Chains of Ice (25 page)

“I didn’t have enough power. I knew I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything because I was angry and hurt. And Gary would have mocked me. They would have gone up, anyway, and I didn’t want to miss the adventure. I wasn’t a man. I was an adolescent bending to peer pressure.” A single tear welled up in his eye and ran down his cheek.

She stood and splashed her way into the pool.

So she did see the tear, knew it for what it was, a dumb-ass weakness, and she had left in disgust.

He was disgusted, too. When had he started caring enough about
anything
to cry? Especially about something that happened years ago? After that disastrous mission, when he got back to New York City, the Gypsy Travel Agency had forced him to go to a shrink. Because of the “trauma.”

He didn’t suffer from trauma. He suffered from the truth, from knowing it was his fault five people had died.

So after the shrink had told him he would need years of therapy, he had done what any man would do in the circumstances—he’d taken himself off to where he could do no harm.

Wow, Powell. Look how well that had worked out.

When his powers had busted loose, he’d managed to bring a mob down on their heads. He’d almost gotten Genny killed, too, and . . .
Oh, God
. . .

His throat closed. His chest hurt.

If Genny had died, he didn’t think he could bear the burden of responsibility. If Genny had died . . . he would have died with her.

He felt the pressure of tears, which made him want to rub at his eyes like a three-year-old kid.

He heard Genny swim close to shore, close to him.

Her quiet voice said, “John.”

She said his name so patiently, and her voice was so husky, he almost smiled. He would have if this pain hadn’t been tearing at his throat.

But he did lift his head, prepared to look casually at her and deny every emotion.

She was standing hip deep in the water. She was cleaned up, no mud anywhere. Her skin was damp and glowing. Her shirt was wet, plastered to her body, its long hem barely reaching her thighs.

His mouth grew parched, but he stoutly told himself that she didn’t realize how provocative she looked.

Then she unfastened the buttons, top to bottom, very consciously, and opened the shirt.

Everything—pain, memories, embarrassment—was wiped out of his mind. His brain was empty of activity, because all his blood had moved to a different organ.

Guilt,
he tried to remind himself. . . . Shouldn’t she be reproaching him for the atrocities to which he’d been a party? Despising him for failing to rescue his team? Reproaching him for putting her into danger?

It seemed not.

She fixed her eyes on his and started to peel out of her shirt. First one shoulder—moving with a deliberation that made him flounder in a sea of stunned and heated red lust. She struggled to get one long wet sleeve off, then the other.

All the time, her breasts moved with her; her belly rippled. He caught glimpses of her cleft through the thin strip of brown hair that grew over her pubes. Her skin was lightly tanned; her nipples were brown and puckered . . .

This spirited woman was stripping for . . . him.

If she despised him, she had a funny way of showing it.

She splashed out of the pool, stepped over him and straddled him, one foot on each side of his chest.

Water sluiced down her legs, her inner thighs.

“Do you have any thoughts in your mind?” she asked.

He shook his head. Although it wasn’t true. He did have
one
thought.

“Good. I want this to be written on a clean slate.” She leaned over him and spoke slowly and clearly. “You’re a man who holds responsibility dear, so you believe that you’re to blame for the deaths of your team members.”

“Yes. I am.” Between her legs, water droplets clung to the inner lips, open for him to gaze upon.

“I think you know logically it’s not your fault, but for all of your life, you’re going to want to do what you can to pay for what you consider your crime.”

“Yes. I will.” Her clitoris was tiny, rosy, tucked tight against her body.

“John, if this is the truth, then what are you doing hiding away in a remote corner of Russia? Why aren’t you out there in the world, using your special gifts to destroy the bad guys and make life better for the Abandoned Ones?”

“That would make sense.” The entrance to her body was a darker rose, warm and inviting.

Still in that calm, slow, sensible voice, she asked, “Isn’t that why you signed that contract with the Gypsy Travel Agency in the first place? So you could help children not be exploited the way you were?”

He nodded.

But he must have worn a dazed expression, for she laughed and said, “I know that right now, you can’t comprehend the words, but you can hear me. Promise that, later, you’ll think about what I said.”

“I will. I promise.”

Lifting her muddy foot, she placed it on his chest. “What are you thinking about
now
?”

With blunt honesty, he said, “I was thinking that before I met you, I was dead inside.”

Her gaze swept down him and lingered on his straining erection. A smile crooked her mouth. “We seemed to have cured that.”

His hard-on, already at full capacity, doubled in size.

Well, it felt like it doubled in size, although he supposed it wasn’t true, because Genny hadn’t run away yet. “The cure may kill me.”

She rubbed her sole back and forth over his breastbone. “One question. Why, if you believe I betrayed you, did you tell me your story?”

His thoughts were a tangle of new doubts and past nightmares, and he couldn’t say he believed in her. He didn’t know if that was true. But he could admit, “I do understand that sometimes the only thing to do is the wrong thing.”

Head cocked, she considered him, then nodded. “All right. That’s good enough. For now.” Putting her foot back on the ground, she sank down on top of him, onto his erection. She fit them together perfectly, her pubic area to his, and she was damp where her body rested on him.

