by Dean Murray
Neither of us spoke for several seconds, and for the first time since before he'd pulled me out of the shower I felt the overwhelming attraction that was always a part of any interaction with Jace. A few seconds before I'd been shaking because I was so cold, but now I was shaking for a different reason entirely. This had nothing to do with the cold, and everything to do with being in Jace's arms.
I was sure that my desire was plain on my face, but I was unable to force myself to look away. I looked up at him, at the perfect jawline, soulful eyes and wavy blond hair, and I was pleased to see that his lips were slightly parted and his breathing had sped up.
We sat there with me on his lap—in my underwear with nothing more than towels draped around me—for a single frozen moment, and then his face moved down towards me. I met him halfway, and the feeling of our lips meeting sent pleasant tingles of electricity humming through me.
We'd nearly died—not just once, but several times—and I could feel that the urgency building between the two of us was partly because of that, but there was so much more to it. For Jace this was—in some ways at least—a continuation of a marriage that had lasted for hundreds of years, a marriage that he still remembered the majority of—a marriage that had included a lot more than just kissing.
I couldn't even begin to understand everything that had passed between the two of us during that much time, but despite that, the sheer amount of things that happened in just the last few weeks had left me feeling like we'd already traveled an impossible distance together. Him finding me, me starting to fall for Kyle, all of the things we'd said and done since then, and all the things that had remained unsaid.
It was all building, a pressure that demanded release, and despite the fact that part of me wanted this to happen, I was too scared to let things move forward without making sure I understood what it all meant. Jace's hands were tangled up in my hair, gently pulling me into him, but I pushed against his chest with my free hand.
"Jace. We need to talk."
He shook his head. "No, we don't, Selene. If there was anything left that needed to be worked out it was resolved inside of those tunnels. You made your choice—put me ahead of the welfare of everyone else you cared about. It was the wrong choice, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it. You don't have anything to apologize for."
I thought I was all cried out—that there wasn't anything left inside of me—but his words drew more tears out of me. I leaned back into him and kissed him softly as I cried tears of joy.
"That's all I needed to hear, Jace. I just needed to know that there was still a chance for us to be together. I'll use that stupid scepter for however long it takes to kill Kyle and the others, and I'll stop it from taking me over. I will find a way to come through this so that we can be together."
Our kisses got even fiercer. It was like we were trying to keep the future at bay with the heat of our need for each other. It was a dangerous game to be playing, and I knew it. I was still wearing almost nothing, and even Jace's control had limits, but I was afraid if I stopped that it would break the moment and we'd have to go back to breakfast and trying to figure out how to stop Kyle if the Lady and her court had been destroyed.
Jace pulled me tighter against him, and I could feel the hard planes of his body as though we were separated by nothing more than tissue paper rather than thick, fluffy towels. I'd never been this hyper-aware of the nerve endings running through my skin before.
The towels were softer than any clothes I'd ever worn, there was a sensual feel to them rubbing against my body as we moved against each other, and the very real possibility that they would slip at any moment and expose all of the flesh that I'd been working so hard to keep covered up earlier only added to the rush of kissing Jace.
Jace's hands were on my shoulders now, only inches from the top of one of the towels, and I knew that almost any other guy would have done something to send the towel cascading down to my lap, but he resisted the desire, moaning as I kissed him.
My hands were under his shirt now, and it was my turn to groan at the ache that was building inside of me. The angle was terrible, but I couldn't get enough of his skin. His abs were like slabs of polished marble and it was all I could do to return the favor he was showing me and resist the urge to tear his shirt off.
Jace's hands dropped down to my waist—probably to distance himself from the temptation—but I didn't make things any easier for him. I leaned in and gently nipped at his right earlobe, and I couldn't tell if the tremors were coming from him or from me anymore.
I shifted around to the other side, fully intending on biting his other ear, but a stray lock of my own hair got in the way. I reached up to move it out of the way, and my towel started to slip.
The smart thing would have been to pull back as I made a desperate grab for the quickly falling fabric, but I was overcome by recklessness. Instead of doing the smart thing, I threw myself forward, slamming my body into Jace and trapping the towel between the two of us as he fell backwards onto the bed with me on top of him.
His hands were on the bare skin of my back, and I could feel cool air caressing my legs. I could feel Jace's surprise at our current position, but that lasted only the barest fraction of a second before his mouth moved down low on my neck, and then I was beyond anything even remotely like conscious thought.
He traced a trail of soft kisses forward toward my collarbone, and I gasped as the sensation threatened to consume me. I pulled myself forward, arching my back slightly in order to give him better access to my neck and clavicle, but then his arms clamped down around me, pulling my face back down to him for a single long kiss before he pulled back.
"We need to stop now, Selene. Trust me when I say that I want to keep going, but that wouldn't be fair to either of us."
