Wings of Fire (Guardians of Ascension #3)

She glanced behind her and when the last of them left—Marcus offering her a salute—she turned back and said, “What’s wrong?”

“That you even have to ask should give you some kind of clue, Madame Warrior.”

Her pretty arched brows rose. “You’re angry that I want to train as a warrior?”

“You don’t even have the smallest clue what you’ll be up against.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

Okay, he hadn’t expected that. “The Female Militia Training Camps are like Mortal Earth boot camp on crack. The women are hard-core. Simply put, you’re not.”

“You’re right, I’m not.”

He blinked and let out an exasperated sigh. “Then you shouldn’t be going. You shouldn’t even be thinking about a career in the military.”

“I would have agreed with you yesterday.”

He threw up his arms. “You saw a handful of seconds of military action and you think you can be a warrior? Look at you.” He gestured with a hand up and down her body, his gaze pausing more than once on the size of her chest.

“So women with big boobs can’t serve?” Now she scowled.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were looking at my chest, though. Admit it.”

“You don’t look like a goddamn warrior.”

She nodded, her lips pursed. “What do I look like, Antony? A vampire? An ascender? A woman who has to mount her wings at least once every ten days or she goes insane? A woman who just spent the last three months in captivity? A woman who before her ascension was hiding in a library because life had kicked her around too much? And exactly how many of those things make it bad or wrong for me to decide making war in a world at war is the right thing for me to do?”

“You haven’t thought this through and not once did you ask, What do you think, Antony?”

At that, she released a small sigh. She even frowned a little. “What do you think, Antony?”

“Don’t fucking patronize me. You don’t give a good goddamn what I think. You already told Madame Endelle what you plan to do. That you didn’t give me a second’s thought summed it up for me.”

“I didn’t give you a second’s thought? All I thought was—I want to do what Antony does. I want to lay it on the line every day or night of my life so long as Rith lives, so long as Greaves lives. I want to battle beside my man. I want him to be proud of me. I was such a mouse when I arrived here, when Havily and Marcus found me in my courtyard, naked and in full-mount and Crace arrived? There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stay alive in that situation. So, yeah, I did think of you, that I wanted to be just like you.”

Shit. By the end of this speech, her eyes had filled with tears and she put three fingers against her lips in true Parisa fashion.

He took a step toward her but she lifted her other hand, palm flat out in his direction. “Don’t.” She lifted that hand a little higher, then vanished. He still couldn’t believe she already had the ability to fold.

He traced her back to the villa. Thank God she’d had enough sense to go there and not anywhere else.

By the time his battle sandals touched down on the hardwood floor of his villa foyer, she was headed to the south rooms on a quick march. Now she was pissed. Fine.

He followed after her. By the time she’d passed through the formal living room and he was just about to catch up with her, she turned around and shook a finger at him. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“You don’t want a long-term relationship with me,” she cried. “You’ve told me you don’t. Just remember that.”

Had he said those words to her? “You don’t, either. You don’t want the breh-hedden. You’re inaccessible.”

“Not like I used to be but you’re right. I don’t want to be bonded to you. I don’t want to be this close to anyone. But what’s worse, what is killing me, is that I really, really don’t want to lose you.” Again, her fingers found her lips and her eyes filled with tears.

Ah, shit. “You don’t?”

She put her hand on her forehead. “No. I really don’t.”

Just how far down this road were they anyway?

Oh … God.

“I don’t want to lose you, either,” he said. And that was the truth, apparently for both of them.

“Great,” she said flapping her arms once up and down. “So what do we do? I didn’t want this.”

“Me, neither.”

“Oh, Antony, what are we going to do? Everything is happening so fast and I’m still so raw about Rith and being held captive. I’m exhilarated that we brought the women home but now I’m horrified that there are twenty-one other facilities like Fiona’s.”

He moved close to her and put his arms around her. “Hey,” he whispered against the top of her head. Even though they were fighting, that sweet scent of tangerines got to him all over again. “Ease down, Warrior.”

She chuckled. Her arms slipped around his waist, finding a place beneath the center back strap of the weapons harness.