His cock surged with excitement, a creature intelligent enough to know heaven was close.

She kept her feet on the ground, her knees tucked up beside him, and asked, “Tell me, John . . . how does it feel to lie stretched out in the mud, the springs bubbling against your back, the heat warming your skin?”

He thought about it,
felt
the sensations, said, “Now that you mention it . . . it’s good.”

“You’re so eloquent, John.” She was laughing at him.

He didn’t care, because she leaned forward and kissed his nipple, sucked it, kissed it again. Picking up a handful of mud, she smoothed it down his breastbone.

“Earth and water,” she said. “So primal, so perfect. Isn’t it satiny? Don’t you want me to . . . ?” Leaning down, she rubbed her nipples against his.

Her chest was soft, her breasts were glorious, and to have her move like this on him created a havoc he could resolve only one way.

He grabbed for her, ready to turn her over, take her.

She caught his arms. “Not yet.”

“I can’t wait.” The pressure of his despair, his painful return to life, her blatant kick-start to his libido—it was too much. He needed satisfaction
now
. “I can’t wait,” he repeated, and again tried to wrap her in his arms, to turn her, enter her hard and fast—revel in her dark passage and heal himself there.

“Not yet,” she repeated forcefully. “You owe me. You know you do.”

He froze. He did owe her.

That second time, under the waterfall, had been glorious for him—and her. Yes, he knew that for sure; he had made sure of it—but he couldn’t lie to himself. That wasn’t the way to make love to a woman who had been a virgin only the day before. He recognized his outburst for what it was—the rampage of a man returning to life, and hating the pain that accompanied the resurrection.

He owed her . . . to control himself. So he surrendered to her demand. He lowered his arms, closed his eyes, and braced himself. “Okay. But tell me when you’re ready to . . .”

“You’ll be the first to know.” Man, that girl managed to inject irony into her tone.

Closing his eyes proved a mistake. He didn’t see what she was about to do.

So when she spread handfuls of mud over the top of his shoulders and massaged the muscles of his arms and whispered for him to relax . . . it was a surprise.

When she spread mud across his belly, frosting his skin in small circles . . . it was a surprise.

When she took his cock in her mouth . . . he thought he was going to come right then.

He groaned, twisted, fought—but not too tenaciously. He didn’t want her to stop. He wanted that warm, wet, clinging mouth to explore him, suck on him, give him the kind of pleasure he hadn’t experienced . . . ever.

Yesterday, today, the sex had been fabulous, a release such as he’d never experienced.

But yesterday and today, and all his life before, he had held a wall between himself and real emotions—a wall he had built to keep out the guilt, the anguish, the memories of a day so horrible no living man could bear to keep it in his mind.

So he blocked it.

Then Genny had forced him to confess his crimes and he felt . . . he felt free. Light. The recollection was still there, waiting for him to deal with it, but now he knew that someday he
could.
And that certainty allowed him to
feel
as he never had before.

As Genny used her mouth on him, her hands caressed his thighs, and again the silky mud created whorls of sensation under his skin. “Genny?” His voice came from deep, deep within. “I can’t hold back much longer.”

She lifted her head.

He lifted his, opened his eyes, and begged her like a puppy dog with his eyes.

“What?” she snipped. “You’re not going to inject me with power love?”

“If you want me to.”
Ask me. Ask me.

“I think it’s time you learned to be more subtle with your power. It’s not just about how grand a gesture you can make, but also about what small things you can do to make lives better.”

“I totally agree.” He didn’t even know what she was talking about. He only knew she was settling onto him, taking him inside her body, making him feel like the shah being serviced by a slave girl—a slave girl who gave lectures about how he should manage his future. And as long as he kept nodding his head, she kept sliding down on his cock, rising again, sliding down again, until he was buried so deep he trembled, desperately waiting to see what she would do now.

She picked up handfuls of the warm, soft mud, and smeared his chest again, then leaned down. As she moved on his cock, she rubbed her chest to his—and laughed when he groaned.

She was riding him, traveling at her own pace, and he gave up all power to her. He gripped her butt with his hands, strained and wanted to come, agonized as he held back.

He didn’t want this to end . . .

He was enveloped in sensuality: the warm mud cradling him, her hands and chest stroking him. She held him tightly, the slow slide of slick heat on his cock an aphrodisiac so compelling he knew he would never forget this day, this moment.

This was going to end too soon.

His urgency spiraled out of control.

He drove up and into her and, without his volition, his power surged and sparked. Driven by the motion, the energy, the freedom, she sat up and pressed herself on him, up and down, up and down.

She was glorious, wild and free, a primitive idol with mud smeared across her skin. Her hair flew in the breeze and her breasts bounced, her golden eyes glowed with joy. As climax swept her, she looked into his eyes and smiled, alive with bliss.

He watched her, held her hips in her hands. The muscles of her thighs shifted and strove. Inside, her body rippled and clutched.

And when he came, he plunged into a satisfaction so deep and so distinctly Genny, he knew nothing in his life would ever be the same.