16. Hephaestus

16

HEPHAESTUS

Pandora is long-gone by the time Minos finishes lecturing me on all the ways I’ve failed him. It’s just as well. I don’t have it in me to keep fighting right now. I’ve never been so fucking exhausted in my life. Everywhere I turn, I’m falling short of people’s expectations. Minos. Pandora. Brontes and the rest of Hephaestus’s people. Even my cursed wife. I shouldn’t care about the latter two, but when they become part of a larger problem? That shit is a trend, not an exception.

I stop by Minos’s library to snag a bottle of whisky and tuck it into my jacket. I turn toward the door and stop short.

Icarus leans against the wall. He’s wearing slacks and a shirt that looks like he started unbuttoning and got distracted. He doesn’t look much like his father, aside from his coloring. Light-brown skin and wavy dark hair. But his eyes are wider and doe-like, his features fine and delicate. Like Ariadne, he apparently takes after his poor, dead mother.

He lifts a single brow. “Stealing liquor. How pedestrian of you.”

“I don’t have time for this.” I shoulder past him. The last thing I need is a reminder of everything I’ll never have. Icarus and Minos rarely see eye to eye, but Minos never threatens to disown him.

Not even after that fuckup where he attacked Pan instead of Dionysus at the house party.

No matter how often Icarus disappoints his father, he’s still Minos’s trueborn son. No one can take that away from him, not even his father.

“Crown sitting heavy, Theseus?”

I don’t answer, and his mocking laughter follows me all the way to the front door. Down on the street, I dig out my phone and press Call before I can talk myself out of it.

Adonis answers almost immediately. “Yes?”

“Where are you?”

A hesitation. “I’m at home. Why?”

I hang up without answering. The positioning of the pathetic husband is Adonis’s fault. I agreed to it, but it was his idea in the first place, and clearly, it’s not helping me. I can’t push back against Minos, can’t get a handle on my wife, but I can put Adonis in his place.

It’s not until I’m standing at his front door, feeling like I’m about to come out of my skin, that I can admit that I also just want to see him. I bang on the door. Too hard. Too angry. I don’t know how to be any other way.

He opens it a few seconds later, and the sight of him relaxes something inside me. I fucking hate that he has this effect on me…almost as much as I crave it. It’s worse now. Stronger. He’s obviously in for the night, wearing gray lounge pants and nothing else, his smooth brown skin showing off clearly defined muscles.

Adonis smiles briefly. “Hephaestus. What a lovely surprise.”

“Theseus. I told you to call me Theseus.”

“We’re not in private.”

I walk past him without an invitation and barely wait for him to shut the door to continue. “Now we are.”

“Did you need something?” He leans against the door and crosses his arms over his chest. The move makes his biceps flex, and I have the almost overwhelming impulse to sink my teeth into them.

“I needed to talk to you,” I say faintly, still staring at his body. I shake my head once, sharply enough that it should shake some reason back into my brain. It doesn’t work.

“You could have talked to me on the phone. You hung up and came here in person.” He doesn’t move, though his gaze coasts slowly over me. “Why are you really here…Theseus?”

The low way he says my name feels like he reached out and ran his hand over my bare skin. I take a step closer to him on instinct alone. “I wanted to see you.” I pull the bottle out of my jacket. “Thought we could have another drink.”

“Liar.” His smile widens, taking the sting out of the word.

I take another step closer to him. “I came to yell at you. I look foolish in the media. Minos is furious.”

“Mmm.” Adonis’s focus narrows on my mouth. “Closer, but still not the full truth.”

Another step. We’re almost chest to chest now. A deep breath would bring us flush together. When I initially reached out to Adonis, it was to use him as a weapon to strike at my wife. That’s not why I’m here now. It’s not even because Minos is pissed.

I’m here because, out of everyone in Olympus, Adonis is the only one I’ve ever really relaxed around, even a little. He reminds me of Pandora, a bright exterior that camouflages a clever mind and a core-deep kindness that might as well be a different language for all I understand it. He might have helped me for his own reasons, to hurt Aphrodite, but our initial chat would have covered that and then some.

No, this is something else.

“Theseus.” His voice is low and full of things I can’t define.

“Adonis.” Slowly, almost reluctantly, I lift my hand and place it against the center of his chest. Gods, his skin is soft. I clear my throat. “You feel it, too.”

His deep inhale presses his chest more firmly against my hand. “This won’t end in anything but heartbreak for both of us.”

One has to have a heart for it to be broken. I lift my gaze to his. “Do you care?”

“I should.” Another of those deep breaths that feel like he’s reaching out to me without moving his arms. “My heart is already shattered. Another blow might be the end of me.”

I bite down on the strangest impulse to reassure him that I won’t break his heart. It’s not a promise I can make. Even if we weren’t on fundamentally opposite sides of the coming conflict, I am who I am. I can’t offer soft words and softer landings.

I only know how to destroy.

