The Return (Titan 1)

Her eyes closed and her chest rose sharply, straining the robe. Fuck me. Seriously. This girl was off-limits for a multitude of reasons, especially considering who her father was, and while I would have loved to piss him off, I didn’t want a lightning bolt in the ass. But my fingers itched to touch the skin peeking out from the robe, to slip my hands under the material.

“My life here is important. Everything I’ve been working toward means nothing now—my education, what I wanted to do with my life.”

I really needed to stop staring at her chest. “You are a demigod. You will eventually help save the world and blah blah. That’s more important than…What were you studying?”

“Psychology,” she answered. She laughed, the sound soft and sad. “I know that probably isn’t important to you, but it is to me. It means a lot to me, and now that’s been stripped away and I…” She stopped talking, her expression taking on a distant quality.

She had no choices now. She had a destiny she’d never known about, probably didn’t want, and might end up getting her killed. I got how much that sucked. My heart pounded in my chest for no reason. “I’m sorry.”

She blinked as if surprised, and then she turned to the side. That expanse of exposed skin was killing me. “I just realized something.”

I wasn’t really listening. Moving toward her before she could speak another word, I caught the edges of the robe. The backs of my fingers brushed her skin, revving me up. Her breath caught as her body stiffened. Her neck craned as her eyes widened, met mine. There was so much depth in them, more than what I’d realized before. There was so much emotion. Confusion. Unease. Innocence. Oh, but there was more. Fear existed in their depths, but so did curiosity. There was a crater-sized part of me that wanted to slip the robe off her shoulders, to see how she’d respond, how deep that innocence ran, and if the curiosity I was tracking in her gaze, in the way her lips parted, was stronger than the fear.

I tugged the edges together. “Distracting,” I murmured.

She exhaled softly as pink infused her cheeks. Reaching up, she grasped the edges just below my hands. Our hands didn’t touch, but my knuckles pressed against her skin, scalding me. For a moment, neither of us moved. We seemed to be stuck in a moment in time.

“Your eyes are kind of glowing again,” she whispered.

They tended to do that when I was feeling anything strongly, and I had lot of feels right then—all of them inappropriate. I let go and forced a step back from her. “What did you realize?”

Several moments passed before she spoke, and when she did, I noted the change in her voice. The sound was huskier, softer. Interesting. “I don’t know if my mom is crazy anymore,” she said, and talk of her mom effectively slaughtered my hard-on. “She said my father was an angel who visited her. It wasn’t an angel. It was… God, I can’t even believe I’m going to say this, because it does sound really crazy, but it was Apollo.”

“Yeah, it was him, creeping into the bed of a young lady,” I muttered, eyeing the wet bar. I wanted another beer.

Josie forged on. “And she said that everything that happened last year with the natural disasters, the whole world on the brink of war, was the world on the verge of ending. She was right, wasn’t she?”

I nodded. “Kind of like the gods bowling with Earth.”

“There…there must’ve been so many times when I thought she was hallucinating—it might all have been true, and we—my grandparents—they put her on meds. Antipsychotic meds. And those meds, if you aren’t schizophrenic, it can… You shouldn’t be on them. Oh my God…” She plopped down on the bed, her expression starting to crumble. “We probably made it worse for her.”

My gut twisted with helplessness as I stared at her. The glassy sheen to her eyes told me she was seconds from crying, and I wasn’t good with that shit. Emotions—they were bad. But I stepped toward her.

Her chin rose as she drew in a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. The shininess in her eyes was still there, but no tears fell. I stopped halfway to her, wondering what I was doing. She exhaled roughly. “I want to go home. I need to go home. Now.”

Chapter 9

“YOU WANT to go home?” Seth repeated. He stared at me like what I’d just said was the craziest thing spoken that night. And there had been a lot of crazy.

I’d used every moment soaking in that tub—that awesome tub—focusing on keeping my head on straight, and I’d barely pulled that off. Having him bust into the bathroom hadn’t helped. I still couldn’t believe he’d thought I was in there drowning myself. And I really couldn’t believe I’d been totally naked in the same room as him. I was kind of naked now, since this robe left so little to the imagination, but I wasn’t going to think about that. I was pretty sure he’d gotten an eyeful of my breasts in the bathroom anyway.

At least now he was a couple of feet from me, staring at me like I was insane. That was better than him right in front of me, his fingers curled around the edges of my robe, his knuckles against my skin, and staring at me like… My breath hitched as a strange flutter danced low in my stomach. He’d been staring at me with eyes that were slightly luminous, and he’d looked hungry.

I couldn’t recall any guy ever looking at me like that unless I was holding a basket of chicken wings or something. But in that moment, with the back of his hands searing my skin, if he had lowered his mouth to mine, there was a good chance I would’ve stood there and let him.

I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

Pushing those thoughts aside, I rose as I reached for my belt, making sure it was still tight. “I need to go home to see my mom. I need to talk to her.” Guilt churned through me even though I knew it was ridiculous. Who would’ve thought that any of what she had been saying for years was true?

Seth folded his arms as he eyed me. “And you can’t just, I don’t know, pick up the phone and call her?”

“I can, but I want to see her.” Frustrated and feeling about a thousand other emotions, I reached to tug my hair loose, but stopped when the stupid top of the robe gaped open again. Clutching the edges, the flutter was back when I noticed the way he seemed to breathe deeper. I needed to focus—and not on the flutter. “I don’t expect you to understand or even care, so I’m not going to go into the million reasons why what I need to say to my mom—the huge apology I need to deliver with probably a garden of flowers—is not phone-call appropriate. I want to be with her. I want to hug her. Okay? So I need to see her. Not call her.”