ThirteenNights Read Online Free Page B

line. Amazons put a high price on protecting their royal genetic
heritage. For me and my sister, they will take this directly to your Elders and
demand justice. Your life is not guaranteed.” Worry lines rippled across her
forehead.
    “So, my Amazon princess, you are concerned for me.” He liked
that. A lot. “My coding talent has no equal so the only way they’ll catch me is
if you get pregnant. And that isn’t likely to happen.”
    “Why not?”
    “Hidden in the warriors’ database, which I regularly hack,
is a study by an Amazon researcher on the fertility rates of the warrior races.
The Elders banned it but the research findings were irrefutable. We’re dying
out. Only a few children are born every year. Sterility is rampant among many
of our kind.”
    Annie’s mouth fell open. “The deities are losing their power
but the pantheon mortals are losing their existence?”
    “It seems so.” He paused. “Love me tonight, Annie. Maybe we
can’t save the pantheons, but we can save each other.”
    Turning around in his arms, she captured his face between
her hands. Soft lips pressed against his. Teeth nipped gently along his bottom
lip, coaxed him to open to her. Her tongue swept in his mouth with sexy flicks
and lingering swirls. Her kiss captured him with the demand of a warrior and
the need of a woman.
    Inflamed by her fervor, he let her lead. He’d been aching to
kiss her since she first smiled at him. That she took the initiative to break
the rules had him hot, heaving and ready to just take her on this couch.
    “I booked a room here,” he said against her mouth. “I’m not
sure putting on a show is in our best interests, no matter how tempting the
idea might be.”
    Scrambled as his brains and body were from her nearness, he
didn’t know how they got to the room. When he woke up in the morning alone, he
knew the night would be forever stamped in his memory. The wickedness in her
eyes, gentle caresses interspersed with the hard bite of nails against his
skin, and oh the pounding—that hot, damp velvet glove that grabbed, held him,
pulsed against him as she came.
    Thirteen Nights would never be enough. He wanted a lifetime.
    But she had left sometime after midnight, unwilling to sleep
next to him though he’d asked, coaxed, even demanded. How much could he really
push her? Were stolen kisses and whispered secrets as far as his Amazon would go?

Fifth Night
     
    Tai woke up early, intending to use his day to organize the
perfect evening. Most warriors took the two weeks surrounding the Thirteen
Night ritual off from regular duties to focus their energy on the task at hand.
The unspoken truth, as Tai had relayed to Annie last night, is that the fertility
of warrior races, not historically high, was deteriorating Even worse, the data
showed that mixing up the gene pool beyond the warrior races and allowing
children to be raised in family structures would not only reinvigorate their
fertility, but develop stronger, more flexible warriors.
    Like me.
    Rather than using knowledge to address the problems, the
warriors did what they always did and just threw more muscle into it. And they
were muscling themselves out of existence. Maybe he was wrong last night. Maybe
he could save the pantheons, show them another way. And he would start with one
beautiful, brunette Amazon.
    He picked up Annie and brought her to the outdoor skating
rink at the National Gallery of Art. Her face puckered up like a fish. “A date
at a hotel, I got. But this is a real human date, isn’t it?”
    “I’m half human.”
    Her eyes still bulging out, she nodded and a hint of a smile
tugged at lips he couldn’t resist kissing. Since she broke the kissing taboo,
he figured he could now do it as often as he liked.
    “I loved skating as a child,” she murmured as if to herself.
Skating for warriors, he knew, was a full-contact sport that made NFL hockey
look like a teddy bear tea party.
    While they waited in line to rent skates, he held