Warrior Enchanted: The Sons of the Zodiac Read Free Page B

off.”
    On a shrug, Emerson took another sip of her wine. “Nothing helps.”
    “Not even Drake?”
    “No.”
    “He might be able to if you let him in.”
    She raised a practiced eyebrow. “I don’t need the lecture, Callie.”
    “You’ll get none of that from me. He’s a grown man. He can figure out his own mind. That one only looks dreamy on the surface. A hell of a lot more goes on underneath.”
    Emerson rubbed a spot above her heart. Didn’t she know it.
    Which was the entire problem.
    The all-fun, no-strings sex fest she’d looked forward to carrying on with her hot neighbor had turned too serious.
    Way
too serious.
    She took a sip of her wine in an attempt to chase the suddenly raw taste of fear on her tongue. “Why does everyone want to make this more than it is?”
    Callie’s voice was quiet across the butcher-block counter. “Maybe because it is?”
    “It can’t be. I’m not wired that way.”
    “Is anyone?”
    Emerson laughed at that one. “Hell yeah, lots of people. They’re the ones that live those nice comfortable lives in the suburbs, with two-point-two kids and a minivan.” People like her sister, who believed if she simply ignored the gift she’d been given—ignored the gift that lived and pulsed and
breathed
under her skin—it simply didn’t exist.
    “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
    On a quiet nod, Emerson stared at Callie, unable to lie to her friend. “No. I don’t. Nor do I think anyone has a carefree life without pain or suffering or their own personal brand of misery.”
    “So why can’t you have it, too? Love is what makes all the pain and suffering and personal misery worth it.”
    “I’m just not cut out for it, Cal.”
    “He loves you, you know.”
    The words struck as hard as a blow to the chest before being replaced with something else.
    Delight.
    Yet even as the hot bloom of satisfaction suffused her veins, Emerson fought to cut it off. “Then that’s his problem.”
    “It’s
your
gift, Emerson. Yours and Drake’s.”
    “I can’t give him what he needs.”
But the goddess help me if I can give him up.
    Drake clawed his way through the afternoon heat of the jungle. Themis’s intelligence had been spot-on, as always. The scumbag drug lord was exactly whereshe’d said he’d be. Other than the land mines the asshole had embedded all along a two-mile radius from his home base, the hunt had been quick, the kill justified.
    Themis loved her humans far too much to take such decisive action, and he’d been more than a little surprised at the order. The goddess of justice rarely, if ever, ordered killing as a means to solve a problem.
    After he’d seen the shallow graves full of the drug lord’s victims and the devastating pollution that filled the nearby river—a result of runoff by the man’s manufacturing operation—Drake understood Themis’s decision.
    All of her Warriors had a job to do—a contribution that made the whole of their unit greater than the sum of its parts—and he believed in his. His military training had set him up as the perfect person to handle ops like this. He knew how to execute military strategy and could be counted on to get in, do the job and get out.
    He stayed cautious, keeping an eye out for the hastily set land mines stationed every few feet. He’d already tripped one and narrowly missed having to regrow a few limbs thanks to a quick port back to where he’d started. He did sport a nasty burn on his foot that hurt like a bitch and his attitude—already prickly from Emerson’s standard exit strategy—had gotten worse with each heat-filled, passing step.
    Why did he let her affect him like this?
    Kneeling down, he settled his backpack next to the river and rubbed a hand over his chest. The once-clean river showed the ravages of the drug lord’s greed as several dead fish bobbed along the fast-moving current.It was moments like this—those quiet moments he spent all alone—when he wondered if he’d have