Love for a memory, p.6
Love for a Memory, page 6
Darius had taken care of her then, but that looked ordinary to him. The flu. Seeing her after she had been tortured would have been unacceptable. To that day, Sophia didn’t regret the pact she’d made to keep Darius in the dark. Even if she had puked her guts out for a week to pay for it.
Once he’d shown her their enemy was quiet for the moment, Zeke turned off the display and set it to record, before grabbing a pillow from the couch and stuffing it into the vent so their own conversation wouldn’t make it down to the ones hunting for them.
With that done, he locked the door to the unit and walked back over to her slowly, standing on the side of the bed closest to her with his arms crossed over his chest.
“It’s not going to happen again.” He said simply, without getting any closer to her.
Sophia continued to stare at the ceiling. “I’ve lived for a long time, and those rookies managed to catch me. Not only that, but they have to show up here after I thought everything was safe again. They have to show up here at a time in my life where I actually have someone that I care about, and that I want to keep around. Someone that I…”
She only paused for a moment, but then she kept going. “Someone I have serious feelings for. Now everything is just going to get fucked up all over again, but I guess that’s one of the things I’m best at.”
“Wow. Way to make it all about you.” He shook his head, walking away to take his shirt off and toss it on his bag by the wall before he turned back to the bed and laid down next to her. “The fact that they’re staying in this hotel means they’re not here for you. They’re here for Aimee and Cody, though I’m not sure if they’re even positive about Cody. There’s no way they know you’re here. I rerouted your flight five ways from Sunday just to get back at you for screwing up the plans I’d made for your itinerary in the first place, so I know.”
“Thanks.” She finally closed her eyes, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the Hunters in the room below. “You know, I doubt I would even be able to use my hands if I hadn’t made a healing pact after that. The man is particularly vicious when he wants information. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him.” Sophia finally unclenched her hands slowly. “And I would be blind in one eye.”
“Made a good choice with that pact, then. You couldn’t pull off the eye-patch thing. You could try, don’t get me wrong, and I love a naughty pirate wench as much as the next guy who’s watched too many Gore Verbinski movies, but I prefer your eyes exactly the way they are.” He raised his head just enough to glance down the bed at her. “And your hands.”
“This isn’t a joke, Zeke. If you had any idea, everything that I’ve had to sacrifice to live…” Slowly, Sophia turned onto her side and just looked at Zeke. Every time she was around him she felt like she had to keep herself tough, to keep herself from looking even a little weak, or he might get bored with her.
Sometimes, though, it wasn’t easy keeping all her secrets.
“No one that I’ve ever met knows where the Mark came from, or if they do, they’re not telling. Even my parents didn’t know, all those years ago. Hunters have been around just as long as we have, in one form or another.
“They’ve always been vicious, even if their weapons change along with some of their methods. Hunters found our village when Darius and I were young, and everyone was trapped. It was a massacre waiting to happen. My parents were well-known in the village. They were some of the first targets because they were the source for so many Markings.
“I was thirteen when I was Marked, my mother’s last gift to me along with her life. She and my father made a pact with the Voice that if they sacrificed their lives, we would be shielded from any Hunter’s eyes for a year. So we would have enough time to get away, to learn to negotiate with the Voice, and to protect ourselves.
“My first pact was about memories. It was something that helped us along our way, and it was something that gave me leverage over the people I stole from. It taught me a lot. In the end, Darius and I decided we would find a way to live as long as we could to protect the same type of people our parents loved so much. Getting caught by Hunters over an attractive fuck was an insult to my parents’ memory and to thousands of years of hard work. This is a big fucking deal to me.”
“I’m getting that.” He said quietly, having listened attentively to the story he’d never heard before. Darius and Sophia had always been secretive by nature. It was something that everyone in the covenant accepted, including Zeke. “And you are a big fucking deal to me.”
Sophia reached out and ran her hand along the side of his face before she slid in closer and wrapped her arm around him. She pressed her forehead to his after the kiss, and she sighed heavily against his lips. “Most of the time I think you’re just going to get bored with me if I’m not the badass woman that you keep telling me you think that I am.”
“You couldn’t stop being badass any more than I can stop being OCD, sweetheart.” He moved one arm around her shoulders to hold her against him. “And life with you is far from boring. Chasing leads, crunching numbers, and single-handedly amassing a fortune for our covenant that would make most corporate CEOs blush every day, yeah, that gets boring. But these last few months have been a lot more than that.”
“I know.” She moved her lips to his jawline before she started nibbling down his neck. “And honestly, I don’t care if this ends up in one big fucking mess. I don’t want to be this unnamed thing that we are.”
He rolled onto his back to pull her on top of him, his fingers tangled in her hair to keep it out of his face. He ran his fingers down over the scars along the back of her neck that he never asked about. “We can talk about naming this thing we are in the morning.” It was clear he had other ideas for the moment.
As she brought a knee up to his waist to trap him beneath her, his hand answered her touch, moving along the underside of her thigh to pull her closer with a tug that was seldom interested in being gentle.
