feminine demands a man had to pay careful attention to hear, to sense, and that gave Jason a violent pleasure to fulfill.
Stroking his hand down the curves of her body, he cupped the back of one sleek thigh and rocked against her, pulling out a bare inch before pushing back in. She broke the kiss to suck in a breath, her head twisting on the pillow as her body undulated in perfect rhythm with his own, as if they had always been meant to be lovers.
When he fisted his fingers in her hair and retook her mouth, her hands slid over his nape to close over the sensitive arches of his wings in a caress that made him groan, her tongue dueling with his own. He pulled out a fraction more, rocked in harder, her breasts rubbing against his chest in sweet temptation.
Breaking the kiss, he rose up on an elbow and cupped one of the sensitive mounds.
“I happen to think I’m not the pretty one in this bed, wild lover-mine.” Husky, breathless words.
He held her cat-bright gaze, rubbed her nipple, once more tasted those lips that shaped such sweet words. Words that entangled, marked him, claimed him. Jason allowed the entangling, the marking, the claiming. For the first time in his life since he’d buried his mother and destroyed what remained of his father, he allowed himself to belong to someone.
Then he loved her.
“I can’t create light,” Jason said to Mahiya sometime later as he lay on his back with her spread possessively over him, his hand on her lower back. “Only black fire.”
Frowning, Mahiya pushed up on the muscled silk of his chest to look at him. “Of course you can—you lit up the tunnels.”
A long, steady look.
Her mouth fell open. “Me? That was me?”
“You’re very strong, Mahiya Geet, and that strength will only grow. You must work on learning every aspect of your power.”
Astonished and pleased, she sat up cross-legged beside him, her hair covering her breasts. “Will you help me?” It was so easy to ask him—she knew he’d never seek to hurt or humiliate her.
“Yes,” he said, placing his hand on her lower back again, strong and hot. “And when I’m not here, I will ask the others in the Seven to come by as often as they can, so your development does not suffer. Raphael, too, is apt to take it upon himself to check on your progress.”
That, she hadn’t expected, but then, Raphael and Jason had a relationship unlike any she’d seen Neha have with her courtiers and advisors. “I suppose I shall have to become used to having the most powerful of visitors.” Butterflies in her stomach, born of happiness not worry.
“After I’ve had time to settle in,” she said, “and Dmitri has returned with his wife, we should invite our friends for dinner.” She rather thought she would like to do such things, would like to have their home filled with the laughter of friends who were family. “Elena will enjoy the gardens.”
Jason moved his hand to play with strands of her hair, his knuckles brushing the tip of her breast with each pass. “We’ll have to have two such dinners,” he murmured, continuing with the lazy caresses that made indolent pleasure curl through her veins. “They can’t all be out of the city at the same time.”
“I knew that,” she said with a laugh, because they both knew she hadn’t considered it. “There’s so much I have to learn and explore, Jason.” Excitement bubbled like champagne in her blood.
Coming up over her as she dropped back onto the bed, Jason pushed the sheet gently to her waist, his fingers making a swirling design on her hipbone that rippled a shiver over her frame. “If you ever decide,” he said quietly, “that you wish to explore other—”
She pressed her fingers to his lips, held that storm-dark gaze. “I may have been stuck in the fort, but I wasn’t cut off from the world. Thousands of vampires and angels of all ages and levels of power passed through it in the years of my existence.
Jason’s lips curved in the most subtle of smiles, and it was a kick to her heart, a treasure beyond price.
Laughing softly in delight at the fact that her spymaster was teasing her in return, she reached up to trace the swirling black of a tattoo that spoke of lands of white sand and blue seas, palm fronds waving in a balmy breeze while seagulls fought overhead and jewel-bright fish darted in the shallows. “Will you tell me the story of this one day?” she asked in the intimate murmur between lovers as he settled himself between her thighs once more, his weight braced on his forearms.
“It was to remind me I was alive,” he said, the words stark. “I felt so little a part of the world at times that I wasn’t certain I wasn’t a shadow in truth, a phantom who made no impact, had no place. The pain, and the indelible mark of that pain, told me I lived, that I was a person.”
Angry sadness twisted within her, but rather than darkness, she gave him a smile. “Well,” she said, rubbing her foot over his calf, “next time you want to feel alive, come home and drag me into a bedroom.” She nuzzled at his throat, her skin flushing.
Bending his head, his hair sliding around his face as his body slid into her own, Jason said,
Epilogue
Mahiya had always known Jason would have to leave—a spymaster could not remain in one place. Though he’d done very well to have information at his fingertips the past two weeks they’d spent entangled with one another as they set up their home.
“Neha and Nivriti appear to be holding their truce for the time being,” he’d told her a week ago. “It’s impossible to predict what either one will do—theirs is a unique battle.”
“Yes.” Mahiya had seen the love behind the hate, seen the need to touch behind the need to annihilate. “I wonder if deep down, they didn’t want to kill one another, if that’s why they both ended up injured but alive.”
“Yes.”
Now, seven days after that conversation, her lover stood waiting to take his leave, heading to parts unknown for how many days, she did not know.
“I may not be able to contact you every day,” he said, the man who had woken her with a kiss this morning buried beneath the obsidian steel of the spymaster. “But I will as often as I can—and should you not be able to get in touch with me, call Raphael or any of the Seven. Or if you’re more comfortable speaking to the women, Elena and Jessamy will both be able to get their hands on any relevant information.”
This man, she thought as he spoke, would never tell her he loved her, would never give her flowers and pretty romance. He might never even admit either to her or to himself that she mattered to him in a way that was no simple sensual connection but a heart bond that made her chest ache.
But, what did she need of words and flattery? She’d grown up around lies and illusions, whispers and insinuations, the thousand intrigues and romances of a living court. Eris had said he loved Neha over and over, and he’d told Nivriti the same thing.
No, words did not matter to Mahiya, never would.
“I know,” she said to Jason’s instruction. “I have everyone’s numbers.” Putting her hands on his shoulders, she rose on tiptoe to claim a kiss to hold her until his return. “I’ll miss you while you’re gone,” she whispered against his lips afterward. “And if you don’t take care of yourself, I’ll be most displeased.”
His fingers spread on her lower back, his head bent over her own. “I’ll return home as soon as I can.”
Tears clogged her throat at his acceptance that this was his place now, his haven. Stepping back, she twined her fingers through his. “I’ll walk you to the edge of my hill.” It was a joke, the rolling hillock of land barely deserving of the name, but she’d insisted on calling it that—until she’d woken up two days ago to find a neatly
