“Oh, it’ll work,” he drawled. “It just won’t get me free.”

She bristled. “Then what is your plan? You have to have one. I would.”

He rocked his head back against the wall and watched her through half-lidded eyes. “Come closer.”

“So you can try to hurt me? I don’t think so.”

“No,” he murmured. “So I can touch you. Everywhere.”

She stared at him as if his words were a trick, but his incubus senses picked up the sound of her heart beating faster, her breaths coming in a rolling stutter, and he knew she was putting his audio to visual. “You’re a pig,” she said, with a lot less conviction than he knew she was capable of.

“You want me to turn into a raging monster?” Actually, he wasn’t in much danger at the moment, but she wouldn’t know that. He just… wanted her.

“You have plenty of slack in your chains. If you need release, you have a hand…” She cleared her throat. “The bathroom is right over th—”

“I need to touch,” he growled. “I’m an incubus, Idess. I need contact. A female. You. This is torture.” Sure, he was playing on her guilt, but he wasn’t lying. Having her so close and being unable to do anything about it was killing him.

Her chin came up, all haughty. “You ask too much of me.”

“Then, will you…” He took a deep breath. “Will you kiss me?”

Her lids flew up. “What? No. I can’t.”

“Is it against your angel rules?”

She swallowed hard enough for him to hear. “No, but—”

“Then give me that at least.”

“I don’t have much experience with kissing.” Her gaze jerked away, and he felt the odd need to comfort her.

“Neither do I,” he admitted.

“Liar,” Idess whispered.

“Not about this,” he whispered back.

Their gazes locked. Tension bloomed like a Sheoulin rose, dark, beautiful and, potentially, poisonous. And then, with agonizing slowness, she leaned forward and braced herself on his shoulders. The first, fleeting contact of her lips against his sent a buzz of lust through him. The second contact was bolder, lingering, and the buzz grew strong enough to send reverberations all the way to his toes.

She might not know what she was doing, but it didn’t matter, because what she was doing was enough. More than enough. He lifted his face to meet hers, to intensify the kiss that was already building steam. When her tongue flicked timidly across his bottom lip, he jerked as if he’d been goosed and damned near forgot why he’d asked her to kiss him in the first place.

Steeling himself, he eased his wrist out of the cuff. Flexed his fingers. Wished he could touch her, could run with this kiss and see where it would lead.

Instead, he struck.

Ten

The ominous sound of metal clamping around Idess’s wrist reached her ears a split second before Lore flipped her over and slammed her into the mattress.

“Remember when I said I’d get free and make you experience everything I had?” he growled.

“You bastard!” Still dazed from the kiss, she struck out with her free hand, but he caught her fist, tugged it up to his chained hand, and took it prisoner. Effortlessly, he pinned her with his heavy body and drove his fingers into her jeans pocket.

“I’m the bastard? You’re the one who chained me up.”

“You gave me no choice!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He smiled, and she knew he’d found the key to the cuffs. “Killing Kynan is a no-no. Bad Lore, bad.”

Snarling, she rocked her head up to catch him in his lying mouth, desperate to cause any kind of damage she could. If he freed himself… well, she didn’t even want to think about what he could do to her. To Kynan. He reared back, and she caught only a glancing blow to his chin.

“Feisty,” he mused. “I like it. Gimme more.”

“Oh, I’ll give you more.” The Bracken Cuffs prevented her from morphing into her fallen angel father’s form, but that didn’t mean she was helpless. She brought her knee up hard, nailing him on the inner thigh. He sucked air and wrestled her leg back down before trapping both her legs between his.

Cursing, he lunged, and she heard the click of the key in the cuff lock. In an instant, he was free, and both her wrists were secured. He rolled off her and yanked on the chains, tugging them taut and pinning her to the bed with her arms stretched above her. She shouted in frustration, but he must have taken it as a cry of pain, because he loosened the chains before looping them around the bedposts, effectively keeping her from getting to her feet.

For the first time, she wished she could still sense his emotions, could use the knowledge to get her out of this. Instead, she’d wasted hours burning off the blood link at a distance, feeling what he felt while safely away from him. She liked to think she was strong, but every time the lust he felt pulsed through her, she’d fallen to her knees and prayed for the willpower to not go to him.

“You’re going to pay for this!” She threw everything she had into an assault on the chains, screaming and pulling until she was sure her arms would pop out of their sockets.

Lore reached for her, but snatched his hand away at the last second. Foul words fell from his lips as he found one glove and his jacket on the floor. He tugged them on, and the next thing she knew, he was on top of her again, settling down as if her body was the most comfortable place in the world to be. His weight acted like a blanket, wrapping around her and calming her like a swaddled infant.

“There, now,” he said softly. “The tables have been turned. The captor is now the captive, and all those other fun movie lines I never thought I’d say.”

Idess’s heart pounded against her rib cage as helplessness and fresh anxiety set in. “Let me go.”

“Like you let me go when I asked?”

She swallowed. “Please. You can’t kill Kynan. He’s important.”

“Yeah. Important to me.”

“To the world.”

“I think the world will survive without one human asshole.”

Actually, it might not, but she’d found that demons rarely cared about the fate of humankind, so she switched tacks. “This isn’t just about the world. I have a personal stake in his life.”

He snorted. “What, you won’t earn your wings if he dies?”

“That’s exactly what will happen.”

He rolled his eyes, but when she just stared, he stiffened. “You’re serious.”

“You can’t even imagine.” Tremors of panic swept from her toes to her scalp. Only a handful of Memitim had never Ascended, were doomed to either guard Primori forever or spend eternity as a human, being born again and again and never making it into Heaven. Some had even been snuffed out of existence. But as terrible as those punishments sounded, they weren’t her primary motivation for not wanting to fail.

