Forbidden Embers (10 page)

“All right, then. I’ll try to come back tomorrow or the next day.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” His smile was surprisingly gentle, considering the fire lurking in the back of his eyes. He leaned down to kiss her again and she raised her lips, waiting for the spark to consume her one more time.

She expected the heat, had braced herself for it, in fact. But what she got was so much more—and less—that she didn’t quite know how to process it. His lips brushed softly, sweetly against hers before sweeping up her cheek to her forehead. Once there, he pressed a kiss right above her left brow, then dropped his hands and let her go.

“I guess I’ll see you around, then,” he said with the cocky grin she had first seen from him.

“I guess you might,” she answered, then watched as he turned and headed back into the forest he had come out of right after she’d landed. As she watched him go, she told herself she should be grateful that he’d taken the initiative and walked away. Because after the tender way he’d just kissed her, she wasn’t sure she would have had the willpower to do the same.

W
at the fuck had just happened? Logan stared after Cecily for long minutes, wondering how he’d gone from thinking about using her to just thinking about her so quickly. It was crazy, but from the second he’d touched her, he had forgotten what he’d come here to do. Had forgotten everything but the way she felt in his arms.

Jesus, he really was an asshole. If Cecily hadn’t called a halt to it, they would have had sex. Hell, what was he thinking? They would be having it still. If she hadn’t stopped him, he would be balls-deep in her right about now.

The thought only made his already-hard dick harder, especially as he imagined what it would feel like to be inside her. She had tasted so fucking sweet—like strawberries and caramel and fresh, rich cream—that he had wanted to devour her.

His beast had clawed at him from the inside, raking sharp talons down his skin in an effort to get to Cecily. To feel her and touch her and taste her. God, he’d wanted to go down on her, to thrust his tongue deep inside her and see if her pussy tasted half as good as her mouth.

Somehow he knew it would, which only made the fact that she had left him a million times worse.

Trying to shake off the desire that was a knife in his gut, Logan grabbed a shirt and pulled it on. Then he started hiking down the steepest side of the mountain, figuring if he couldn’t exhaust himself with sex, he could at least do it with another, less pleasurable physical exertion.

But fifteen minutes into the hike, he knew it was no use. He didn’t want to climb up and down a mountain. He wanted to fuck, and for the first time in his very long life, not any woman would do. He wanted to fuck a specific woman. He wanted to fuck Cecily.

Shaking his head as he scaled down a particularly sharp cliff face, Logan called himself every name in the book. And then made up a few for good measure. It worked, and by the time he’d made it to the bottom of the sheer rock drop, he was feeling almost like himself again. Except, of course, for the raging erection that came back every time he thought about Cecily.

He’d have to get that under control—get himself and his dragon under control—because meeting Cecily had been a gift from the gods. Oh, he’d had a few ideas on how to get inside the Wyvernmoon compound, but none of them were without risk of discovery. Not of his actual presence, because, really, being accepted as a guest of the clan had been the whole point. He couldn’t do what he had to do by spending months skulking around in the dark.

But presenting himself to the clan council, asking for amnesty for a while—that came with certain risks, especially because the Wyvernmoons were bound to be more paranoid than other clans, considering what they’d been up to.

Being invited in without asking for an invitation, however, would be a huge plus in his favor. He had already figured that out before he’d met Cecily, but talking to her—kissing her—had only solidified his plans. If he played his cards right, the princess herself would be his ticket into the compound. And once he was in and an accepted escort of the princess, it would be a hell of a lot easier to destroy the clan.

The thought grated a lot more than it should; he should be overjoyed that he’d hit on an almost-foolproof entrance to the clan. It was stupid to be worried about it, stupid to feel that niggling bit of guilt at the thought of using Cecily so blatantly. Yes, she’d been nice—a lot nicer than he had ever imagined she would be. But that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people had different faces. It was more than possible that she had been involved in the Wyvernmoon attacks but could seem like a genuinely nice person on the surface. Look at how many sociopaths were able to fool the people in their lives for so long.

Not that he was calling Cecily a sociopath, but he couldn’t help wondering if she was amoral. How could she not be if she sanctioned the vicious, bloody, terrible massacre of innocents with that stupid virus? How she could be anything but a coldhearted bitch if she had anything to do with what the Wyvernmoons had been doing to his clan?

And, not to put too fine a point on it, what the fuck did it say about him that he could still want her when he believed that she was somehow involved in destroying his clan?

Even if he gave her the benefit of the doubt, even if he tried to tell himself that it was her father and brother who had spearheaded the whole viral attack, they had both been dead for a number of months. Someone had to be carrying on the work in their stead, and if it wasn’t Cecily, then it was someone close to her. And if she really didn’t know, well, then, she was a lot stupider than she’d come across today. Because the woman who had met him quip for quip, who had stared at him out of those shrewdly sexy purple eyes, had been anything but stupid.

Still, he could use the desire he felt for her to his own advantage. Could play on the desire she felt for him just as easily. And if he ended up in bed with her . . . His cock jumped at the thought, telling him that ship was already headed for port. So, fine.
When
he ended up in bed with her, it would just be sex. Not pure, not simple, definitely not uncomplicated—at least not with the agenda he was determined to push forward—but it would just be sex. He just had to get a grip on himself and on Cecily, and then everything would be fine.

