CHAPTER 4
Cait emerged from the narrow ravine, scuffling in her untied boots, still clutching the blanket over her damp clothes. In a sudden shift of weather, the sun had appeared, making the snow sparkle and the trees blaze with melting ice. Vapor shimmered in the air.
Cait blinked. It was like coming out of a movie theater or the eye doctor’s office. Everything looked brighter, sharper, clearer, every rock rimmed with shadow, every leaf illuminated with light. Even Rhys’s already amazing looks took on an unearthly edge.
In this dazzling, light-tinged landscape, she felt small and cold and ordinary. Hitching the blanket around her shoulders, she shuffled toward the fire.
Rhys followed her silently, stooping to throw another log on the fire. The dying flames seized it greedily.
She cleared her throat. “Thanks. My hair’s turning to icicles.”
Rhys frowned. “You should dry it. You don’t want to get sick.”
“No,” she agreed fervently.
WARNING: UNPROTECTED SEX IN FANTASY SETTINGS WITH MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS MAY RESULT IN HEAD COLDS.
AIDS.
Pregnancy.
Panic pressed under her breastbone like a knife. Oh, God, what had she been thinking?
All her life she’d been so smart, so careful…[ ]until Rhys. When she was with him she had no more inhibitions than a drunken coed at a frat party. Even now, she ached with awareness of him, his long-fingered hands and hard, lean body, his guarded, golden eyes and sensitive mouth.
She took a deep breath, to steady her nerves and her voice. “Although my mother says colds are caused by viruses, not exposure. So, as long as you’re healthy…” She trailed off, looking at him expectantly.
“I am healthy. You will take no hurt from—” He paused. Some emotion flickered in his golden eyes and was gone too quickly to identify. “You will not get sick because of me. But you could get chilled.”
“Healthy” was good, Cait thought hopefully. She could live with “healthy.” She would prefer not to live with “pregnant,” but she would deal with that when and if it happened. She ignored the crazy hammering of her heart, the unfamiliar soreness between her thighs. She was a grown-up. She would take responsibility for her actions.
She bundled the blanket around her wet head like a towel. “There. Satisfied?”
Rhys’s gaze drifted over her, touching her breasts, her throat, her mouth. “No.”
The rush of heat caught her unprepared. She was overreacting. Emotional. Off-balance. Because it was her first time, she supposed.
She reached for the kettle, covering her awkwardness with action. “I’ll make us some tea.”
“Caitlin.”
She squinted at the fire. Whatever affected her vision this morning shot dancing color through the flames. “What?”
Rhys knelt beside her. He tipped her face to his. His eyes were warm, his touch light and cool. “I have something for you.”
She struggled for breath, for humor and normalcy. “Breakfast?”
His smile gleamed. “Breakfast, certainly, later. This now.”
He bent and kissed her mouth.
Heat washed over her. Cait closed her eyes and leaned into him, needing his warmth, seeking the reassurance of him wanting her. But before the kiss could go anywhere, he left her kneeling alone by the fire.
She heard him rustling in his pack. Chilled and disappointed, she opened her eyes.
He turned to her. She was so focused on his face she didn’t see at first he held something in his hands, something that glittered in the tricky light: an intricately woven, thick gold chain.
He held it up, and the sunlight ran along the links like fire. “For you.”
For a moment she wondered who the hell hiked through the Appalachians with an expensive necklace tucked in his backpack. But the sun struck the worked gold, dazzling her, and the question faded.
“Wow, it’s…[ ]beautiful.” In her new, sensitive sight, the light dripped from the heavy links of the chain and blurred the edges like water.
“It’s for you,” Rhys said, and stooped to place it around her neck.
Cait rocked back on her heels, moving instinctively out of his reach.
He frowned. “Caitlin?”
She stared at the gleaming necklace in his hand like a mouse transfixed by a snake. The links pulsed with a light and life of their own. She shivered.
“Don’t you like it?” Rhys asked.
How could she explain her aversion to his gift? She didn’t understand it herself.
“I…It’s too much. We hardly know each other.”
Which made the fact that she’d had sex with him—“Do it.”—even more incomprehensible.
“It’s a token,” Rhys said.
Some token.
Cait stared at the sparkling, mocking necklace. The heavy gold chain resembled a rapper’s bling or a…a dog collar. A very beautiful, very valuable, very decorative dog collar.
Her hand went to her throat. “I can’t accept this.”
“I want you to have it,” Rhys said, kneeling behind her. “Let me fasten it for you.”
She was tempted. All that gold carried weight. The necklace felt significant somehow, like a gift from a longtime lover rather than a trinket from a one-night stand. She wanted to think her first time meant something to Rhys. That she meant something to him.
But when the chain swung in front of her face, her hand reached of its own volition and grabbed it. “No! I want—” What? What could she possibly say without offending him? “—I want to look at it first,” she finished weakly.
“You can look at it all you want,” Rhys said, a bit grimly. “Around your neck.”
Cait’s hand tightened. The chain seared her palm. Her stomach clenched. “Not without a mirror.”
His face tensed. And then he shrugged and released the necklace, leaving it dangling from her hand. “I can’t force you, of course.”
