Rogue Rider

Thirty-four

Jillian pulled the pickup next to the house, and even before she shut off the engine she became aware of a presence nearby. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as if she was being watched. If those Aegis assholes were spying on her, they were going to see the business end of her shotgun.

Cursing, she hopped out of the truck and stomped to the front of the house. As she opened the door the fresh scent of fir tree hit her. Light spilled from the living room, a familiar multi-colored glow, and as she stepped inside, she saw the Christmas tree lit up in the corner. Beneath it, piled high, were dozens of wrapped presents.

A lump formed in her throat and butterflies flitted in her belly, and when she sensed movement behind her, the butterflies went crazy. “Reseph,” she whispered.

“Merry Christmas,” he replied softly. “I know it’s early, but we never had the chance to get the tree we talked about.”

“Because you got your memory back.” She turned slowly, bracing her heart. Didn’t work. The sight of him made the stupid organ jerk painfully against her ribs. God, he was as gorgeous as ever, standing there in jeans and a black thermal Henley, his hair falling in lush blond waves to his shoulders.

“I miss you.” He cleared his throat. “I want to make it up to you.”

He wanted to make up to her the fact that he didn’t want to be tied to her? Not a chance. “I don’t want to hear it. I want you gone, and I don’t want to see you for another eleven and a half months.”

“I’m not leaving.” His expression hardened. “Not until I’m finished with what I have to say.”

“Then you’ll be talking to the wall, because I’m not interested.” She started for the bedroom, intent upon shutting him out here, but she hadn’t gone two steps when she found herself backed against the front door, Reseph’s hands on her shoulders, his mouth on hers. Oh, it felt good to be like this again. So good she wanted to weep with relief… and with anger.

“I’ll talk to the wall,” he said against her lips. “I’ll talk to a window, the fireplace; hell, I’ll talk to the fucking carpet. But eventually I’ll get to you, and you will listen.”

“I hate you.” She thrust her hands into his hair and kissed him back. Hard.

He captured her lower lip in his teeth and then laved the gentle bite with his tongue. “I love you.” A buzz of both pleasure and pain at his words and the stinging nip rushed through her.

“You hurt me.” She tore open his jeans and took him in her hand. His hard length jerked in her grasp, and he moaned. She loved that sound. Loved that she could make him need her.

“Jillian… stop.” He captured her wrist and forced her to stop stroking.

“Dammit,” she snapped, shoving at his chest, although it was like trying to move a brick wall. “You said you wanted to make it up to me. This is what I want. You hurt me. You made me love you. You made me promises, that you liked this life and wanted to be with me, and then you yanked it all away.”

“I know.” He sounded like he’d swallowed sand. “That’s why I’m here. But we need to talk first.”

“Talk? You? Mr. Who Doesn’t Love Casual Sex?” She shoved at him again. And again. As if pushing him was going to bring back all the happiness they’d shared. When he didn’t budge, she changed tactics and ripped off her sweatshirt. She went for her jeans, but this time Reseph grabbed both her hands.

A rough sound erupted from his throat. “Jillian, stop it.” She looked up and nearly swayed at how his eyes glinted with shards of lust. “I’m on the edge right now. Being here with you is making my sex demon half rage. I want to mount you so bad. Throw you against the wall and pound into you until the roof comes down on top of us.”

A powerful punch of arousal made Jillian’s body quiver at Reseph’s words. “Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t want it like this, and neither do you.”

“You have no idea what I want,” she yelled. With a snarl, she shimmied out of her jeans. “I wanted you to fight for me instead of against me. I wanted you to trust yourself as much as I trusted you. I wanted you to want to be tied down.”

A shadow of shame crossed his face, but in an instant it was gone, replaced by that intense, dangerous lust that had always permeated their lovemaking.

“I made mistakes,” he growled. “But I’m here now.”

“Well, give the man a medal,” she ground out, and before she even finished her sentence, he’d hauled her off her feet and braced her high up on the wall. His mouth was on hers in a demanding, almost brutal kiss. A raw, animal noise came out of him as he dug his fingers into her bottom to lift her and lower her onto his erection.

