“I highly doubt that will happen.”
“It happens all the time. People do that. And you have to admit that our relationship hasn’t exactly been a smooth and trouble-free one.”
He leaned in, the dare blazing in his eyes. “You wouldn’t enjoy one that was. You love the challenge. The fencing and the sparks that fly.”
I had to take it back. The man did know me pretty damn well. “But that’s not what works for a marriage. I don’t want to be married to you!”
A stricken look crossed his face. Impossibly, I’d wounded him. He stood and paced over to the glass dome, staring out into the night. I kicked myself mentally a few times and tried to think of what to say to make it up.
“Why did you come after me?” He asked it in a quiet voice. Carefully neutral again.
“What?”
“You heard me. Why did you risk your life, the lives of your precious companions and all of this independence you hold so close to your heart to accomplish the nearly impossible—wresting me from Titania’s grip? Particularly when I told you not to.”
Oh.
Why had I?
Rogue had literally disappeared in the middle of the night. No one but me believed him to be in jeopardy. With only dreams to go by—filled with his cautions and Titania’s taunts that he belonged to her again—I’d insisted on chasing after Rogue. I’d risked everyone’s lives to do it, to free him from the total mental enslavement she’d trapped him in.
It just hadn’t been a question at the time. I’d had to do it.
“That was your out, cruel Gwynn. If you didn’t want me, you could have walked away then and gone on with your life. I told you, over and over, not to look for me.”
The pain in his voice cut through me. I struggled off the bed and went to him, the stone floor warm against my bare feet. He didn’t turn, the elegant line of his profile remote and cold.
“Hey.”
He didn’t acknowledge me, so I had to snag his sleeve with a claw—which sliced the fabric. Oops. He glanced down at the tear and raised that eyebrow at me, haughty and removed as ever. Waiting for my answer.
“I couldn’t not look for you, okay? These are two different things. I can care about you without wanting to be married to you.”
“And do you?” he asked, watching my face. “Do you care for me, heartless Gwynn?”
The heart he claimed I lacked thudded hard in my chest, feeling bruised and swollen.
He unfolded his arms at last, and stroked my cheek. “Tell me.”
I had to tilt my chin back to look up at him and considered wishing up some heels, so we could be closer to the same height. The words and feelings wound together inside me, fighting each other. “I know you can sense how I feel.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“Just to torment me?” I had wanted it to be a joke, but my tone came out a little ragged.
“No.” He passed his thumb over my lower lip, sending a thrill through me. “Because you like to hide behind your wit. You’re careful of what you admit to out loud—as you should be, you’ve learned well—but this is important. No ducking behind omissions or clever wording. It’s only you and me here. I’ll hear you say it.”
“You’re one to talk,” I retorted, but it lacked any sting.
His lips twitched on the left side, sliding into a smile. “You have always been an excellent pupil.”
“Is this a way of trapping me into agreeing to marriage?”
That midnight gaze darkened, his thumb tugging my lower lip down while his fingers feathered over my jaw, as if he wanted to pull the words out of me.
“We will revisit that topic tomorrow, agreed?”
“Tomorrow being after dawn, yes,” he specified.
At least I’d have a better shot of discussing the ramifications of such a step without the seductive influence of the candlelight, the nearby bed and...what was I thinking? Rogue would be present, which meant I’d be seduced regardless. Time to get it out there.
“Yes,” I admitted, feeling as if I were standing with my toes hanging off the edge of the high dive. “I care about you.”
The hand on my cheek slid around to the back of my neck and he wound his other arm around my waist, pulling me up against him, his lips a whisper from mine. “And do you love me?”
“Does it matter to you?” I answered, rattled enough to give the same response he gave me when I asked that question.
“I find that it does matter, yes. Do you?”
“I thought you weren’t sure what it even meant.”
“I’m learning. I’ve learned a great deal from you, passionate Gwynn. I did mean it when I said I loved you. This thing that throbs between us and makes your pleasure, your happiness, mine. It’s new to me, but I’m learning to like it. I like that it made you come after me, and it feels like a wound to contemplate that perhaps you don’t feel this same thing. Am I fool to have thought so?”
“No.” I said it softly. “I didn’t know you felt love is all.”
“I didn’t have a name for it. Call it love, if you will.”
I’d told him I wasn’t sure if it mattered. Hearing it then and now, I found it did. I even believed him, feeling the strength of it vibrating with a subsonic hum through his body into mine. Mesmerized by the look in his eye, I stepped off, fell, and let the water close over my head. “I’ll call it love too.”
His mouth took mine, fierce and triumphant. Breathless from my risky confession, I returned the kiss, feeling starved for him. That thing he’d named, that throbbed between us, became a shared song of desire and need. I clung to him, willing in this moment to give up thinking about it all. I wanted to be with him.
But he pulled back, smiling when I protested.
He held out his hand and showed me the earrings. They glittered like jewels, inverted Stargazer lilies, limpid blue and luminous in the soft light. The man never gave up. “Will you wear them?” His voice held a level of warning and wariness. I’d worn them before, but mainly so he’d grant a stay on the marriage thing. This just put us back to where’d we’d been before Titania tried to change the game.
