in the fist of heaven.

He gave her neck a soft squeeze and swirled a finger under her hair. “Open your eyes,” he whispered. “Look at me.”

When she did, warrior ferocity had replaced the feminine surrender. No fire magic dancing across her irises this time. Just Keko, connecting with him.

He withdrew a little, the grip and slide of her body making it exquisite, making it deliciously painful. But drawing back was the best, in his mind, because it just meant he got to go back in. That’s what he loved most. Entering her. Claiming her. Watching her control be dismantled piece by piece. It was the most freeing sensation when the world disappeared and all he knew was her.

As he drove back inside, they made twin gasps. When she arched back, pushing herself onto him, he’d been a fool to think that she’d ever been at his mercy, to think that she would willingly give up any measure of control. Because with just that little movement she’d turned the tables and made him hers.

Had it really been so long since they’d done this? Been together like this? How come he remembered everything so clearly and still felt like she was brand new?

Digging his fingers into the base of her neck, using her as leverage, he took her in the hard way he knew she liked. The way he’d been dying to . . . this time.

Because even as he was driving hard into the most stunning, most desirable, most frightening woman he’d ever met, his thoughts of her were soft. Next time—next time, he vowed—he would touch her and have her in a way that echoed how he’d never stopped feeling this whole time apart.

She was growing warmer, the Chimeran blood reacting to the animalistic, human part of her that responded to sex. Which meant she was getting closer to the wonderful place they both wanted her to be.

Keko dug her heels into the stone and lifted her ass. With only her feet and hands for balance, her body took on an incredible roll and swing as he thrust into it, a free, breathtaking thing that alternately swallowed him and rocked him away. The heat in her was building to a point he’d been craving for years—a point that had scared the shit out of him the very first time, but which had quickly transformed into a dangerous kind of high.

A blast of heat emanated out from her core—a sharp shard of pain that licked along him, then instantly shifted to a rippling, searing form of pleasure the likes of which he would never be able to describe in either English or Ofarian. His water people from the stars didn’t have words to adequately relate how it felt to be inside a Chimeran woman when she came.

He remembered not to stop as her fire and her orgasm crested, her body trembling madly. Her pleasure lasted for a long time, and he wanted to drain out every drop, to know fully what he’d given her. To watch her.

Still on hands and heels, her body made shaking, colliding undulations that reminded him of waves on the most tortured, lovely, storm-addled sea. Through the slit of her eyelids he saw the brilliant spark of her orgasm.

The sounds she made were completely unlike anything he’d ever heard. Soft and high and broken free from the toughness she was so good at portraying. It was those sounds, the unchained moans and feminine pleas, that undid him in the end. Set in time to his thrusts, to the collapse of her hips and the quivering of her thighs, the end of her orgasm brought on the beginning of his.

Her body refused to let him go. Her spine resumed its delicate and deadly arch, pulling out the intensity of his pleasure. The sight of her—the sound and scent and feel—scraped out every last molecule of lust inhabiting his body and sent them all shooting toward the scorching, wonderful place where they were joined.

Her body started to sag but he loved—needed—the position so much he couldn’t let that happen, so he slipped a hand under her ass and lifted her up. Kept her body in perfect alignment to his. Let the wet slap of their bodies take over everything.

He couldn’t see her anymore behind the black of his closed eyelids. Couldn’t think about anything but this.

When he came, it was with a force that rivaled their first time, when sheer surprise and the thrill of discovery and the allure of forbidden fruit had heightened everything. That moment when he’d first realized that he wanted this woman in a way that he’d never wanted anyone else. He could hear his own gasps, but they were mere echoes of the pulsing euphoria that surged through his body.

The whole world shifted, and when it realigned he realized he’d collapsed against her body, pressing her into the rock. Her ankles were locked around him again, his face against the soft slope of her neck. His skin had pebbled with a chill, and he could feel the tender waves of heat she was doling out. Warming his body. And his heart.