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The statement stirred me. I had never said anything like it to him and it occurred to me that it might bother him that I hadn’t.
I pressed the horseshoe to his left earlobe—U-shape up, of course—wishing it to attach and drawing on the streaming crystal amplification to make it stay there. He moved under my touch and I thought perhaps it felt as sensual to him as it did to me.
When he opened his eyes to meet mine, they burned with feeling. That edgy, part-hopeful, part-desperate desire. The egg timer popped into the air next to us, which didn’t surprise me in the least. Two-hand dispensation, after all.
He pulled me into his embrace, hands roaming over my body while he kissed me with long, gentle pulls of his lips. He cupped my bottom, palming my curves in the close-fitting jeans. For my part, I buried my hands in his hair, holding to the back of his neck and returning the kiss with a fervent longing that did surprise me. Where had this hunger come from, when I had been so angry with him?
I just couldn’t think about it, any of it. Only touching and being touched made any sense.
Much too soon, he broke the kiss and pulled back, hands still on my body. I must have made a little sound of protest, because he cocked his head a little.
“Are you offering more than one kiss, delicious Gwynn?”
His dianthus-edge lips were dark and moist in light. The cave had amplified our desire for each other too, I realized. I throbbed for him and marveled at his self-control.
“I’d better not,” I whispered.
Those lips twisted in a cynical half smile.
“Of course you think that.” He shook his head but grinned. “For now, it’s enough that you want this too.”
Chapter 9
At the Inn of SevenMoons
‡
Time slips between realms do not appear to follow any mathematical progression I can determine. The worlds appear to mesh randomly. Perhaps a chaos theoretician would haveinsight.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “Magic”
By the timewe made it back to camp, it had grown late enough for all the human soldiers to be asleep. Starling was waiting up for us but looked so bleary I sent her off to bed. I had barely enough energy to gobble some sort of roasted fowl before I began nodding off myself. Rogue explained that the cave could do that—you felt supercharged while you were in it, then drained after.
Part of the price you paid for its services.
I would have been fine with him leaving that part out. Now I felt uncomfortably as if I’d been in the gullet of a gorgeous, crystalline Venus flytrap. Rogue was tired enough not to correct my image, which told you something right there.
Consequently we slept with no further hanky-panky. Which was just as well as I didn’t think my heart could withstand another onslaught. It was a bad sign that I couldn’t stay mad at him. Lust I could withstand. This slow-growing regard for him…this craving to be with him…bad, bad, bad.
Worse, in the morning when I woke and he wasn’t there, I missed him. Again. Still. Rogue had become my crack and I needed regular hits or…or what?Nothing. Get up, get dressed, eat your breakfast, mount the horse.Why Rogue couldn’t be bothered to ride along with us, I didn’t know. Too pedestrian, I supposed.
Starling muttered some caustic remarks about cranky sorceresses and, promising that lunch would put me in a better mood, left me to my own devices while she rode beside her new love-interest.
At least Darling kept me company, though he seemed uncommonly excited about the midday meal also. I mulled over what I’d learned the night before. More important, I wondered why he’d shown me so much, given me such powerful tools. To organize my thoughts, I made a little list of possible reasons.
1.Out of the goodness of his heart (ha!)
2.To equip me with skills to protect myself
3.To lull me into trusting him
4.To deceive me with partial information
5.All of the above
This was why multiple choice never worked. You could almost always make an argument for “all of the above.” With a sigh I tucked my notepad in the pocket with the dragon’s egg and vial. I’d think about it more after lunch. Which, it turned out, was waiting for us around the next bend. At a classically styled pub.
It could have been imported from the U.K., every stone and beam faithfully relocated and reassembled, just like the London Bridge moving to Arizona to span Lake Havasu. And with the same sort of startling dissonance.
