Drowning in Fire Read online

  He reached up as if to touch her face and an invisible force slapped clarity into her brain. She pushed herself away and rolled off the bed. This was a fuck. Nothing more. She’d seen a challenge in him, she’d needed as good a release as he did, and she went after him. Mission accomplished.

  There was nothing more to it. He was water. She was fire. And she had her orders.

  Head on straight now, she turned around to find Griffin still lying there, muscled arms folded behind his head, one dark-haired leg cocked up. Watching her. Utter relaxation made the lines of his body soften, and there was a quiet tilt to his mouth, a warmth in his eyes, that made him seem like a new man.

  And then he began to talk.

  • • •

  GRIFFIN

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” Griffin heard himself say to the magnificent, naked woman standing next to his hotel bed.

  When Kekona cocked her head, a sheet of straight black hair slipped off her shoulder. She was frighteningly confident in her own skin. Extraordinarily sexy.

  “In Utah at the Senatus?” she asked, all casual, like nothing mind-blowing had just happened between them. Like they hadn’t just fucked each other’s brains out. “Or in this room with me?”

  “Technically, you are in my room with me.”

  That could have been construed as a dismissal, but she didn’t bend to pick up her clothes. Made no move toward the door. For the first time in a very, very long while, Griffin had the urge to smile. Just an urge, though; it never quite poked through.

  He crossed his arms behind his head. “Either,” he replied, marveling at his own truth. “Both.”

  She smiled knowingly behind her obsidian eyes, those things that had flashed actual fire when she’d come. For the rest of his days, he’d never be able to get that image out of his memory. He didn’t think he’d ever want to.

  In the back of his mind he registered that she’d spoken the word “Senatus,” that the organization of the elemental races was his true reason for being here, but the vision of Kekona standing there, looking like sex itself, erased pretty much all present thought.

  Not an ounce of fat on her anywhere. Taut skin in an exotic caramel shade he guessed to be somewhere between Pacific Islander and Asian stretched over some seriously sick muscles. She was ridiculously strong. Phenomenally beautiful.

  But the thing that got to him most was how nonchalant she was acting, how she’d so quickly and easily ducked out of his reaching hand. That touch had meant to tell her, however stupidly, that she’d cemented a permanent spot in his consciousness. It hadn’t meant to be claiming, but complimentary. She was looking down at him now like he’d waited on her in a restaurant. Didn’t she just have the same experience he had? Why wasn’t she completely out of her head like he was?

  Oh. Right. Because it was clear that she’d had plenty of sex in her life, and he hadn’t slept with anyone in over two years. Because he’d been hung up on Gwen Carroway after the destruction of their arranged marriage when she’d fallen for someone else—a Primary, no less. Because he’d thought that Gwen was what he’d wanted and had taken his own sweet time getting over her, before realizing that falling for someone because you’d been told to by a bunch of scheming traitors wasn’t really falling for someone at all.

  So he’d thrown himself into leading the Ofarians, rebuilding them, steering them into a new future. Work, work, work. Politics, politics, politics. No time for lovers. No desire for them, really. Until Kekona.

  And what a shocker that had been.

  Though he didn’t want her to leave—that realization making his body tense up all over again—he knew that eventually, soon, she would.

  But she didn’t. Instead she came closer, causing his lungs to pick up pace. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the rumpled bedspread. “Do you want to get a few things out of the way?”

  He sat up, resisting the incessant urge to touch her. “Things. Like what?”

  “Questions.”

  Ah, business. “Ask away.”

  She pursed her lips, a lovely, playful expression. “I meant do you have any for me after your first Senatus meeting, but I’ll bite.”

  He had a ton of questions for her, none of which involved the Senatus.

  “How’d you find us?” she asked.

  He saw no reason not to tell her. “The Board, the old system of Ofarian leadership, had been gathering clues about other Secondary races on Earth. Scattered sightings or unproven occurrences, some cryptic references, that kind of thing. When I took over, I followed the breadcrumbs they’d been hiding.” He folded his arms across the tops of his knees, knowing that the Senatus had been well aware of the Ofarians’ existence for years—maybe even decades—but had deliberately avoided approaching his kind.

  “I already told the Senatus all this,” he added. Which meant that Kekona may have been the chief’s second, but she wasn’t privy to all the information her superior was. Interesting.

  She didn’t respond. “After the Board fell, how’d you get to be leader?”

  “Ah”—he scrubbed at his cheek—“by default? I didn’t know I wanted the position when I was elected, but they voted me in anyway. I’m a bit, um, controversial.”

  Genuine surprise widened her almond eyes. “You didn’t want to be leader? And your people voted you in anyway?”

  Griffin exhaled, remembering how Gwen had refused the new leadership position and nominated him instead. It wasn’t information he worried about sharing with the Senatus. Kekona would relay these words back to them tomorrow, and Griffin thought it might make him seem more humble. “Yes,” he said. Kekona seemed sincerely confused at that, which sparked his curiosity. “How is your chief chosen?”

