Page 38 of We Are the Match
“Not my father’s,” she says. “Not Troy’s. Just my mother’s words, her very own. And what about you? Your rings?”
My hands still, thumb and index finger still touching the rings on my left hand. Three steel bands, each with a flame engraved. One for all those I lost on Troy. One for the unwanted gift of life still beating in my chest. One for the Family I will punish for it all.
“Also a gift,” I tell her finally.
“Paris,” Helen says, and for just a second she actually meets my eyes. “Why do you want to be here?”
To get close to you. To get close to your father. Because he has taken everything from me, and I wanted some of it back before the end.
But I cannot say that.
So I say: “I had a few options. This one looked like it would make me the most money and leave me the least dead.”
“There are jobs that make more money,” Helen says thoughtfully, but now she cannot meet my eyes, a muscle in her jaw tightening as if there is something to my response that caused her pain. “I—Tommy said ... he said he thought you were dangerous. Violent. That you looked at my father like—” She shakes her head. “You’re from the group home. I heard there was an accident during the war, that part of the house was destroyed.”
I lunge forward, leaning across the table, my hand inches from her throat. “Anaccident?” I snarl. “A fuckingaccident? Don’t bullshit me, Helen, not here.”
She shifts just slightly, the soft skin of her shoulder exposed. There is terror in her eyes, and it rushes through my body. “What are you talking about?” she asks.
“You can’t be serious.”
Helen shivers in the wind.
“He killed them,” I say finally. “Your father dropped bombs and killed them to make a point, Helen. And they all died, except for me.”
Helen gasps as if I have struck her, and I am frozen there, watching emotion play out over her face.
I want to wrap my hands around her throat. I want to push her back against the chair and make herpayfor what happened to the girls of Troy, make her pay for not bothering toknowthe way we all died.
Instead, I reach across and tuck her wrap over her shoulders again, my fingers brushing her exposed collarbone as I do.
She nearly jumps out of her skin, and I freeze, my fingers still touching her shoulder.
We stare at each other, our faces inches apart, and then Helen of the gods reaches for me in return.
Chapter 12
Helen
Paris is sharp teeth and lean muscle. She is wind and rain. She is a lethal blade of a woman, and then she is kissing me as I have never been kissed in my life. She is kissing me as if she cannot get enough of me, as if she will never have me again, as if she wants to hurt me, and I want it all.
Does it matter if she is dangerous, if she feels like this? And she may have been the one who leaned in and kissed me, but I am the one who scrambles across the space between us, nearly knocking the trays of breakfast over as I do.
She pulls me to the sofa, nips at my lip, and then I am straddling firm, muscular thighs, her tongue in my mouth.
She is taller than me by at least a few inches, but I am curvier than her. Still, she is strong enough to flip me over a second later, and she straddles me, pinning me to the cushions beneath us. She draws back, her mouth hovering a breath away from mine, her hands pinning my wrists.
“Helen,” she says, my name a growl in her throat.
I lean toward her, but she pushes me back down.
“No,” she says. “No, Helen.”
No one ever, ever tells me no.
Everyone wants more of me, always.
But this damn woman has said it to me so many times in the last twenty-four hours, and now she is staring down at me with her wild storm eyes and she is holding me here, unmovable.
