Born of Fire (The League #2)(6)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Rolling over, he pinned her beneath him. She struggled to throw his weight off, but it was useless. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds.

He caught her wrists in his hands before she could pull his blaster free, and held them beside her face. “Stop it!”

Shahara froze. Her blood pounded a fearful trail through her body. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She refused to be undignified further.

Only one other time in her life had someone held her in this manner and she hated it. She hated him.

Bravely, she stared up at his face.

Even this close, she could barely see the difference between his dark irises and the pupils of his eyes. It amazed her that her wrists didn’t hurt from his firm grip, and that his weight didn’t crush her.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, dreading the answer.

To her complete shock, he dipped his head down. And before she could think to turn her face away, his lips covered hers.

CHAPTER 3

The gentle pressure of Syn’s lips stunned her. His kiss was so light, it felt like a feather dancing across her lips, sending a chill down her spine.

A crisp, clean scent of leather and man filled her head. He surrounded her with warmth and, for a moment, Shahara lost herself to the strange sensation of his h*ps lying against hers, his chest pressing intimately against her br**sts. To the foreign, aching throb that began in the pit of her stomach and moved lower.

She sighed as a deep-buried need surged. No man had ever kissed her so tenderly. Most men grabbed at her with hands that hurt and pinched. And the last kiss she’d received had been a brutal assault on her lips that had left them bloody and bruised and sore for weeks.

That wasn’t Syn’s kiss. His soft, tender lips belied the cruelty she knew him capable of.

Closing her eyes, she breathed in the warm, manly scent of him as his tongue gently probed her mouth, dancing with hers before his teeth nipped tenderly at her bottom lip.

Syn closed his eyes, savoring the succulent velvet of her mouth as he inhaled the pure scent of female. Never in his life had he tasted anything so wonderful. So addictive.

She was sweet and soft. He released her hands and cupped her cheek. Then he left her lips and trailed a path with his mouth down her cheekbone.

Shahara shivered as his whiskers gently scraped her skin before he nuzzled against the sensitive flesh of her neck. Her throbbing intensified as chills spread all over her.

His warm breath tickled her ear while he whispered something poetic in a language she couldn’t understand.

Unbidden, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, caressing the corded muscles that rippled beneath the smooth silk of his shirt. His rich, warm voice continued to soothe her with its strange, melodic language. Lulling her, hypnotizing her.

She’d never known a man could hold her without causing pain and her newfound knowledge amazed her.

Syn shifted and she felt the hard bulge of him against her thigh.

Panicked shock jolted her.

In that instant, Shahara remembered herself and why she’d come. He wasn’t a tender man and he damned sure wasn’t a kind one.

He was a vicious killer.

Hissing, she gripped his ponytail and pulled him away from her. “Vanna sitiara!” She caught him under the chin with her fingernails.

His oath matched her own as she raked his flesh. At this point, she didn’t care if he killed her. She refused to ever lie with a man wanted for rape and murder. Men were cruel and abusive by nature and she’d die before she ever submitted to one.

Syn grabbed her hands again and held them by her face. His breathing labored, he curled his lips into a fierce snarl.

Bravely, Shahara glared her hatred at him. “If you rape me, convict, I’ll tear your heart from your chest and feed it to you!”

The anger fled his features. His eyes went strangely dull as if something from his past shredded him. It was as if she stared into the face of a statue without any emotions or life at all.

“I’ve never raped a woman, and I have no intention of starting now.”

A drop of blood fell from his neck where she’d scratched him and landed on her cheek. He stared at it for a moment before looking back at her eyes. “I’m going to release you. If you attack me again, it’ll be the last time you ever make such a mistake.”

The icy dare in his voice quelled her more than his words. She had no doubt he would make her long regret any more moves against him. And like Gaelin, he would relish her torture. Laugh at her while he did it.

But there would come a time when his guard would lax. Then he would be hers and she’d make him pay dearly.

He released her hands and rose.

Shahara lay there for a moment, warily watching him.

Without taking his gaze from her, he retrieved the bottle from the floor. He gripped it so tightly, his knuckles protruded sharply against the leather of his glove.

“Go ahead, throw it at me.”

A glimmer of shock passed across his features before he recovered his impassiveness. “I should. Hell, if I had any sense at all, I’d kill you and dump your body in the nearest slime hole.”

Shahara lifted her chin defiantly. Far better opponents than he had tried and failed. “Then why don’t you?”

“I have an appointment to keep.”

The unexpected response was far from comforting. But it served to weaken her cockiness.

He slid his hand under his chin and cursed when he withdrew it and saw the blood on his glove. He gave her a look of such loathing that she thought he might kill her after all.

Instead, he turned around and headed into the bathroom.

She wiped his blood from her own cheek and listened to water splash against the basin. Rising from the floor, she stood in the bedroom uncertain about what to do next.

How was she going to get out of this mess?

Was he going to kill her? And just what would he do to her before he took her life? Various terrifying possibilities flashed through her mind, making her shiver.

Hesitantly, she walked to the bathroom door that he’d left partially open. He stood in front of the sink, wiping the blood away with a washcloth.

“What are you going to do with me?”

His hand paused under his chin and he met her gaze in the mirror.

The hatred in the dark stare chilled her all the way to her soul. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’ve never had anyone stupid enough to break into my house.”

