SeducetheFlame Read Online Free PDF Page B

it. You were out of control,” he insisted in a
soft, matter-of-fact way.
    “You were too.” The defensive response slipped from her
before she could clamp her mouth shut. “But that’s not the issue.”
    “Of course it is.”
    “The issue is that you’ve clammed up for so long it’s
started to affect me. You’ve turned me into something I’m not, and if you don’t
want to take a chance, then it’s my right to be able to date whoever I want.”
Her tone climbed higher and higher through the speech until she yelled, “It’s
been fourteen years, Ray.”
    The water around her ankles churned and steamed. Dimly, she
realized her feet were getting uncomfortably hot in a flooded room. She had
ruined the flooring, at the very least.
    “You see what happened.” Ray flung an arm out to indicate
the room.
    She glanced away from the steam-heated man whose hair clung
to his head in tantalizing rivulets. The shirt beneath his suit was so
transparent it showed the hair on his chest. Her mouth watered. She jerked her
stare away from his tightened nipples.
    Past him, the bed Vincent had so recently occupied was
empty. Ray shrugged out of his jacket and chucked it onto the bed. Her eyes
rounded. Ray never treated his clothes that way.
    The plaster on the walls had scorch marks and cracks. The
ceiling had smoke stains. The bedding floated in the puddles on the floor. Ray
continued his calm speech.
    “We stopped in time, but this could’ve gotten so much worse.
Para-talents, when they join together for life—sure, they can live longer and
become more stable and stronger, but if they don’t balance, one of them will
weaken and die. The other, they take that excess power and it can explode. You
know all this but you seem to have forgotten. All you need for a reminder is
what just happened. This house could’ve blown up in a fiery volcanic blast.”
    “You assume you’d be the stronger of us,” she said in a
deadly calm voice. She hitched her chin and straightened her shoulders. “For
all you know, I could’ve flattened this house with a tsunami.”
    “Precisely my point.” Ray put his hands on his hips in
emphasis. The action parted his shirt and Clarissa nearly groaned aloud to see
the sodden fabric doing nothing to hide the happy trail that led down his flat
stomach and into his waistline. Damn the man looked fine all wet and steaming
mad. “Until today, you’d kept your powers in check. I’ve long trusted in your
ability to do so.”
    That rebuke stung a bit and her mouth dried so fast, it
stole any reply she might’ve been able to form.
    Ray turned on his heel, trudged out and barked orders at
someone outside. “Plane leaves in an hour. I’m grabbing my bags. And Clarissa
is coming with me. She needs to get checked out by the healer as well.”
    Clarissa sputtered and took a step forward to give him a
piece of her mind.
    She stopped in her soggy tracks. Water still sloshed in the
room, her hands were fisted so tightly her shoulders ached, and she’d just made
out with Ray Cinder. For the first time. Ever.
    She hadn’t kissed a man since she’d divorced her husband, a
human without elemental powers or knowledge of para-talents. She’d cared for
Stephen, and if she weren’t a water mage, she’d have grown old happily with
him, but one day she’d seen him staring at a baby with yearning. She’d left
him. The gut-wrenching blow after three years of marriage made her want to slap
herself. She hadn’t been fair to him, or to herself, by lying about who she was
and keeping him from a future he wanted. And he’d gone after that future. Not
two years after their divorce, he’d married again and now had a family living
happily in the suburbs of Kansas City.
    She could not lie to herself again.
    Tromping barefoot, she had no idea where her shoes had gone.
She splashed out of the room and upstairs. The Cinder house was large and well
appointed. The bottom floor had the usual, kitchen, large gathering area,