Heat

Chapter Twelve

Raven swam in a haze of light, surrounded by invisible colors. She still knew they were there, somehow, but at least they had become invisible, so she knew she had to be coming down. She also knew she was in the hotel and tied to the bed, which was in itself a marked improvement over earlier, when she had honestly believed she was swimming. Breaststroke and everything. Yeah, he was a heavy-handed bastard and a murderer, but give the Devil his due, Kane made some nice shit.

And speak of the Devil…

Kane unlocked the door and came inside, one arm curled around a bucket of Colonel Sanders’ finest. He glanced at her, grunted, and closed the door. “How do you feel?”

The question sparked a strong sense of déjà vu. He must have asked her before.

“Pretty good.” When he only arched a brow at her, she added, “Nothing hurts.”

“Really?” He put the food down, tossed his hat on the table and shrugged out of his coat. “Nothing?”

“Well, okay, my arms hurt, but that’s from being tied up, you jerk.” Oops. Shouldn’t have called him a jerk. She guessed she wasn’t as sober as she thought she was.

“I wouldn’t have to tie you up if you’d behave,” he replied mildly, coming to her side. “You don’t have a wide stripe of self-control.”

And oooh, did she want to answer that.

Kane fingered the metal ornamenting her breasts and belly, then parted her pussy lips and stroked cautiously at her labia. His hands were completely impersonal, his expression merely academically interested. “This doesn’t hurt?”

“A little, but only when you touch ‘em. And it’s not so bad.” Raven nibbled at her lip, debating the wisdom of her next words. “Please untie me.”

He raised his eyes to meet hers.

“Please.”

“I think one more night will do you good,” he told her.

He was serious.

“Kane, please!” Raven cried. “My arms are killing me!”

Kane reached up to enclose her arm in his hands. He rubbed slowly, kneading at her biceps with the rough pads of his fingers. Her strained muscles came unlocked, much as Raven wanted to resist, and in the end, she shut her eyes and just tried to pretend she was somewhere else. It wasn’t hard. Not in the state she was in.

He went to work on the other arm, chuckling. “I don’t know why I do these things to myself,” he said conversationally. “I’d love to have you untied. And grateful. But, damn me, I love to torture you even more.”

His hand strayed down to the crux of her splayed legs and stroked past steel and into secrets. She winced at the bruisy ache his touch awakened, and he growled low in response. “I’d have to be a lot more careful than I know how to be,” he muttered, and then gri

“Untie me,” she said. “There’s things I could do.”

“Oh, I know.” He laughed softly, his finger driving slow up inside her, teasing her with uncustomary gentleness. “And I want you to do them, that’s the hell of it. Am I hurting you, Raven?”

“A little.” And behind the hurt, there was that glowy good-will that was the echo of his waning drug, a thing that made the pain easy to endure.

He adjusted the angle of his thrusting hand. “And now?”

“No,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.

“You look so unhappy,” he observed. “Your face is a liar, Raven. You know you like what I do to you.”

“When the sun gets hot, you get hard,” she said, and his hand stopped moving. “Do you like it?”

Silence.

Stupid drug-addled thing to say. She didn’t much care. Colors were everywhere.

Then laughter, low and genuinely pleased. His hand resumed its lazy rhythm on and inside her. “Mm, I like that. Kanetus E’Var y tantanka Vahst. Ha.” His fingertip began to rub in tiny, rapid circles as he thrust and Raven ground up at him with that sleepy-brained pleasure before remembering she hated him and trying to pull away.

“No no no,” Kane crooned, leaning over her as he rubbed. “Ge-sa en Vahst. I don’t care. And I don’t let you care. I am Heat. Ahhh.” The sound came from him as he arched against her, his bare chest pressing against hers. He grazed his sharp teeth along her shoulder and then whispered, “You’re wet, Raven. You are. Listen. You don’t have to open your eyes if you don’t want to. You can hear it.”

She could. She could hear the sucking, greedy sounds of her body wanting what he gave her. “So what?” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“No, you’re right, it absolutely does not.”

He took his hand from her suddenly, and Raven’s eyes flashed wide. She bucked her hips, but he was already standing and walking away, leaving her keyed and empty. She stared after him in disbelief and then struggled, really struggled, against the sheet binding her ankles. Kane leaned against the wall, chewing on a piece of chicken. He watched her, smiling.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Since that very first time at the rave on the beach, there had only been two kinds of sex for Raven: either it was good and she came, or it was business and she didn’t. Kane had proved he could make her cum whether she wanted to or not. He was a king and a country all his own, but that didn’t give him the right to do this, to make her hot and then shut her down. It wasn’t fair. It just…wasn’t fair!

