After a moment, Lilly asked, “Will you confess or will they already know how your people died? When they find you, I mean.”
The question was a good one, but he hadn’t decided how to handle it when the time came. They’d been told that as beings of the Beyond, they were under constant surveillance. But Alex had always had doubts.
She took his silence as an answer and met it with another question. She had them stockpiled, it seemed. “So this army you’re in …did you sign up or were you drafted?”
“It’s not a choice. We’re bred to protect the Beyond.”
She didn’t like that answer. Her full lips drew into a flat line.
“We are promised afterlife if we die in glory,” he tacked on, as if that would make the truth of it any better.
She cast him a disparaging glance that told him it didn’t. “But they can’t see you—your people or leaders or whatever you call them,” she said. “They’re not omnipotent, like God?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“So for all they know, you’re down here fighting the good fight. Your two friends will still get afterlife, right? They died in their own kind of glory, fighting for what they believed in.”
She was right. Alex was hazy on the logistics of how such things as the afterlife worked, though. He had a comical vision of a bearded being with a checklist and an inventory of deeds waiting at the gates. No matter how it was written, though, both Caleb and Jared had died doing their duty.
For now, that’s all anyone could know.
He looked at Lilly. “So what are you, a war analyst?”
She flashed a smile. “I’m a marketing advisor for a small health store chain.”
He stared at her for a moment, too surprised to respond. It seemed so ordinary, and Lilly…Lilly was the opposite of ordinary.
“Health food?” he disparaged. “Does that mean you don’t eat meat?”
She shook her head guiltily, adding, “Not veal, though.” Like it was for bonus points.
She smoothed the edges of the last bandage and stood. Alex stood, too. He should move away. And now. Because having her in touching distance seemed to be destroying all of his common sense.
“The longer I stay, the worse it will be,” he said, trying to infuse the words with the power to make him leave.
“Who are you trying to convince, Alex? You or me?”
“You’ve got a smart mouth,” he said. “You know that?”
“It’s a gift.”
A gift. One he wanted. She stared at him with those lavender-blue eyes and all he could think of was tasting that smart mouth. One kiss, that would be enough, he told himself.
But she met him halfway as he leaned closer and he knew it was a lie.
Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance by Jennifer Ashley, Alyssa Day, Felicity Heaton, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Erin Quinn, Bonnie Vanak and Caris Roane
CHAPTER 6
Slowly, Alex kissed her. He’d meant to be quick. A small sample and then walk away. But lips and breath and tongue combined to shut down his brain. Her taste was like a drug that spread rapidly through his system. Suddenly, not touching her everywhere seemed like the worst choice he could make.
He pulled back and stared into her eyes. She looked startled and aroused, wary but very willing. She listed forward, her face turned up, her hands warm on his bare chest and Alex couldn’t have denied what he wanted any more than he could turn back time.
In an instant, the decision was made.
Had been since he’d first held her in the woods. Maybe everything he’d done since that moment had been a way to get to here. With her.
His forehead touched hers, noses aligned as he stilled, letting her breath become his, giving it back with his own. So intimate, the sharing. Exotic, unexpected, addicting. Thunder and lightning that struck at ancestral instincts that he didn’t know he possessed. She pressed against him, his briefs a thin barrier to the hardness straining to be released. Every part of him tuned in to her actions, reactions, the way they spurred his own.
What did it mean that he’d brought his hands to her face and found skin so soft he had to brush his lips over it? Press his nose into its sweetness? What did it say that he thought he could stand there and kiss her for hours and never grow tired of the way she felt, the way she tasted?
She seemed to be seeking something. A touch? A word? He wanted to give it to her, whatever it was, and the thought pulled him back. Her eyes glittered bright blue and diamond-like from between her thick lashes. Her hair was messed up, her cheeks chilled, but she felt like a flame in his hands. Fluid. Dangerous.