Light of Kaska (32 page)

He made a sound in his throat that sent a shiver of heat through her entire body, melting muscles and bone and leaving a throbbing ache behind. He shifted away for an agonizing moment and she wasn’t aware of the shredding of her under things, only that there was air between them, space that she couldn’t stand. She whimpered, tightening her hold and arching her body towards him.

He answered her unspoken plea, sliding home into the slick grip of her body with a long, hard thrust. She caught fire, her entire body flaming with pleasure and coiled need. Her cries were muffled by his thick groan, but he responded to her body’s fierce demand, thrusting ever harder, deeper, faster. Need uncoiled in wild release, exploding through her body again and again, obliterating her senses in a storm of pleasure.

"Kessu’s
balls!" Stryker ground out, panting through the wake of his own climax, vast, unimaginable pleasure giving way to panic. He sank abruptly to his knees, cradling Keza’s limp form in his shaking arms. "Keza? Answer me, damn it. Did I hurt you?"

Her head lolled back, amber eyes hazy and half-lidded, a dazed smile curling her swollen lips. "Mmm?"

He fought the impulse to shake her. Counterproductive. "Did I
hurt
you?"

With languid movements she shifted in his lap, arching her body like a cat. The motion sent him deeper inside her and she inhaled sharply, lips parting and eyes drifting closed. Her inner walls tightened again and he felt another hard slap of lust, shocking in its swiftly renewed intensity.

"If this is hurt," she moaned, doing a slow, agonizing writhe on top of him, "than I just converted to masochism."

New sweat misted his brow and he knew he’d carry this sultry image of her for the rest of his life. Gritting his teeth, Stryker took hold of her hips and carefully lifted her, separating their bodies. "Keza mine, you’re killing me," he growled, trying to ignore her whimper of protest. "What about the—about your—" He struggled with the words, feeling the blood drain from his face with another surge of panic when he thought of the life inside her. He touched shaking fingers to her lower abdomen. "Did I hurt—this?" he asked in a low voice.

She stared at him for a long moment, the sultry heat in her amber gaze giving way to something just as disconcerting, a slow smile lighting her face like the rising of the sun under her skin. Ignoring his restraining hands, she wiggled closer and tightened her arms around his neck. "You’re afraid," she whispered in a wondering tone.

His brows snapped together in a glower. "Answer the damn question."

"No, you didn’t hurt anything, Chase. Not me or the baby. Or, I guess it’s not a baby yet, but it’s implanted and growing."

"How do you know? How do you know I didn’t just—?"

Her smile altered, growing mysterious and ancient, like the smile of her goddess. "House, connect to Keza continual scan."

A hologram flickered to life over her shoulder and he stared at it with a sense of dislocation. The image was very organic, fleshy pink and red cradling a glob that twitched ever so slightly.

"I had a mini-scan implanted so I could watch it grow." She gave a soft laugh, her breath brushing against his jaw, her fingers stroking the back of his neck. "It’s my favorite show. When I wasn’t planning your gruesome death, I was watching this. See? It’s just fine."

He gave it a dubious frown. Having never seen an implanted human embryo before, he couldn’t say if it looked fine or not. But there was no blood. "My gruesome death?" he asked absently, plucking her petting hand away from his neck with a distracted shiver.

"I guess I don’t handle rejection well," she said with a wry twist of her mouth.

He turned his frown on her. "Not rejection, Keza mine—protection. I knew I couldn’t keep my hands off you. You come down here calling me names and wearing this damn thing," he growled, fisting a hand in the thin cloth of her dress, "and I lose my friggin’ mind. Mauled you first chance I got."

There was a twinkle in her eyes as she resumed stroking the back of his neck. "And I enjoyed every second of it. The point you seem to be missing is that I don’t want you to keep your hands off me. You don’t hurt me when you touch me, Chase. I can’t believe you really think that. The only reason I was sore last time was because my body was a little—out of practice. And we overdid it. Just a little," she added with a teasing, dimpled smile.

He took a hard breath and removed her hand once more. "Stop petting me or we’ll be overdoing it again," he muttered, peeling her arms from around him and lifting them both to their feet. With a grimace of discomfort, he adjusted the wetsuit to cover his aroused body, too aware of the burn of her hungry eyes.

"Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you took it off?" she asked with a flutter of her lashes and a bright smile.

"We’re going to medical to get you checked out."

She greeted this announcement with a sudden frown. "No, we’re not. I’m not getting a scan every time we have sex. And if you stay here, we’ll be having sex a lot." Her frown disappeared as she studied his torso, hands reaching out to slide over his ribs. "If you stay here, you’ll be mine, Chase Stryker. Sure you don’t want to run?" She peered up through her lashes at him with a look that said she clearly knew the answer.

He ground his teeth on a groan and plucked her clever hands from his hot skin, that
you’ll be mine
burning fast through his layers of control. Every male animal instinct he had urged him to drag her to the floor and stake his own claim in as primitive and permanent a way as possible. Instead, he breathed carefully and asked, "What the hell happened to my skittish little farm girl?"

"She came home."

She gave him that glorious, sunshine smile, drawing him to her like a moth to a flame. He went with a sensation like vertigo, feeling much the same delirious terror as the moth, he supposed. He kissed her, tasting the light on her lips and feeling it soak into him with a sense of unreality. When he lifted his head, her smile had deepened into something else, something even more disturbing than sunshine.

"Will you show me your plans, Chase?" she asked, amber eyes flicking to the ghostly hologram still floating close by. "The design is so amazing. How did you ever come up with it?"

He shrugged a shoulder, easing back from her and trying to clear his delirium-soaked brain. "Harle’s fault," he mumbled, distracted by the tingling in his mouth from her incandescent kiss, a tingling that seemed to dive down deep and disappear into his core. "He got me drunk."

Her dimpled smile tilted the rock under his feet. "So this is a drunken fantasy? We’ll have to give you alcohol more often."

He rubbed a hand hard around the back of his neck and glanced over at his creation, feeling the skin of his face prickle and tighten with heat. "I told him I’d hurt and scared you. He said I could make up for it with flowers and sweets, or…" He gestured at the design without looking at her, a peculiar weightless illness at his center, as if he’d just taken a fatal step off a cliff. "You’ve got a thing for those water critters, so—" He gave another awkward twitch of his shoulders. "Seemed like a good idea at the time. Once I got the picture in my head, I couldn’t stop."
Keza wrapped her arms around his waist and rubbed her face against his chest with a contented sound in her throat. "Thank you, Chase. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. The design is stunning, so gorgeous and perfect. When can we get started on it?"

"We?" he rasped, his arms closing around her as inevitably as the pull of gravity. That falling sensation eased a little and he sensed solid ground appearing under his feet again.

She tipped back her head and gave him that new smile, the one beyond sunshine, the one that was filled with everything he needed but couldn’t name. "You’ll need my help. I promise I won’t steal your tools."

He stared down at her helplessly. He didn’t know what expression he had on his face, but her mind-bending smile faded into a faint frown, returning a bit of sanity to him.

"You can’t do it alone, Chase. And the selkies won’t let anyone else down there...will they?"

He cleared his throat. "They put up with Harle being around, but they won’t go near him. They think I’m a play-toy, though."

Her delighted smile and the way she tightened her hold and pressed her delicious little body against him set his world on fire. "Really? This I’ve got to see."

"Tomorrow," he growled through clenched teeth. "I need to get you in bed."

Her smile changed, eyelashes lowering over amber flame. "Mmm, you read my mind."

He let out a harsh breath, swiftly disentangling from her hold. "To sleep, Sunshine," he husked, turning her toward the stairs.

She scowled at him over her shoulder. "I told you—you don’t hurt me. Get it through your head, Chase, because I’m not keeping my hands to myself."

His muscles tightened in primitive response, but he clenched his jaw and kept her moving onward up the stairs. "Sleep, I said. Don’t you need more rest now?"

"Why, because I’m pregnant? I’m not an invalid. And you won’t hurt the pregnancy either." She paused, shooting him an odd look over her shoulder. "Were you afraid of hurting it because of your candidacy? Your status is secure. We conceived—even if something does go wrong, unless it’s proved beyond a doubt that your genetics caused the problem, you’re still considered a proven candidate."