  “The ali’i, or chief, isn’t chosen. You fight for it. With this”—she lifted a fist—“and this.” She drew a short, sharp inhale, and then expelled a small flame onto her knuckles where it danced without effect or apparent pain. With another inhale, she sucked the fire back into her body. Griffin’s turn to marvel.

  Kekona leaned closer. “So do you want the leadership now?”

  A difficult question. The Senatus hadn’t asked him this much, about his history. Maybe it was time they knew—time they understood where he’d come from to better comprehend what he was fighting for. It would give her something to report back, and in the end it could work to his advantage.

  Strangely, too, he wanted to speak to Kekona’s earnest expression.

  “Yes and no,” he answered truthfully. “I could do without the actual command, but what I want is more important.”

  “Better integration with the Primaries.”

  He nodded, not remotely shocked she’d been told what he’d presented to the Senatus just hours ago. “That’s right.” Shifting on the bed, he realized they were both still naked, and that while he sort of wanted to cover up, she didn’t even seem to notice.

  “But . . . why?”

  This was what he hadn’t told the Senatus, at least not this version, in this way. He thought that the story might sound more convincing to them coming from her, told to her by Griffin in a private setting, rather than him blathering on to three other Secondaries who wore obvious cloaks of doubt and fear.

  “In old Ofarian society,” he began, carefully choosing his words, “you were born into very specific classes. The ruling class, the working class, the soldier class . . . you can guess what I was.”

  The way her eyes flicked appreciatively across his arms and legs made him burn like when she’d been touching him. “I can guess,” she said.

  “I never had any choice in what I was to become. I had no dreams except for what was given to me. No skills other than what I was prepped for, what I’d been made to tend or grow.”

  “Chimerans are kind of similar,” she said, and by the remark she’d made about having to battle for the position of
ali’i, it made sense.

  “When I was a teenager,” he went on, “I was tested, and then trained to be the sole protector of someone who, at the time, was one of our greatest assets: Gwen Carroway, our old Chairman’s daughter. It was all I knew up until two years ago—her and her protection. I was eventually made head of Ofarian security.”

  Kekona blinked and shook her head, long strings of black hair swinging around her shoulders to brush the curves of her breasts. “I don’t understand. That wasn’t your dream?”

  She may not have understood him, but he understood Kekona. Because she’d had to fight to be Chimeran general, she’d nursed her own dream from probably a very young age. She’d seen what she wanted, battled for it, and won.

  “No,” he replied. “It wasn’t. But now my people have the chance to start over, to create dreams outside of Ofarian magic or structure, outside of the Secondary world. Opportunities I never had. I want that for every one of my people. I want that for all Secondaries.”

  Her full mouth twisted and he knew he hadn’t sold her. That was okay. For now. Baby steps. Spying and manipulating was so much easier when it was done out in the open.

  Kekona pulled her feet onto the bed and curled her legs to one side, getting more comfortable with him. He liked that. She was hard and muscular, a clear warrior, but there was a feminine gracefulness to her movements, and it made him hyper aware of her presence, still so close.

  His hand was halfway across the space between them before he realized it. Too late. No turning back. But instead of going for her face again, which he sensed would make her back off, he fingered a piece of her glossy hair. She flinched but didn’t move away.

  “It doesn’t catch fire?” he asked in wonder.

  “Wouldn’t make much sense to be Chimeran if it did, would it?”

  True. “It feels . . .” amazing.

  “What?”

  He shook his head, let her hair slide out of his palm, and rolled off the opposite side of the bed. He went to his bag, ripped it open with more force than was necessary, and pulled out a pair of gray flannel pants. When he looked up, her eyes were skating over him in obvious—and wonderful—approval.

  A slow smile spread across her face as she pushed from the bed and sauntered toward him with powerful elegance. The woman knew how to command a room. She didn’t have to stand on her tiptoes to kiss him, soft and swift, and it was then he first tasted the zing of sweet smoke on her breath. It curled down his throat and made its home inside him, and he knew he was done for.

  “Kekona,” he whispered, before he could stop himself.

  Her head snapped back mockingly. “Yes? Griffin?”

  No one had managed to unnerve him, to embarrass him, in years. He found that he liked it, this reminder that he was real and not untouchable. That he was someone other than a leader, a scapegoat, a man to be feared, admired, or hated.

  He cleared his throat. “Anyone call you anything besides Kekona?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly, he felt very brave. “What can I call you then?”

  With a lift of an eyebrow—arched and dramatic compared to his flat, thick ones—she nodded to the door that opened into the hallway. “On the other side of that, call me ‘general.’ But in here, ‘Keko.’”

  Feeling victorious and electrified, he pushed his hands into the black silk of her hair and tilted her head back. To his delight, she let him. “So this is happening again?”

  “Yes.” She nipped at his bottom lip. “I believe it will.”

  • • •

  The next night, Keko let him throw her onto the bed.

  It had been another grueling night session with the Senatus around the bonfire in which he’d been asked to relay stories of successful Ofarian integration into Primary businesses and schools. The inquiries had planted hope, which, if he’d been smarter, he would have recognized as him having reached the apex before the crashing fall over the back side of the mountain. Because as soon as he concluded talking about an Ofarian man who used to do accounting for the old Board and had recently secured a job at a large Primary firm for equal pay and excellent retirement, the premier and the chief—Aya remaining oddly silent—dragged out example after example of times when the commingling had done more damage than good.

