So dirty.

She spun, bent at the waist and kicked backward. Her legs were powerful weapons, built for springing high into the air so that she could take flight from the ground. If she had made a solid connection on any part of his body, bones would have snapped.

Instead she only managed to kick air. Iron hands latched onto her ankle. Quentin heaved, and then she was airborne after all. He swung her like a bat at a baseball game, spinning backward. Wind whistled in her ears.

When he let her go, she flew into the corrugated metal of a closed warehouse door. The hollow boom echoed off the surrounding buildings as she slammed into the ground. A starburst of pain bloomed where she made contact with the wet concrete. If the maneuver had happened to almost anyone else, at the very least it would have knocked the breath out of them, but her rib cage and lungs were as powerful as her legs.

She coughed and rolled, pushing hard, hard, because gods he was fast. His boot caught her in the ribs before she could gain her feet. He kicked her so hard it lifted her into the air, and she slammed back into the metal door again.

She hit the ground a second time, only this time she landed on her hands and knees, and all her talons flicked out, switchblade fast. This was finally getting interesting.

She couldn’t kid herself. He let her get to her feet. He stood poised on the balls of his feet in a boxer’s stance, fists ready. She straightened slowly, watching his eyes. They were hard and flat, showing nothing of his intention.

He threw a high jab, aimed at her face.

She didn’t try to block it or hit back. Instead she slid sideways as she grabbed his wrist, twisted at the waist and yanked. He had thrown his body weight forward in the punch, and she used that extension to propel him around so that he struck the corrugated metal door. He was tensing to gather himself for a spring even as his back hit, but she could have told him not to waste his effort.

It was too late. She had him.

Even as he impacted, she slammed his wrist into the door, all five of her talons splayed. They were strong enough to pierce metal, and that’s what they did. She drove them through the door until she literally pinned his wrist, using her own hand as a handcuff. As he instinctively brought up his other hand to strike at her, she grabbed that wrist and drove her talons into the door, tightening the fingers of both hands. Her fingers were not as hard as her talons, and the torn metal cut into her flesh.

It was worth it.

Sharp incredulity twisted Quentin’s face as he realized what had happened. He shouted in rage point-blank into her face as he tried to heave her away from him. It strained her grip through the metal of the door. He was immensely strong, and he might have been able to manage it in almost any other position, but with his arms splayed and her body pressed against him, he couldn’t get enough leverage.

Her voice hoarse, she said, “That never would have worked if you had been any of the older sentinels. They would have known better than to try to trap me against this kind of door. It’s one of those things you learn. If you live long enough.”

He snarled wordlessly, his long, powerful body straining against hers, and it was every bit as glorious as when she sprawled on top of him at the sentinel party. Every bit, and more. He arched his back, pushing hard against the door so that fresh pain bloomed in her rigid hands, and he tried to knee her.

She wasn’t as vulnerable down there as a male was, and again, he couldn’t quite get enough purchase to knock her off of him. With an agile twist of her hips, she opened her legs and straddled his long, hard thigh as he shoved upward. He connected with her sex, not hard enough to bruise but enough to almost lift her off her feet.

She gave an almost soundless grunt and clamped her legs together on his thigh. He bared his teeth and shoved upward again. Even through the barrier of their clothes, the friction felt good. She didn’t need anybody else to tell her how twisted that was. But he was all there, too close and personal, his muscles bunching and flexing underneath hers. The sound he made was raw and animalistic, and he was all trapped, all hers.

They were both breathing heavily. She let her eyes drift half closed as she looked at the strong line of his tanned throat and imagined licking it while his head was tilted back in supplication. Sexual heat flashed through her, stronger than ever before. Instinctively she tightened her legs on his thigh. It increased the friction, and a jolt of intense sensation pierced her body so that she sucked air.

Quentin was staring at her, his face savage. A hard length grew against the jutting bone of her hip. She froze as the delicious, addicting smell of his arousal wrapped around her, as warm as a silken blanket and as inevitable as a python’s tightening coils.

