“I’ll take your dare,” she said, and her smile was just this side of a slow slide into suicide. “If you take mine.”

NINE

That surprised him. She could see it in the quick dilation of his vivid eyes. Then he burst out laughing. The sound was darker, harsher than his earlier laugh had been. “I don’t believe you.”

“You should.” Leisurely, she stood, and he did too, springing upward with a catlike quickness that had her wondering if he had ever been truly relaxed that evening, or if his appearance had been disingenuous.

Disingenuous. She liked that word to describe him. It fit. On the surface, he was smooth charm with everybody else at the Tower, cloaking the blade that she knew lived inside him.

Genuinely curious, she asked, “How did you and Kitty Lawyer get along?”

“Who?” He looked blank.

“The chick you were with the night of the sentinel party. Wyr lioness, lawyer. Painted nails, high heels and possessive.” Kitty Lawyer had licked his chin too. Aryal’s smile soured. She’d forgotten that until just now.

He made a slicing gesture. “Not the topic at hand, sunshine. The topic you brought up, I might add. Unless you’re just throwing things out there at random to see if you can get a rise out of me.”

Mmmm. A rise. That sounded like fun. She turned away from temptation and forced herself to concentrate on what they were talking about. “I meant what I said.”

“Now you’re f**king around with me. You know you couldn’t do it.” He came around the table at her.

His predatory instinct had kicked in. Ooh, she should probably flutter around and act all flustered. Instead her eyes widened. “Not any more than you could?”

He circled her, as if assessing her physical attributes. “We’ve been down this road already.”

“Have we?” He had reached her back, where he paused, standing in utter silence. He was trying to rattle her. It wasn’t working. She stood still, arms crossed, in an appearance of relaxation while inside, adrenaline kicked in. Okay, maybe it was working a little. “I propose a different turn down that road. But of course, if you’re not interested, we can stop talking about it right now and hit the sack.”

He was interested. She could sense it pouring off him. He circled around to face her again, appearing casual again, except she knew better. The pulse at the base of his jaw pounded. He drawled, “I’m listening.”

She took a deep breath. “We hold an experiment and set a time limit. We get fifteen minutes each of total control over the other person. You think you could handle that?”

Once she had thought of the idea, she couldn’t stop. Surely fifteen minutes was doable. She could do almost anything for that long, including holding her breath. It would totally be worth it to own fifteen minutes of his ass.

Quentin looked suspicious. After he thought for a moment, he said, “Fine. On one condition. Your time comes first.”

“You wish.” She snorted. “We’ll do a coin toss.”

“No coin toss. You brought it up. They’re your terms. You go first.” His smile had turned catlike in anticipation. “Besides, you’ve bloodied me twice. You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything. You pounded my head on the pavement and throttled me. Twice.”

“You pinned me against a metal door with your f**king talons, for God’s sake.” He moved so close, he was in her face. They stood toe-to-toe, looking in each other’s eyes. “You punched me.”

“You punched me first,” she pointed out. It had been a hell of a strike too, much faster than she had expected. She had admired that—and made a point to never forget it.

“Are we going to keep going like this forever, or are you going to strike the bargain you offered?” He gave her a hard smile that glittered in the firelight, put a finger under her chin and tilted her face just so. Then his mouth came to hover over hers, their skin barely touching. He whispered, “Give it up, Aryal.”

Her breath came short and fast, and he had to know it, because the only way he could be closer to her was if he were French-kissing her. He started to laugh again, only this time it sounded angry. He really did think she had just been f**king with him.

She said, “Deal.”

He froze.

It was her turn to laugh. She always loved the feeling of cutting loose, no matter where she found it. Jumping off a cliff, starting a chase, losing all the doubts and questions and analyses. She was the original Nike girl. Just doing it.

She might not trust him, but she trusted her own judgment. He wouldn’t kill her. There was no way he could do it in this kind of setting and hope to sell it as an accident to Dragos back home, and besides, he had been telling the truth about that earlier. Just like her, he’d had the impulse and given it up.

