by Michele Hauf
“Bea?”
“It’s something I’ve wanted since I was a child and I used to sit in the shadows watching my half sisters and brothers play. They’d always exclude me because Malrick made it known how unfavorable I was. The dark one.”
He stroked her hair, and she flinched at the soft touch. She hadn’t expected such tenderness from a growly wolf. And when her teardrop landed on his wrist, she quickly swiped it away and turned her shoulder to him, coiling forward as she sniffed back more tears.
What was this? She didn’t cry. She was too tough for that. Her skin had hardened to armor over the years of neglect and abuse. Where had she put her blade? Stones, but she had lost track of it!
Kir embraced her, and he tugged her against his chest even as she tried to pull away to escape the unwanted kindness. She wasn’t deserving. She was the dark one. The one no one wanted to touch.
And then something inside her cracked open and reached out for the touch. For a moment of understanding. She sank into Kir’s arms and he cradled her to his warm chest, his heartbeats lulling her, urging her to curl up against him and tuck her head beneath his chin.
“All I want,” she whispered, “is to find my mother.”
Chapter 7
Dinner arrived via delivery and Kir set out the plates and poured red wine while Bea pulled herself together upstairs. He’d held her weeping and shivering in his arms. Never had a woman opened herself up to him like that. It had felt fragile to him, a moment he’d best handle carefully and with a reverence, given the faery’s tears. He felt honored she’d shared that with him.
But how to help her find her mother? Bea had no clue who the woman was. Malrick had never given her a species, so she literally had nothing to go on. She wasn’t positive her other half was vampire. And the database the enforcement team kept wasn’t so precise a guy could type in a random faery name such as Bea’s and get anything beyond a blinking cursor.
And really? If any in the pack knew he was allocating precious work time to help his wife track a suspected vampire, they’d have harsh words for him, for sure.
Yet he was compelled to do what he could. He preferred Bea giggling and fluttering about—even naked, if she chose—so he’d see what he could do.
Thinking about fluttering... A lithe faery skipped down the stairs and landed on the parquet floor with a barefoot bounce. Sashaying into the kitchen, her wings fluttered behind her bare shoulders. And bare body.
Kir’s eyes took in skin and softness and nipples and, oh...that sweet vee between her legs. “Uh...usually dinner is eaten clothed.”
Why had he said that? He had to get his head around the notion that the woman preferred skyclad. And, as a man, he was all for the blatant tease. But he did need a few safe respites from the kick in his libido. Like eating. Mealtime should be clothed. Maybe?
“Slip on something now,” he said, setting the filet mignon delivered from a three-star restaurant on the table, “and after we’re finished, I promise to slip it off you. If...that’s what you’d prefer.”
The faery squealed and clapped and spun out of the room, wings dusting the walls as she scampered upstairs.
And Kir chuckled and shook his head. He’d just asked a woman to put on clothes. What on earth was wrong with him?
* * *
The wolf did like his meat. Bea did the polite thing and tasted a bit of the pink beef. The sauce was savory, but she had to gag down the meat. Ugh. Good thing plenty of vegetables also sat on her plate. But the thing that distracted her from the distasteful meal? Mortals had food delivered to their front door in boxes. How cool was that?
“I’ll do what I can to help you,” Kir offered after a sip of wine.
She lifted a brow and stabbed a carrot slice with her fork. “Help?”
“Find your mother.”
“Oh, yes! Thank you.”
“It’s the least I can offer you. Family is important.”
“Knowing that packs thrive on tight bonds, I’m not sure my definition of family is the same as yours.”
“They are all different, but I think love is a common bond in all families.”
“Then my definition is really far from yours.” Because love? Yeah, that wasn’t a word she’d ever heard muttered in her father’s demesne. Love tended to be tricksy for the sidhe.
