He seemed to start and come to himself. His joy became muted but she could still feel it beating in him. He smiled at her and said, “Of course, forgive me. I am mistaken.”
Then his telepathic voice sounded in her head like deep bell chimes in the wind. My name is Ferion. I knew a woman once who looked much like you. Meeting her was one of the greatest gifts of my life.
I am honored that you would share that with me, she said. But it is dangerous for me that we talk of this, and I am not that woman. In fact, I am very much less than that woman.
Not to my eyes, he said. Please allow us to offer you sanctuary. I know our Lord and Lady would greet you with joy every bit as deep as my own. We would treasure your presence among us.
She hesitated and for a moment, oh, she was tempted. The thought of such a welcome wrung at her lonely heart. But Ferion’s reverence brought her up short. She didn’t think she could bear to live with such regard. Not when she was so much less than what he thought she was, nothing very special at all, just a glow-in-the-dark night-light and a stupid parlor trick and a big mouth that got her into too much trouble. Living with the Elves, where she would feel like a fraud while she aged and died and they remained forever the same, would just be a different kind of loneliness.
The jealous hand on her ankle tightened. She looked down at Dragos, who was watching her with a narrowed gaze.
I thank you for the offer of sanctuary. Perhaps one day I may take you up on it, she said to Ferion. While she couldn’t accept, she couldn’t bear to say no, either, to what might be the only home ever offered to her. In the meantime, I have a debt to pay.
Ferion said aloud, “Lady, I beg of you, come away with us. Do not stay with the Beast.”
She squatted by Dragos and dared to peek under the hoodie covering his wound. It had stopped bleeding. She mopped the blood streaks from his shoulder as gently as she could, wiped her hands on the material and folded the bloodied part into the rest of the hoodie.
“This train wreck all is my fault,” she said. “I have to do what I can to make it right.”
Dragos’s grip on her leg eased. His fingers slid along her calf in a subtle movement.
It annoyed her so much, she snapped at him. “But no matter what ridiculous thing you say, I am not yours. You wouldn’t be here except for me so I will see you to the Elven border. I know you lost your head, and you got all scary and obsessive and territorial, and you want to get back your property and all that, but come on. All I took was a freaking penny. Besides, I already gave you another one.”
One corner of his long, sexy, cruel mouth lifted in a smile.
The Elves refused to touch Dragos, so she had to help him as much as she could. By the time he had pushed himself off the ground and she had gotten herself insinuated under his good arm, the Elves had disappeared. She knew better than to believe they were gone.
“You took a 1962 penny,” Dragos said. His teeth were gritted. “You left a 1975 penny. It’s no replacement.”
She stared at him. “Oh my God, it’s scary you noticed that.”
“I know everything in my hoard and exactly where it is,” he told her. “Down to the smallest piece.”
“You could go to a doctor, get checked out for OCD,” she panted. “There might be medication for that.”
His chest moved in a silent laugh.
She focused on putting one foot in front of the other. He leaned on her as little as possible—otherwise they both would have crashed to the ground again. He still felt like a Volkswagen had been hung around her neck.
They got inside. He collapsed on the couch. He draped an arm over his eyes and stretched out one leg until his boot hung over the end. He left the other foot planted on the floor. Between the blood and the buttons she’d popped when she ripped it open, his Armani shirt was ruined. She eyed his chest that went both wide and far, narrowing to an eight-pack that rippled into his jeans.
For God’s sake. The male was injured and here she was ogling him like a pervert in a porn store. “I’m just not right in the head,” she muttered.
He said from under his arm, “I’ll pursue that comment later.”
She turned to the kitchen. “I’ll get you some water.”
“Scotch.”
“Okay. And water.”
She brought the bottle of scotch along with a jug of water and a cloth. He swiped the scotch bottle from her, uncapped it and drank half without pausing. She waited until he came up for air. Then she sat on the wood-framed coffee table and used the washcloth to wipe the blood off his chest. The entry wound was already nothing more than a white scar.
