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But as a fae female, and experiencing sexual need of him, she could only remain rooted to the secret hallway floor, staring at him through the screen, essentially spying on him.
He wrapped up his routine with more stretching, then moved to the balcony to stare out at a rolling vista of farmlands and the occasional island of trees. Ferrenden Peace was a beautiful, pastoral country, almost a realm apart.
What she did next, however, was unpardonable. Using the new skills Rosamunde had only that morning trained her to develop, she cast a layered enthrallment shield around herself, left the hall, and stole into his room.
She had to see him close up.
Moving to the balcony, she took up a place at the end so that she could watch him. He smelled heavenly, a rich mossy forest scent, like something wooded. Her nostrils flared and the wolf part of her wanted to howl, wanted to cry out some message to the world that she’d found him, she’d found the one.
He had no idea she stood five feet away from him, staring up at his gray-green eyes, his straight brows, the angled, masculine line of his cheeks.
Her gaze fell to his neck and shoulders, corded with tight, extremely well-defined muscle. He drank from a water bottle, small sips, rehydrating as his gaze wandered the distant vista.
Sheep bleated, a jarring sound in the serene pasture. His gaze rose, tracking a hawk, hers did as well.
She realized that in all her travels while hiding from her mother, she’d spent only one year in Walvashorr Realm and all during that time, she’d never once seen Mastyr Seth. Would she have had such an intense reaction to him all those years ago if she had?
She wanted to touch him. That was the worst part. It was one thing to hold the shield tight and disguise her presence, but quite another to put her hand on him. She moved closer, inching her fingers toward him. A vibration ignited deep within her body and instinctively she knew what it was, her mating frequency, and that none of her previous boyfriends had ever once awakened her in this way.
Though she didn’t actually make contact, Seth suddenly grabbed his arm and rubbed the area near the tips of her fingers. He must have sensed her proximity.
She drew her arm back, fearing discovery. Still keeping her shield tight, she hurried from the room, returning to her castle bedroom. She lay on her bed for a long time, stunned that only a realm ruler had been able to arouse her mating frequency.
A realm ruler.
Seth of Walvashorr.
It wasn’t until the next day that she settled into her investigative routine, ferreting out every scrap of information about Seth, making liberal use of the Nine Realms Internet, reading every comment, every blog, every newspaper article that even so much as mentioned his name.
From that information, she’d gradually constructed a portrait of him, that he lived an extremely solitary existence for a realm ruler, but that he was a man of honor, a powerful warrior, and he spent every waking moment serving Walvashorr.
He had only one residence of any significance, his Shauck Gorge house, while most of the other mastyrs had three or four. The apartment in south Walvashorr, in Hawgrine, didn’t count nor did the odd treehouse he’d built at Redheart Peak in the north.
He had no close friends, and in this one thing especially, Lorelei felt she could really relate to Seth. Batya, now a blood rose and bonded to Mastyr Quinlan, had become a good friend, maybe even the first real friend Lorelei had ever had in the past seventy-two years of her life, from the time she’d escaped her mother’s prison-home when she was eighteen. But her transient lifestyle had severely limited the things she’d been able to share with Batya.
Essentially, she’d lived her life apart, like Seth.
So she understood him and even the cause of his chosen solitude. He’d been orphaned at eight when an Invictus pair had killed his parents. While on a family picnic, Seth had been exploring deep in the nearby forest and when he’d come back, he’d found a massacre. His younger brother and his parents had been drained and slaughtered, while an older brother had disappeared.
An orphanage had followed, a place where survival of the fittest had defined day-to-day existence.
Almost a century later, he’d been engaged to a woman named Kristen, but she’d died. Not much had been written about those circumstances, but they couldn’t have been good because he’d never tried again. He kept women at a distance.
Shortly after, he’d become Mastyr of Walvashorr.
As the reverie drifted away, Lorelei sighed deeply. She lifted the comforter to her nose and breathed in. The fabric smelled of Seth, that intensely rich, mossy scent of his. She knew she’d been left to recover in his bed and something about that afflicted her heart badly. Her chest felt strangely heavy and weighed down. She worried about Seth and though she’d been instrumental in saving him at Loperz Canyon, she could feel in her bones that there was more to come.
She trembled, as the fae part of her warmed up. She had a sense of the future, that she would become much more than Seth’s bodyguard. Yet how could two such solitary individuals ever trust each other enough to journey together?
* * * * * * * * *
Seth played Debussy, a sure sign he had a problem to solve. Something about the impressionistic music, or maybe just the soothing aspect of running his fingers up and down the black and white keys, helped his brain to process whatever dilemma had him tied up.
And he needed processing right now: Rosamunde, Lorelei, her latent power, the future of the Nine Realms. And of course, his blood starvation.
His stomach cramped in increasingly tight waves. He should have called his doneuse sooner. But she would arrive at full-dark and he’d be ready to face whatever it was that Rosamunde had hinted at when she’d told him to be open to Lorelei.
In between pieces, his hands shook, another indication he’d waited too long to feed.