Realization clunked her over the head. She had a feeling it had been trying to get her attention for a while now.

He was fighting the same unwelcome attraction for her as she was for him.

She laughed. Talk about twisted. There they were together, tied up in their own little knot. She whispered, “You know, we ought to just have some hate sex already, and get it out of our system.”

If she had thought his eyes were brilliant before, now they turned incandescent.

The erection pressing against her hip grew harder and longer. The air between them was so charged, they could light up the city for blocks around. It tingled across her nerve endings, raised the tiny hairs at the back of her neck.

Nobody had ever accused Aryal of having an excess of sanity. She deliberately pressed her hips against the hard length of his cock, causing friction for the both of them. They both hissed.

Quentin bent his head close to hers, his teeth bared. Even though she had him trapped, he was still very dangerous. She watched him warily. She knew he had some kind of magical training, and she held herself tensed for some kind of offensive spell.

But he didn’t reach for any magic tricks. Instead he growled, “You may have me pinned at the moment, but you’re trapped too. You can’t do anything with your hands locked like that.”

She twitched a shoulder. She could feel the blood pounding in his body. “I promise you, it’s worth it.”

He was breathing deeply, his gaze focused with laser intensity on her mouth. “I smell your blood.”

“That’s been worth it too,” she whispered. Her hands were going numb. At this rate, she was going to have to work at getting them unclenched again.

He roared, “WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO GET YOU TO BACK THE FUCK OFF!”

Stray floating strands from her tangled hair blasted back from her face. She let her head fall back, carefully arched away from him so he could not strike at her throat with his teeth, and she laughed again. “I dunno, maybe a confession?”

“A confession.” His gaze ran compulsively down the line of her throat as if he couldn’t help himself, but his voice was flat, disbelieving. Then something seemed to snap inside of him. He snarled, “You want a confession? Fine. I broke the law. I broke it more than once. I broke it lots. I liked breaking the law. Are you f**king satisfied now?”

He caught her with her mouth hanging open, and every word he spoke was the truth. She shut her mouth with a snap. “Goddamn it, I knew it,” she said softly. “What do you do, run a smuggling operation?”

“I don’t run a smuggling operation. I did. In the past. I shut it down last year. You won’t find any evidence, because there isn’t any. I’m that good. Everything that happened is locked inside my head. Shipping manifests. Dates, times. I never put any of it on paper. I worked with a double-blind system. Nobody knew the other parties involved. Most of them didn’t know they were smuggling.”

She picked apart every word he said with her truthsense dialed high. Her eyes narrowed, she asked suspiciously, “Why did you stop?”

His chest heaved as he gave an explosive sigh. “Something bad happened. I tried to do something. I wanted to help out a friend and had good intentions, but I almost got a couple of people killed. After that, I pulled the plug on everything except the bar.”

“So that’s it—that’s everything? That’s all you did?” Everything except the something he had tried to do, at any rate. She asked hopefully, “No espionage?”

He snorted. “No.”

She made a face. “No murder for hire? No spying?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” he snapped. “I made damn good money. That’s it.”

Good gods, he was telling the truth. She tried to disbelieve it anyway, but couldn’t muster any conviction. It was … disappointing. She pressed, “What did you smuggle? Drugs? Human trafficking? Guns?”

He glared at her in exasperation. “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic. Of course I didn’t. I smuggled in liquor for the bar, gold and diamonds, some artwork. High-dollar stuff. I might have dabbled in some magic items from time to time.”

She scowled. At the most he had cost the Wyr demesne some tariff money, and a whole lot of her time. “If that’s all you did, why the f**k didn’t you just say so earlier?”

He sneered. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

She studied him, her mouth twisted with frustration. After all this time, that was it. He lost his temper bad enough to spit out the truth, and she didn’t give a shit about any of it after all. She said, watching him closely, “You really gave it all up. You don’t break the law in any way, anymore.”