“So your pack is your family?” she asked as she sipped the cool red wine and made a dessert out of watching her husband devour his food. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“One sister,” he offered, pushing his now-clean plate away from him and sitting back to savor the wine. “Her name is Blyss. She married recently and now lives part of the year in Minnesota with her redneck werewolf husband.”
“What’s a Minnesota?” Bea asked around a crunch on a string bean.
He chuckled. “It’s a place.”
“Oh. I didn’t do very well in mortal realm geography classes.”
“It’s in the United States, which is on a different continent from this one. About a nine-hour flight west.”
Bea’s eyes widened. “You fly?”
“Not with wings. Though, can your kind fly across an entire ocean?”
“Probably not. We’d have to stop and rest on a mermaid’s head or chill out on a whale’s back. So, a sister? And just the one? Now I can understand how you manage to embrace family.”
“A family that is too distant lately. I miss her, but Blyss and her husband return to Paris for the winter and spring. I still haven’t seen her new baby, but she sends me emails and texts pictures all the time.”
“Emails and texts? Is that computer stuff?”
“Yes.” He pulled out a cell phone from his vest pocket and aimed it at her. “Smile for me.”
Wiggling her shoulders, Bea assumed a pose with a bright grin. Something flashed on the back of the phone and she gaped. “Did you just steal my soul?”
Kir chuckled. “Not even. I just made an image of you. Or the camera in my phone did. Now I have it with me all the time so I can look at it whenever I like. See.”
She inspected the image on his phone and it was her! “That’s amazing. But I’m still a little worried about my soul.”
“I promise you I’ve no such magic. So now if I wanted to I could send your picture to my sister with the click of a button. I did tell her about our marriage. She’s excited for me. I still haven’t told Blyss about Edamite, though. Want to ease her into that one slowly.”
“What’s an Edamite?”
“Edamite Thrash is the man’s name.”
“Sounds villainous.”
“It is a perfect villain name, right? He’s my, er...half brother. My mother kicked my father out years ago after she discovered his marital indiscretions. I didn’t know about Ed until recently. Apparently, my father has a taste for darker things.”
“Like vampires?” she said with a perk up of her shoulders. Heck, if the man’s father had a child with a vampiress, then Bea should expect as much understanding from the son, right? And they had something in common: dads who did dark things. Yay! Not.
“Not vampires. Demons. Vampires, I tolerate. Demons, I despise,” Kir said. “And leave it at that.”
“Ah. So that means you don’t like this Edamite guy?”
“He’s...okay. We’re learning to accept one another. Hell, my family is messed up, there’s no way around that one. Until recently Blyss denied being a werewolf. She took pills to suppress her wolf.”
“Really? How’d that work for her?”
“Well, for a while. But then she met Stryke Saint-Pierre and he brought out the wolf in her. Much to my relief. A wolf who denies her heritage? That’s just wrong.”
“You’re proud of what you are.”
“I am.” He offered his goblet across the table and Bea met it with a ting. “To werewolves!”
“And their half-breed wives,” Bea offered before she sipped.
Kir paused before sipping. His eyes met hers. He smiled behind the gl
ass rim, then drank. “To my half-breed wife, who isn’t quite sure what her other half is, and who promises to keep those fangs out of my neck. Yes?”
She set down the goblet and curled up her legs to sit kneeling on the chair, catching her chin in hand as she considered his proposal. It wasn’t much to ask. And she really did not want to give him a blood hunger if it was unnatural to his species. She should be thankful this arranged marriage seemed to be working out so far. The man was kind, sexy and all sorts of virile.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “I can promise that. But I’m going to have to satisfy the hunger I have, just so you know.”
“With a human?”
“Yes. And soon. This is a new venture to me, being in this realm, not having any friends who will offer their necks for a snack when I need one. I’m not sure how to go about it.”
“Is it a sex thing?”
She sensed the worry in his tone and shook her head. “No. And yes. Most times when I’ve taken ichor it’s been while having sex. But I don’t have to have sex just to have a bite. And now I’m a married woman. I do take our vows seriously. Weird as it is to marry a stranger.”
