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After she rinsed the soap from her hair, she pressed a hand to her chest. She could also feel that she was slowly building a new supply for Stone, even though she could tell that for the present he was satiated. The whole thing was as intriguing as it was unsettling.
She wondered why the blood rose phenomenon had come into existence in the first place? Even as she mentally posed the question, her fae instincts already seemed to know the answer. The increase in essential power as a result of the bond aided each couple in defeating whatever enemy was present at the time.
In this case, her Aunt Margetta.
She found Stone’s crème rinse and applied it liberally. They shared the managing of long hair in common. She loved Stone’s thick wavy black hair.
She loved his tattoos and his lean muscled body.
His eyes.
His shoulders.
His tight ass.
And she’d loved looking into his mossy-green eyes last night when he’d brought her to the peak and beyond.
Her body warmed up and set to tingling all over again. She’d truly never dreamed sex could be this amazing.
Through the years, she’d had an occasional lover, but she’d always pretended to be someone else. When the man discovered her identity, he usually found an excuse to disappear.
She didn’t blame any of them and the truth was, she’d never fallen in love.
Now she was with Stone and part of her knew it all made sense.
Yet, as she stepped under the spray once more, she also knew she couldn’t complete the bond with him since she had more than one difficulty still standing in the way.
She pondered the secret of his birth parents. The compulsion to tell him what she knew became a powerful force within her. Given his hot bloodedness and his strong beliefs in the right way of doing things, he would see it as a betrayal that she hadn’t told him.
But how could she have done so? When she’d learned the truth herself, Davido had sworn her to secrecy.
Finally clean and with all the crème rinse out of her hair, she shut the water off. She’d long accepted the curse of the occasional entrapment vision that Margetta would set for her and she’d learned to settle those horror-filled visions into a locked-up place deep within her mind.
Each vision had meant the death of beloved realm-folk. Without jeopardizing the lives of the entire population of the Nine Realms, she’d had to live with the terrible foreknowledge of those acts Margetta had planned to inflict on innocent people.
The first few times it had happened, she’d nearly lost her mind. Only a series of counseling sessions with Davido, and later Vojalie, had kept her sane. They’d each helped her to build a personal, if painful, vault in which these visions lived. She’d had to separate herself from the terrorist that was he
r aunt, to keep the blame firmly on Margetta’s shoulders, rather than be consumed by her own guilt.
She had no intention of telling Stone about these visions, at least not if she could possibly help it. He wouldn’t understand, especially since one of those visions had been of Charborne and the subsequent slaughter of half the villagers and outlying farmers, including his adopted troll parents.
She’d long since forgiven herself for what she had been unable to control and hoped she’d never have to confess her foreknowledge to Stone. The man was a warrior vampire. How could he possibly understand her need for complete restraint?
He wouldn’t. He would have believed he could have done something, which meant if he ever learned this secret, he’d never forgive her for holding back.
She felt weighed down again with the cost of being Queen of Ferrenden Peace and a conduit for the elf-lord power. Sometimes she wondered who she would have been if she’d never ventured with her baby goats into the mist and her mother had lived. Of course that was a fool’s game and she quickly set it aside.
This was her life. She must deal with it as it was.
~ ~ ~
The moment full-dark arrived and his fragile vampire sensitivity to light was no longer at risk, Stone stripped out of his jeans, grabbed a swim towel from a stock he kept near the sliding glass doors, then headed outside to the end of the dock.
By then, he’d heard his hair-dryer whirring and knew it would take some time for Rosamunde’s long and very curly hair to dry.
So, a swim it was.
He made for the far shore and swam in long easy strokes, swinging his head from the water every now and then to drag in some air. As he drew close to the far end of the lake and his fingertips touched the mossy rocks, he flipped in the water and headed back.