I nodded, knowing he needed this from me—and because I liked them, though I wouldn’t tell him that—and he pressed them to my earlobes, the tendrils tickling and sending dark shivers through me as they attached.
“How did you get them off without me?” he asked, curious, since I should not have been able to undo his spell.
“A dragon’s egg.” The dragons—and all associated with them—nullified magic.
“Clever Gwynn.”
“How did the horseshoe earring I gave you come off?”
He fingered his left ear where I’d affixed my one and only gift to him. “Titania.”
Of course. Her power trumped mine. More powerful than a dragon?
“Do you have it still?” he asked, raising the eyebrow on the left side of his face, the black pattern snaking with the movement. He’d sent it to me, a message of his own. “I would have it back if so.”
“I’d had it in the dress Titania poofed off me, back at her castle. It might be gone.” That pained me, that I’d been so careless, but Rogue was already shaking his head.
“You made it. Only you can destroy it. Call it to you.”
“How?”
“Hold the image in your mind and reach out to it. Imagine it landing in the palm of your hand. You can consider this your lesson for the day,” he added archly, reminding me of our old bargain of exchanging daily lessons for kisses and him sleeping in my bed. My gaze went, as if of its own accord, to the big bed in the center of the room. It seemed we would be sharing it every night from now on. And more than kisses. The thought made me shiver.
“Problem?”
“No.” I said it firmly, for both him and myself. One day at a time, right? I followed his instructions, mentally reaching for the golden horseshoe, which seemed to have a niche in my mind. As if anchored there. Interesting. I called and it appeared in my
palm. Fabulous trick. And it explained much of what Rogue could produce on a moment’s notice. Like, say, a creepy cyborg army.
Then, however, I was stuck.
I couldn’t pick the damn thing up and place it on his ear. Eventually I might get good at using the claws like pincers, but I couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Frustrated, I looked up to find Rogue patiently watching me.
“I’ll hold it in place.” He took it from me. “And you seal it there. Perhaps with a kiss,” he added, inviting me with a wicked glint in his eyes.
Did he think I wouldn’t? Carefully setting my palms on his shoulders, I stood on tiptoe, focusing the wish on my lips and bound the earring to his skin. He hissed at the sensation—I might have added more punch than I needed—and seized me by the hips, lifting me so I wrapped my legs around his narrow waist. I nipped at his earlobe, drawing it into my mouth and sucking on it, using my tongue to toy with the earring. Tasting his skin in lieu of burying my hands in his hair.
Rogue groaned and deposited me on the bed, coming down with me and pulling his ear from my mouth so he could kiss me, deep and full. “I believe we have unfinished business,” he muttered between kisses.
“I should probably clean up,” I protested.
“Do you think I care for such things?” He lightly bit the spot just under the corner of my jaw, pulling the skin into his mouth and making my head swim with need. “You taste delicious. Like yourself. Here you are in my bed, where I’ve dreamed for ages that you’d be. Don’t make me wait a moment longer, cruel Gwynn.”
The line of his cock pressed hot and urgent against my thigh and I was wet for him. More, I longed to have him inside me with a visceral and endless craving. “I don’t want to wait.”
His hands flexed on my hips, then moved behind me to lift my groin hard against his. “I want you naked,” he demanded. “Wearing nothing but my earrings.”
Overcome, I wanted it too. “Then do it.”
Magic whipped out of him in a black-edged slice that left me nude, making me gasp. With sharp desire, not surprise. Rogue sat up, the candle flames flaring higher with the scorching desire in eyes, and moved so he could look at me in full. I flushed, brutally aware of his gaze and my vulnerability. I’d been naked in front of him once before, but I might have been a little drunk at the time. And then that night had turned out so badly.
“Don’t think of that time.” He ran a long-fingered hand down my flank to my thigh. “This is that night. It will replace it. Be what should have been. We are safe here.”
“Okay,” I whispered, easily losing my thoughts in the long caresses as he stroked me, tracing the curves of my body while I undulated under his touch. If I’d thought that this coupling would be fast and furious, the explosion following months—years?—of packing powder into our internal kegs, I was wrong. He used both hands, lavishing me with sensual strokes, following the swell of my breasts and circling my belly button.
“What is this?” he asked, bending his head to dip his tongue in the indentation, making me gasp and wriggle.
“My...navel,” I got out. “It’s leftover from growing in my mother’s womb.”
“Will our child have one?”
“I imagine so.”
“Good.” He glanced up at me, grinning playfully, a long lock of silky black hair falling across his deep blue eye. “I like it.”
Then he followed my midline, licking and kissing as he went, so my belly fluttered. “Rogue...” I put my hands on his shoulders, urging him up. To no avail.
“Yes, beautiful Gwynn?”
“I can’t wait.”
“Yes, you can.” He swept his tongue along the tender underside of my breast, sending electrical bolts all through my system. My thighs were slick and I scissored them together. “As you made me wait.”
“So we’ll be in bed for nearly a year?”