“It is weird, but we’re adjusting.”
“We are.” She raised her glass for another toast. “Now, you had mentioned something about getting me out of these clothes?”
* * *
They started up the stairs, but by the time Bea’s foot made it to the fourth runner her dress was off and Kir nipped at her ankle. She giggled and turned to pull him up by a hank of his curly hair. The wolf liked it when she was rough with him, she had noticed, so she dug in her fingernails at his shoulders.
“Right here?”
“Good a place as any,” he said as he bowed to her mons and lashed his tongue over her pulsing clit. He pushed up one of her legs and she gripped the stair rail so she wouldn’t slide down, but it seemed he had a good hold on her. Bea realized she wasn’t sitting on the stairs, because he supported her completely in his big, muscular embrace.
Tilting back her head, she squealed with delight as he dived in deeper and fed on her. The man knew how to get directly to the point, and it wasn’t long before she was gasping, gripping his hair and fighting the urge to release. And then she did not fight it. She bucked her hips as her wolf shoved down his pants and pushed himself to the hilt inside her.
He gripped the stair rail to the left and slammed a palm on the stair riser to her right. Bea’s head bumped into a stair above her. “Ouch!”
“Sorry. Let’s take this upstairs.” Without sliding out of her, he managed to crush her against his chest and take the remaining stairs up to the bedroom.
They landed on the bed amid her giggles and his huffing pants. “You think this is funny?”
“Yes, you crazy wolf.” How did she get so lucky to have been married off to such a fun and amazing man? It felt wrong, but she didn’t want to go there, so Bea, instead, tilted his head up to look at her. “You’re good to me, wolf. Why?”
He shook his head and kissed her stomach. “Because I’m honoring our marriage vows.” He kissed her mons. “And you’re worth being good to.” He slid lower to kiss along her leg. “And you make it a lot easier to do this marriage thing than I had expected.”
She could get behind all that. He made it easy, too.
“Tell me about these,” he said, tapping his fingers on the violet designs covering her feet. “Sidhe markings?”
“Yes, they are significant to the Unseelie. They are what connect me to the earth and make my nature glamour work. I won’t come into any magical sigils for years. The older we get, the more powerful we grow. Of course, being a half-breed, I’m not sure what’s in store for me, magic-wise. I’m just thankful I can bring out my wings. You know, I can’t rely on glamour here in the mortal realm?”
“Is that like becoming invisible?”
“Yes, making it impossible for the human eye to see me among them. I wonder what that’s about?”
“Not sure.” He kissed the Unseelie marks and then clasped her hand.
“I like holding your hand.”
“More than this?” He glided up and kissed her breast.
“Yes and no. I think I need more time to consider the question. Maybe you should do that a little more.”
“Your wish is my command.”
Chapter 8
Kir woke in the morning and stretched his arms over his head. Bea’s spot on the bed beside him was empty. Had she gone down to make him breakfast? He suspected she had no clue how to cook. Likely a princess was used to being served and waited on. Yet he’d been surprised by her confession about not being loved by her family.
He’d always felt loved by both family and pack. That is, until his father had left. But that had been twenty years ago. He’d not forgiven Colin Sauveterre for his rash decision to leave his family because of a demon lover; nor had he forgotten the pain of such a betrayal. Yet he refused to allow that harsh memory to weigh him down.
He’d lived a good life, had great friends and a good job. So it was difficult to understand how Bea’s father could be so cruel to her as to make her feel as if she were unloved. A pariah. Had she no friends in Faery?
Well, he’d do his best to show her how good family could be. Soon the pack would welcome her, too. He’d gotten lucky that she wasn’t some kind of horned creature that wore a scaly skin. Though the vampire side bothered him more than he’d ever tell her. He rubbed his neck. She may have tasted his blood, but she couldn’t have gotten a good drink. Surely, if a blood hunger was going to develop, he’d have noticed by now. Maybe?