But an endless bout of pitching, kicking and pulling got her nothing but a burning sensation where her bindings chafed. Exhausted, she fell back, capable only of writhing in weak futility. Her efforts had sent her heart to racing, and that in turn only stirred up the quasi-intoxication of her brain, loosening her lips even though she was just sober enough to understand the un-wisdom of what she was about to say.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I never know with you,” he replied seriously. “Maybe I’m waiting for you to ask me nicely.”

“You untie me right now, you son of a bitch!” she screamed.

He burst out laughing.

She lost it. With her inhibitions firmly out the window for now, she unleashed a rage of truly volcanic proportions. She bucked and banged the headboard. She cursed him until she ran out of profanities and was reduced to wordless tantrum-screaming. She managed to knock a picture off the hotel wall and tip the lamp on the nightstand over, but that was it. Ultimately, she wore out and sagged into the bedding, choking on the rawness of her throat, sweaty and trembling with strain.

“I hate you,” she said, her voice cracking.

Kane strolled up beside her and set the bucket of chicken on the bedside table. He planted a knee on the mattress and then swung his leg up and over her, straddling her hips. She glared at him, her jaws tightly clenched, and he rocked a little, settling himself with insolent slowness atop her. He took a drumstick from the bucket and pinched off a bite, holding it to her lips.

Without thinking, she lunged up and bit him on the hand.

Kane hissed through his smile and his hips ground down at hers. It brought pain back to her in a sickening bloom, but it woke that druggy pleasure also. Raven gasped, her eyes rolling back with the force of the conflict, and writhed luxuriantly beneath him. Somewhere in the middle of her sensual awakening, he started to feed her. She ate mechanically, but there was something unsatisfying about the way the chicken broke open in her mouth. She kept trying to spit it out, to get her teeth on the hand that fed her, and every now and then, he’d let her.

“You’re still a little under, aren’t you?” he murmured. He tossed the bones indifferently to the floor and leaned forward, pressing his hands to the headboard and bending until his chest just lightly touched hers. His breath came in puffs against her face and she closed her eyes away from the sight of him overwhelming her vision.

He growled, a sound that vibrated through his chest and into her, stiffening her nipples and coarsening her breath. She turned her face into the pillows, not sure whether she were escaping him or offering herself, but she knew he’d take and he did. He nipped at her exposed jaw, lightly at first, and then as deeply and intensely as any kiss. Pain squeezed a sound out of her; he responded by moving his hips back and forth over hers. She could feel him stiffening through his clothes and she pressed up against that hardness, her mind fogging with opiate pleasure.

Kane’s hand pushed between them, feeling carefully at her slick sex. She moaned, trying to impale herself on his searching fingers, but though he ground his palm against her, he wouldn’t give her what she wanted. The pitch of his growl changed from that sensual rumble to one of sharp frustration, and then he pushed himself back to sit on her thighs. He peered at her splayed sex and bared his teeth.

“It’s okay,” Raven heard herself say, speaking fast and pleadingly. “I’m fine, it doesn’t hurt, it really doesn’t. It’ll be fine. Fuck me.”

He muttered one of his hard alien curses, glaring at her pussy. “No.”

“You bastard!” she said, and burst into tears.

“I know what that means and I had a father,” he replied, cocking a brow at her. “So that isn’t a very nice thing to say. Do you know what happens to people who say unkind things to me?”

For just an instant, lucidity froze over the swirling chaos of Raven’s mind. “You break their heads open,” she whispered.

He smiled faintly. “Besides that.”

Raven frowned, relaxing a little, and let some of that syrup thicken up in her brain again. “You hit them?”

“I do that, too,” he agreed. “But I don’t feel like hitting you right now. Guess again.”

Squarely back in i

“That isn’t very nice either, but I like the way your mind works.”

“I give up,” Raven grumped.

“Too bad, you had some really good ideas.” Kane reached down and stroked all around her pussy without actually touching it. “But no. Do you know what I do to Ravens who aren’t nice to me?”

“What?” she wailed.

He leaned forward, his face right against hers. “Nothing,” he said softly.

And then he got up from the bed.

She couldn’t believe him. She physically could not, and it was a physical inability, leaving behind it a physically cramping pain. The front of his pants bulged with the proof of his readiness and his desire and there he was, walking away from her as she lay spread-eagled on his goddamn bed. She screamed his name, and he reached down off-handedly, picked up her t-shirt, and came back to stuff it in her mouth.

“Tomorrow,” he said, clearing her brow of stray strands of hair. “Tomorrow, you’ll be healed up enough to travel again, and you’re going to look back on this and wonder how much you dreamed. Personally, I hope you remember all of it. Particularly this.” He reached down toward her sex.