The knots in her stomach eased. Cait felt as if she had won some kind of victory instead of a silly dispute over a necklace. Of course he couldn’t force her. She was overre-[ ]acting again.
Her hand burned. She stuffed the chain into her jeans pocket without looking at it again.
Fortunately, Rhys didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he was simply too polite to comment. “You will at least accept breakfast,” he said.
Relieved, Cait smiled. “I’d love breakfast. If we have time.”
He gave her a blank look.
“Before we go to the shelter.” Cait tried again. “You said you would take me to the nearest shelter today.”
Rhys stared down his long nose at her. “You are in a hurry to rejoin your companion?”
Maybe he was jealous.
“Josh?” Somehow in the last twenty-four hours, Josh had gone from being an annoyance to being completely irrelevant. Cait shook her head. “No, but he must be worried about me.”
“Then why hasn’t he come looking for you?”
Cait shifted uncomfortably. Josh hadn’t responded to her screams for help yesterday. She told herself he hadn’t heard her, but…[ ]“I’m sure he reported me missing. There are probably rangers out looking now.”
“If he notified the authorities, there would be search teams. And dogs,” Rhys pointed out with depressing logic. “We would hear them.”
“Maybe the snow slowed everybody down.”
“The snow would have increased the urgency of the search. If there were a search.” Rhys didn’t exactly say Fat chance, but his tone implied it.
Cait frowned, troubled. She trusted him. He had rescued, fed, and sheltered her. They’d had sex, for heaven’s sake. But she would feel less…[ ]alone if somebody else knew where she was. Or rather, that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
“I still need to go,” she said. “I don’t want to risk Josh contacting my parents and freaking them out.”
“Your parents…They would be upset if something happened to you.” Not quite a questio
n.
“I told you they were overprotective.” She watched him take four small red-and-yellow apples, a loaf of bread, and a jar of honey from his pack. Her stomach rumbled. “I think it’s because I’m all they’ve got.”
Rhys quartered an apple. His knife had a bone handle with carved snakes twined around the grip. If she didn’t look straight at it, the snakes wriggled in the corners of her vision. The illusion was almost enough to make her lose her appetite.
“They did not wish for other children?” Rhys asked in a perfectly normal voice.
She blinked and accepted a slice of apple. “They couldn’t have any. Which is kind of ironic, because my mom was pregnant with me when they got married.”
He lowered the knife. “They told you this?”
She swallowed. “No, I did the math when I was about ten. It didn’t bother me. I mean, my parents are crazy about each other. Ever since they were in grad school. I did wonder why they waited fourteen years to make their relationship official, but maybe they just needed a little push.” She shrugged and wiped her fingers on her jeans. “Maybe they didn’t believe in marriage.”
“Or maybe there was someone else.”
She rejected the suggestion instantly. “Mom says Dad is the only man she ever loved.”
“I meant for him.”
The idea that her father could have had another lover seemed odd, disloyal, even, but Cait forced herself to consider the possibility for all of…oh, ten seconds. She had the impression—not from anything her parents said, more from the things they carefully didn’t say—that her father had split for a while before they got married.
And then she shook her head. “You don’t get it. You don’t know my dad. He’s Mr. Family Man. He would never do anything to hurt my mother. Or me.”
“You are fortunate,” Rhys said, and because of his peculiar, formal speech she couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
Maybe not. She remembered he hadn’t seen his own father since he was eight years old. I have no family, he’d said.
Sympathy flowed through her. Impulsively, she reached out and patted him on the knee.
Rhys stiffened in outrage.
She couldn’t feel sorry for him. He would not tolerate it. If she had the slightest idea who he was or what he had been sent to do, she wouldn’t dare feel pity for him.
He could destroy her.
Her hand still rested on his knee. Her tanned, warm hand. He looked from her ragged nails into her compassionate brown eyes and was lost. He couldn’t do it. Not now.
She had touched him voluntarily. In kindness, not in lust. She had baptized him with her human tears, anointed him with her virgin blood. She had resisted his enchantment.
He could not destroy her now if his very existence depended on it.
Which, he reflected grimly, it might.
Her hand tightened. “What’s the matter? You look…”
She paused, her kindness warring with her honesty, and he did not know whether to laugh or weep. How did a man contemplating his damnation look?
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He was offended.
He had been rejected before, of course. His father had hugged him sometimes, or ruffled his hair, but his mother never had. And when Rhys’s father had chosen death over continued existence in the Queen’s court, the eight-year-old had quickly learned his mother was impatient with grief and intolerant of tears.
But the adult Rhys had never been refused—anything—by a sexual partner before. He understood now the Queen’s fury at a lover’s rejection.
Not a good thought. Rhys got a grip. Not a helpful thought.
Not a thought he could explain to Caitlin or defend any longer to himself.
“I’m fine,” he said. “But you are right. We should go soon.”
There was a chance, if he got her away quickly, that his treachery would go undiscovered. Not a good chance. Ursus would have reported Caitlin had been successfully separated from her companion on the trail, and Puck—despite his occasional sympathy for humans—could not be trusted.
