Kinked

OFF!”

Stray floating strands from her tangled hair blasted back from her face. She let her head fall back, carefully arched away from him so he could not strike at her throat with his teeth, and she laughed again. “I dunno, maybe a confession?”

“A confession.” His gaze ran compulsively down the line of her throat as if he couldn’t help himself, but his voice was flat, disbelieving. Then something seemed to snap inside of him. He snarled, “You want a confession? Fine. I broke the law. I broke it more than once. I broke it lots. I liked breaking the law. Are you fucking satisfied now?”

He caught her with her mouth hanging open, and every word he spoke was the truth. She shut her mouth with a snap. “Goddamn it, I knew it,” she said softly. “What do you do, run a smuggling operation?”

“I don’t run a smuggling operation. I did. In the past. I shut it down last year. You won’t find any evidence, because there isn’t any. I’m that good. Everything that happened is locked inside my head. Shipping manifests. Dates, times. I never put any of it on paper. I worked with a double-blind system. Nobody knew the other parties involved. Most of them didn’t know they were smuggling.”

She picked apart every word he said with her truthsense dialed high. Her eyes narrowed, she asked suspiciously, “Why did you stop?”

His chest heaved as he gave an explosive sigh. “Something bad happened. I tried to do something. I wanted to help out a friend and had good intentions, but I almost got a couple of people killed. After that, I pulled the plug on everything except the bar.”

“So that’s it—that’s everything? That’s all you did?” Everything except the something he had tried to do, at any rate. She asked hopefully, “No espionage?”

He snorted. “No.”

She made a face. “No murder for hire? No spying?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” he snapped. “I made damn good money. That’s it.”

Good gods, he was telling the truth. She tried to disbelieve it anyway, but couldn’t muster any conviction. It was … disappointing. She pressed, “What did you smuggle? Drugs? Human trafficking? Guns?”

He glared at her in exasperation. “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic. Of course I didn’t. I smuggled in liquor for the bar, gold and diamonds, some artwork. High-dollar stuff. I might have dabbled in some magic items from time to time.”

She scowled. At the most he had cost the Wyr demesne some tariff money, and a whole lot of her time. “If that’s all you did, why the fuck didn’t you just say so earlier?”

He sneered. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

She studied him, her mouth twisted with frustration. After all this time, that was it. He lost his temper bad enough to spit out the truth, and she didn’t give a shit about any of it after all. She said, watching him closely, “You really gave it all up. You don’t break the law in any way, anymore.”

“No.” Everything in his hard voice and face radiated the truth. “Not since before I decided to try out for the Games and committed to becoming a sentinel.”

“Bah,” she said in disgust. “How pathetic.”

All that obsession, all that work. For what?

She forced her stiff fingers to open and wiggled them out of the holes her talons had torn into the door. Letting go of his wrists as she backed away, she shook out her aching hands and inspected the cuts on her fingers. They stung, but they weren’t too bad. They would heal soon enough.

Quentin pushed away from the metal door immediately and didn’t stop moving until he was several yards away. All the time he stared at her with narrowed eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s your whole reaction—‘how pathetic’?”

She gestured impatiently. “I don’t care about any of that shit.”

Hands on his hips, he angled his head, the perfect image of a man who had been pushed too far. In a very quiet tone of voice, he said, “You. Don’t. Care.”

Was it something she said? She curled a nostril at him. “No, I don’t.”

He detonated.

SIX

Quentin’s wrath took him outside of his body until he felt as if he hovered in the open area, an invisible spirit looking down at the two figures from above.

He roared, “What the fuck do you mean you don’t care? What have the last two hellish years been for, IF YOU DON’T FUCKING CARE?

Aryal stared at him as if he were a lunatic. “Well, I didn’t know what you’d done, did I? You’re a dangerous man. You proved that when you became a sentinel. I knew you did something, but I didn’t know you did just that.” She threw out her hands as she spoke, making a throwaway gesture. “I can’t believe I wasted all that investigation time on a petty thief.”

He was airborne before she had finished speaking the last words. In one giant leap, he was on her, his hands fastened around her throat again. The flying tackle knocked her flat on her back on a snowy patch of pavement. He sprawled on top of her, instinctively shifting so that he trapped her with the weight of his body.

He had never felt this way before, about anything or anyone. Someone was growling. Belatedly he realized that someone was him. He pounded her head on the pavement. “All. That. Time. All. That. Time.”

He was vaguely aware that she had grabbed him by the throat too, the tips of her talons poised at his jugular. He should probably care about that.

She said in a choked voice, “In retrospect, we should have talked about this while I still had you pinned.”

“You would make a paciflstic saint homicidal,” he panted.

She burst out laughing.

He was strangling her. And she laughed.

Incredulity wormed its way into his rage-soaked brain. He stared down at her.

Her angular face was suffused with color, those stormy gray eyes dancing. Her black hair spread out in a sulfurous fan, gleaming dark against the white snow. She didn’t care that his tightening fingers cut off her air supply any more than he cared that her hand was poised to tear out his throat.

His gaze focused on her mouth. She had a kind of strong femininity that was completely unlike the bright artifice and colors that so many modern women employed. No makeup, no jewelry, no fancy stuff done to her hair, and no floaty, flouncy clothes. Nothing about her looks took after conventional beauty, but her mouth was exquisitely formed, the bold lines of her lips softened by generous, curving flesh.

We all recognize something of our own wildness in you. Who had said that? Grym. Her lover.

“You and Grym can’t be mates,” he growled. “Someone would have said something if you were.” She would have been much more stressed at the thought of a month’s banishment from New York. Mates did not thrive well without each other.

If anything, she laughed harder. “You’re still an idiot.”

He had to do something to shut her up, or he really was going to kill her. The pure, hot flame of his fury shifted. The extreme emotion had torn him wide open, and a maelstrom of sexual aggression screamed in. The muscles in his body felt paper-thin, barely able to contain the emotion.

Shifting his hands to fist them in the thick, silken hair at the back of her head, he lunged down to conquer her reckless, anarchistic mouth.

He felt the surprise jolt through her body as his lips locked over hers. She lay flat underneath him where she belonged, and he didn’t coax, tease or entice as he would have with any other woman. He took. Breathing heavily, he forced her mouth open and plunged deep inside with his hardened tongue. His body, his mind, were all on fire. Dimly, a small part of him, the cool intellectual part that wasn’t wholly