He would get into the compound.

Destroy the lab and the virus.

Find a way to bring the Wyvernmoons down once and for all, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

He couldn’t afford to take his eye off the ball, not at this late date. Dylan and the other Dragonstars were counting on him. It wasn’t in him, after everything they’d done for him through the years, to let them down. Not for anything.

Happy now that he’d worked things through to his satisfaction, Logan started the long climb back up the mountain. This time, with his mind relatively settled, he could focus on the beauty of his surroundings instead of on the maelstrom of thoughts and feelings that had been whipping around inside him on the way down.

South Dakota was beautiful, or at least the Black Hills were—a lot more beautiful than he had anticipated when he’d been walking his desert back at home. Oh, the sunrises and sunsets were different here, the landscape nowhere near as barren and mystifying as what he looked out at every day in New Mexico, but it had its own brand of charm.

The trees were gorgeous, full and green and towering much higher than anything in the flat deserts of New Mexico. The hills themselves were rocky and filled with colors ranging from gray to brown, red and gold. And the lakes . . . Coming from a state where water availability was a huge deal and where they could sometimes go years without a good rainstorm, it was amazing to know that there were lakes and rivers and waterfalls around many of the twists and turns of these mountains.

Still, they weren’t all that tall compared to the Colorado Rockies that he, Shawn and Ty liked to climb at least once a year, just to prove they still could. Logan was at the top of his mountain—Cecily’s mountain—in no time, without even having broken a sweat.

Still, Cecily’s unexpected arrival had forced him to skip the dip he’d planned in the lake earlier that evening. Though it was getting dark—or maybe because of it—he thought now might be a great time to remedy that. None of the wildlife up here would bother him. His dragon was by far the fiercest, biggest thing around, and local predators were usually smart enough to recognize that, even when he was in human form.

He took a quick detour through the camp he’d set up after a visit to one of the local camping stores. Stripped off his shirt and grabbed a towel out of his pack before heading down to the lake he’d been dying to try since he’d first found it.

Once there, he stripped down and dived in. The water was cold—freezing, really—but he’d been expecting it. This was South Dakota, after all. And it was fall. In a couple more months, right around the time of the first big snowstorm of the year, he figured he’d be longing for the warmth of this water.

He’d been in the water about fifteen minutes, had swum a few laps across the small lake and back, and had just started lazing around under the waterfall when he felt her creep into his mind.

Slamming his feet down onto the rocky floor of the lake, he stood up and looked around, letting the dragon peer out of his eyes. Using his beast’s sharp eyesight, he studied every inch of the shore around the lake, looking for her. His beast growled with pent-up sexual frustration. If she’d come back, he was going to take her here and now. To hell with guilt, to hell with his plan, to hell with everything about the Wyvernmoons. He wanted inside her in the worst way, and he was going to get there.

Except after a few minutes, he figured out that Cecily was nowhere to be found. Somehow, some way, his mind had managed to connect to hers over a pretty decent distance. And while he’d always been able to do that with the Dragonstars, he’d never been able to pick up on the thoughts of anyone else miles away before. At least not without some serious effort.

Not sure what was going on but determined to figure it out, Logan settled down to listen to whatever it was Cecily wanted to tell him. Which, as it turned out, was a singularly bad idea. Because within two minutes of eavesdropping on her thoughts, it was like the hike and the swim had never happened. He was back to being hot and hard and raging for release.

Pissed off, out of sorts, and so aroused that breathing had become an Olympic event, he fisted his hand around his cock and willed Cecily to let him in just a little more.

 

She was twitchy. There was no other word for it. She’d been home for nearly three hours and despite being exhausted, she couldn’t settle. Instead, she prowled through the house, her eyes focused on the blackness of the night beyond the huge picture windows her father had put in years before.

She wanted to be out there, racing through the cool darkness as the wind wound itself around her body.

She wanted to relax, to let go of the control that had stifled her for so long, and just be.

She wanted . . . she wanted Logan. She wanted to be back in the mountains with him, holding him again. Kissing him.

What was wrong with her? She’d dated men before, had kissed a number of them, but none of them had left her feeling like this. Like her skin was too tight and her blood was too hot and every other part of her body was screaming for relief.

Unable to take being cooped up in the house one second longer, she threw open the back doors and walked out to the patio. Immediately, a cool wind brushed against her, but instead of relieving the heat that was burning her from the inside out, it just stoked it. Made it worse, until she could barely think.

Why had she walked away from Logan that afternoon, when it had been obvious that he would have been more than happy to give her what her body was begging for? She didn’t prize her virginity, didn’t plan on using it to bargain for power or position, as her father had always planned to do.

So why hadn’t she followed through with what both of them wanted? Sex wasn’t a big deal to most shifters—or, at least, not that she could tell. With their animal natures, it was just one more need to assuage, one more itch to scratch.

Annoyed and achy, she flopped down on one of the big chaise longues that overlooked the pool and tried to concentrate on something, anything, besides the emptiness she felt inside her.

It didn’t work.

She glanced up at the sky, at the stars that were specks of gold and silver against the blanket of night, and thought of Logan. What it had felt like to be touched by him, held by him, kissed by him.

It had been hours, and her lips still felt swollen and well used. She’d never been kissed like that before, like a man was ravenous, starving for her.

And not just any man, but Logan.