Archangel’s Enigma (Guild Hunter #8)(57)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Does it not hurt to be alone?” he asked her, his hair sliding to the side as he cocked his head in that way he had of doing. “I like being petted. Don’t you need petting?”

His honesty demanded her own. “I’ve made myself not need it.” It had been brutal when her natural inclination was to wallow in sensation. “It’s why I first picked up the sword. To put my sexual energy into controlled violence.” Rather than the sadistic kind practiced by her parents.

“Fighting is like rutting.” Naasir’s eyes gleamed. “Not the same, but it gets the blood pumping and it makes me ready.”

When her eyes dropped instinctively, she had to force them back up. She had no business checking whether or not he was aroused. “Sexual pleasure is like a drug,” she said to Naasir. “You become addicted to it until it takes over your life, until pleasure alone isn’t enough and the search for novelty turns brutal. At least that’s how it is with my family.”

“Your parents rule a sector,” Naasir pointed out. “They do other things.”

“It’s a far-off and not very important sector.” Charisemnon might have deviant appetites, but he was still an archangel and no fool. He knew his daughter and her husband weren’t capable of running a large sector, so had stuck them in a small, unimportant corner politically speaking.

“They also have two stewards who can run the territory without instruction, they’ve been doing it for so long.” The twins had been there since long before either Andromeda’s mother or father had even been born. “My parents are powerful enough to be dangerous when called upon to defend the territory, but otherwise . . .”

She gripped one of her hands with the other, squeezing tight to restrain the urge to reach out and play with the silken temptation of Naasir’s hair. “They’ve been dissolute and jaded and sexually violent since they were young.” She’d read stories of her parents’ debauchery, their every move chronicled because of her mother’s bloodline.

“The fact they can’t control their urges makes them weak.” Naasir’s gaze was a lightning strike, as if he’d shatter light right through her, exposing all her secrets. “A woman who has fought her natural sensual instincts for hundreds of years is not weak.”

Andromeda sucked in a breath, wanting to grab at his words and hoard them close. “It requires constant control.”

A shrug. “I have to exercise the same not to act too inhuman.”

“Don’t,” she found herself saying. “Don’t act with me.”

Snapping his teeth at her, he grinned at her little jump. “I thought you wanted me to act civilized.”

“Argh! I said that once while I was mad.” She pushed at the warm, bare skin of his shoulders when he laughed, wicked amusement in his eyes. “You make me want to act totally uncivilized.”

His eyes lit up. “Good.” Rising to his feet, he said, “I must keep watch. Rest and think about choices.”

She scowled at his back as he retook his position by the window. “Don’t try to give me orders when we’re not creeping about.”

Glancing over his shoulder, he raised an eyebrow. “Sleep or you’ll fall down when you lumber about. You haven’t mastered creeping yet.”

She threw a pillow at him.

Catching it, he laughed in unhidden delight, his claws apparent on the softness of the pillow. His unrepentant badness made her lips twitch as she fell back onto the bed and pulled up the sheet, programming her mind to wake in a few hours so Naasir, too, could rest. He was older and stronger than her, but he still needed rest. As he needed blood.

Her mood sank again as she thought of him feeding from another woman.

But that, too, was the natural order of things. Naasir was a sexual creature and women were drawn to him. There was no room in his life for a scholar who’d taken a vow of celibacy before she’d ever understood what it was to need, to so desperately want . . . to look into eyes of molten silver and see a future far more extraordinary than the one written in her blood.

*   *   *

Andromeda and Naasir left the cottage after nightfall, fully dressed in their dry clothes. Naasir had ordered her to cut up a sheet and use the strips to wrap up her feet, since her slippers had fallen apart during the final hours before dawn. She’d used the oldest sheet she could find, the one that looked as if it had been forgotten in the cupboard.

Rejuvenated by sleep and food, with her feet protected enough that stones didn’t cut into her soles, she was able to trek for hours without flagging.