“You smell so good,” she whispered against his chest.

Though desire rippled through him, he didn’t act on it. Was this their first fight? Probably wouldn’t be the last. Did he want to live without her? Could he bear her being gone day and night for weeks while she trained at the local camps?

Did she really want to battle as a warrior?

Shit.

“I don’t know what to do,” she murmured.

He sighed. “How about I hold you until you figure it out.”

She chuckled once, a bounce against his chest. “That could be a millennium.”

“Works for me.”

How strange that he could look down the years, decades, centuries and see himself holding her like this. What was it about Parisa that fit so well? Was it just the call of the breh-hedden, something outside them both forcing them together, or were they truly a good fit for this dimension, this world, this war?

He drew back and looked down at her.

She looked up. “You smell like sage.” She smiled.

He didn’t need more of an invitation than that. He dipped and caught her lips in a kiss that deepened swiftly. Before the thought had formed, his tongue was in her mouth and searching out every crevice as though he had never kissed her before.

She withdrew her arms from around his waist and slid them up his chest to encircle his neck. Her weapons harness and dagger collided with his. There just wasn’t a lot of intimacy when three daggers and a lot of leather separated skin from skin.

“Antony,” she murmured, meeting his gaze. “I’d like to go home, I don’t mean permanently, I mean right now. I’d like to be with you in my home, the one I’ve lived in for the past several years, on Mortal Earth.”

He had spent a lot of hours in her home. It was a unique house with a central courtyard, a private space that no one in the neighboring houses or the street could see into.

Everything about her house spoke of who she was: the muted hues of gold, maroon, and purple, the varying floors of carpet, wood, and tile, the heavy tapestry drapes in an olive green that flanked almost every window. In some ways, her house had a similar feeling to his own. And there wasn’t a room or hallway that didn’t have books in it, or on shelves, stacked on tables, locked away in glass cabinets as prized possessions. There had even been some left on her nightstand, a reminder that she’d had a life before her ascension.

Her love of books was just one more thing that bound him to her, whether he liked it or not.

“You know that I took care of your place.”

She smiled. “You told me again and again, remember? I know you couldn’t hear me when I’d voyeur you but I heard everything you said to me.”

“I know. At least, I thought that was the way it was for you. I hoped it was.”

“It was. You told me you went to my Peoria home every Monday and made sure all the utilities were paid for, the mail collected. You said Endelle kept the house cloaked in mist to keep death vampires away.”

“Yep.”

“So the water’s still turned on?”

He smiled. “You have a good-sized shower over there, though not as big as mine.”

Her amethyst eyes darkened. “Antony, no one’s is as big as yours.”

He chuckled. She was so his kind of woman. His brother warriors might call him a gentleman but when it came to women he bedded, he’d always preferred everything to be open, erotic, even experimental. That she’d engaged in long-distance sex with him for three months still pleased the hell out of him, and when she’d agreed to use her voyeur window on them last time, he’d known bedtime between them would be just right.

He also loved never knowing what direction things would take.

“My bed is only a queen and you’re definitely king-sized.”

He met her gaze, his lids at half-mast. “King-sized, huh?”

An answering rush of tangerine scent, softened with a bouquet that was just her, tingled his nostrils. King-sized indeed.

She writhed against him, all of him. “God, yes,” she whispered against his lips, which made his hips buck into her. “Fold me now.”

He didn’t hesitate. He thought the thought and the moment he felt the bricks of the courtyard beneath his feet, he kissed her hard. Small cries of approval drifted out of her throat and into his mouth. He wanted her to keep crying like that, louder and louder, until she was screaming against his lips and he could swallow her orgasms down.

He pulled back just a little. “I need this off.” He touched her weapons harness and folded it off so that a split-second later, her pale flesh was a beacon in the night. His right hand caressed one of her full breasts. He was a big man and he had big hands. They barely fit around her, she was that big. Oh, yeah. He rubbed his thumb over her nipple and she cried out. He kissed her again.

He felt her hands give a tug on his harness. She drew back. “And I need this off.”