“No.” Everything in his hard voice and face radiated the truth. “Not since before I decided to try out for the Games and committed to becoming a sentinel.”

“Bah,” she said in disgust. “How pathetic.”

All that obsession, all that work. For what?

She forced her stiff fingers to open and wiggled them out of the holes her talons had torn into the door. Letting go of his wrists as she backed away, she shook out her aching hands and inspected the cuts on her fingers. They stung, but they weren’t too bad. They would heal soon enough.

Quentin pushed away from the metal door immediately and didn’t stop moving until he was several yards away. All the time he stared at her with narrowed eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s your whole reaction—‘how pathetic’?”

She gestured impatiently. “I don’t care about any of that shit.”

Hands on his hips, he angled his head, the perfect image of a man who had been pushed too far. In a very quiet tone of voice, he said, “You. Don’t. Care.”

Was it something she said? She curled a nostril at him. “No, I don’t.”

He detonated.

SIX

Quentin’s wrath took him outside of his body until he felt as if he hovered in the open area, an invisible spirit looking down at the two figures from above.

He roared, “What the f**k do you mean you don’t care? What have the last two hellish years been for, IF YOU DON’T FUCKING CARE?

Aryal stared at him as if he were a lunatic. “Well, I didn’t know what you’d done, did I? You’re a dangerous man. You proved that when you became a sentinel. I knew you did something, but I didn’t know you did just that.” She threw out her hands as she spoke, making a throwaway gesture. “I can’t believe I wasted all that investigation time on a petty thief.”

He was airborne before she had finished speaking the last words. In one giant leap, he was on her, his hands fastened around her throat again. The flying tackle knocked her flat on her back on a snowy patch of pavement. He sprawled on top of her, instinctively shifting so that he trapped her with the weight of his body.

He had never felt this way before, about anything or anyone. Someone was growling. Belatedly he realized that someone was him. He pounded her head on the pavement. “All. That. Time. All. That. Time.”

He was vaguely aware that she had grabbed him by the throat too, the tips of her talons poised at his jugular. He should probably care about that.

She said in a choked voice, “In retrospect, we should have talked about this while I still had you pinned.”

“You would make a paciflstic saint homicidal,” he panted.

She burst out laughing.

He was strangling her. And she laughed.

Incredulity wormed its way into his rage-soaked brain. He stared down at her.

Her angular face was suffused with color, those stormy gray eyes dancing. Her black hair spread out in a sulfurous fan, gleaming dark against the white snow. She didn’t care that his tightening fingers cut off her air supply any more than he cared that her hand was poised to tear out his throat.

His gaze focused on her mouth. She had a kind of strong femininity that was completely unlike the bright artifice and colors that so many modern women employed. No makeup, no jewelry, no fancy stuff done to her hair, and no floaty, flouncy clothes. Nothing about her looks took after conventional beauty, but her mouth was exquisitely formed, the bold lines of her lips softened by generous, curving flesh.

We all recognize something of our own wildness in you. Who had said that? Grym. Her lover.

“You and Grym can’t be mates,” he growled. “Someone would have said something if you were.” She would have been much more stressed at the thought of a month’s banishment from New York. Mates did not thrive well without each other.

If anything, she laughed harder. “You’re still an idiot.”

He had to do something to shut her up, or he really was going to kill her. The pure, hot flame of his fury shifted. The extreme emotion had torn him wide open, and a maelstrom of sexual aggression screamed in. The muscles in his body felt paper-thin, barely able to contain the emotion.

Shifting his hands to fist them in the thick, silken hair at the back of her head, he lunged down to conquer her reckless, anarchistic mouth.

He felt the surprise jolt through her body as his lips locked over hers. She lay flat underneath him where she belonged, and he didn’t coax, tease or entice as he would have with any other woman. He took. Breathing heavily, he forced her mouth open and plunged deep inside with his hardened tongue. His body, his mind, were all on fire. Dimly, a small part of him, the cool intellectual part that wasn’t wholly driven by his internal whip, grew a little thoughtful about his lack of control.