Now I was thinking about all that pretty skin.
And I’d seen a decent amount of it.
Had I thought she was plain before? Plain and pretty? I was reevaluating that observation when the bathroom door finally opened and Josie emerged.
Oh for the love of the gods hiding in Olympus, she was wearing a robe. Not even one of those awful terrycloth, unisex robes a lot of hotels had. That wasn’t how this hotel rolled. She’d found a thin, silk one that had been hanging on the bathroom door. It was cinched tight in a way that drew attention to her small waist and rounded hips.
The robe was beige and damp in interesting areas, like right below her navel, above the belt, and in the valley between her breasts. She sucked at toweling off. Not that I was complaining. My gaze moved to her breasts. Her nipples were clearly visible, pressing against the thin material.
Gods.
I spread my legs, hoping she didn’t look at my lap. Nylon pants don’t do much when it comes to hiding an erection.
She walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t want to put the other clothes back on,” she said, peeking at me through thick lashes. “You’re…you’re the one staring now.”
My eyes were glued to her. “I am.”
Her stare met mine for a moment, and then flickered away. “Rude,” she muttered, glancing back at me.
I grinned. “Your friend is supposed to bring your clothes over. It will probably take her a while. Some of the mortals were too close to your dorm room when we were there. She needs to make sure anyone who thought they might have heard or seen something doesn’t repeat it…or remember it.”
Sucking her lower lip between her teeth, she looked away. “How will she do that?”
Dropping my feet to the floor, I set the empty bottle aside. “She’ll use a compulsion to make them either forget what they heard or saw, or she’ll make them think something else happened.”
That got her attention. Those deep blue eyes were on mine again. Her brows knitted in confusion, pinching her face in a way that was almost…cute. I drew back. Cute? “So a compulsion is kind of like mind control?”
“Yeah.” I brushed my hair back off my face. “Pures can do it. Any of the gods can. Halfs can’t. They are vulnerable to compulsions like a mortal would be.”
She seemed to consider that. “Can you do it?”
I nodded.
Her fingers nervously fluttered over the knot in her belt. “Does compulsion work on me?”
“It shouldn’t. You’re a demigod.” I paused. “But your powers have been bound, so who knows? I can give it a try.” The look on her face said she’d rather I didn’t, but that didn’t stop me. My gaze met hers and held it. “Take off your robe.”
Her lips parted, and then her mouth gaped open. “What the hell?”
Disappointment rippled through me. “Guess it doesn’t work.”
“You’re a pervert.”
I shrugged. “Been called worse.”
“I bet,” she muttered crossly.
“You have no idea.” I stood, raising my arms above my head and stretching. Her next question surprised me.
“You said you can use the elements? Can you…show me one?”
Lowering my arms, I watched her. “So you want a show and tell?”
She hesitated and nodded.
My first instinct was to tell her no, because I’d had enough of that in my life, but that’s not what I did. Lifting my arm toward her, I opened my hand, palm up. While pures usually only excelled at using one element, usually the ability that ran in their families, summoning any of the elements was second nature to me. I guessed it would be the same for her once she was able to tap into her abilities.
I didn’t even have to really think about it.
Heat rolled across my skin, licking into the air around me. A spark appeared above my palm, followed by the faint scent of burnt ozone. A second later, a small ball of amber-tinged flames appeared, the outer layers of the fire encasing my hand.
“Holy wow.” Josie pushed off the bed. “Your hand is legitimately on fire!”
My lips twitched. “It doesn’t hurt.” I moved my hand, flipping my palm down and then up. “It goes where I want it to.”
“Wow…” she repeated, walking around the bed, inching closer to me. She stopped a few feet shy and the glow of the fire reflected off her dewy cheeks. “That’s…just, wow.”
I closed my fingers, extinguishing the flames as I met her awed gaze. “You’ll probably be able to do it, too.”
She shook her head as her fingers went back to fiddling with the knot on her robe. “I can’t even wrap my head around that.”
The edges of the robe had started to gape under her throat, teasing me with a flash of pale skin. “You will. You’ll have to.”