“Does it still hurt?” she asked, anxiety gnawing at her.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Your voice is too loud. Shut up,” he told her. She bit both her lips as she finished washing him. He sighed and shifted. While he had lost none of that lethal animal grace, it was obvious he was in pain. “Keep doing that with the cloth. It feels good.” He paused. “Please.”
After freezing for a moment, she said, “I’ll get a clean one.”
She dropped the bloodied cloth in the sink, grabbed another and hurried back. He hadn’t moved. She began to smooth the dampened cloth over his chest and shoulders. If he had felt hot before, now he was an inferno. She took the arm draped across his washboard stomach, pushed up the sleeve and bathed it. Then she put it down and reached for the arm he had covering his eyes. He let her, eyes glittering under half-closed lids.
“It was the phone call,” she said. “For the steaks. I didn’t call a number from the phone book. I had memorized a help line number somebody gave me.”
“I got that.” His reply was very dry.
She nodded, dipped the warm washcloth in the water from the jug to cool it down and started over again. The words kept pouring out of her. She said, “I was scared when I called them. I thought you were going to kill me.”
“Got that too.”
“I’m sorry,” she burst out. She grabbed the scotch bottle from him and took a deep swig.
As she lowered the bottle, she caught him smiling. “Good,” he said. “You should be very sorry. In the last two days, you have cost me an untold amount of manpower, tens of millions of dollars in property damage—”
“Hey. Let’s keep the record straight. I wasn’t the one who threw a hissy and hollered fit to wake the dead.” Her spine straightened and she glared at him.
His smile broadened, a slash of white in the room’s gathering darkness. “You’ve caused me all kinds of broken treaties with the Elven community, and now I’m sick as a dog.”
She pointed at him. “You broke those treaties. You weren’t supposed to come here. How crazy is that.” A pause. She looked at him with sad eyes. “Are you really sick as a dog?”
“Pretty much.” He gestured for the bottle and she handed it over. “My body’s fighting off the poison. It’s better than it was. In a little bit I’ll be able to move around on my own.”
She turned and sat with a small grunt on the floor. She leaned back against the couch facing away from him. She drew up her legs, put her elbows on her knees and pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her headache had grown. “I’m not sure where the Elven demesne ends, but it won’t take long to drive it. Couple hours. We’ve got some time.”
He dug his fingers into her hair and lifted up the strands. “I want some of your hair.”
She lifted her head. “What?”
“I said I want some of your hair. Give me a lock and I’ll forgive you for breaking and entering.”
“Oh-kay. Sure.” She squinted at him. “So I give you a lock of my hair, take you to the Elven border and drop you off?”
He laughed. “I never said I was letting you go. I just said I’ll forgive you.”
“I knew that had to be too easy,” she muttered. “You’re just not a straight road, are you? Okay, so why will you forgive me but not let me go?” Her shoulders sagged. “Never mind. I’m
too tired for this conversation.”
He kept running his fingers through her hair. “Did you ever give your boyfriend any?”
Her eyes tried to close. The gentle tugging on her scalp was making it all but impossible to keep her head upright. “Ex,” she mumbled.
“Ex,” he amended.
“No.” She fought against the drugging pleasure, to wake up. She gave his hand a halfhearted push. “Stop it. I can’t keep my eyes open when you do that.”
“So don’t.” He smoothed his palm over her head. He liked how her voice got soft with drowsiness. He liked that she didn’t smell of fear any longer, that her scent was tinged with a lingering faint arousal. “Go to sleep,” he murmured.
“Gotta meet that deadline. Set an alarm.” She tried to struggle to her feet.
As she was rising off her knees, he hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her down on top of him. It wasn’t hard. She was off balance to begin with and wobbly with fatigue. She oophed and tried to push off him, but he wrapped his arms around her and trapped her in place.
