Poisoned Kisses

Poisoned Kisses
Stephanie Draven

Unleash the untamed passions of the underworld in these deliciously wicked tales of paranormal romance.His blood would be her deathDaughter of the war god Ares, Kyra had been born into darkness – a darkness she’d vowed to annihilate. Just as she’d destroy warmonger Marco for feeding the bloodlust she despised. She’d use her nymph’s carnal powers to seduce him, then slay him. But Kyra wasn’t prepared for Marco’s secret weapon.For millennia Kyra had avoided mortal men, but she couldn’t resist Marco’s magnetism, his raw sexuality. That he was a shape-shifter she could forgive, but not his one fatal flaw – his poisoned blood could kill her. Kyra had fallen for the only being who could destroy her… Yet how could she spend eternity without him?

He stalked toward her, eyes locking on hers…

Kyra tried not to stare at his bare chest. It was sculpted like an iron breastplate and gave her vivid memories of having run her hands all over him. “I knew you’d come. After all, we have unfinished business between us.”

His hand came to rest on the wall behind her and he leaned in, his closeness making her nervous and excited at the same time.

He caught her by the chin and lifted it, forcing her to look at him. “I know who you are. You don’t have to pretend you’re demure now.”

The feel of his calloused fingers brought back such sharp memories of pleasure that Kyra felt weak at the knees, just like in all those mortal movies where the fair damsel swoons away. And it wasn’t just arousal. She could have handled that. No, this feeling was something different from lust, and wholly unfamiliar. She felt as if she was being turned inside out and it was more than she could bear.

But nothing had changed. She hadn’t fulfilled her destiny. She hadn’t conquered the hydra within him. She hadn’t killed him. She hadn’t even convinced him to give up arms dealing.

But she knew he was going to kiss her. If she didn’t stop him, he was definitely going to kiss her.

And gods help her, she wanted him to…

Dear Reader,

I always thought that in Homer’s Odyssey, Calypso really got a raw deal! Having saved Odysseus from the sea, she was his lover for seven years before he broke her heart and sailed away without a backwards glance. Something about this always stuck in my craw.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against a good mortal woman like Penelope, but I promised myself that if I ever invented a supernatural heroine who saved the hero from a dark fate, she’d get to keep her man. Accordingly, I’ve written a much happier ending for my nymph and her wayward warrior!

I’d be delighted to hear what you think, so please stop by www.stephaniedraven.com. And here’s hoping that, like the heroine of this book, every single one of you blazes a path through the world.

Yours,

Stephanie Draven

About the Author

STEPHANIE DRAVEN is currently a denizen of Baltimore, that city of ravens and purple night skies. She lives there with her favorite nocturnal creatures—three scheming cats and a deliciously wicked husband. And when she is not busy with dark domestic rituals, she writes her books.

A longtime lover of ancient lore, Stephanie enjoys reimagining myths for the modern age. She doesn’t believe that true love is ever simple or without struggle, so her work tends to explore the sacred within the profane, the light under the loss and the virtue hidden in vice. She counts it amongst her greatest pleasures when, from her books, her readers learn something new about the world or about themselves.

POISONED

KISSES

STEPHANIE DRAVEN

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

To my husband, who is my light in every dark storm

and the man who carries me over all life’s thresholds.

Prologue

Ares climbed over the rubble of his burned-out armory, his mood black as the soot-covered remains. So much waste, he thought, kicking aside scorched artillery crates. All harmless shrapnel now. So many mortars reduced to ash…so many bullets warped from the heat, deprived of their savage destiny on the battlefield. Magnificent guns destroyed without ever finding their way into the hands of even one ferocious warrior. It was a travesty. And the broad-shouldered god decided that someone should have to pay.

“Who did this?” he roared, discovering one of his vultures hovering over a dead body. At his approach, she left off tearing at the corpse’s gory innards and flapped her wings. With a rush of wind that spiraled the dust and autumn leaves around her, she rose into the form of a willowy redhead and licked the blood from her scarlet lips.

“The guards say it was a woman who blew up the armory,” his vulture explained, shoving the gutted corpse onto its back. The dead man’s belt was unfastened, his pants unzipped, as if he’d died while taking a piss. “This one caught her and decided to have a little fun…”

“It doesn’t look as if he had a chance to enjoy himself.” Ares noted the dead man’s face, stiffened in shock, as if he couldn’t fathom what had happened to him. But Ares knew what had happened.

Kyra had happened.

His daughter was lethal with a blade and knew how to defend herself. She was also a rebellious child with a knack for finding new and unique ways to annoy him. “What about the file on the hydra?”

His minion twitched. “It’s gone. Kyra must have taken it.”

Ares liked the look of fear in his vulture’s expression and was hungry to take out his frustrations on her. There could be pleasure in it—for him, at least. He reached for that fiery hair, yanking his vulture’s head to the side so that her throat was exposed. “And where is my daughter now?”