There was a pause. “I’ve been thinking.”
“So that’s what you were doing in the bathtub for twenty hours?”
“I wasn’t in there for twenty hours.” Her arms lowered to the side, and the material gaped further, revealing the gently curving swell. Back to sweet again. “You said I have to go to South Dakota.”
I dragged my gaze to hers. “Yes.”
“And then you’re just going to leave me there?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Apollo’s orders were to get her to the Covenant. That was all. I sure as hell wasn’t hanging around there.
Her eyes closed and her chest rose sharply, straining the robe. Fuck me. Seriously. This girl was off-limits for a multitude of reasons, especially considering who her father was, and while I would have loved to piss him off, I didn’t want a lightning bolt in the ass. But my fingers itched to touch the skin peeking out from the robe, to slip my hands under the material.
“My life here is important. Everything I’ve been working toward means nothing now—my education, what I wanted to do with my life.”
I really needed to stop staring at her chest. “You are a demigod. You will eventually help save the world and blah blah. That’s more important than…What were you studying?”
“Psychology,” she answered. She laughed, the sound soft and sad. “I know that probably isn’t important to you, but it is to me. It means a lot to me, and now that’s been stripped away and I…” She stopped talking, her expression taking on a distant quality.
She had no choices now. She had a destiny she’d never known about, probably didn’t want, and might end up getting her killed. I got how much that sucked. My heart pounded in my chest for no reason. “I’m sorry.”
She blinked as if surprised, and then she turned to the side. That expanse of exposed skin was killing me. “I just realized something.”
I wasn’t really listening. Moving toward her before she could speak another word, I caught the edges of the robe. The backs of my fingers brushed her skin, revving me up. Her breath caught as her body stiffened. Her neck craned as her eyes widened, met mine. There was so much depth in them, more than what I’d realized before. There was so much emotion. Confusion. Unease. Innocence. Oh, but there was more. Fear existed in their depths, but so did curiosity. There was a crater-sized part of me that wanted to slip the robe off her shoulders, to see how she’d respond, how deep that innocence ran, and if the curiosity I was tracking in her gaze, in the way her lips parted, was stronger than the fear.
I tugged the edges together. “Distracting,” I murmured.
She exhaled softly as pink infused her cheeks. Reaching up, she grasped the edges just below my hands. Our hands didn’t touch, but my knuckles pressed against her skin, scalding me. For a moment, neither of us moved. We seemed to be stuck in a moment in time.
“Your eyes are kind of glowing again,” she whispered.
They tended to do that when I was feeling anything strongly, and I had lot of feels right then—all of them inappropriate. I let go and forced a step back from her. “What did you realize?”
Several moments passed before she spoke, and when she did, I noted the change in her voice. The sound was huskier, softer. Interesting. “I don’t know if my mom is crazy anymore,” she said, and talk of her mom effectively slaughtered my hard-on. “She said my father was an angel who visited her. It wasn’t an angel. It was… God, I can’t even believe I’m going to say this, because it does sound really crazy, but it was Apollo.”
“Yeah, it was him, creeping into the bed of a young lady,” I muttered, eyeing the wet bar. I wanted another beer.
Josie forged on. “And she said that everything that happened last year with the natural disasters, the whole world on the brink of war, was the world on the verge of ending. She was right, wasn’t she?”
I nodded. “Kind of like the gods bowling with Earth.”
“There…there must’ve been so many times when I thought she was hallucinating—it might all have been true, and we—my grandparents—they put her on meds. Antipsychotic meds. And those meds, if you aren’t schizophrenic, it can… You shouldn’t be on them. Oh my God…” She plopped down on the bed, her expression starting to crumble. “We probably made it worse for her.”
My gut twisted with helplessness as I stared at her. The glassy sheen to her eyes told me she was seconds from crying, and I wasn’t good with that shit. Emotions—they were bad. But I stepped toward her.
Her chin rose as she drew in a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. The shininess in her eyes was still there, but no tears fell. I stopped halfway to her, wondering what I was doing. She exhaled roughly. “I want to go home. I need to go home. Now.”