He entered her in a hard, powerful surge, and then he was pounding into her the way he’d said, his hips jackhammering against her. Ecstasy rolled through her, her orgasm hitting her so fast her mind spun. She thrashed against Reseph, loving how he wasn’t sparing her mouth, her back as it scraped against the wall, or her sex as he pumped into her in a ruthless, delicious onslaught.

His pace picked up, but how that was possible she had no idea. He jerked wildly, his body shuddering, and another climax ripped through her as his hot semen splashed inside her. A shout tore from his throat, and they both convulsed, swamped by pleasure.

When the shuddering and panting waned, Jillian’s muscles turned to water, and very gently, Reseph eased her feet to the floor.

“Fuck,” he muttered, shoving himself away.

She blinked, brain fuzzed out and not functioning yet. “What’s wrong?”

He zipped up and then snatched the blanket off the back of the couch and handed it to her. “Condom. Forgot to protect you again. I want to know if you’re pregnant.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what he’d do if she were, but she was suddenly too tired to fight. “I’m not from the last time.” She’d started her period the day after she’d returned from Greece, and she’d been strangely sad about it. And God, how bizarre was it to think she could have been impregnated by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

He watched her wrap up in the blanket, the lights from the Christmas tree glittering in his eyes. “Are you okay?” His voice was gravelly. “I was too rough with you.”

“Honestly, I don’t think that would be possible.” The air crackled with instant tension as that night in the airport parking lot got between them. Dammit. She quickly pretended she didn’t notice the taut strain in the room. “Where have you been staying? I’ve worried about you.”

“In an old hunting cabin in Switzerland.”

“So far away,” she mused.

Twisting around, he straightened the silver garland wrapped around the tree. “Not when all I have to do is step through a gate to be anywhere in the world in seconds.”

“True,” she said. “But I thought you hated the snow.”

Reseph smiled. “I’ve learned to like it, I think. Reminds me of you.”

A dull ache began to pound in her chest, because she wasn’t ready for this “talk” yet. Her emotions were too raw. “But you don’t like to be alone.”

His shrug was halfhearted. “Without my family and you, I don’t want to be with anyone else.”

“Your family turned you away?” She’d hoped that with the return of his sanity, his siblings would welcome him back.

“They had no choice, Jillian. If Pestilence returns, I could turn on them.”

This again. She gathered the blanket more tightly around her. “That wouldn’t happen.”

“We can’t guarantee that.”

She felt like screaming in frustration. “God, Reseph, how can I have faith in you, but you don’t?”

Reseph turned away from her, and his voice went low. “I’ve had to spend a lot of time alone, Jillian. And it turns out that I don’t like myself very much. Now I know why I surrounded myself with people. I was shallow and vain, and I couldn’t let myself get attached to anyone.” He inhaled a shaky breath. “I went to Sheoul today to visit my sister’s grave.”

Grave? She understood loss far too well, and she drifted closer to him. But was it for his comfort, or hers?

“You have another sister? A Horseman?”

“Human.” He kept fiddling with the tree, rearranging ornaments and lights. “My real mother, the sex demon, abandoned me with a human female who raised me as her own. Of course, she wasn’t much better than the demon mom. My human mother left me alone to fend for myself so much that I think I was malnourished for the first twelve years of my life. Almost died in a fire once, because there was no one around to save me. I’m still not sure how I got out if it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t know she wasn’t my mother until I was an adult.”

“That’s when you were cursed to be a Horseman, right?”

“Yeah.” He moved a red bulb next to a blue one. “My human mother gave birth to a girl a year before our curses.” Affection drenched his voice. “Ariya was great. The one thing that really made me happy. I didn’t see her as much as I should have… I was always out drinking and whoring. And then, after our curses, we all kind of went insane for a while.”

She’d read about their killing rampages, the destruction they’d caused everywhere they went. Reseph, having been cursed as Pestilence, had been given the power to inflict plagues on people, animals, and crops, and his swath of death had been widespread.

