She laughed, though she could feel her cheeks heating. “I remember that.”
His smile faded, his gaze intense. “Tell me.”
“What?”
“Tell me what our time together at the lake house was like. I can’t remember all of it. The sea witch’s actions are clear in my mind, though some of her questions are fuzzy after she used that dagger. But my time with you is coming in bits and pieces.”
She swallowed. “What do you want to know? And before you ask, for the twentieth time, no, we did not have sex.”
“But we did other things. I know that.” He swam closer, and she refused to back away. “I want to know how I held back. Even now, I hunger for you. Not just your blood, but your mind and body.” He looked her over. “You’re small but put together well. Soft and slight, not as curved as most sea nymphs I know. You’re sexy but standoffish. You don’t put out a vibe.”
“A vibe?” She hated the stereotype about nymphs being nothing but lusty females needing to pleasure sexual partners—men, women, other, it didn’t matter. If you were a sea nymph, you obviously wanted sex. Sadly, for all the sea nymphs she’d met, that held true. But not for her.
“You don’t have it.” He caught a strand of her hair and let it trail through his fingers. “Or do you? You’ve seen my kin. You have male roommates.” He seemed to surprise himself with the information, and his brows drew close in a scowl. “Do you want them too?”
“No. Just... ” She caught herself. “I don’t want anyone.”
“Just me.”
She didn’t like his smug tone. “We’re no longer together like that.”
We could be. No. We should be.
His hunger was impossible to miss, but those couldn’t have been his thoughts, could they?
“Tell me. Please,” he tacked on in gruff voice. “What was it like before? Tell me what we did at the lake. You can skip the sex parts if they make you want me more.”
She rolled her eyes and had the satisfaction of seeing him laugh. Grudgingly, she told him, “We played games together. We had fun. You were always trying to take care of me, though I tried to get you to stop. I didn’t want to take advantage of you, but you kept saying that it was normal for a vampire to care for his mate.”
He gave a slow nod, watching her as she spoke, and she wondered if he was remembering.
“I enjoyed being with you.” She swallowed. “I told myself not to, because you were under a spell, but I... ”
His eyes narrowed. “What did you do, Kaia?” She bit her lip, and his gaze turned red. “Tell me.” He wiped his thumb over her lip, taking away the sting of her bite. “What did you do?”
“I started to have feelings for you.” She felt like an idiot, the confession slipping out. “I didn’t mean to. I even knew you weren’t exactly you, vulnerable from the spell. But you were so kind and sweet. And you made me ache in places I had never let anyone touch.” She put a hand to her heart and looked at him, and his red-eyed stare was so familiar it hurt to see.
He covered her hand with his and listened to their hearts beat in sync.
They floated there, just like that, his hand over hers, beating as one.
After a while, he lifted his hand and drifted away, back into the darkness of the lake.
“Go inside to safety, Kaia,” she heard him say. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Okay.” She felt him move until he’d put plenty of distance between them. Then, feeling lonely, she went inside.
To her surprise, she didn’t dream. And if she did, she didn’t remember the next morning when she woke to a dark and stormy day. Instead, she felt nothing but peace and a male acceptance that she shouldn’t have been able to sense, with the psychic feel of the gruff vryko she’d seen just the other day.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Orion didn’t know what to think. His memories of Kaia were rushing back to him in sleep and while awake. Saturday night, after his swim with Kaia, he was riding with Kraft into the city for a little recon on some warlocks Mormo wanted them to survey when another memory hit him, this one of Kaia and Orion watching a home shopping channel together, laughing and making fun of some of the stranger items on TV.
Had he ordered cat pajamas for Shadow? And pink “Dogs Do It Better” slippers for Kraft?
“Okay, that’s it.” Kraft pulled the Land Rover to the curb in front of a small gym that looked as if it supplied drugs to half of Seattle. Not a great area, and not a great human population either, apparently, as a trio of large, seedy, muscular men left the gym toward their vehicle.
“We have visitors.” Orion nodded to the humans growing closer. One of them carried a bat. The other two wore suit trousers and white undershirts, their pupils dilated. The tallest man had white powder under his nose until his friend pointed it out. He wiped the powder with his thumb then licked it clean. Likely part of the major drug dealer outfit known to be in the area.
“I’ll get to them in a minute.” Kraft glared at Orion, who wanted to glare back but couldn’t, still too peaced-out by remembrances of his happiness with Kaia. “You are seriously weirding me out.” Kraft swore in German. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Where is my angry friend? We should be kicking ass together, Orion. Yet you smell of sea nymph and continue to daydream when we should be hunting down and roughing up witches.”
“Warlocks.”
Kraft ignored him. “Where’s the fun in daydreaming about sex?” He looked down at Orion’s obvious arousal with disapproval.
Orion chuckled, not caring that he looked as if he had little control. “If that’s what you think, you haven’t had great sex.”
“I’ve had plenty of it.” Kraft looked annoyed, more so when Orion laughed at him.
“Hey.” The man holding a bat stood near the hood of the car. “What the fuck are you doing in our neighborhood?”
“It’s Seattle. Go get yourself a latte from the nearest Starbucks and chill out,” Kraft said in a loud voice. “Look, Orion, we found hints of a god in your room. So maybe you’re not really mating this female. She could be using a god-spell on you.”
“Do you really think Macy would allow that to happen?”
Kraft’s expression darkened. “The female in question in her sister.”
“I’m talking to you.” The human pounded the bat in his hand.
“Hold on,” Kraft yelled. “We’re talking here.” He turned back to Orion. “I don’t think Macy would intentionally lie, but she did hide you from Varu before. And her own mate, don’t forget that.”
“I think Duncan knew.”
Kraft’s eyes widened. “He lied to me?”
“Probably.” Because a vampire would do anything for his mate. Yes, they were pretty dysfunctional after a child was born, but before a vampire’s female got pregnant, vampires were the soul of courtesy. Poems had been written about a vampire’s great willingness to appease his mate, written not just by other vampires, but by the magir as a whole.
Orion didn’t want to admit it, but he thought he might really be mating the little sea nymph. Adorable in her pique, gorgeous inside and out, with a pesky tendency to want to be kind and help out strangers. Except for all that niceness, she fit him perfectly, right down to her need to be surrounded by water.