What the Heart Haunts(4)

She let a smile touch her lips, but it was fake. She wasn’t going to let him go. The only good thing she had left in her, was that she wasn’t going to force him. Herne, even if she’d wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to. One look at all those muscles under his shirt, the taut energy radiating off of him, and she didn’t even begin to have the physical strength needed to pin Khost.

Still, Nalla stepped closer to him, letting her smile turn sad as she stretched up to touch her lips against his. Her hand slid under his shirt, reveling at the smooth touch of his skin. It twitched under her hand, his whole body a bundle of raw nerves.

“It’s okay.” A shudder jerked through him and she ghosted another kiss over his mouth. Tasted his lips with her tongue. “You don’t have to do anything.”

She stepped back from him and let her jacket fall from her shoulders. It hit the ground in a soft whoosh of air. Crossing her arms in front of her, she caught the hem of her shirt in her hands and tugged it up over her head in one fluid motion and tossed it aside. Khost’s face turned pained, desperate.

Pain snagged at her heart. Oh, this she understood. Whatever he might have been when he was human, no matter how many woman he might have had then....since Herne had taken his life and Changed him into another Hound of the Hunt, Khost would have known nothing but the wild night air against his skin.

No kisses, no touches, outside of maybe a crack of their master’s whip. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and his eyes tracked the movement. She wanted to ask him how long he’d been running with the pack. Couldn’t be over two hundred years, he’d have recognized her in an instant for what she was. But a hundred years? That sounded about right and her instincts were rarely wrong.

And a hundred years of celibacy? Nalla leaned forward a little on the balls of her feet. “You can go at any time, Khost.” The corners of her lips hitched up in a half grin. Impish. “I can do this by myself.”

She undid the button on her jeans and pulled the zipper down. He trembled, his gaze tracking every movement. Nalla remembered standing on the edge, just like him, watching as Malek had dragged off his pants and tilted back his head, offering. A tempter in a world with a god who wouldn’t forgive them. But Khost was down here, Herne couldn’t kill him for this.

Guilt nibbled at the edge of her mind and she paused, hands on her hips, ready to pull her jeans down and toss them aside. She’d never regretted her choice. She’d loved Malek; her loyalty to Herne and the Hunt had already been compromised in Herne’s eyes. The sex had just been the final straw and as much as she missed running...she missed Malek more.

She’d had other men since him, but only one of them had ever begun to fill the hole he’d left behind. But loving Mal had been worth this. Khost was the closest male she’d come to finding who could fill that ache in her. A mate again. One who wouldn’t die in fifty years. Nalla closed her eyes.

That still didn’t make this right.

Her hands fell away from her hips and she shook her head, stepping over to pick up her shirt. She’d leaned down to shake it loose from a bush when strong hands clasped her hips, Khost’s breathing unsteady, like a shudder in the wind. Nervous, Nalla left her shirt hanging there and stood up, the bare skin of her back brushing the hot fabric of his shirt, warmed by the heat pouring off of him.

Oh damn. She wasn’t a good enough of a person to walk away more than once. Nalla fisted her hands, her nails biting into her palms in little moon-shaped crescents. She tilted her head back to ghost a kiss over his cheek. “You’re right. We shouldn’t.”

She turned in his arms, his hands sliding over her skin with the movement. She wanted nothing more than for him to cup a breast in one of those hands, to draw a nipple to his lips. To feel his bare chest pressed against hers. But if they did that, Khost would never go back and damn it all, as much as watching him run back to the sky would surely kill her, she couldn’t be the one that made him fall.

She couldn’t be the one who destroyed him, all for something he didn’t even realize he was missing. Nalla reached behind her, grabbed her shirt and yanked it free of the bush even, as she laid one last kiss against his lips. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this either.”

Then she stepped out of his arms and was running again, but unlike last time, she wouldn’t stop when the magic threatened to take him. And she damn well wouldn’t let him catch her. Whispering one of the few words of magic she still had left, she vanished from the forest all together and reappeared. Home. The semi rocking slightly under the sudden appearance of her weight in the cab. She sank down into the driver’s seat, pulled on her shirt and reached for the keys. He would still be running, chasing her maybe, more likely running for the sky.