“Lie down,” he ordered. “I’ll make sure we leave on time. Go to sleep.”
She collapsed on him like a house of cards. He pulled her head into a comfortable spot on his uninjured shoulder. “Quit giving me orders,” she yawned. Under the guise of shifting to get comfortable, she rubbed her cheek against his chest, wallowing in the sensation of warm, powerful male. It seeped into the cold cracks that ran deep inside her. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“Sleep,” he told her.
Just like that, from one moment to the next, she was asleep.
No one was around to witness when he experimented with pressing his lips against her forehead.
He decided he liked that too.
SIX
The bed shifted underneath her. Pia yawned and rubbed her nose. Why was the mattress so uneven and warm? Her eyes popped open. The room was full dark. All she could see were shadows.
She was sprawled on Dragos, their legs entangled. She stiffened and tried to push herself upright, but the heavy arms encircling her refused to let her go. And her head was pinned. She gave a tug. He had wrapped her hair around one thick wrist.
Gravel seemed to be lodged in her throat. She croaked, “You think I would try to run away again while you slept? I wouldn’t leave you when you were hurt.”
He unwound her hair and let go of the ends, smoothing it back. “I didn’t sleep.”
This time when she pushed onto her elbows, he let her, allowing one arm to loop across her waist. Not going to think about that nap. Not going to think about sleeping in his arms or how shocking it was that it felt so good. Whoops. She just thought about it.
“How could you not sleep?” she asked. “Did you feel too sick?”
“It’s not my usual habit, but I can go days at a time without eating or sleeping if I need to.” He kept his voice at a sedate pitch. The sound rumbled through her. “I have no intention of sleeping in the Elven demesne. Besides, all I needed to do was rest.”
“How do you feel now?” Too groggy to keep her head up, she sank down again and rested her cheek on his pectoral. Mmm. Satin skin over iron.
“Better. My shoulder feels like ice, but the pain has eased. I’ll be able to get up and move around, but I don’t think I’ll be able to shift until well after their deadline expires. The magic of their poison was well constructed.”
She ran light fingers over his injured shoulder. The area felt feverishly hot, much warmer than the rest of his body, not icy. “That doesn’t hurt?”
“No.” He captured her hand and brought it up to his mouth. She stiffened as he slipped her forefinger into his mouth and sucked.
Just like that the intense lust from the dream came roaring back. His hold on her waist shifted her until he brought them into better alignment, pelvis to pelvis. The evidence of his arousal jutted long and thick under his jeans. She groaned and tried to wriggle away. All she managed to do was rub their bodies together.
She choked, “Stop it.”
He took his time sucking his way to the tip of her finger. His dark voice brushed her like a lazy tiger rubbing against her skin. “Why? You wanted me in the dream. I wanted you. I have smelled your arousal since. Only a few hours have passed. We have time before we need to leave.” He licked her palm, a sensation that shot all the way down her body to throb between her legs.
She gasped. “What happened was in a dream!”
“So? We both still want it.” His lips moved to the delicate skin of her wrist.
The pulse at her wrist beat a frantic tattoo against his mouth. His tongue traced the vein. She was not just shocked but bewildered. He was such a sledgehammer kind of male, but this sensuality had a knowledgeable gentleness she didn’t know how to handle. She had to work to find her outrage again. When she did, it was whimpering in delight.
“The dream was a spell! It wasn’t real.”
“It was the truth,” he said. Long fingers began to tease their way under the hem of her shirt to trace along the skin at her lower back. “The beguilement brought you what you wanted most.”
Her skin prickled and she felt suffocated. She struggled hard to get free and meant it this time. For a moment his arms tightened on her as if he would refuse to let her go. Then his hold loosened.
She scrambled to her feet, collided with the coffee table and knocked something over. Wetness soaked the carpeting at her bare foot. She had kicked over the jug of water she’d used to sponge him clean.