If he hurt her really badly, he was going to have to cut her loose at some point, and then it was his turn.

And if he tried to renege on his part of the bargain, well.

Hell hath no fury like a harpy who’s been f**ked over.

“Fifteen minutes,” she told him. “Set your iPhone’s clock when you’re ready to start. We wouldn’t want to lose track of such a short amount of time.”

Inside, her heart was leaping about like a jackrabbit. If she could have pounced on it to make it stop, she would have. How badly was she going to hate this? She needed to keep her eye on the prize—her time with him, or a real sense of righteousness as she kicked his ass.

Angling his head, looking the very picture of incredulity, he backed up, dug in his pack until he found his iPhone, turned it on and programmed it. His thumb hovering over the screen, he glanced up. Anticipation had sharpened his lean features until he looked even more predatory than ever. “Last chance to back out.”

Surprised that he even offered, she snorted, the sound derisive. “It’s just fifteen minutes. You’re not that scary. Do it.”

He pressed the iPhone. Held it up and showed it to her. Fifteen minutes were counting down on the screen. Carefully he set it on the table.

Then he sprang at her, and even though she had been expecting him to do something, somehow she hadn’t been ready for his incredible speed. He pushed her back until she hit the wall. Already they were both breathing heavily, as if they had been fighting for a very long time.

He pressed his long, hard body against hers and took her chin in one hand, and with the other hand, he held a stiffened finger under her nose.

“Shut up,” he said. “Don’t say a word out loud or telepathically. We’re going to have fifteen minutes of silence from you. I know that’s going to break your head, and the thought of that makes my day, so just f**king do it. Don’t touch me, and did I say, shut up?”

Laughter exploded out her nose. She opened her mouth.

He glared at her. “One word, sunshine, and you forfeit your fifteen.”

Ouch. She had words, so many of them, crashing into each other like a freeway pileup. She made a frustrated noise and panted a little with the effort to hold them back.

He stroked her hair. Her gaze slid up and sideways to track the movement of his hand. His expression was sharp, electric. He looked fascinated with whatever he saw in her expression. “Can you do it?”

She widened her gaze and shrugged. She honestly didn’t know. Of all the things she had been braced for, she hadn’t expected this. As an adversary, he was diabolical. As a potential sex partner, the diabolic part grew exponentially.

He chuckled, and the husky sound was full of triumph and intent. Then he bent his head and kissed her.

Really, really kissed her. Deep and full out, his tongue invading her mouth, his lips hardened and hungry as he pressed against her body. Kissing and kissing her.

Her hands came up.

He said in warning, telepathically, Huh-uh.

They hovered in midair. Clenched into fists.

Meanwhile the pileup of words continued on the freeway in her head. The wreck was tremendous and ugly, and the force of holding all those words back while keeping her hands off of him, while he continued to leisurely, thoroughly, sensually explore her mouth, caused her whole body to shake.

He never said she couldn’t kiss him back. She did so, aggressively, while she growled low in her throat, and his hot, accelerated breathing gusted over her cheek. His hips pinned hers, and the long, hard length of his stiff c**k pressed against her belly.

She had the impulse to grab hold of his hips and yank him harder against her—and caught herself just in time before her hands connected. Damn it! Why didn’t he just tie her up and make this easy?

He sensed her struggle, of course, and laughed wickedly against her lips. The hoarse sound vibrated against her chest. He put his hands at her waist, slipped them under her sweater and the thin cotton undershirt she wore underneath, and slid them up the length of her narrow torso until he reached her high, slight br**sts.

She never wore a bra. She hated them and didn’t need one. His hands collided with bare, sensitive skin, and they both sucked in air. She threw out her arms, and her fists slammed into the wall.

Quentin. Caeravorn. Is. Touching. Me.

She liked having her br**sts fondled. She wasn’t any stranger to it. It was still the Quentin part of the whole equation that bent her head.

