A low throb had taken up residence between my thighs sometime earlier, competing with whatever complicated thing my heart was trying to do. I didn’t like the combined feeling... and I also craved it like a drug I hadn’t known I needed. Strong hands slid down my shoulders, brushing along the length of my arms and guiding me into a new pose that stretched my spine between the grip he now held on my wrists and the fulcrum of my hips resting on his feet.
And—holy Jesus fuck–it felt good. Not just because of the deep stretch through my pelvis and back, but also for the feeling of flying... of being suspended above the earth like a bird on the wing. A faint moan slipped out on my next exhalation, and his grip on my wrists tightened, his thumb caressing my pulse point.
I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be letting these walls crack, because I wasn’t at all sure what sort of monsters lay in wait behind them. As though sensing that I was in danger of being overwhelmed, Rans completed the pose and helped me dismount, my feet landing lightly on the carpet as he bent his knees and stiff-armed my upper body into an upright position.
I took a step back, my breathing going ragged as he relaxed back, lacing his fingers across his chest and looking up at me from the floor with depthless blue eyes.
“I, uh, need to use the bathroom,” I stammered, and fled the room.
A few moments later, I closed the upstairs bathroom door behind me and leaned on it. My eyes were burning and I didn’t even know why.
Shit, shit, shit.
Was I so pathetically desperate for some kind of intimacy in my life that I was going to have a meltdown after a goddamned yoga session? Rans needed me to help him figure out what the Fae were up to, and I needed him for the protection he could offer.
Okay, so we’d fucked a few times. I was part succubus. I needed sex, and he knew that. He seemed to get enjoyment and a bit of temporary mental peace out of it, so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. That was all. Anything else was just my loneliness reading things into a purely practical partnership. Things that weren’t there.
My heart was pounding again. I had to start thinking about how to extricate myself from all of this. I needed to get my dad, and then I needed to get out. The Fae would never stop chasing me. Eventually they’d track me down again. Hell, if Rans hadn’t been successful in overcoming Alma’s conditioning and making her forget about me, they might well know already that I was in Chicago.
If they descended en masse and Rans tried to protect me... well, I’d seen him fight off a few Fae, but now I also knew that the Fae had a weapon that could murder vampires. I absolutely refused to be the reason he died.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I had already agreed to giving Albigard a few hours to get the phone message and start looking into things. Since I was the Fae’s real target, it wouldn’t make any sense for them to hurt Dad, or... kill him.
No sense at all. They probably intended to use him as some sort of hostage against me, right? There was still time to save him.
And now all I had to do was go back downstairs to the family room and pretend I hadn’t just come close to sniveling like a little girl because someone finally cared enough about me to do all the things Rans was doing. Because I’d finally found someone who fit inside my messed-up life.
I thumped my head gently against the door a couple of times, in the vain hope that it would make my brain stop being stupid. Then I flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink to support my paper-thin excuse for running off.
When I returned, Rans was waiting, leaning against the foot of the couch in an easy sprawl. “All set,” I said, too brightly. “What’s next?”
Rans shot me an enigmatic glance from beneath his dark fringe of hair. “Next? Why, Zorah...I’m so glad you asked...”
* * *
Four hours later, I was a sweating, shaky mess after an afternoon spent going over and over basic self-defense moves. Maybe Rans had sensed my inability to cope with gentleness, or maybe this was simply the usual way you taught someone how to fight. Whatever the case, my gooey, doe-eyed emotions had been replaced first by surprise, then frustration at being overpowered again and again by a much larger and stronger opponent... and finally by sheer exhaustion.
I didn’t feel that I’d made any significant amount of progress in my skill set, but there had been a couple of occasions before my fatigue started to overcome me where our sparring fell into a sort of rhythm, almost like a dance. The feeling lasted for only a few seconds each time, at which point Rans would duck through my guard and subdue me.
As far as the iron dagger went, we hadn’t progressed beyond him showing me how to grip the hilt properly, and a few minutes of practice at drawing it from its sheath at the small of my back. At the moment, if I tried to use it, I’d be more likely to injure my opponent by accident than on purpose... if I didn’t fall over my own feet and stab myself to death instead, that is.
Rans leaned against a bare stretch of wall, not even winded. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on the smug bastard’s body, either.
“I thought you said you’d taken self-defense classes?” he asked.
Hmm... maybe I could try throwing the knife at him?
“I knew enough...” I said