"You have the self-control of a saint. I thought you were waiting before because you didn't want to let things get too far before telling me about Kyle…"
Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth I realized only an idiot would mention a brother she'd kissed just a few weeks earlier to the guy she'd just finished making out with—especially if she was still hoping to convince said guy to resume the making out—but Jace just gave me a slow, lopsided smile.
"That was part of it, but that wasn't the only reason. I wanted you to have a chance to make your own choice—and you've had that now—but there's more to it than that."
"Is it because you think I still have feelings for—"
He silenced me with a shake of his head. "Of course you have feelings for Kyle. I don't expect those to go away instantly—in fact they may never go away. Even when we were together before, you still had feelings for Kyle. The important thing is that you've picked me, and I know you're not the type of girl to go back on that kind of decision—not when you know what you're getting yourself into."
"Why then?"
Jace sighed. "I could tell you that I'm worried that you're racing into stuff precisely because you feel like you need to prove something to me—"
"That's totally not the case! I…"
I wanted to keep going, to tell him that what I was feeling right then wasn't driven by any kind of external circumstances, but I couldn't go on—not under the weight of his knowing stare.
"Okay, you might have a point—a very small one, but one all the same. That's not a reason for us to stop though—if you're going to worry about stuff like that, you'd be a lot better off worrying about the fact that I'm scared out of my mind there might not ever be another chance—we might not make it through the next twenty-four hours."
"Actually, that was going to be my second point. I could come up with at least another half dozen reasons for us to wait, but the truth is it all comes down to the fact that doing this right now would be wrong. After all of this is over and the world goes back to whatever passes as normal for people like us, I'm going to ask you to marry me. Sex can wait until then."
It hadn't escaped my notice that he'd just proposed—sort of. I
wanted to yell 'yes' and tear his clothes off, but he wasn't wrong to be worried that I was rushing into something that I probably wouldn't have done under other circumstances.
That was a fear that went both ways though. I didn't want to make a big deal out of his stated intentions, not when it was possible that his feelings would change after we defeated Kyle and the rest. In the end, I just tried for the truth.
"So you want to marry me, and I want to marry you. There's no reason to wait, Jace. What difference are a marriage certificate and vows said in front of a clergyman going to make? I'm not going to be any less committed to you six months from now, and I don't want to wait and miss this chance. Despite the brave front you're trying to put on, we both know that the odds against both of us making it through this war alive and sane are pretty steep."
Jace leaned forward and kissed the bottom of my neck again, and I felt my eyes start to roll back into my head. I thought for a second that I'd convinced him, but then he pulled back and brushed a lock of hair out of my eyes.
"That's pretty amazing, right?"
"You don't need to ask that—it's obvious it's mind-blowing. All you have to do is pay attention to the fact that I forget to breathe every time you do it to me."
"Yeah, I'll be honest, I kind of like the way you do that. Your heart skips beats too, sometimes."
I pulled one hand away from my towel for just long enough to try to shove him back down onto the bed, but it was like pushing against a tree.
"How much of the intensity you feel is because you're being kissed by me, and how much of it is because we're skirting around the edges of things that we shouldn't be doing?"
I opened my mouth to tell him that it was all him, and then realized that I couldn't answer truthfully—not without admitting that he might be onto something.
"So you're saying that something being 'wrong' adds extra spice to it? So the only reason that we can't do this is because we were both raised to think that we shouldn't be doing it?"
Jace gave me another smile, but this one had an edge of sadness to it. "No. I think that God has given us laws for a reason, and this would be a bad idea regardless of whatever we believe or don't believe, but I know that you don't share my feelings, so I picked an argument that you could relate to."
We sat there in silence for a while before I shrugged. "Did that ever change? Were you always the man of faith while I was agnostic?"
"No. You came to believe in a higher power of some kind. Our beliefs weren't exactly the same, but they were close enough—it just took you a long time. You've never been particularly big on faith."
I sighed and nodded. "Okay, you win. I don't want to do something now that's going to ruin things later on. Making out with you is already mind-blowing and I'd hate to spend the next hundred years wishing that every time was as amazing as the first time. You know, you could have just told me that you didn't want to go against your beliefs."
Jace leaned forward and kissed my forehead. "I considered it, but there were two problems with that idea. I'm actually surprised that you didn't see them immediately for yourself, oh crack researcher."
"Oh, yeah? Well, since I'm feeling particularly stupid today, how about you just tell me what they are?"
"The easiest one is the fact that you're incredibly persistent. You would have meant to back off, but the simple fact that you don't share my beliefs would have meant that part of you would have continued pushing at the edges of what I was willing to do."
I wanted to disagree with him, but the truth was that he was right. He'd told me before now that he wanted to wait to have sex until after marriage, but that hadn't stopped me from throwing myself at him just now. Part of me kind of felt like I should go crawl under a bridge somewhere. It was a pretty slimy thing to be doing, so I deserved for him to be condemning me, but his expression didn't look condemning at all.
"Okay, that makes sense. You're right, I haven't been very supportive of your beliefs—not like I should have been. What you did was smart because you put it in terms that make me feel like I've got skin in the game too. What was the other reason?"
