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“Does it have something to do with my being reincarnated?” she asked, unknowingly providing him a way to escape the turmoil of choice.
“It has everything to do with it.”
Anticipating her next question, heading it off, he said, “The periods of blacking out and not remembering what happened will pass.”
The script on her skin glowed like an accusation. Coward!
Addai denied the charge. It was too soon to free her, too risky right now, when she might choose to hunt for Corinne on her own if the situation became dangerous and he decided to end her participation in it.
“We should get up and begin searching for the boat,” she said.
“When this is over, promise you’ll go willingly to our home.”
She leaned forward, touching her lips to his, fingers stroking where his wing merged with his back and sending a shudder of pleasure through him. “I have obligations to the Tucci.”
Her answer convinced him of the rightness of his decision to hold off releasing her from the angelic bindings keeping her human. “The Tuccis won’t stand in the wa
y of my desire to have you.”
It was the wrong thing to say. In implying threat to the vampires, he’d reminded her of the repercussions to her family. Sajia grew still.
Not wanting to lose what he already had with her, he said, “They’ll free you from your oath in a bargain that will satisfy all of us. You’re my wife. Your place is with me.”
Her eyes flashed with fire. She sat, taking the heat of her skin and her soft curves from him. “Maybe the woman you once knew was content to let you order her life as you saw fit, but I am not that woman. If you think otherwise, then you love a memory, not who I am. My place is wherever I choose it to be.”
Pride and masculine arrogance demanded he prove the truth of his claim. He acted on it, tumbling her backward and lying on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. A quick thrust and he was inside her. “Tell me you’d choose to be apart from me. Tell me your soul calls out for any other but mine.”
The soft yielding of her body and the heated, tight clasp of her channel on his cock made it impossible for her to lie. His wings settled against her thighs, brushed in sensuous reminder of how erotic she found them when they made love.
Sajia shivered. Her eyes closed as she gathered strength. Opened as she said, “I won’t exchange one type of servitude for another, despite our games of dominance and submission. Despite what we once had. If I’m to love you as deeply as I did then, it will be because you treat me as an equal in our relationship. Not as your prize or your reward, but as a wife who is both joined to you and separate from you.”
He wanted to rail against her demands, against hearing her say out loud what he already knew, that she didn’t yet love him in the way he so desperately craved. He wanted to tie her to the bed again until she was mindless with pleasure, her will bent so thoroughly to his that they were one person, bound so intimately together that they wouldn’t exist apart. But some small, rational part of him accepted an irrevocable truth: she wasn’t the same woman he’d loved before, though he loved her no less for it. Her soul was more thoroughly Scorpion, honed in the fiery birthplace of the Djinn so she could survive in a world that had been changed forever by what the humans had done to it.
He could put none of his thoughts into words. Could do nothing to change their immediate future. That left him with only the moment, and the pervasive need to have her clinging to him, crying out his name in sobbed release.
If anything could ease him, it was how readily she gave him those things, even as she wrung out his surrender in equal measure. Making his buttocks clench and his breathing become labored, his skin grow slick and his thoughts scatter as he came in a lava-hot rush of semen.
They left the bed a short time later, remaining in the cabin only long enough to wash and eat a breakfast of bread and fruit. Then they resumed their search, using the Constellation’s powerful engines instead of its sails.
Lunch was eaten on the deck, with the vastness of the ocean spread out around them. In the distance several cargo ships were visible, two leaving the bay and three heading toward it.
Dotting the blue were fishing boats, large and small, populated with men working their nets or using poles and lines. It had been time-consuming getting close enough to each of them in order to eliminate it from their search.
Sunset was approaching when Sajia spotted a boat with a red lantern to the right of the cabin doorway and a blue on the left. Addai slowed the Constellation. He’d not thought it possible to feel what a human would feel, the knotting of his stomach that came with fear.
He couldn’t be in two places at once. Couldn’t will himself to the boat and guard her at the same time.
Free her from the bindings, the internal voice advised. And he denied it once again.
“Get in the cabin, Sajia, while I take the Constellation closer.”
Resistance flared in her. A refusal he saw her fight to suppress as she remembered her earlier promise. She obeyed, though she left the door open and hovered just out of sight beyond it.
Three men were visible. All three rested their hands on their knives when he changed the Constellation’s course and headed directly toward them.
He kept the speed steady, calculating the distance and the point at which he would be close enough to use his voice as a weapon. And when it arrived, he said, “Lie down on the deck and you will be spared.”
They lay down as ordered, docile in the promise of death and damnation he carried with him.