The insult brought her temper to boil. “I’m not stupid.”

His disbelieving snort made her want to carve his heart out. “Breaking into my house wasn’t exactly an award-winning act of intelligence. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a landline or computer here, or any other way for you to contact anyone on the outside. You can’t get through the scanner that runs over the doors and windows unless I disarm it. So where does that leave you?”

Shahara’s stomach churned. It left her at his mercy and they both knew it. “I won’t be your plaything.”

His scathing glare raked her body as if she were the most disgusting thing alive. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

He rinsed out the washcloth and hung it on the towel rack to dry, then pulled out a tube of medicine and began applying it to the scratches. “I’ll be gone until morning. You have the freedom of the place until then.”

He turned around and faced her, his eyes piercing her with lethal coldness. “But I warn you now, there’s only one thing in this life that I treasure and that’s my home. If you so much as put a scuff mark on my floors, I will take it out of your hide.”

In spite of the threat and the fact that she knew he would carry it out, Shahara narrowed her gaze. Show them no fear. That was the first lesson she’d learned as a young teen. “I don’t take orders from convicts.”

Faster than she could blink, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him with a steely grasp. His eyes snapped vivid black fire, provoking a potent fear inside her that she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.

In that instant, she knew this man was capable of anything.

His grip tightened. “Mess up anything, and I’ll throw you to a rape gang so fast you won’t even have time to protest before they cut out your tongue.”

Shahara swallowed at the threat that reached the center of her panic in a way nothing else did. It was her very worst fear. Her heart pounding, she stared at him, unwilling to let him know how much his threat frightened her.

Despite her effort, she had the distinct feeling he knew anyway.

She pulled her wrist free of his tight grasp. Why was he willing to leave her in his home? It didn’t make sense. “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

“Think up ways to kill me while I sleep.”

The blase tone didn’t comfort her in the least. “I’ve already got a large number of them in mind.”

He shrugged. “I should warn you that if you succeed in killing me, you’ll never get out of here alive. You’ll starve to death long before anyone misses me and thinks to come here to see if I’m all right.”

Now that was something she hadn’t thought of.

“Like I won’t starve to death anyway if you keep me here without food,” she said sarcastically, thinking about the empty cupboards in his kitchen.

Without a word, he snatched his gloves off the counter, walked past her and pressed the controls to open his closet. He pulled out a black leather jacket and shrugged it on his massive shoulders. “You can take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch. If it’ll make you feel any better, lock the bedroom door.”

That said, he left the room.

Shahara stood in shock at his words. One minute he threatened her, then in the next he offered her a relative amount of safety.

What kind of convict was he?

Before she could regain her thoughts, she heard the front door close behind him.

Syn leaned his head back against the closed door and took a deep breath to center his raging emotions and hormones. It’d been years since anyone had knocked him so off-kilter. A cynical stoic by birth, he’d always been able to control himself, control his emotions.

But something about Shahara made a mockery of his iron will.

He didn’t know what was wrong with him. How could he be mad enough to kill her, then turn around and kiss her?

If he didn’t know better, he’d swear she used pheromone enhancers.

“You’re losing your edge.” If he had one single brain cell left, he’d cuff her to the bed instead of giving her the freedom of his house to devise a way to kill him once he returned.

But then he knew the reasons for that particular stupidity. One, she was Caillen’s beloved sister and he didn’t want to traumatize her too badly and have his friend never speak to him again over it. Two, she reminded him too much of Talia. The scared look in her eyes as she watched him, expecting him to throw her to the ground and tear her clothes from her.

He hadn’t been old enough to protect his sister—a fact he’d never come to terms with.

And he would never harm a woman like that. Anyone for that matter. It just wasn’t in him.

But what was he going to do with her?

Sighing, he wished he knew an easy answer. He’d give her a few hours alone. Maybe then she would calm down enough that he could speak to her without her trying to claw him to shreds.

Or maybe he should tell her he was a friend of Caillen’s . . .

Yeah, right. She most likely wouldn’t care. And considering the type of people Caillen usually associated with, it would only give her another reason to take him in. She’d probably consider it a community service.

No, it would be best to keep his friendship with her brother a secret.

Surely by morning she’d be willing to listen to him. For now he had a shipment to focus on and his legitimate business affairs.

Shahara leaned her head back, letting the hot water slide against her body. It’d been a long time since she last had a hot shower . . .

And this was heaven.

In her flat, she was lucky to have lukewarm water even in the summertime.

She must be insane to shower when she should be plotting an escape, but as she’d searched his place, the temptation had been too much for her. Besides, Syn had told her he’d be gone for the night so she had hours left to plot a way home. For just a few minutes, she was going to indulge herself.

Feeling much better and with clearer thoughts, she left the shower, grabbed the long, fluffy towel on the bar and wiped the water from her face. She gasped as she realized the scent of musk in the towel smelled just like Syn.

She clenched her teeth in anger and tossed the offending towel to the floor. No matter how good he might smell or look, Syn was a convict with an extremely violent past. She must never forget that.

Just as she bent over to pick up her underwear from the floor, the door to the bathroom swung open.

Horrified, she straightened and stared into a pair of beautiful, wide dark eyes.

Syn froze dead in his tracks as all breath left his body like he’d been sucker punched. He couldn’t have been more stunned had he opened the door and found a huge lorina waiting there to devour him.