Sophia quickly pulled off her t-shirt and bra and threw them aside before she ran her hand across the waist of his shorts. He was already shirtless, so she was more than glad to go for the shorts as she continued to hover above him. “I didn’t want you to come with me, but all of a sudden, I’m glad you did.”
“Somehow I thought you might be.” She was too far away to pull back into a kiss, but his hands ran up over her breasts freely to massage her neck and shoulders. “It’s like I said before, the faster you knock it off with being pissed at me, the sooner you can get to enjoying things.”
His touch was rough as his hands moved down over her nipples slowly, already hard and standing to attention beneath his palms. She sat up straighter on top of him and tilted her head back as she moaned just loud enough for him to hear. He teased her a little too well, even though she was still halfway dressed.
After a moment of letting his fingers continue, she tried to refocus her efforts on getting his shorts off. Sophia leaned down into him so that her breasts were almost touching his chest before she started to slide down so that she could take his shorts off slowly. “You mean the sooner…we…can get to enjoying things.”
“Yes, I believe that is what I meant by that.” He made no move to stop her from doing whatever she wanted, and laid there on the bed once she was finished removing his boxers as well, bending one knee with his hands behind his head.
He was taller than she was, and she was just over six feet tall, but he was built more lean than she and Darius were. He didn’t show off his muscles like some men she knew, but the man had hardly any fat on his toned body. The tattoos around his Mark stood out on his shoulder, but he didn’t have any others that were visible at the moment, though Sophia had seen the large tattoo that covered his back on a number of occasions. Right now, she had other things to look at.
Sophia slid completely off of his body to get rid of the rest of her clothes before she moved back to his side again. Her hand slid across his thigh before she ran her fingers across the most attentive part of him. The first time she’d seen him naked, she was pleasantly surprised about how well-endowed Zeke was, and she’d savored it ever since. He could satisfy her in any way she could devise, and a long life had made her intensely creative. When her fingers wrapped around him, she kept her pace slow to take vengeance for the way he had teased her nipples.
He took her other hand in his as he moaned, then pulled her up into a kiss as she teased him, running his hand over her breasts roughly as his tongue danced with hers. Nothing about his intimacy with Sophia had ever been quite what he had expected before her, though he should have known they wouldn’t be, knowing all he did about her in the first place.
She had a rare kind of patience with their lovemaking most of the time, savoring everything about it fully instead of being in a rush to reach a foregone conclusion. He did his best to match her patience most of the time, but somehow he was never quite able to control himself as long as she was. Not only was she one of the most badass women he’d ever known, but also one of the most talented, and his every caress against her skin, his every moan was an act of appreciation, including the caress that slowly made its way down from her breasts to between her thighs.
She kissed him roughly as she stroked him, but eventually she let go to grab onto his shoulder, moving them both so that she was back against the bed and he was above her.
Sophia opened her eyes just a moment to look up at him before she kissed him again, giving him control, which was not something she normally gave anyone. At all.
“I’m all yours, you know.” She whispered against his ear before she nipped against his skin, her legs parting slowly to give him whatever access he wanted. As patient as she was, it didn’t mean she was any less eager to let him explore her body.
His lips returned to hers, kissing her back into the pillow as his hand slid up her thigh. Though his kiss was gentle, his hand was not as he shoved her legs apart, then slid slowly up to the center of her. She could feel him smile as he found her dripping wet and ready for all he had in mind. His fingers slid into her delicious heat and circled her clit. “So it seems.” He took one of her hands and held it up against the headboard, taking yet more of the control.
Sophia moaned softly as his fingers explored and teased, but she knew exactly what Zeke was capable of, and it was more than a few pleasurable touches. “Surely that’s not all you have.” She challenged him casually. It was what they thrived off of, after all, challenging and constantly one-upping.
The fact that she could still speak at all was enough to challenge Zeke, and he chuckled as two of his long fingers slid inside her, moving torturously slowly until they found a spot inside her that his flawless memory remembered from a hundred other times they’d been together. As soon as his fingers found what he was looking for, his fingertips beckoned faster inside of her, quickening their pace as he kept her pressed into the mattress. “Too much?” He teased with a chuckle against her ear as his fingers withdrew teasingly.
“N…no…” Her hips responded to his fingers as much as he would allow, and the volume of her moans increased slightly. “More.” She demanded after a groan, impatient for more.
Zeke’s expert touch was as precise as it was wild against her clit, and he knew the moment she was about to get exactly what she wanted. He drew back from it, his touch stopping exactly where it was until her hips bucked violently against his hand.
He tormented her with another few kisses for one ragged breath, then another, and another, before his fingers resumed with a fervor. Between fucking her with his fingers and circling her sensitive clit, he could feel the tension in her cresting. Her back arched, her muscles drawing tight as a bowstring.
Sophia’s moan turned into a growl of pleasure as her entire body shook with the force of an orgasm. She had needed it more than she ever planned on admitting to Zeke, simultaneously cursing and blessing the fact that he knew her well enough to seduce her when she was so worried about those downstairs. He had her a little too well figured out.
When Zeke finally slowed his touch, she pushed him over roughly so that he was the one on his back. Still gasping from the pleasure that ripped through her body, she moved herself on top of him quickly and took her turn at control. His focus on pleasing her had him more than ready for her, and she held her dripping sex just above him before she slid down slowly onto him. His cock pushed into her centimeters at a time, and the fullness of him had her gasping.
