Page 88 of Legacy of Temptation

He propped himself on one arm and used his other hand to make shivery little trails along her shoulder. “Pillow talk.”

“Is that your favorite way to communicate with a woman?”

“Well, it’s not theworstway.”

She laughed as she unscrewed the bottle cap. Why did he have to be so irresistible? She really wanted to be done with him when this was over because she had a feeling they were in for a lot of shit—shit that would probably be easier to deal with if she didn’t like him.

Or if she at least didn’t drool over him.

“Well, when you talked about liking luxury, it made me wonder if that’s how you grew up.”

“You mean you weren’t briefed on every aspect of the Horsemen and their lives as part of Aegis training?” Underneath the husky, post-sexual drawl was a note of bitterness.

“Yeah, I was,” she admitted. “And I knew a little from back in my news days and from reading the Four Horsemen graphic novels, but I’ve always wondered how true everything I heard and read was.”

There was a long stretch of silence. And then a quiet, “What did you hear?”

It was her turn to be silent. She hadn’t thought this would be a sensitive subject, but now it occurred to her that he’d grown up in a completely different world, one in which most humans hated or feared his kind. One in which his mother had betrayed The Aegis and triggered a war between the two agencies.

She needed to tread carefully.

“I heard that all the Horsemen are richer than God, and that you grew up in a castle in Greenland. I just assumed that if you lived in a castle and were rich, you’d have lived a life of luxury.”

He snorted. “Castles are chilly, no matter how much money you have. And I inherited my mom’s human weakness for being affected by extreme heat and cold. I was always freezing. But we didn’t want for anything. And since my dad can cast personal Harrowgates, we could go wherever we wanted pretty much whenever we wanted. I mean, I could too, as long as Cujo took me, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unless it was to my aunt’s or one of my uncles’ places.”

She shook her head. She was still freaked out by the fact that he had a pet hellhound. She’d never seen one and wasn’t sure she wanted to. By all accounts, they were violent fiends that liked to sexually ravage their prey before eating it alive.

“So, you can’t cast your own Harrowgates, but you can travel with Cujo?”

“As long as I’m touching him, he can take me wherever I want to go.”

How cool was that? She hadn’t had a pet growing up at all, let alone one that could take her anywhere she wanted in the blink of an eye. “How do you communicate with him?”

He shrugged. “We communicate everything through images or emotion. I can call him in my head, but actual words are sometimes tricky.” He took a swig of his water. “Did you travel much when you were growing up?”

She nodded. “My parents love to travel. They didn’t have much time because they were lawyers at a big firm, but at least twice a year, we’d go to Europe or the Bahamas or something. Gave me a love for exploring new places and cultures. Where did your parents take you?”

“It was usually just me and my dad. He took me all over. Lunch in Tokyo or dinner in Berlin. Things like that.”

That. Sounded. Amazing. If she could travel anywhere in seconds, she wouldn’t stop exploring new places and eating new things. “Where were your mom and sister?”

He took a long drink of water before saying, “My sister doesn’t like to travel, so my mom usually stayed home with her.”

“Doesn’t like to travel? Why not?”

A couple of heartbeats passed as if Logan was trying to decide how—or if—to answer.

“Amber is, as my parents put it, an empath of remarkable strength. Being around people she doesn’t know is hard for her, especially crowds. She gets sensory overload. Actually, she gets overloaded by a lot of things.”

Well, that wasn’t in The Aegis’s broad library of knowledge. Very little was known about any of the Horsemen’s offspring, actually, and most information they did have came from the rumor mill and unreliable sources.

“So, she doesn’t ever leave the house?”

“She does, but she only visits my aunt’s and uncles’ places. She loves Ares’ Greek island. She’ll go there just to hang out on the beach all day or to chill with our cousins. But trying to get her to go anywhere else is almost impossible.”

“That must be so hard for her,” she murmured. “So, she still lives at home? Does she have a hellhound too?”

“She lives at home, and no, she doesn’t have a hellhound. I only have one because it was orphaned when Pestilence killed its parents.”

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