Poisoned Kisses. Stephanie Draven

are supposed to do. We’re there to take the bullets if we have to. We’re there to protect people who can’t protect themselves. But in the end, we just observed.” He said the word with venom.

      “You were just following orders.”

      He winced. “Bullshit, Ashlynn. Since when has that been a defense for anything? But I’m trying to make up for it now. Now I help people fight back. I make damned sure they’re equipped to fight back. I give them all the guns and the ammo they’ll ever need.”

      He was just like her—trying to do the right thing, and making every conceivable mistake along the way. He was all but naked and she could read it on his skin. He carried inside him a terrible grief, and not just for the mother he’d lost to madness or the father he’d buried today.

      She wished she could take it away, make it hurt less somehow. The cords on Marco’s neck were tight with emotion and Kyra couldn’t stop herself from tracing his chest with her fingers. He watched the path of her touch as if mesmerized, and it encouraged her. Her heartbeat picked up the pace of his. Kyra stroked the scar on his bare shoulder, knowing a bullet fragment was still there in the bone. And yet, that bullet had caused less damage than the things Marco had done, and the things he’d failed to do. He wanted someone—anyone—to understand. And she did. He was only a mortal, so she couldn’t imagine how they were so much alike. But there was no denying it. He was a reflection of her. It made her want him.

      And why not? She could give him pleasure without having feelings for him, she told herself. She’d done it with countless mortal men before. She was a nymph of the underworld; she could use her skin to soothe his pain. It didn’t have to mean more than that.

      She drew his hand to her and kissed the still-angry scar. Her lips upon the sensitive skin made him twitch. “Don’t,” he finally choked out. But Kyra stepped closer and kissed the scar on his shoulder, too. At first, he was still as a stone, but the heat of his skin and the soft hair of his bare chest against her cheek reminded her he was no statue. “I have an open wound,” he whispered. “I’m not safe to touch.”

      No, he wasn’t safe to touch. And that, in itself, held a powerful allure. “You’re bandaged. It’s not dangerous to touch your skin, is it?”

      “No,” he admitted, sheepish longing in his eyes. “I just…don’t want to hurt you.”

      Mortal men never wanted to hurt nymphs, but they always did. And yet, Kyra couldn’t turn away from him. Not when he needed her. “Your kisses aren’t poisoned, are they?” she asked, lips trailing up to his mouth, achingly soft. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever kissed a man so softly. But the scent of his clean skin and the taste of salt upon his lips made her sigh. He’d been holding his breath, and now his lips parted as he exhaled into her kiss. She took that breath into her with all its stain and sorrow and kissed him again, giving that breath back to him cleansed with her inner light.

      Then it happened all at once.

      The way he groaned. The way he took her hands, clasping them at the small of her back. The way he crushed her against him, his teeth scraping along the hollow of her throat. It was the grief that drove him, she thought. Mourners often sought solace in physical connection, as if to prove to themselves they were still alive. But she didn’t mind. She knew how to make her body malleable for a man’s pleasure.

      She let him pull her onto the sofa in front of the fire where he laid his body atop hers, pulling her clothes off piece by piece. There was some fumbling with his wallet on the end table where he’d left it, and he sheathed himself in a condom. Then it was all skin and sweat and sighs.

      The feel of his arousal hard against her sent little shocks along her skin. The sudden forcefulness of his body as he pinned her wrists over her head made her senses spark like the fire in the hearth. Kyra was no shy maiden nymph in the face of a man’s need. No coy Daphne, to flee from Apollo’s lust. This was a threshold that Kyra wanted to cross.

      Her thighs parted and their eyes locked as he sank all the way into her. She’d done this to comfort him and sate his needs—but it stoked a fire inside her, too. She loved his thickness and the way she stretched to accommodate him. She loved the feel of his muscles as his back arched. She arched, too, to meet him.

      He was looking into her as she looked into him; he was inside her just as she was inside him. There was nowhere to hide—and for one magical moment, she was certain that he knew her, that he saw her true face, that he saw her for herself.

      But then he closed his eyes.

      Gods above and below, she loved the feel of this mortal. The scratch of his beard, the light scrape of it on her cheek that reminded her he was man and she was woman. She loved the rough texture of his scars. How must it feel to have marks that so boldly told the story of his pains right there on the surface of his skin? And she loved his strong arms. Arms long enough to wrap all the way around her. Arms that made her feel as if she were not too wild to fully embrace.

      She’d had many lovers before. She’d worshipped the perfect bodies of ancient gods. She’d admired the well-oiled muscles of Olympic athletes throughout the ages. But for some reason, Marco’s body, battle-hardened and scarred as it was, suited her perfectly. He fit with her, and every time he pushed inside her, the sensation of completion was renewed.

      She wanted to make him come—fast and hard. She wanted to move her hips in just the way he liked, and make him forget everything else. But as they moved together, it was her arousal that spiraled higher and higher, out of control. The couch scraped against the floor, his chest scraped hers, and it went on and on, as if every stroke exorcised some demon. As if every caress were a confession. She kissed him as they strained together, a kiss broken finally by her own gasping climax. Flickers of light danced beneath her eyelids and she couldn’t believe it had happened so quickly or so intensely. His followed soon after, a groan at the back of his throat. He buried his face against her chest as his body convulsed in orgasm, his legs straining between hers. Beneath him, Kyra lay nothing short of astonished.

      Afterward, her body tingled with sensation, every single hair seeming to stand on end. They were quiet, her hands stroking the hair from his damp face as he nuzzled her breasts. It’d been a quick release of tension—and now he seemed to want more. She did, too, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex this tenderly. At least, it’d been tender by Kyra’s standards, and tender wasn’t her way. Somehow, she and Marco had connected. Maybe it was because they were so much alike.

       Or maybe it was because she was pretending to be someone else.

      The thought was so sobering, so unsettling, that she stopped the trail of his lips down her stomach. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

      Everything was wrong. What’s more, his bandage had peeled away just enough so that she could see the crudely stitched wound. The threads looked frail and tattered as if the poison was eating them away. What if even a little bit of his blood dripped onto her skin again? Just being this close to him, she was taking her life in her hands, and yet, why did she suddenly fear it was her heart most in jeopardy? “It’s just…”

      “You regret it,” he finished for her.

      No. She didn’t regret it. And that was the problem. “It’s just—I’m not sure I’m the kind of woman who does this.” What she meant, of course, was that she wasn’t the kind of nymph who did this. She took lovers, certainly. But this encounter with Marco had the potential to be so much more. And that frightened her out of her wits.

      As the silence stretched on between them, his shoulders tensed in the firelight. She could see she’d angered him, broken the thread of tenderness between them. When he spoke again, it was guarded. Sarcastic. “What, Ashlynn? Are you afraid I’m not going to respect you in the morning?”

      “Maybe,” Kyra said, but that was a lie. She was afraid that, in the end, she’d be just like all those silly, sentimental nymphs who mistook sex for something more, and lost themselves in the bargain. “You wouldn’t be the first man to judge a woman in