But the other sidhe were not Rhys’s main concern. They would not question his command, and they had no reason, yet, to doubt either his power or his will.
Caitlin was his, by birthright. He had been chosen to bind her. He would be granted time to accomplish his task—even to enjoy it—before the others came.
Before the Queen came. The thought slid into his chest like a knife.
“You sure?” Caitlin asked, still concerned.
Her ignorance was her defense.
He forced himself to smile. “That we should go now? Yes. You don’t want to worry your parents.” He could not say the word without a slight bitterness. If not for her parents, she would not be in danger. Of course, she would never have been born, either.
The reminder goaded her to get up and moving. She laced her boots while he doused the fire. Rhys watched her clear away the remains of their breakfast, confident and awkward in her youth and her humanity, her wildly curling hair falling into her face; and longing for her flamed in him.
He had never forgiven his father for letting lust rule him, blind him, consume him, so that all he lived or hoped for was a smile from the Queen. When the smiles stopped, he had gone uncaring to his death, heedless of the son he left behind.
But now at least, perhaps, Rhys understood him.
He could not afford his father’s weakness. He was his mother’s son.
He slung his pack over his shoulder. “Come.”
Caitlin cast a startled glance toward the overhang. “What about the rest of your stuff?”
He could hardly tell her the “stuff” she saw, chosen to impress and reassure her, was so much human trash to him. He had no need of it where he was going.
“I’ll come back for it,” he said.
As they hiked, the sun climbed. The snow retreated from rocks and ridgelines. Fog floated under the trees. The air filled with birdsong and the sound of rushing water. Ice tumbled down, revealing dark patches of fir and bare, wet branches.
Cait swung along, lifting her face often, drinking in the sun or the view or the moisture. “It’s like a scene from a movie.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. “A movie?”
She smiled at him. “You know, the one where the four children are fleeing the wolves through the snow, and the snow starts melting, and it turns to spring, and the whole time they’re being pursued by the evil queen.”
He stared at her, appalled, his heart pounding in his chest.
“You didn’t see it,” she guessed.
He managed to find his tongue. The evil queen…[ ]“No.”
“It’s based on some really famous children’s book. Not that my mother ever let me read it,” Caitlin added ruefully. “Too much woo woo.”
“My mother,” Rhys said with precise and terrible irony, “never let me read it, either.”
Cait grabbed his arm. “Oh, look!”
Rhys tensed. He couldn’t help himself. The sidhe did not touch except in the formal figures of the dance or the equally deliberate moves of sex. Every time Cait touched him, she breached the walls he’d learned to construct to protect the sniveling, abandoned, eight-year-old child within.
She pointed to a carpet of flowering trillium, its heart-shaped leaves poking through the melting crust of snow. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Beautiful.”
But he wasn’t looking at the wildflowers.
Smiling, she turned and met his gaze. Her color rose, pink and warm and full of life.
The sidhe didn’t blush, either.
He bent and saluted her with his lips—her warm cheek, her sunburnt brow. Her arms came around his neck. Standing on tiptoe, she kissed him back with undisguised enthusiasm.
She kissed him back.
Her response stripped him of finesse and control. He was suddenly shaking, desperate and clumsy as a boy beset by a succubus in the dark. Only the woman pres
sed against him was no greedy demon. This was Cait, sweaty and sweet, warm and real. Vulnerable.
He tangled his hands in her hair and heard—felt—her make a sound low in her throat. It vibrated in his chest. His cock swelled, hard against her leg. She wiggled against him, her arms tightening around his neck.
Yes, he thought. Hold me. Kiss me. Let me…
Shuddering, he tore his mouth from hers and buried his face against her throat. Her pulse drummed. Her hair waved against his cheek.
“Stay,” he whispered, his lips against her skin. She tasted of salt. “Stay with me.”
If she stayed, he would find a way to protect her. He would devote himself to her happiness. She would live forever and never want, never need, anything else. Anyone else.
“Here?” Cait asked.
He raised his head. She was smiling, the curve of her lips warm and amused, her eyes free of shadows.
Or comprehension. She did not, could not, know what he was asking of her.
“Don’t you think eventually we’d get a little tired of the great outdoors?” she asked.
He shivered. She had no idea. And it was better that way. Safer that way for them both.
He brought her along the paths of his people back to the woods she had left behind. The air thickened with human contagion. Her world overlaid his like a veil, dimming its sparkle, deepening its shadows. Here, where the old growth trees thrust their roots deep in the earth and pierced the sky with their branches, the fabric thinned. Any tiny tear in her perceptions, and she could fall from one plane to another.
But ahead, Rhys could see the dull obscurity of the track cutting like a scar through the living landscape. The trail, conceived by mortal minds and built by human hands a mere seventy years ago, would protect her.
His own way forked.
Rhys stopped and pointed. “There, do you see? Your way is there, through the trees. The blue blazes will take you back to the trail. The shelter is only a few hundred feet to your right.”
Caitlin faltered. “Aren’t you coming with me?”
He clenched his jaw against temptation. He could not. This reality was all he knew, all he’d ever known. His ignorance terrified and shamed him.
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