"I don’t give a shit about that," he said, shaking his head in sharp rejection. Keza was more than enough to deal with—he didn’t need to add all that candidate idiocy into the mix.

Keza was silent for a few moments, long enough for them to reach the main floor. She shifted to walk beside him, sending him quick looks out of the corner of her eye. Grimly, he occupied his mind with different plans to evade her upcoming seduction, while his wayward hand slid with compulsive delight down her spine.

"So…" she began in a hesitant voice, her feet slowing. "How do you feel—I mean, what do you think about, ah… Do—do you like children?"

His fingers tensed against the small of her back and he shot her a veiled glance, heart lurching at the anxiety in her lovely face. Her round-about question was easy enough to interpret—she wanted to know how he felt about her pregnancy. Staring ahead, he kept his voice even as he said carefully, "Couldn’t really say. Never spent much time with ‘em."

"So…you wouldn’t want to spend much time with…with ours?"

He panicked just a little. All of a sudden the world seemed to have lost its oxygen supply. "Keza," he rasped, pulling thin air like a marathon runner. "I’m not father material.
Kessu,
if you were smart, you wouldn’t let me near the kid. We were pushing our luck just to…" He waved a hand at her lower belly without looking at her, feeling the blood rush out of his face. He finished on a mumble, "I keep waiting for your Goddess to strike me down."

Her hand flashed out and latched onto his arm, pulling him to a halt. Her fingernails bit into his skin but he barely noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the magnificent, furious fire blazing from her features.

"The Goddess blessed our union with this child!" she snarled.
"She
approves! If you don’t want to be a father to our child, that’s your choice, but I won’t hear you disparage what we did. It was beautiful, and this baby will be just as beautiful! A miracle, like her father," she said in a lower voice, releasing him and stepping back.

He winced to see tears fill her eyes. Damn it, he couldn’t seem to stop hurting her. "Keza—"

"Be quiet. I’m not done yelling at you," she said shakily, wiping at her eyes then slapping at his hands when he reached for her. "I will love this child enough for the both of us, but it would have been nice for her to learn how to be strong from you. To learn how to be fearless. I want you in my life, but the baby and I are a package deal. You can’t be near me without being near—"

"That’s not what I meant," he cut in, panic spiking again through his chest. "I’m a con, Keza, a criminal. I stole, hurt people, killed. You’re nuts for wanting to get anywhere near me. I hurt you even when I don’t want to. What would I do to a kid?
Kessu’s
ghost, Keza," he gritted, running rough fingers through his hair. "Fearless? This is scaring the
shit
out of me."

She stared at him, sniffled, and wiped at her eyes again. Then she took a deep breath and gave him a watery smile. "That makes me feel better."

He frowned at her. "What? Why?"

"Well," she sighed, shifting to his side and slipping an arm through his before moving them both along the corridor. "As you just pointed out, you’ve done some bad things. Probably seen worse. You seem to think that makes you a bad person, but a bad man wouldn’t care less if he fathered a child or not. With the things you’ve seen and done, a little baby shouldn’t even make you blink. If it scares the shit out of you, than that says it means a lot to you. I’m a little nervous about being a mother, too. I hear that’s normal."

He stared down at her blankly. "Does crazy run in your family or is this a hormone thing?"

She snickered. "You’ll get used to it, Chase."

"Kessu
preserve me," he muttered and she snickered again.

Chapter 17

Morning arrived with a brilliant splash of sunlight and a newfound sense of wellbeing. Keza wanted to leap out of bed, dance around the room, and maybe break into song. Except she had a terrible singing voice and getting out of bed would mean leaving the gorgeous man sprawled next to her. So she grinned and stretched instead, nearly groaning at the luxurious sensation of limber muscles and satisfying, sweet tenderness.

Chase muttered something incoherent into the pillow and her grin widened. She had to hand it to him—the man had tried to escape. But she’d been delighted to discover a new, amazing power. He hadn’t lied; he really couldn’t resist her when she touched him, stroked him. Especially when she used her mouth.

Keza sighed with remembered ecstasy, the morning growing hazy with erotic images. Shivering in delight, she turned on her side and propped her head in her hand before trailing reverent fingers over warm, cinnamon skin.