Zeke’s hands went to her waist as he savored the heat of her, looking up into her dark eyes. When she had taken all of him at last, he moaned and grazed his hands up her sides to her breasts to circle her nipples as she rode him.
This was how he always thought of Sophia whenever she’d entered his thoughts in the last few months, not to mention a few hundred times before she’d actually gotten into bed with him. Beautiful, powerful, in control, and in every way welcome to every part of him she wanted.
“More.” He growled with a teasing smile in answer to her own demand.
She kissed him even as he held her breasts, a touch of power moving through the contact that Zeke had only recently learned about from her. Sophia was more in tune with the Voice than most of the Marked Zeke knew, and even in that moment, she had more clarity of mind to use it than she had a right to. Without any explanation, Zeke’s pleasure increased along with the pace of Sophia’s hips, and she smiled as she watched his face respond to the spike. Being able to trade her own pleasure for the ecstasy of her lovers had been a deceptively simple pact, but it was a weapon she had deeply enjoyed using over the centuries. Zeke was no exception.
His groans grew louder and louder as Sophia rode him, shaking the already unsteady bed until it slammed over and over into the headboard loudly. His arms eventually wound their way around her back as he drove himself deeper into her, kissing her furiously as his vision swam with stars.
Eventually he rolled them over again on the huge bed, burying his face against her neck. He growled her name the moment before he climaxed with a gasp, and his entire body shook with the intensity of it as his heart slammed against the inside of his chest.
As soon as he climaxed, Sophia could feel the restoration of the sensitivity of her body, and she grinned as she kissed the side of his neck, tasting his salty sweat. Her legs wrapped around him as soon as he flipped them over again, and her fingers gripped onto his back. Most of her pacts were selfish in nature, but she loved that pact more than most. Rarely had she been with a man that she used it with, but she loved the fact that she could make them feel as special as she felt when she was with them.
“Had enough?” She teased as she whispered into his ear, his body still trembling against hers.
“Of you? Are you kidding?” He was breathless, still unwilling to move. He kissed her roughly along her neck and eventually pushed himself up to move his kiss back to her lips. “Not even if I live to be as old as you are.”
Sophia kissed him several more times and kept her legs around his waist to keep him inside of her a little longer. She liked the closeness, the feeling of them still joined together, his body pressed against hers. “I hope you do. Enough with secrecy. I don’t care if Darius knows, I just want to do this with you all the time, kiss you all the time. I don’t care who knows. Who hears. Every woman would be jealous, and that’s fine by me.”
That made him laugh as he finally moved to lie beside her with one hand behind his head. “Every woman who knows me would think you have piss-poor taste in men, is what they’d feel. As for what your brother’s going to do about it…you’d know that better than I would.”
“He’ll probably get mad at me, but then you and I can go do another round of this, and I’ll forget all about it.” She grinned and kissed him until she was breathless. “Any complaints?”
“Sounds like a decent plan. Element of surprise, certainly, favorable turnout.” He rolled onto his back, though he had to contort himself to keep from falling off the bed. “If it goes that smoothly, though, I’ll probably die of shock.”
Sophia moved closer and rested her head on Zeke’s chest, smiling as she heard his strong heartbeat. She wrapped her arms around him and held tightly as she started to calm. Her enemies were only a short distance away, but that didn’t mean she was hopeless about the situation. Especially not with Zeke repeatedly telling her that he wasn’t going to let her die. “Cuddling isn’t really our thing, but I think I’ll try it out. Just for now.”
“That would be a first, true enough.” He pushed her hair out of her face and shifted to get a little more comfortable. “Spooning that turns into wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night sex, yeah, we’re semi-pro at that, but not so much the cuddling.”
She yawned only a few times before she was completely out, still holding onto him. They had plenty of roughness between them, between arguments and sex, but it was a rare thing for them to just hold onto each other. Peacefully. But rare was nice, from time to time.
* * * * *
As the entire hotel seemed to shake around them, a pounding noise coming from the room directly above, Travis looked up from his work in annoyance. “Seriously?” He asked in exasperation, since the noise continued for what seemed like an inhumanly long time.
“The whores in Vegas must be trained for endurance.” Cassandra put aside her tablet and laid back in her bed. There was no way she could focus on her work when the couple in the room above them was obviously having a better time than she was. “I’m a little jealous.”
“Are you kidding? You’re a lot jealous. Please just tell me you didn’t download Tinder again to window shop. I hate it when you get that desperate.”
Cassandra glared at him, but she couldn’t exactly say that she hadn’t when she definitely had. “I’m not desperate. I’m just…needy. See, this is why companionships can get complicated. You can’t tell me listening to that hasn’t made you want to jump someone and get your own party started.”
“It’s made me want to make sure I find a quiet bed to do it in when the mood does strike me, I can tell you that much.” He sighed as he looked over at her and shook his head. “Go on then. We’re not likely to make any progress on anything past midnight, even in this city. The investigation we need to do will have to wait till tomorrow.”