He dragged both of her tops up and stared down at her naked torso as he rubbed callused thumbs over the dusky, erect flesh of her ni**les. Sensation jolted through her, jagged bolts of lightning strikes that hit at her moistening sex.

Desperate for something to grasp so that she could keep her hands off of him, her talons flicked out. She dug them into the walls and held on. His expression was clenched, the tanned skin darkened. He muttered something under his breath. Her mind was too hazed to figure out exactly what he had said. It had sounded very like a curse.

Then, still flicking one nipple with the nail of his thumb, he bent his head further, pulled the other nipple into his mouth, and bit her.

Pain joined the lightning bolts of pleasure, each sensation heightening the other to an almost unbearable pitch. She had always liked the mixture of pain and pleasure, like the raw fire of brandy coupled with the smooth sweetness of chocolate. She cried out wordlessly, arching her back to offer her br**sts to him, and hooked one leg around his waist to pull him tighter against her, rubbing the center of her aching flesh against his erection. Heat from their bodies wrapped them in a velvet inferno.

Do it. Bite me again. She nearly strangled on her own tongue. Son of a bitch.

After the bite, he suckled strongly, each pull as devastating as a blow. She cried out again, the sound sharp with the unbearable ache building in her body.

The only sounds in the cabin were sexual ones that created a mélange of urgency. The abrasion of cloth, rasp of breath, the sounds that he made, the sounds that she made.

Until a foreign noise thrust into the mix. An insistent beeping.

Fractured thoughts and impulses climbed over the wreckage in her head, and tried to make themselves coherent. What the hell … somebody hit whatever that is … make the noise stop.…

Realization hit.

It was the alarm on Quentin’s iPhone.

His head lifted. They looked at each other. His eyes were glazed, hands still clenched on her rib cage.

What to do.

She wanted, needed him to continue. She almost grabbed him to kiss him again. In fact, she was surprised she didn’t. The only thing that stopped her, the one thing that was more compelling than the hunger rampaging through her body, was a single thought.

She yanked her talons out of the wall and retracted them, and smacked his shoulders with the palms of her hands, hard enough to make him stagger back a few steps. With a smile that blazed across her face, she said, “My turn.”

Quentin was on fire. His body was ablaze, his mind hazed with smoke.

This small slice of power that Aryal had given him was the headiest thing he had ever experienced. It ravaged his senses like napalm, clinging to everything and transforming the landscape inside of him. She, who was normally so uncontainable, was under his control.

He looked into her uncommon face, twisted with agonized desire. The tendons in her arms stood out as she dug her talons into the wall and struggled to do as she was told. She had arched her torso away from the wall in an unconscious offering to him. It caused her abdomen to hollow out underneath the graceful arc of her rib cage. Above that, the curve of her slender br**sts flared. The small nipple he had bitten and sucked had turned red as a ripe cherry.

Everything about her was racy, streamlined and built for speed.

Greed swallowed him whole. He gripped her with both hands, fingers imprinting on the canvas of her flesh, and thought, you are mine right now.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

What? He shook his passion-fogged head.

Her head came up, dark eyes wild with some internal storm. Something hit him, knocking him back a few steps. A half second later, he realized it had been her.

“My turn.”

No. NO. He wasn’t ready to stop, to give her up.

“I need more time,” he said. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.

“That’s another bargain.” She yanked down her tops and gestured with a shaking hand at the noisy iPhone. “Do something about that or I will.”

Dear Christ. He stalked over to the table and jabbed at the phone, and it stopped the incessant noise. Then he leaned both hands on the tabletop and struggled to get control of his breathing. The scent of her arousal was an aphrodisiac so strong he felt kicked in the teeth.

“I’ll set it for the next fifteen minutes.” He began to punch it in.

She moved up behind him, curving her long body along the line of his as she laid her cheek against the back of his neck. “What if I wait?” she said against his skin.