Born of Fire (6 page)

Unlike most fools, he’d never fall for such an obvious trick. But far be it from him to tell
her
that.

He smiled wickedly, wondering how far she’d go with her ruse. This was one show he planned to savor.

Leaning her head back to expose the graceful column of her throat, she tossed her hair over her shoulders before trailing her hands slowly over her thighs and breasts.

She hesitated at the fasteners of her battlesuit.

Would she dare?

She did. Feeling as if he were being tortured, he followed the path of her hands as she lowered the opening of her suit to reveal the black lace of her undergarments. And the luscious swell of her breasts.

“Well?” Her husky voice drove him almost beyond his limit as he imagined sliding one hand inside that suit and cupping her.

She leaned forward, her breasts barely remaining inside the black lace barrier as she wiggled her way-too-attractive hips. “Would you like to join me?”

Yes
. . .

If it were any other woman, he wouldn’t hesitate at the invitation.

Hell, he could barely refuse her now.

But then he was used to disappointment.

It was time she learned what happened to little seaxes who played deadly games. Crossing the floor in three strides, he reached out for her.

Just as he almost touched her, she struck out like lightning. With a resounding curse, she fastened the front of her battlesuit and sprang from the bed.

Syn ducked her roundhouse kick and moved to a safe distance. “Don’t try this crap with me,” he growled,
his lust instantly dying as his will to survive took over. “I’m a street fighter and you
will
get hurt.”

“So am I and so will you.” Rushing toward him, she punched at his throat. He caught her wrist in his hand and pulled her up against him. Her breath left her in a startled gasp as she collided with the solid wall of muscle. Her heart thundered in her ears and fear scaled her throat.

His steely hands closed around her arms.

“Let go of me!” She stomped on his instep, twisting free of his hold.

Syn cursed, moving away from the wild
byrollo
. What kind of shoes did she have on? They sliced like knives even through his heavy boots.

Her eyes narrowed at him in hatred. Quicker than he could react, she dove for the bottle and rose with it.

“Put it down.” He kept his voice level. “If I draw my blaster one more time, I
will
kill you.”

She lifted the bottle higher. “Open the front door,” she demanded in a strident tone that told him just how desperate she was.

Only too well, he understood her panic and fear. He didn’t like being cornered either. “I’m not going to hurt you. Put the bottle down and just talk to me.”

Shahara curled her lip in disgust. Did he really think she was stupid enough to release her only weapon? Especially after his threat? “Go to hell.”

He smiled, flashing a single dimple in his left cheek. She licked her dry lips, afraid of what the smile signified.

“Okay, keep the bottle. Just talk to me like two rational people and maybe we can find a solution to this problem. Deal?”

She tightened her grip on the bottle, wanting to toss
it at his arrogant head. “I don’t make deals with convicted rapists and murderers, I take them to justice.”

His smile vanished. “I have
never
raped or murdered anyone. And I damn sure haven’t been convicted of it.” The other charges were a different matter that he wasn’t about to bring up to her.

“That’s not what the contract on your life says.”

His jaw tensed. “I didn’t rape or murder Kiara Zamir.”

“Tell it to the Overseer.”

Syn stifled his curse. Was there not one person in the fucking universe who could believe the truth when he spoke it? This wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. Kiara’s father wouldn’t listen to reason any more than this headstrong tracer.

As for the court system . . . yeah, given his father’s reputation, he didn’t stand a chance. He’d be convicted and executed based on his name alone.

If she turned him over to the Gourish government, he’d be gutted long before Kiara’s father realized his daughter was still alive. And if Zamir had already found out she was alive and sleeping with Nykyrian, then there was no telling what her father would do to him for the part he’d played in their affair.

He’d been the one who signed the contract for Kiara’s protection . . . That made him fully responsible for her welfare.

And if the Ritadarions ever got their hands on him . . . Well, their reaction was something best left to horror movies.

“Fine.” He held his hand away from his blaster, hoping to calm her. “Keep the damn bottle. It won’t protect you anyway.”

That apparently was the wrong thing to say.

Before Syn could react, she ran at him, catching him
in the stomach. His breath left him with a loud
oof
as he lost his balance and the two of them tumbled to the floor. She tried to hit him with the bottle.

He caught her wrist. “Stop fighting me.” He pried the bottle from her hand.

She didn’t respond verbally. Instead, she raked her fingernails down the side of his neck, burning a path into his skin.

Anger darkened his vision and, for a moment, all he could think about was killing the woman on top of him. He was tired of her drawing blood every time she got within reach.

Rolling over, he pinned her beneath him. She struggled to throw his weight off, but it was useless. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds.

He caught her wrists in his hands before she could pull his blaster free, and held them beside her face. “Stop it!”

Shahara froze. Her blood pounded a fearful trail through her body. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She refused to be undignified further.

Only one other time in her life had someone held her in this manner and she hated it. She hated
him
.

Bravely, she stared up at his face.

Even this close, she could barely see the difference between his dark irises and the pupils of his eyes. It amazed her that her wrists didn’t hurt from his firm grip, and that his weight didn’t crush her.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, dreading the answer.

To her complete shock, he dipped his head down. And before she could think to turn her face away, his lips covered hers.

The gentle pressure of Syn’s lips stunned her. His kiss was so light, it felt like a feather dancing across her lips, sending a chill down her spine.

A crisp, clean scent of leather and man filled her head. He surrounded her with warmth and, for a moment, Shahara lost herself to the strange sensation of his hips lying against hers, his chest pressing intimately against her breasts. To the foreign, aching throb that began in the pit of her stomach and moved lower.

She sighed as a deep-buried need surged. No man had ever kissed her so tenderly. Most men grabbed at her with hands that hurt and pinched. And the last kiss she’d received had been a brutal assault on her lips that had left them bloody and bruised and sore for weeks.

