Kinked (Elder Races, #6)

Quentin ate both hares, because, screw it. If Aryal chose not to stick around, she forfeited any supper he had caught and cooked.

Then he sat with his head in his hands. Every now and then he fed logs into the fire and took pulls off the bottle of scotch. A fitful wind gusted through the trees overhead. They didn’t get any rain or snow, but the weather in the Bohemian Forest at this time of year was unpredictable at best, and that situation could turn in a matter of minutes.

Him, give up control. To Aryal.

It was the most self-destructive, cockamamie idea he’d ever heard.

Yet as he faced the harpy, his reaction to her had been more uncontrolled than ever.

He had never before been so close to her when she was in her Wyr form. The sight of her took his breath away. She was still recognizable as Aryal, but her features had become more upswept and pronounced. Her piercing eyes would be able to pick out prey from miles, and good gods, those wings. They spread out behind her in a huge fan. Short, dark gray feathers covered the tops of the wings, close to the powerful humerus bones that held them aloft. They darkened down the wing to the long primary feathers that were pure black.

Like her face, the racy, slim bone structure and musculature of her nude body was accentuated. Her slight high breasts were tipped with small nipples, and from the waist downward, her hips and long legs were covered in small gray feathers that looked like they might be soft. He wondered what she would do if he ran a hand down her thigh.

If only she wasn’t so goddamn magnificent.

She looked alien and completely wild, and then she had leaped into the air, defying gravity. That was when he got it, when he really understood what Grym had meant, because he didn’t just grasp it with his head. He felt it with his gut.

She didn’t fit the concept of what a modern female should be like, and that made her even more annoying to a modern, entitled male such as he. She didn’t defer to his opinion or mask her own spiky personality to fit the concept of any modern behavior, because she wasn’t modern. She was truly one of the most ancient and wildest of creatures.

The fact was, she had probably already curbed herself in some way to fit in at the Tower as much as she did. For the most part, she kept her slashes down to verbal jabs and her predatory instincts focused on her investigations. The rest of her was just plain ornery.

He chuckled without much amusement. He couldn’t even say that he had just grown obsessed with her, because he had already been obsessed with her for some time. Now that his obsession had turned sexual, he couldn’t seem to turn it off. Or maybe it had been sexual all along, and he had only just come to realize it.

She had been right. He had never given up sexual control to anybody else. What would it be like to give it up to her, that pure, wild creature? It was never going to happen, so he would never know.

The nape of his neck prickled, and instinct made him tilt back his head and look at the cloudy night sky. There a gorgeous nightmare spiraled, wings outspread to their fullest as she cocked her head and looked down at him.

How long had she been up there, circling overhead and watching him?

His body clenched. The panther in him wanted to leap at her and drag her down to earth. The man wanted to cover her with his body, and make her give all of that purity and wildness over to him.

She came down and landed a short way away from the trees, snapped her wings back, and shapeshifted into her human form. Then she strode into the camp. She must have flown high, because her black hair sparkled with wetness.

She seemed centered somehow, revitalized. Flying for her must be what taking to his panther form and running in the woods did for him. That was when he had an epiphany.

She had a whip that drove her, just as he did.

She squatted in front of the fire without saying anything. They sat in silence for some time. Oddly enough, it was almost companionable.

Quentin looked at the scotch. The liquid was significantly low in the bottle. What the hell. He offered it to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.

“When you spied on me in my bedroom,” he said, “you liked it.”

She cocked her head at that, considering it for a moment before she shrugged. She drank a mouthful of scotch and passed the bottle back to him. “I loved your cock. The woman and the toys annoyed me.”

He burst out laughing, and a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. “I’ll confess,” he said. “The woman and the toys annoyed me too.”

Aryal looked at him sideways. “Then why do it?”

He took a deep breath and straightened his back. It was a good question.

Why did he do it?