She held out her arms as she went forward until she came to the wall. Her fingers slid along the smooth plaster until she found a switch. She flipped the switch and then stood with both hands braced on the wall, eyes squeezed shut against the sudden light.
Her face felt like it was on fire. Keith and the horrible mistakes she made. Ignoring her mother’s advice, opening up and sharing, all because she wanted to be in love and to be loved, she wanted to be trusted and to trust. All because she wanted a lover and a mate, a real home, a safe house, a place she didn’t have to run from, and dare she think it, maybe someday even children.
The muscles in her arms were too tight. She rubbed her damp cheek on her shoulder.
The couch springs protested. She felt rather than heard him come up behind her. An inferno of energy boiled along her hypersensitive nerves.
Dragos pressed his body to her back. He pressed his hands over hers, so much bigger and darker than the slender feminine ones that trembled underneath. Her distress bruised the air. He lowered his cheek to the top of her head.
His Court was at times a tumultuous place. Some were mated. Many were single. All the Wyrkind lived with a frank sensuality, and all too easily hot emotions ran to violence.
He took a female on occasion, but his couplings were always simple. It was straightforward sex with no complications. But he had been a witness to many other couplings that were much more complex. Hurt feelings, misunderstandings, jealousies, broken hearts, infidelities, passions—it all played out in a backdrop to Court life.
This was a complex female, no simple sex for hire. He considered what to do, examples of things he had seen, discarding one thing after another. Then he said in a quiet voice, “I don’t understand. Will you please explain to me?”
Damn him. Now he knew that saying “please” got to her, he was starting to say it. She shook her head.
He sighed. “I am old and I am often cruel and calculating, and it is not safe to be around me when I am in a rage. I do not apologize for what I am. I am a predator, and I rule other strong-minded predators. But I did not mean to distress you.”
She calmed as she listened to him. The horrible sense of exposure faded. He surrounded her with his body, and his energy engulfed her.
He didn’t understand. He thought the dream was just about sex. If it were only that simple. She leaned her head back and he moved so that she rested in the hollow where his neck met his shoulder.
She said, “The dream was ma
nipulative. It was outside of reality. You might choose to do things in dreams that you might not choose to do when you’re awake.”
“But it was true?” His breath puffed the delicate hairs at her temple.
How strange that he was uncertain. He wore arrogance with much more ease. That shouldn’t be as charming as she thought it was. She really wasn’t right in the head.
“There was a truth in the dream,” she admitted. “It is not as obvious as just sex.”
“There is more to it than I thought.” She could hear the smile in his voice. He sounded . . . pleased.
“You’re glad about that?” she asked, unable to keep from smiling too.
“You’re complicated. I am not bored.”
She pulled one hand out from under his and covered her mouth. “I’m so happy I could entertain you, Your Majesty.”
He wrapped his arms around her. “So, what is this reality that is not as obvious as the sex in the dream? How does it connect to the arousal I have sensed from you?”
She reveled in the strength of those arms and decided to let herself enjoy being held. No analysis, second-guessing motives, no looking forward, no expectations. “Is that how I really feel? How much might be left over from the dream spell? You’re complicated too, and I’ve been pretty damn scared of you off and on today. And for me, attraction is one thing, but making l—” She drew in a sharp breath. “But sex,” she amended, “is quite another. I have to have a certain level of trust in someone before I can choose to be that vulnerable.”
“You trusted Keith,” he said.
She couldn’t keep from flinching. “Yes, I did. And he betrayed me. And that still hurts.”
“The beguilement from the dream has worn off,” he told her. “Whatever you feel is real, and what you choose to do about it is all your own.”
He pulled her hair to one side and put his lips to the bite mark at her neck. Her pulse fluttered like a butterfly and her breathing hitched. His arms tightened and then he let her go and stepped back. She turned around, disheveled and bewildered. Graceful bare feet gleamed pale against the neutral beige of the carpet, her toes painted a glossy red. She looked delicate and delicious and his groin tightened.