That wasn’t Syn’s kiss. His soft, tender lips belied the cruelty she knew him capable of.

Closing her eyes, she breathed in the warm, manly scent of him as his tongue gently probed her mouth, dancing with hers before his teeth nipped tenderly at her bottom lip.

Syn closed his eyes, savoring the succulent velvet of her mouth as he inhaled the pure scent of female. Never
in his life had he tasted anything so wonderful. So addictive.

She was sweet and soft. He released her hands and cupped her cheek. Then he left her lips and trailed a path with his mouth down her cheekbone.

Shahara shivered as his whiskers gently scraped her skin before he nuzzled against the sensitive flesh of her neck. Her throbbing intensified as chills spread all over her.

His warm breath tickled her ear while he whispered something poetic in a language she couldn’t understand.

Unbidden, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, caressing the corded muscles that rippled beneath the smooth silk of his shirt. His rich, warm voice continued to soothe her with its strange, melodic language. Lulling her, hypnotizing her.

She’d never known a man could hold her without causing pain and her newfound knowledge amazed her.

Syn shifted and she felt the hard bulge of him against her thigh.

Panicked shock jolted her.

In that instant, Shahara remembered herself and why she’d come. He wasn’t a tender man and he damned sure wasn’t a kind one.

He was a vicious killer.

Hissing, she gripped his ponytail and pulled him away from her.
“Vanna sitiara!”
She caught him under the chin with her fingernails.

His oath matched her own as she raked his flesh. At this point, she didn’t care if he killed her. She refused to ever lie with a man wanted for rape and murder. Men were cruel and abusive by nature and she’d die before she ever submitted to one.

Syn grabbed her hands again and held them by her
face. His breathing labored, he curled his lips into a fierce snarl.

Bravely, Shahara glared her hatred at him. “If you rape me, convict, I’ll tear your heart from your chest and feed it to you!”

The anger fled his features. His eyes went strangely dull as if something from his past shredded him. It was as if she stared into the face of a statue without any emotions or life at all.

“I’ve never raped a woman, and I have no intention of starting now.”

A drop of blood fell from his neck where she’d scratched him and landed on her cheek. He stared at it for a moment before looking back at her eyes. “I’m going to release you. If you attack me again, it’ll be the last time you ever make such a mistake.”

The icy dare in his voice quelled her more than his words. She had no doubt he would make her long regret any more moves against him. And like Gaelin, he would relish her torture. Laugh at her while he did it.

But there would come a time when his guard would fall. Then he would be hers and she’d make him pay dearly.

He released her hands and rose.

Shahara lay there for a moment, warily watching him.

Without taking his gaze from her, he retrieved the bottle from the floor. He gripped it so tightly, his knuckles protruded sharply against the leather of his glove.

“Go ahead, throw it at me.”

A glimmer of shock passed across his features before he recovered his impassiveness. “I should. Hell, if I had any sense at all, I’d kill you and dump your body in the nearest slime hole.”

Shahara lifted her chin defiantly. Far better opponents than he had tried and failed. “Then why don’t you?”

“I have an appointment to keep.”

The unexpected response was far from comforting. But it served to weaken her cockiness.

He slid his hand under his chin and cursed when he withdrew it and saw the blood on his glove. He gave her a look of such loathing that she thought he might kill her after all.

Instead, he turned around and headed into the bathroom.

She wiped his blood from her own cheek and listened to water splash against the basin. Rising from the floor, she stood in the bedroom uncertain about what to do next.

How was she going to get out of this mess?

Was he going to kill her? And just what would he do to her before he took her life? Various terrifying possibilities flashed through her mind, making her shiver.

Hesitantly, she walked to the bathroom door that he’d left partially open. He stood in front of the sink, wiping the blood away with a washcloth.

“What are you going to do with me?”

His hand paused under his chin and he met her gaze in the mirror.

The hatred in the dark stare chilled her all the way to her soul. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’ve never had anyone stupid enough to break into my house.”

The insult brought her temper to boil. “I’m not stupid.”

His disbelieving snort made her want to carve his heart out. “Breaking into my house wasn’t exactly an award-winning act of intelligence. In case you haven’t
noticed, I don’t have a landline or computer here, or any other way for you to contact anyone on the outside. You can’t get through the scanner that runs over the doors and windows unless I disarm it. So where does that leave you?”

Shahara’s stomach churned. It left her at his mercy and they both knew it. “I won’t be your plaything.”

His scathing glare raked her body as if she were the most disgusting thing alive. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

He rinsed out the washcloth and hung it on the towel rack to dry, then pulled out a tube of medicine and began applying it to the scratches. “I’ll be gone until morning. You have the freedom of the place until then.”

He turned around and faced her, his eyes piercing her with lethal coldness. “But I warn you now, there’s only one thing in this life that I treasure and that’s my home. If you so much as put a scuff mark on my floors, I
will
take it out of your hide.”

In spite of the threat and the fact that she knew he would carry it out, Shahara narrowed her gaze. Show them no fear. That was the first lesson she’d learned as a young teen. “I don’t take orders from convicts.”

Faster than she could blink, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him with a steely grasp. His eyes snapped vivid black fire, provoking a potent fear inside her that she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.

In that instant, she knew this man was capable of anything.

His grip tightened. “Mess up anything, and I’ll throw you to a rape gang so fast you won’t even have time to protest before they cut out your tongue.”

Shahara swallowed at the threat that reached the center of her panic in a way nothing else did. It was her very worst fear. Her heart pounding, she stared at him,
unwilling to let him know how much his threat frightened her.

Despite her effort, she had the distinct feeling he knew anyway.

She pulled her wrist free of his tight grasp. Why was he willing to leave her in his home? It didn’t make sense. “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”