Kinked

His gaze had turned reckless. “I was going to kill you too.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You might have tried.”

Actually he might have succeeded, just as she might have. There had never been a time when sentinel had fought against sentinel. Each of them had highly individualized talents. Even the gryphons’ talents differed from each other. But they were all comparable in terms of strength, agility and cunning.

He tugged again at the bottle and this time, losing interest in the tug of war, she let go. He took a long pull. She watched the long muscles of his throat work as he drank. When he finished, he said, “I still might try.”

Her smile turned mocking. Was this their version of detente? He wouldn’t be talking about it, if he really meant to try. Neither one of them would. They wouldn’t give away that much of their intentions. She told him, “Now you’re just flirting.”

Fat from the cooking meat dripped onto the fire and it hissed. One corner of his sexy mouth hooked up as, moving at a leisurely pace, he turned away from her.

She nearly grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him around to face her again, but she controlled the predatory impulse and watched as he squatted to turn the hares on the spit. He splashed both hares with the liquor. It caused the flames to flare up, searing the meat.

She liked the sight of him on his knees. She would like it better if his head were tilted back in supplication. The alpha male, subjugated to her.

She didn’t know why the impulse to change into her Wyr form took her over. She just did it, and walked up behind him. Even though she was silent, his back tensed. He was aware of her every move.

She reached out to trace the shell of his ear with a talon. “You like to dominate pretty, soft girls,” she whispered. “The hors d’oeuvres. It feeds something macho inside, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like a big, strong man.” He turned his head to stare up at her, the firelight gilding his hair. She stroked very lightly at the sensitive whorls inside his ear and smiled as she watched the shudder that shook through his body. “You play such pretty games. A strip of leather, toy handcuffs. None of it is real. You would never dare to really give up control yourself, would you? You don’t have it in you.”

He glanced at her wings and down her body. His face blazed with something hotter than the fire. Deliberately he straightened to his feet and looked at her. He said, “You have no idea what I would do, or what I would dare.”

Her wings flared out. With a forefinger, she pressed the razor-sharp tip of her talon against the curve of his lower lip. Pressed very gently, until a single ruby drop of blood welled.

He never moved or turned away. All his bones stood out, the shadows accentuated with the force of whatever it was he felt.

The harpy leaned forward and licked the drop of blood away. His blood tasted rich and heavy, and his lips tasted like whiskey.

She smiled, barely containing the hectic urge to hurtle into space. “I dare you to give up control to me,” she said.

“That’s twice you’ve drawn my blood,” he said between his teeth. “I owe you something for that.”

She had no way of knowing what he was feeling, only that it was something powerful enough to cause him to breathe heavily, as if he had been running for a very long time. He licked his own lip, touching his tongue where hers had already gone.

And he smelled like sex again, hot and sultry, and more intoxicating than any liquor. She hissed, “I dare you to give it up.”

His eyes flared as he took her by the chin. His claws had come out. “I’ll take that dare,” he growled. “Just as soon as you give up control to me.”

Her laughter pealed out over the clearing. She yanked her chin out of his hold. Then she gave in to the desire to leap into the night. She winged away from the clearing without looking back.

No one controlled the harpy.

No one.

Quentin ate both hares, because, screw it. If Aryal chose not to stick around, she forfeited any supper he had caught and cooked.

Then he sat with his head in his hands. Every now and then he fed logs into the fire and took pulls off the bottle of scotch. A fitful wind gusted through the trees overhead. They didn’t get any rain or snow, but the weather in the Bohemian Forest at this time of year was unpredictable at best, and that situation could turn in a matter of minutes.

Him, give up control. To Aryal.

It was the most self-destructive, cockamamie idea he’d ever heard.

Yet as he faced the harpy, his reaction to her had been more uncontrolled than ever.

He had never before been so close to her when she was in her Wyr form. The sight of her took his breath away. She was still recognizable as Aryal, but her features had become more upswept and pronounced. Her piercing eyes would be able to pick out prey from miles, and good gods, those wings. They spread out behind her in a huge fan. Short, dark gray feathers covered the tops of the wings, close to the powerful humerus bones that held them aloft. They darkened down the wing to the long primary feathers that were pure black.

Like her face, the racy, slim bone structure and musculature of her nude body was accentuated. Her slight high breasts were tipped with small nipples, and from the waist downward, her hips and long legs were covered in small gray feathers that looked like they might be soft. He wondered what she would do if he ran a hand down her thigh.

If only she wasn’t so goddamn magnificent.

She looked alien and completely wild, and then she had leaped into the air, defying gravity. That was when he got it, when he really understood what Grym had meant, because he didn’t just grasp it with his head. He felt it with his gut.

She didn’t fit the concept of what a modern female should be like, and that made her even more annoying to a modern, entitled male such as he. She didn’t defer to his opinion or mask her own spiky personality to fit the concept of any modern behavior, because she wasn’t modern. She was truly one of the most ancient and wildest of creatures.

The fact was, she had probably already curbed herself in some way to fit in at the Tower as much as she did. For the most part, she kept her slashes down to verbal jabs and her predatory instincts focused on her investigations. The rest of her was just plain ornery.

He chuckled without much amusement. He couldn’t even say that he had just grown obsessed with her, because he had already been obsessed with her for some time. Now that his obsession had turned sexual, he couldn’t seem to turn it off. Or maybe it had been sexual all along, and he had only just come to realize it.

She had been right. He had never given up sexual control to anybody else. What would it be like to give it up to her, that pure, wild creature? It was never going to happen, so he would never know.

The nape of his neck prickled, and instinct made him tilt back his head and look at the cloudy night sky. There a gorgeous nightmare spiraled, wings outspread to their fullest as she cocked her head and looked down at him.

How long had she been up there, circling overhead and watching him?

His body clenched. The panther in him wanted to leap at her and drag her down to earth. The man wanted to cover her with his body, and make her give all of that purity and wildness over to him.

She came down and landed a short way away from the trees, snapped her wings back, and shapeshifted into her human form. Then she strode into the camp. She must have flown high, because her black hair sparkled with wetness.

She seemed centered somehow, revitalized. Flying for her must be what taking to his panther form and running in the woods did for him. That was when he had an epiphany.

She had a whip that drove her, just as he did.

She squatted in front of the fire without saying anything. They sat in silence for some time. Oddly enough, it was almost companionable.

Quentin looked at the scotch. The liquid was significantly low in the bottle. What the hell. He offered it to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.