“I—I don’t know,” the vulture stammered. “They shot her, but she escaped.”

Bullets wouldn’t stop Kyra. As a nymph of the underworld, she crossed the thresholds of life and death at will. What’s more, she was immortal. He’d seen to that. There wasn’t a wound she could suffer that wouldn’t heal. She could appear to mortals in her own guise, or fade into the mists like an apparition. The fact that she’d let his guards see her meant that she’d wanted him to know she was responsible for this.

The unmitigated gall of the thing! For Kyra to destroy his weapons was almost too much to bear. And to add to that insult, she’d taken the file on the newest hydra—a man whom Ares intended to add to his monstrous menagerie. Admittedly, the war god admired Kyra’s audacity. After all these years, most of the forgotten ancient immortals slunk away like beaten dogs to live mundane modern lives, but his daughter was still certain she was fated to do something glorious. And he couldn’t fault her for it, even if it drove her to test him like this.

Ares was an indulgent patriarch, after all. Unlike his own wine-soaked lecher of a father, Ares encouraged the fierce nature of his descendants. He’d even made war with them at his side. Oh, how mortals had trembled when Ares rode into battle with his twin sons, Phobos and Deimos, at the reins of his chariot! How the mortals had screamed in terror when he unleashed his monsters. Fire-breathing horses, hydras, chimeras and minotaurs… Oh, how he missed those days.

And he intended to relive them with Kyra at his side. If only she’d accept her true destiny. Instead, she was in open rebellion against him. Did she think he could be stopped by blowing up his munitions? If so, she was wrong. Lesser gods might fade away, but the forces of war remained eternal. No one sacrificed at Zeus’s temples anymore. The science of spindly weathermen had reduced the once fearsome sky god into an old man who spent his days in a taverna complaining about the loss of Greek culture to the European Union. Exhaustion, science and some of the newer gods of peace and goodwill had crowded the old gods off the world’s stage. Even crafty Hecate had been relegated to being a fortune-telling gypsy!

But Ares was different. It had been a long time since anyone had seen him as the Greek god of bloodlust, glowering from beneath his plumed helmet, but men still worshipped him, whether they knew it or not, because war was different, too.

The new gods didn’t glorify it, and science only made it more deadly; it bankrupted the victors as well as the vanquished. War was a senselessness mankind couldn’t explain. Warriors no longer called for Ares by name, but they still made bloody sacrifices. And whereas Zeus once ruled the gods of Olympus, Ares meant to rule now.

So how was he to deal with Kyra’s rebellion? Perhaps it was a phase that would pass. After all, his daughter was born to viciousness. Kyra claimed to abhor war, but the wreck she’d made of this armory only proved that she was bred for destruction.

The sooner he forced her to accept it, the better.

Chapter 1

Kyra was dressed to kill. Literally.

Just beneath her short red skirt and only inches above her high-heeled boots, a small but deadly hunting knife was strapped to her thigh. A gun might have been more useful, but Kyra preferred the weapons of an older, less complicated time.

A knock came at the nightclub’s bathroom door—probably another gaggle of drunken Italian socialites—but Kyra wouldn’t be rushed. She stared at her reflection in the mirror to steel her courage. She might not be able to thwart Daddy and his bloodthirsty minions, but she could do this one heroic thing for humanity. This was her destiny.

But the mirror reflected a distorted image. It was cracked, as if the thumping club music burst through the wall from the other side. Still, she could see that her plunging pearlescent halter top complemented neither her black tresses nor her ghostly pallor. No matter. Kyra never let mortals see her true form, anyway. Tonight, her prey would see her as she wished him to see her: with blue eyes and cropped platinum hair; after all, she’d studied Marco Kaisaris long enough to know his type. And she was ready. Hydras like Marco were dangerous, but surely not to someone like her. She just had to kill him. Like Theseus and Perseus of old, she had a monster to slay.

With that thought, Kyra gave the bathroom door a shove and it swung open like a gate to the underworld. She stepped into the nightclub’s press of bodies and people made way for her, as if they sensed her power. As the dance beat drummed at her pulse points, she brushed against the crowd, and it excited her because she had a nymph’s nature; she found the vitality of humans to be infectious and distracting. This was, of course, one of the many dangers of getting too close to mortals.

The club was dark but for the strobe lights that shined spots on the walls, purple as evening shade, purple as wine. The grape kaleidoscope illuminated the writhing bodies on the dance floor, flashes alternating with pitch-black. But the darkness posed no obstacle for Kyra. Like all nymphs of the underworld, she carried an internal torch. Her eyes could penetrate the darkness. She could see through a crowd, through clothes, through flesh. Her eyes could even breach the barriers around men’s souls.