If she didn’t succeed in protecting the most important human in existence, the very fate of all mankind, of billions of souls, would be affected when the ultimate battle between good and evil erupted on Earth.

Her betrayal of Rami had weighed on her for twelve hundred years, and every day she’d prayed for a chance to beg forgiveness. But if she betrayed the human race? There would be no absolution.

Something hot and wet dripped down her cheek. A tear. Geez, she hadn’t cried in centuries. Not since the day Rami had Ascended. Before she knew it, the tear turned into a stream and suddenly she wasn’t just sniffling or even crying. She’d gone into a full-on bawl that included great, shuddering sobs and gasps for air.

“Idess… calm down… Idess?” Lore’s hands framed her face. “Hey. It’s okay. Easy, Angel. Easy…”

She cried harder. She couldn’t stop… it was as if she’d been storing tears for all these hundreds of years, and now, like a dormant volcano that had finally erupted, the flow wouldn’t be stemmed.

Then Lore’s lips were on hers, and he was kissing her. His mouth followed the trail of tears across her cheeks as his thumbs, one bare, one leather-clad, swept back and forth across skin that had grown as sensitive as if it were sunburned.

“Shh…” He tenderly kissed her ear. “It’s all right.”

“No,” she moaned, because it was far from all right.

His hands stroked her cheeks, his bare thumb drifting lazily across her bottom lip. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m not used to handling anything like this. I don’t know what to do.”

“I—” She cut off when the tip of his thumb slipped into her mouth. She didn’t think. Didn’t want to.

On impulse, she latched on to it and drew it deeper into her mouth. His eyes darkened and his mouth fell open so his piercing flashed and wow, if she’d thought she’d had power over him before, when he’d been at her mercy, chained, and needing release… it was nothing compared to now. The knowledge that she could affect him while she was restrained was a revelation.

Now she just had to figure out how, exactly, to use what she’d just learned.

Drawing on her very rusty seduction skills, she swirled her tongue around his knuckle and then nipped the pad. When he released a ragged breath, a zing of pure excitement shot through her in a powerful, almost sexual rush. Her br**sts grew achy, her belly fluttered, and okay, there was no almost about it. Bringing a male pleasure was an aphrodisiac, for sure.

“I hate how much I want you.” His voice was rough, as though he also hated that he’d made such a confession.

She squeezed her eyes closed. “Is it bad that I’m glad you hate it?”

“I’d think it was weird if you didn’t.” He pulled his thumb from her mouth and slid his hand along the curve of her neck. Her skin tingled under his palm, and her ni**les tightened into hard little beads.

Why did he have to be so understanding? She wanted to rail at him, to fight him, but he captured her mouth with his in a surprisingly gentle kiss given how tense his body was, how rapid his breathing. His tongue teased the seam of her lips, tiny, wet flicks. She told herself that he wasn’t affecting her, that she wasn’t loosening up, that opening up to him was about seducing him.

But as she parted her lips, all she could think about was how good it felt to be touched like this, no matter what the circumstances.

With a moan, Lore thrust his tongue into her mouth to tangle with hers. The cool, smooth piercing against her tongue was an erotic contrast to the rough heat of the kiss. He shifted to ease his hand between them to her breast, and lower, his arousal came into contact with her core. Against her will, she arched against him, welcoming the pressure and friction and sudden hot wetness that flooded her.

She had enough play in the chains to thread her fingers through his hair, and the moment she did, he jerked as though he’d felt an electric shock.

“What’s wrong?” she murmured against his lips.

Lifting his head, he blinked down at her. “Just…” He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Tell me.” She had no idea why she wanted to know so badly, given that he’d just imprisoned her and made her cry.

He also made her burn.

But he said nothing, instead he buried his face in the curve of her neck and shoulder and kissed her there. Again, she arched up, and he began to grind against her, sparking a deep ache.

His hand roved down, between their bodies, and with a flick of his nimble fingers, he ripped open her jeans. Panic flared, and she stiffened.

“Lore… no. I can’t.”

His calloused palm slid into her panties to cup her intimately, and she nearly swallowed her tongue. “Can’t what?”

“H-have sex. Intercourse.”

A soft curse whispered across her skin. But then one finger slid between her folds and his lips caressed her ear as he said, “Can you do this? Let me make you feel good?”

Yes. “No,” she moaned, gasping when his fingertip brushed her clit.

“You’re lying. I can feel it.”

Yes, she was. Sort of. This didn’t have anything to do with her vow of chastity. This was about her, and what being intimate in any way with this man would do to her.

“Don’t,” she said, but her body betrayed her, and she rocked into his touch.

“Don’t what?” One finger slipped inside her core, and she nearly wept with pleasure. “Don’t do this?”

She couldn’t speak anymore. Even breathing had become an effort. Intercourse and self-gratification were forbidden, but what about gratification at the hands of others? Oh, no doubt it was prohibited, but even Rami had admitted that there was a murkiness in the vow, probably intentional, to allow for free will to get you into trouble.

And Lore was definitely trouble.

“Do you want to come?” Another finger joined the first, stretching her sensitive tissue and sending streams of almost overwhelming sensation straight to her brain. “Say it.”

Her teeth were clenched too hard for her to speak. She squirmed, trying to get his thumb to the right place, trying to get it away from the right place—both, neither, because she didn’t know what she wanted at this point.

He didn’t let up, kept making little back-and-forth sweeps across the tip of her cl*tthat drove her out of her mind and to a place where her physical needs were beating down her thoughts.

“Say it,” he murmured.

“No,” she gasped.

“I want to watch.” He dipped his head and brushed his lips over hers. “I want to see you come so badly, Idess. Let me.”