“Allow us to show you how it is done,” he added aloud as he turned away to walk to the witch who rose off her trainer to meet him.
“I have seen you spar plenty,” Amira laughed even as her eyes traced over him with unmistakable appreciation. My hands twitched with urges I didn’t quite understand when he wrapped her up tightly in his arms.
“Are you saying you do not enjoy seeing Riordan try to put me on my back?” I asked before I could reconsider the provocative nature of the question. My heart skipped nervously for how she would respond to it, but I relaxed instantly when I saw her flush with a pleased surprise.
“I am not saying that,” she answered softly.
“Then we shall entertain you,” Riordan declared with a smile of approval at our interaction. He beckoned for me to follow suit when he began removing his weapons.
I tore my gaze from Amira, and she went with Helena to the edge of the mat. I caught sight ofmitérashaking her head in amusement with us, but she did not comment on our obvious attempt to impress Riordan’s mate.
Our mate,I corrected myself. Fuck. That was a heady thought that did make me eager to show off a little.
I quickly removed my weapons and any extra layers, with the exception of my forearm guards, and then turned to face off with myskiá. He looked so smug that it made me smile back at him automatically.
“Happy now?” I asked him snarkily.
“I will be when I put you on your back,” he responded without hesitation as he began to circle.
“You can try,” I countered and moved with him so he remained ahead of me.
“How about your knees then?” he suggested, and the clear intent in his eyes almost had me stumbling over my own damned feet. I was still unfamiliar with this sensual side of myskiá,which was something he had only begun to expose to me after we kissed, but I liked it. A lot.
“You could try asking me nicely,” I teased him back, leaning into the banter a little more confidently.
The way his gaze traced me with a sparkle of curiosity, as if he were wondering whether I would actually obey such a request, had my cock jerking to instant attention. And the idea of granting such a request, should he make it of me, had me questioning why the fuck I was not down on my knees for him already.
He moved suddenly, and we began the familiar dance of striking and blocking that got progressively faster and faster as we looked for weaknesses in the other’s guard. But this sparring session was decidedly different than any other before. We usually concealed our minds from one another so the sparring was fair, and we could not read one another’s intentions. The apprehension rising between us was not merely one of aggression and tactile technique but of a more sexual tension. I breathed in, the taste of his heady exhilaration tingling across myadéneslike a drug that I never wanted to quit. Every time he touched me as we grappled sent a fresh spark of heat through both of us until I almost wanted to let him tackle me.
Perhaps he felt the same way, or maybe Riordan was simplydistracted, but he mistook my feint, and I got my hands behind his knees to finally take him to the ground. His wings vanished seconds before he hit the mat heavily, his breath blasted out of him as I quickly straddled him. My thighs clamped around his hips, my feet crossed over his shins, and I pinned his wrists to keep him completely immobilized beneath me.
“Turns out you’ll be the one on your back,” I gloated, working to keep my wings from betraying my excitement and flaring over him with my triumph.
You would be just as distracted if you could hear her thoughts now,he insisted, and I froze. I was instantly distracted from the victory of taking his body captive by the thought of how Amira must feel about the display.
Riordan did not leave me wanting and began mentally transcribing a vague outline of her thoughts. I was unable to hear her directly, not even through my bond to Riordan, but he could give me a translation. Perhaps it was rather unscrupulous to gain such access to her when we were not yet bonded. But I could not help savouring knowledge of how her heart was pounding, her skin flushed, her breaths coming in tandem with Riordan. Nor could I ignore the way her attention was lingering everywhere that my body connected with Riordan to hold him down. The indecent enjoyment she took in watching us dominate one another was unexpected but a welcome revelation that fuelled my every vulgar fantasy. It also drew my attention back to the visceral sensation of myskiáconquered beneath me.
Gods! The two of them were going to make me hard in front of Helena and Ares, and I’d never live it down.
Riordan’s eyes flared and heat scorched through them, so I knew he was listening as closely to me as he was to Amira’s mind. I opened my mouth to ask him whether he would ever get on his knees for me, but my king abruptly moved to take advantage of my distraction.
He twisted his wrists out of my hold at the same time and gripped me under my thighs to shift me and break my controlover his hips and legs. With pure brute strength, Riordan lifted me up, our chests and shoulders slamming together as I tried to reassert myself. But before I could maneuver my legs into a stronger foundation from which to challenge his burst of strength, Riordan had gotten his legs under him again. We were both on our knees now, facing one another with chests and hips pressed together as we grappled again for control of the match.
Until Riordan leaned close, taking me hostage with nothing more than the soft sensation of his lips and breath on my ear. His groan of sexual frustration had my body trembling with every ounce of the uncompromising need for him that I had suffered through all these long years.
“The things I am going to do to you when you are ready to accept me,” he growled in my ear.
I had to bite back the groan that immediately rose in the back of my throat. All notions of resistance instantly drained from my body so quickly that I melted into him, and he could feel it. He could feel how my body betrayed my craving for surrender, so visceral that not even my tainted mind could object to the thought of it.
Just before he made a move for my arms to wrestle me back under his control.
We usually removed unnecessary articles of clothing to prevent injury to our hands, but my forearm guards had always been the exception to the rule. All my sparring partners had stopped asking about them so long ago that the armour had become almost like an accepted extension of my body. There was always part of my mind that was conscious of my slave markings, as if they were the real me and the rest of my body was their vessel. So I was hypervigilant of the arm guards, and in all my time at the war college, they had not been pulled off even once.
But in that moment, wholly consumed by myskiáand the dream of our future together, I had forgotten that I was nothing but a slave. I forgot my place as a tool for others to satisfy theircruelest depravities. For a blissful moment, my body had not belonged to that vile woman or any of her greedy clients.
For just a moment, I belonged only tohim.
The sensation of air on my horribly scarred skin was so foreign it was like being suddenly naked. I was in too much shock to move as the energy shifted dramatically between us like water had been thrown over my head.