He laughed, warm breath huffing against my skin. “Not so long as that perhaps.” He moved to the other breast, tasting that one also, in slow laps. Frantic, I clutched his head. He cursed and hot blood poured over my hand.
“Oh! Oh shit!” I yelled. A long lock of his inky black hair fell onto the bed beside me and Rogue had a hand clapped over his bleeding ear. “Rogue—I am so, so sorry!”
Absurdly, he laughed, sliding a glittering glance at me. How he could be so amused, I didn’t understand. I hated the damn claws. Hated myself for being unable to control the things. Deep inside, cool and silver-white, the cat stirred. Stretched.
“Shh.” Rogue palmed my breast with his free hand, a distracting caress. “Don’t fret, delicious Gwynn. Look—already the blood is stopping. The ear will grow back, remember?”
The blood—crimson as mine—had ceased flowing so copiously and only trickled down his arm.
“I hate that I did that,” I confessed. It felt as much a placing of myself into his power as telling him I might love him. Not might. I said I did, heaven help me.
“It is rather distracting,” he agreed and kneeled up. Then vanished the blood along with his shirt. His bare chest gleamed golden, the black lines snaking and winding around his left side like a tattoo of thorns. “But I have a solution.”
Across his palms, green ribbons appeared.
For a wild instant, I couldn’t breathe. All those dreams. All the times he taunted and enticed me with the image of those forest-green silk sashes binding my wrists.
The moment had arrived.
So many emotions churned inside me, seeking a way out. If I’d been aroused already, the sight of those ribbons acted like a chemical catalyst, rocketing my internal reaction exponentially. I craved and loathed the thought of them. Of giving him physical power over me in that way. Ripping my riveted gaze from them, I looked into Rogue’s face, hoping to find an anchor in this roaring sea.
He regarded me gravely. Serene, even. Despite the now-ragged ear and the shorn hair above it. But his eyes burned with searing flame, glittering with desire and the challenge.
“Did you always know it would come to this?” I managed to ask, my mouth a desert of apprehension and fascinated need.
“I wished for it,” he answered. “Is that the same thing?”
“With you?” I let out a shaky laugh. “Probably.”
“Give me your wrists, dangerous Gwynn,” he urged me. “Let me bind you, even if just this once. You know you can remove them with a thought, if you need to.”
“Do you promise me that?” I searched his face, reaching for the truth.
“Yes. These bindings, at least, are ones you can always shed.”
Mesmerized, feeling that this might be another of those haunting dreams, I held out my clawed hands and crossed my wrists.
Chapter Five
In Which [Redacted]
If knowledge is power in a technological world, then control is power in a magical one.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “Rules of Magic”
A storm of emotion surged through Rogue’s body, so strong it echoed through me and I nearly cried out with it.
“Thank you, my Gwynn,” he sighed.
With reverence, he wrapped the green silk around my wrists, crossing it around and between. My heart thudded out of control and my breath shuddered in and out of my body. I couldn’t look away, even when Rogue’s dark head bent over, his hair drifting across my naked skin, as he pressed a kiss on the back of each hand. As if the binding amplified sensation, the press of his mouth rolled through me. I moaned, a dark and dissolved sound.
Taking the ends of the ribbons, he drew my hands over my head, slowly but inexorably. Tipping my head back, I watched as he tied them to a ring on the headboard. A ring he’d put there just for me, I knew on some profound level. As one knows things in dreams.
Stretched and bound naked before him, my body bowed by the jewel-toned pillows, I gave up something. Some of my fear, perhaps. Or an anger. When Rogue framed my face with his hands and kissed me, his mouth hot on mine and the longing for me pouring out of his heart, I was undone.
>
He stopped teasing then, his hands dragging over my body in a ruthless possession I couldn’t resist. It seemed as if he touched every part of me, tasted, nipped and kissed every millimeter of skin. I moved with him, while he played me with exquisite skill, as if we performed some bloodless dance of magic and art. He pressed and I bowed. He drew and I followed. For this and this only, he held all the power.
And I yielded it to him with a sense of glory.
Impossibly, the fire between us burned hotter than ever. Equally consuming us, it raged. Rogue muttered incoherent words against my flesh, as lost to it as I. He ravished me in truth, as he’d so often promised to do. I lost all sense of time, reveling in the ecstasy of giving up all my resistance.
I only regained focus when he finally parted my thighs and settled himself between them, pausing for a long and endless moment. I managed to lift my head to see him staring down at my open sex. He’d lost the last of his clothes and kneeled there naked, his cock, as long as the rest of him, jutting high. All over the left side of his body, from temple to ankle, the black thorned lines seemed to pulse. His gaze caught mine in a cobalt flare and he pushed my knees back.
His eyes on mine, he angled himself and pressed the head of his cock against my aching entrance. I held my breath, nearly frantic that it wouldn’t happen, but he smiled, a slow wicked spread of satisfaction.
“Yes, my Gwynn?” he whispered, pushing in just enough to make me crazy.
“Oh please, yes.” I thrummed, vibrating with the need. He’d promised long ago that he wouldn’t take me unless I begged. And here I was. “Please, yes.”
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