He had an appointment this afternoon with a non-pack doctor in the 7th arrondissement. He couldn’t risk seeing the pack’s doctor because if he did harbor a blood hunger, that would surely get him banished from the pack. No matter what happened, he needed to deal with this quietly.
Slipping on a pair of jeans, he padded downstairs. Out from the kitchen sprang a naked faery wielding a samurai sword. The blade flashed before him and landed at his neck.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
“Oops.”
Bea retracted the weapon, performing the sweep to clear off the blood—thankfully, none had been shed—then putting it in the imaginary holster at her hip she should have worn had she been a real samurai.
“Oops?” Kir grabbed the sword and marched into the living room, where he displayed a wall full of ancient weapons. He put the weapon up on the wooden holders from where she’d stolen it. “What the hell?”
The faery pouted and stomped her foot. “I thought you were an intruder.”
“In my own house? Why are you playing with these weapons?”
“I’m not playing with them. I know how to handle a blade. I never went anywhere in Faery without one. Never knew when an assassin would spring out of the shadows.”
“Seriously?” Kir shook his head. It was too early. He wasn’t in the mood for this. And she was...naked. It was hard to be angry with a naked faery. “I’m going to work. I’ll be home around five. The clock is on the wall there. So, when you hear the door open and shut around that time, you’ll know it’s me. Your husband. Okay?”
She gave him an impudent tilt of her nose.
“Damned naked faery,” he muttered as he strode toward the entryway.
“Jumpy ol’ grump of a werewolf,” she spit in his wake.
“Short Stick!” he called back.
No reply.
* * *
Bea slumped onto the couch and pulled up her legs, tucking her chin between her knees. He’d called her that awful thing about being a short stick. She didn’t want to be the thing the loser was forced to live with. She just wanted him to like her. She had begun to believe he actually did like her. If she judged from the sex they’d been having, he was over the moon about her.
Maybe the sword had been too much. She had been playing with him! She’d keep her hands off his weapons and stick with her own blade. But she wasn’t going to drop her in
nate cautionary instincts. She knew nothing about this realm. A girl had to protect herself. And if her husband was always away at work?
“I can take care of myself. Always have. Always will.”
She wandered through the kitchen and tapped the granite countertop. “This is so boring! I need to get out. Explore the city. Learn the landscape. Scope out the enemies and determine who are my friends. Yeah. Good idea, Bea. Time to explore. And—” she tapped a fang “—time to feed this ache for satisfaction.”
* * *
“Demons bleed black,” Jacques said. He set a cup of coffee on Kir’s desk and hiked up a leg to sit on the corner of the desk.
Kir looked up from the computer screen he’d had his eyes glued to for over an hour. When had he last blinked? He rubbed his eyes, then tilted the paper cup in a toast before sipping the lukewarm brew. The coffee machine in the office was ancient and if it ever spewed out anything close to hot he’d probably have to hug it.
“You think the vamp the other night was coughing up demon blood? That doesn’t make sense. The packs pit vampires against one another.”
“I know. But the vamp did mention a denizen.”
“You’re right. We can’t rule out demons. But I didn’t think vamps actually bit demons by choice.”
“The vamp had been tortured. He could have been forced to drink demon blood, or even attacked a demon in defense. Maybe the packs are changing things up. Pitting vamps against demons. I don’t know. I’ll keep muddling the idea over. So, uh...is it okay if I tell you that you’re sparkling again today—because you seriously need to get that glitter off your cheek, man—or should I just let it go?”
Kir swiped his cheek. Sure enough, a fine dusting of sparkle imbued his skin. Every time Bea came...
“You two must be getting along pretty well, eh?”
Kir chuckled and crossed his arms as he leaned back in the office chair. “If you call my wife coming at me with a samurai sword getting along, then yes, we’re swell.”