Still, I can’t leave his comment hanging. “I don’t want to break your heart.” The heart currently racing beneath my palm. I inhale deeply. I can’t place his scent, but it wraps around me all the same, muddying my thoughts.

“Which isn’t the same thing as promising not to.” His smile falters. “Though I wouldn’t believe you even if you made that promise.”

“Adonis—”

“Theseus.” His eyes go serious. “Either kiss me or get your hand off my chest.”

I know the smart move, but I don’t give a fuck. I can’t be his soft landing…but maybe he can be mine. Just for tonight. It doesn’t matter what my original plans were when it came to him. I want him. That’s reason enough.

I kiss Adonis.

His lips are soft. So fucking soft. He makes a sound in his throat and opens for me. It’s the most natural thing in the world to drag my hand up to bracket his throat, tilting his head back to give me better access. His hands find my hips and jerk me forward until I’m pinning him to the door.

Fuck, he feels good.

In the back of my mind was the thought to keep this kiss light, to control this encounter, but all my intentions are swept away in a wave of need. Need to get him closer. Need to get his fucking clothes off so there’s nothing between us.

With that in mind, I start to go to my knees.

He stops me. “Theseus, wait.”

I freeze. “What?”

“Your knee.”

Shame coats me, nearly drowning out desire. I try to shove it down, with only moderate success. “Fuck my knee. I want your cock in my mouth.”

He leans his head against the door and closes his eyes. His pulse races against where I have my lips pressed to his throat. “I would very much like my cock in your mouth,” he finally manages. “But not if it hurts you in the process.”

There it is. That softness I should despise. He’s all but offering me a fault line to expose, an admission that saving me from pain is a lever I can pull to manipulate him.

Except I don’t want to.

I don’t even want to throw his caring back in his face. I want to indulge it, to luxuriate in it. Unforgivable. I don’t give a fuck. I’m not going to stop.

I stagger back from him and catch his hand, dragging him behind me. “Couch. Bed. I don’t give a shit, but tell me where to go.”

“First right.”

I follow his muttered instruction, which leads into a living room with leather couches, a big-screen TV, and three different video game consoles arranged in the entertainment center below it. It’s the vase of flowers that gives me pause. “Are those foxglove?”

Adonis gives a strangled laugh. “Good eye.” He nudges me toward the couch. “They’re not real. Just decoration.”

I don’t have to ask where they came from. It seems like the kind of perverse gift my wife would send a lover. A small, strange part of me doesn’t like that he still has evidence of her in his home, but it’s none of my business.

She’s not here.

I am.

I grip the back of Adonis’s neck and drag his mouth to mine. I love the way he gasps against my lips. There are no games here like with Aphrodite, no power plays and worrying that each move, each touch, gives away more than I intend. There’s just pleasure with a man I’m quickly coming to crave.

One who cares if I hurt myself, even a little. I don’t know what to do with that. I start to sink onto the couch and Adonis catches my elbows, lowering me slowly. I break the kiss long enough to say, “I sit down all the time. I don’t need you to treat me like a child.”

He grins against my lips. “Maybe I just like touching you.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all. I press him back a little and hook my fingers into the waistband of his pants. His cock is a hard imprint against the fabric, but I purposefully avoid it for now. One tug brings him between my thighs. Close enough that I give in to the urge to drag an open-mouthed kiss over his abs. “Spend a lot of time in the gym?”

“You would know,” he rasps. He grips my shoulders and kneads lightly. “You have more than enough muscle to spare.”

Because I thought I’d be a warrior. Not a hero—never that, not with the skeletons rattling around in my closet—but someone who commanded respect and fear in those around him.

Instead, I’m a failure. I failed to take the Ares title and bring Helen Kasios under our thumb. I failed to kill one of the other titles that would have been a good fit for me. I failed to avoid a marriage to a damned witch who comes far too sweetly for my peace of mind.

I’m failing at being Hephaestus.

Adonis sifts his fingers through my hair and tugs gently. “That feels good.”

I exhale slowly. I might have failed at everything else, but I’m succeeding at seducing this man. I’m going to make him feel good, make him come so hard he won’t be thinking of anyone but me.

That, I can do.

“I’m not done yet.” I lick my way down his stomach, but stop short of his pants. I want his cock in my mouth, but even more than that, I want to see him without a single thing hiding his body from my sight. A few tugs on the pants and they slide off his narrow hips, pooling around his ankles.

My mouth literally waters at the sight of a naked Adonis. I don’t know if I believe in perfection, but it’s hard to argue against its existence with this man standing before me. His brown skin is smooth and unblemished by the scars that pepper my body. Even his cock is perfect, long and broad with a wicked curve.

I draw a single finger down his length. “You’re like a fucking piece of art. Are you sure you’re real?”

“Real enough.” His hands spasm in my hair. “If you don’t stop looking at me like that…”

It’s only sex. A release for both of us. Or that’s what I tell myself as I dip down and take his cock into my mouth.

I ignore the fact that those reassurances have the flavor of lies.