Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 11

Changing into sweatpants and a sleeveless tee, Dev continued to ignore his cell phone in favor of a hard workout in the gym set up at the back of the house. Pounding his fists into the punching bag worked off some of his frustration, but left him with no new answers.

Katya drew him. Simple as that. And it was about time he admitted it.

She was the enemy, had even warned him that she was a grenade waiting to blow up in his face, but still, she drew him. Part of him wanted to protect her, take care of her, while the other part, the hard-nosed pragmatist, warned him that doing so would just come back to bite him on the ass.

He’d almost kissed her upstairs, his entire body humming with the raw excitement that came only from arguing with a woman who aroused a much more intimate passion. She shouldn’t have been able to get through the metal of his shields, shouldn’t have been able to affect him on such a visceral level, not without a conscious decision on his part.

And yet she had. She did. Every fucking time.

Slamming his foot into the punching bag, he spun and came down feet flat on the exercise mat.

“You’re good.”

He didn’t turn, focusing on his next round of punches. “Been doing it since I was a teenager.” Since the day he’d realized he carried within him the seeds of the very violence that had shattered his life as a child. “Good stress relief.”

Katya stayed in the doorway, and he was blindingly aware of her gaze as she watched him. It took all his concentration to maintain his focus. “We’ll get you into doing some easy stretches, strengthen those muscles.”

“Are you sure I have any?”

It was a kick to the gut, that hint of humor. He glanced at her, pushing damp hair off his face, conscious of the fact that his tee was sticking to his body, his arms shimmering with sweat. “I’m sure there’re one or two hidden away in that scrawny body of yours.”

Hazel eyes darkened. “Do you always insult the women you kidnap?”

A temper. Interesting. “Depends on the woman.”

“How many have you brought here?”

None. Dev didn’t share his personal spaces well. “That’s for me to know.” Wiping off his face with a towel he’d thrown in the corner, he strode to the door. “I’ll make you that smoothie after I shower.”

She shifted away as he walked past. It was a very Psy thing to do. They hated any kind of physical contact. But Katya had seemed to crave it. Irritated at the change, he took the steps with angry confidence. And when the shower came on ice-cold, he left it that way.

Katya bent over, bracing her hands on her knees as all the breath simply rushed out of her. Dear God, she’d known he was in shape, but . . .

She swallowed, tried to relearn to breathe. She’d once seen a tiger in a wildlife reserve in India. Her job had been with a multinational lobbying for permission to mine in the region, but it was the image of the tiger that had always stuck with her. The lethal grace, the beauty of it—even her Psy mind had understood that it was something extraordinary.

Dev’s muscles slick with sweat, his biceps defined as he punched the bag—he’d been as wildly beautiful as that tiger, as far from the man in the dark suit and formal shirt as she was from the Ekaterina who’d once worked for the Council. It had taken every ounce of control she had not to reach out and stroke him.

He’d probably have snapped off her hand if she’d dared.

Drawing in another shaky breath, she walked across the exercise mat to put her palm on the punching bag. It was heavy. And he’d been sending it back and forth like it weighed nothing. Her memories of the details might be scattershot, but she knew that all her life, she’d valued psychic strength over physical. But after seeing Dev move, she was revising her opinion.

The physical plane was just as powerful as the psychic.

Especially between male and female.

And for the first time, she felt very much female.

She drew in a deep breath, trying to find her balance. . . and catching an echo of Dev’s distinctive scent instead, harsh, sensual, unforgivingly masculine.

Something low in her body tightened, a sensation for which she had no name, no comparison. It was hot and tight and. . . needy. And it craved Devraj Santos.