"Despite all of my beliefs, you make me want to cross lines that I would never even think of crossing with anyone else, Selene. I'm ashamed to admit it—it makes me feel like some kind of fair-weather believer—but where you are concerned, I'm not as in control of myself as I should be. I guess at the end of the day, the reason I just gave you—wanting to make sure that our second and third, and thousandth time is as amazing as the first—is a bigger driver for me right now than anything else. Unlike you, I truly know just how happy we could be. I've already experienced just how amazing we can be together and I don't want to do anything to jeopardize that."
Chapter 19
Paradise would have been staying there behind our wards with Jace forever. Even better would have been if I'd been able to just lie back down on the bed and let him hold me until the sun eventually flickered out.
Reality didn't permit anything of the sort. After a few minutes in each other's arms, I decided that I'd better go get dressed—we were playing with fire, and despite the conversation we'd just had, I wanted him to uncover me just as badly as he wanted to do it.
We were partway through breakfast when I felt a second alien presence inside my mind—this time it was the Lady. I wasn't sure whether I was more relieved that she was still alive and able to communicate, or more angry that she'd left the three of us cooling our heels for so long.
She didn't give me a chance to express either emotion to her though, so it didn't end up mattering. She brought me up to speed in quick bursts of information that scooted right up to the edge of what I was capable of absorbing.
The fighting at Camelot had continued on for hours, and even now it was flaring up from time to time as one or more of the fallen fae managed to reassemble their forms and both sides rushed into the area—one to disembody them and the other in an attempt at giving them enough cover to make a run for it.
Neither side seemed to want to go head-to-head again right now. The carnage that we'd experienced while Byron had been bringing down the ward was apparently like nothing that had ever been experienced before in however many thousands of years the Lady had existed.
Rather than charging back in at each other like they'd done last time, both sides had spent the last few hours looking for vulnerabilities in the other's holdings all over the world. I would have expected Kyle to focus on trying to defend his holdings, that or on attacking the Seelie Court's few remaining active outposts, but he'd instead opted to resume wholesale terrorist attacks on major cities around the world.
When I heard that, I was suddenly very glad that neither of us had turned on the television or the radio yet. It made a sick kind of sense really. He knew that we cared about all of the innocent people he was hurting, so he was using them against us. We couldn't possibly be strong enough everywhere to make sure that he couldn't hurt people, and trying to stop his efforts would just spread us out and make us vulnerable to being ambushed by his forces.
We'd lost a couple of Awakened before the Lady finally pulled back and let him have his way with all of the juicy civilian targets out there. In hindsight, I could see that it was the right decision, but I wasn't sure I could have done it.
The Lady told me that in the last six hours there had been unexplained explosions in DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and LA. That would have been bad enough all by itself, but I got the feeling that her list wasn't comprehensive.
I knew enough by now to know that there had been attacks in other countries. Kyle thought on a global level, and having rival countries blaming each other for all of the damage and destruction would only increase the chaos and further his aims.
It went without saying that without a strong force of Awakened and Seelie Court fae out there in the world actively trying to defend all of those civilians, there wouldn't be anything to stop Kyle from killing as many people as he wanted to kill. Only it turned out
that Kyle wanted people around to rule over after all of the fighting was done. The Lady had called his bluff and he'd backed down.
People were still dying—some from additional attacks, some from secondary effects that had been caused by the initial attacks—but the rate of terrorist incidents had dropped off steeply over the last hour before she'd called me. The reduction in incidents was at least partially because the Lady had kill teams out—one or two Awakened backed by a score or more of the finest Seelie warriors she could spare—looking for the Awakened who were behind the attacks.
They'd managed to kill six Awakened so far at the price of an equal number of disembodiments on our side, but I didn't need her to tell me that those losses wouldn't have been enough to stop Kyle if he'd really wanted to step up the attacks.
The Lady ordered me to get Jace and Bethany headed to Salt Lake City again, and then left my mind. I tried to get hold of her again, but it was no use.
Jace and I finished eating, and then I headed upstairs to take a turn watching out for bad guys while Bethany zipped outside to a nearby field of wildflowers. Twenty minutes later, Jace finished double-checking the supplies he wanted to bring along with us, and once he'd hauled everything up to his Viper the three of us left his house, the Scepter of Storms wrapped in a towel and clenched tightly in my right hand.
With the top up and the windows closed, there wasn't anything to stop Bethany from getting some sleep, and she dropped off within minutes of the house disappearing behind us. That left Jace and me free to talk about anything we wanted, but the conversation predictably ended up focusing on the war.
I'd told him only the bare essentials back at the house—just that we were supposed to meet the Lady's people at Intravil's club again. It only took a few minutes to relay everything I knew, and that was even with me splitting my attention between talking and monitoring our surroundings for the signatures of other Awakened.
I gave him a little while to digest everything I'd told him, playing with the radio until it became too depressing, and then turned it off and started asking him what it all meant.