  Instances that he knew far too well. Instances that had resulted in death. Twelve deaths to be exact.

  So when Keko accompanied him back to his hotel room, his mood a murky, roiling cloud of frustration, he’d slammed her against the wall, his mouth claiming hers before she could speak. Spinning her around, he slid one hand down the front of her ratty, loose jeans and the other up her shirt. A smooth, willing piece of heaven, right in his grasp. His for now. She was grinning at him over her shoulder as he picked her up and tossed her onto the bed.

  She gave him a wonderful fight, smiling with her jet eyes the whole time. Exactly what he’d been looking for. But in the end he let her win, because she seemed to like that. She seemed to get off on victory. When it had started he’d wanted a means through which to take out his annoyance and anger, but then as soon as he was inside her, it changed. He just wanted her, the driving velvet of her body, and the casual exchange of words and random thoughts directly after.

  On the third night they didn’t even make it to the bed, doing it on the floor just inside the hotel door.

  On the fourth night of bonfires, the Senatus finally asked him about his story—the one he’d told Keko about growing up in the Ofarian classes, about how he and everyone else he knew had been wedged into lives they didn’t necessarily want.

  It had taken her a few days to relay this information to her chief. Maybe she’d deciphered the growing tension in Griffin over their past few secretive nights together. Maybe she’d actually wanted to help him. But it was dangerous to think the latter, to take the fork in the road that veered toward the personal. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.

  Griffin told the Senatus about his life up until the downfall of the Board, and the other elementals were more receptive than they’d ever been to his words—at least no outward arguments or raised voices. Griffin went back to the hotel jubilant, that small accomplishment stoking his desire. With a silent folding back of the covers, he invited Keko between the sheets for the very first time. He’d expected a laugh, maybe a roll of the eyes, but instead got a slow removal of her clothes, revealing the body he would never, ever get tired of looking at. When she slipped her feet under the top sheet and lay back, the contrast of her dusky skin against the pure, starched white was remarkable and lovely, the whole process achingly slow.

  With an impatient lift of her brow, he got naked under her appraisal. She made him feel like a Chimeran—full of fire and the urge to use it.

  He came down over her and immediately she grinned and tried to resist, to get a leg over him, to return to their games of the prior nights, wrestling for control. But with firm hands on her forearms, he pressed her into the bed. Not hard, but enough for her not to misread what he wanted, or did not want.

  “Can I just be with you?” he whispered.

  Beneath him she softened, but only a little. Enough to remind him that he was leaving Utah after the Senatus bonfire tomorrow and there wouldn’t be another night with her. Enough for him to know that he wanted to slow it down tonight and . . . memorize.

  As he touched her—for the first time really touched her with care—he told her with words how much he loved the way she felt and looked, and the way she did things to him. When he finally pushed inside her and her Chimeran heat coated him, pulled him deeper in, he told her how much he loved that, too.

  She didn’t respond with any verbal declarations, but he hadn’t expected her to. After they came, staring into each other’s eyes, and he rolled off her, she made no move to leave him or the bed. That was a first. And it would also be a last. He hated that thought.

 
She shifted onto her side to face him, and that said more than her unspoken words.

  “Thank you for not trying to make a fight out of it,” he said.

  Her lips rolled inward and he couldn’t tell if the expression was regret or uncertainty. “It’s just how it is with me.”

  “I know.”

  He stared as though seeing her for the first time. The mysteries of her people glittered around her. Her signature had made a comfortable home in his mind and being, nestling in good and tight. He would never forget it, as long as he lived.

  “Do you want to be ali’i?” he asked, because she wouldn’t respect him beating around the bush.

  The answer came without pause. “Yes.”

  “So you’ll eventually have to fight your uncle.”

  She shrugged. “To get where I am now, I had to fight my best friend, Makaha. I fought my brother.”

  “What was that like, fighting your brother?”

  “My older brother. Bane means ‘long-awaited child,’ if that tells you anything about how my parents viewed him.” With a rare glance down, her finger ticked at the edge of the bed sheet. “I’ve been fighting my whole life.”

  “Ah.”

  Looking up, she smiled, and the realization over how much he was going to miss that sight gouged a hole in his chest.

  “The first time I beat two boys at once. Makaha had taken this slingshot I’d made, and when I tried to get it back Bane came over. They taunted me in front of my parents, in front of a lot of people. That’s when my fire came out for the very first time. I laid them both out with my fists and finished them off with flame. I knew then that I’d be general someday.”

  Griffin smiled and laughed. Both happening simultaneously for the first time in years. Thanks to Kekona Kalani.

  “Are you and your brother close?” he asked.

  She seemed perplexed by the question. “As close as family is supposed to be.” Which answered nothing . . . and a lot at the same time. “Bane and I share parents, but Makaha is my dearest friend. My brother in much more than blood.”