“When I finally went back home during a period of lucidity, I found that, as usual, my mother had left Ariya alone. I tried to take care of her, but…” His big shoulders rose and fell a few times before he continued. “But I went crazy again, drinking, sexing, killing. It was just two days, but by the time I got back home, Ariya was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“A demon took her. I tracked that fucker to Sheoul and made him suffer for days before I killed him.”

“And your sister?” Jillian asked weakly.

“She died when the demon took her through the Harrowgate.” He swung around, devastation etched into his expression. “Since she died in Sheoul, her soul is trapped there for eternity to be tortured by any demon who can detect souls.”

Horror sifted hot and cold through Jillian like dry ice, and she slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God,” she mumbled into her palm. “That’s…” There was no word for it, so she gave up trying to find one.

“Yeah.” He inhaled, taking a very long time. “I buried her in the nicest part of Sheoul, and I didn’t leave her for months. I didn’t eat. Didn’t drink. I slept beside her grave. Limos finally found me and dragged me out of there. But it hurt like hell for so many years. After that, I guess I never wanted to love anyone like that again. I know I never wanted to feel like that again. Easier to be happy and unattached. Take the easy road, as Ares put it.”

“But you did get attached again, right?” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “You got attached to me.”

He laughed bitterly. “But would my old self have gotten attached? No. I’d have fucked you and left you so fast your head would have spun.”

His ugly words drilled a hole in her chest, but she soldiered on, determined to talk some sense into him. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You aren’t that person anymore. And you’re not the evil demon who tried to start the Apocalypse.” On some level, she still couldn’t believe she was saying things like that.

“But I’m not the Reseph you knew, either.”

“He’s the real you,” she insisted in what Reseph had called her stern frying-pan voice. “He’s the one who came out when there was no history to mold his personality.”

“Maybe.” He walked over and sat across from her on the coffee table. “Whoever I am, I’m going to fight for you. I want you in my life. I want you to be my mate, and I want you to bear my children.”

She blinked. Holy shit, she was going to fall over. When he jumped into something, he jumped all the way into the deep end, didn’t he? No testing the waters.

“You don’t have to answer now. I’m willing to wait. It’s probably best anyway.”

Maybe she was still reeling from the mate and children thing, but she was confused as hell about that last bit he’d said. “Wait? It’s not that I disagree, but… why is it for the best?”

“Because I’m still not sure I can keep Pestilence at bay. I’m not sure I can patch my head up enough to protect you.”

Her heart sank. Plummeted right to her feet. “Then we can’t be together,” she croaked.

He stiffened. “What do you mean?”

God, how could this be happening? “I can’t go through this again. I can’t be with you and wonder if someday you’re going to leave because you don’t have faith in your ability to control Pestilence.”

“It won’t be like that.” He took her hand and squeezed, tugging her closer. “I’ll be here for you. I might need time now and then, but I’ll be here. It might just be a while before we can settle down with a family.”

“How long?”

There was a long silence. “I can’t answer that. Not yet.”

“Exactly. I’m not waiting around for years, only to have you one day say it can’t happen.” Her eyes stung, and her vision blurred as she peeled away from him and got to her feet. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and I know I can’t live through that pain.”

She steeled herself against the hurt in his eyes. The man she loved was in there, but until he realized it himself, she couldn’t back down.

“Go, Reseph. I love you, but I can’t be with you until you can trust in yourself the way I trust in you. I’m not going to compromise on what I want.” She’d done that with every man she’d been with, and her relationships had always ended badly. Reseph, more than any of the others, had the power to destroy her.

Reseph moved to her, but she sidestepped and gestured to the door. “Dammit, Jillian, I won’t give up.”

“That’s your choice,” she said. “But know that I won’t give in.”

The moment the door closed, Jillian sank to the floor in a pool of blankets. She wouldn’t cry. Not again.

She told herself that over and over, but the tears came anyway.