There’d be sex, too.
Only then, he’d been saying that to scare me off. But now … now being mates, well, sex came hand-in-hand with love.
Des pulls us towards the dark woods that border the clearing, his silver eyes smoldering.
I can feel the sly looks of other fairies as we slip away, and I can’t help the rising heat in my cheeks. They all know what we’re about to do.
We leave the music and the dancing behind us, the forest eerily silent.
“What are you thinking?” Des asks, his voice smooth like Scotch.
That just the thought of your skin pressed to mine is making my knees weak.
“That you’re a sly devil,” I say instead.
His laugh echoes through the night, unfettered, abandoned. He pushes me up against a nearby tree, the trunk slipping between my wings. “You’re as wild as me, Callie. I know what you crave—what your siren craves.” He nuzzles my neck. “Let me show you.”
Between that soft touch and his seductive words, my siren surfaces, brightening my skin.
I arch into him, throwing my head back.
Yes.
This is everything I want. Him and me beneath the dark sky. Primal. Passionate.
I reach for his pants just as he reaches for my skirts, gathering them in his hands. Our hands are deft and hurried, our movements jerky. I can hear my own breath hitching.
With our clothes still halfway on, that hard, delicious flesh of his presses against me.
“My mate,” he murmurs, his hair tickling my cheek as he leans into me.
There’s an urgency both to the magic that’s demanding, demanding, demanding and to our own fevered passions.
The Bargainer’s shadows blanket us, darkening our surroundings until it’s just him and me, a single point in the dark universe that he rules.
His wings come around us, further shielding our bodies.
Next to my glowing skin, I see his neck muscles clench, and with a powerful shove, he enters me.
One of his hands cups my breast through the fabric of my dress, and then his head dips down, his hot mouth kissing the exposed skin of my chest. My fingers dig into his shoulders.
He’s moving in and out of me, our bodies hot and wet where we’re joined. They make slick, wet noises as we come together.
“Meant … to take this slower,” Des rakes out.
It’s almost painful, the force of his thrusts. This joining isn’t something sweet. It’s wild, primal, and it calls to all my darkest corners.
I thread my fingers in his hair and force his head to the side. Minutes ago, all his white blond hair had been elegantly swept back from his face. Now it’s fallen victim to my touch.
I tighten my grip on his hair. “I don’t want slow,” I say, glamour entering my voice. “I want everything the King of the Night can give me—and then I want more.”
With a growl, Des gives me exactly that.
Again, and again, and again.
Chapter 23
I wake to the rustle of oak trees and the cold chill of dew on my skin. My hipbone hurts from sleeping on a hard surface, and the scent of moist earth fills my nostrils.
Where am I?
Blinking sleep away, I sit up, running my hands through my hair and pulling out several leaves and twigs. My dress still glows softly, and at my back is the tree Des and I thoroughly sullied earlier.
Des.
I glance around, but he’s nowhere in sight. I rub my temples, trying to remember through the beginnings of a hangover just how the night ended, and why I’m now alone.
Off in the distance, a branch snaps.
I go still.
What are the chances that that’s my Night King?
Zero, my mind whispers.
I rise to my feet, trying to be as silent as possible. Not that I’m doing a great job being innocuous. Kind of hard to go unnoticed when you’re in a dark wood wearing a glowing dress.
I begin retracing my steps. I think I can figure out a way back to my suite; I just have to get out of this forest.
Another branch snaps, and I jump at the sound.
Is someone following me?
And where’s Des?
Just when I’m sure I’m heading in the right direction, the forest seems to deepen rather than give way to the Sacred Gardens.
I massage my forehead. Did I really get it all backwards? The smoky remnants of the bonfires seem to be stronger here than where I woke up … but there’s no music, no laughter, no sounds of any revelers.
I’m utterly alone.
Behind me, leaves crunch.
I tense.
Maybe I’m not alone …
Slowly, I swivel around.
Off in the distance is a broad shouldered man with a shock of white hair.
“Des!” I feel myself instantly relax.
I begin heading to him, first walking, and then, when he doesn’t come any closer, I begin to run. “Des!”
Before I can get to him, he disappears.
That stops me in my tracks.
He’s coming for you … the trees whisper.
“Des?”
I feel the press of metal against my throat, and from the edge of my vision I can just make out Des’s white blond hair.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
If this is his idea of training …
But it’s not training. It’s not. I can sense the malicious intent in the rough grip he has on me and the way the blade digs into my flesh, like it wants my skin to split.
The Bargainer’s supple lips skim over my cheekbone. “Fear me, mortal,” he whispers, “for I will be your undoing.”
Des brushes a kiss against my skin, and then drags his knife across my throat.
I wake with a choked cry, holding my neck.
Not dead. Just a dream. Just a dream.
Des has my body cradled in his arms.
“Callie,” he says when he sees I’m awake, relief coating his words. He pulls my head in close. “Callie, Callie, Callie,” he murmurs—more, it appears, to reassure himself than to actually get through to me.
The Bargainer and I are tangled up in soft sheets, our bodies naked.
I pull away from him long enough to look into his eyes. He has no idea that right now I’m coaching my mind to not see him as a threat. The bite of that blade felt so real.
I swallow.
A nightmare is all it was.
I draw in a shuddering breath, the last of the dream sloughing away.
“I’m okay—it’s okay.”
Early morning light filters through the window of our room, the sun making the scent of flowers come alive around our suite. At some point last night the two of us had slipped away to our rooms, finishing here what we’d started in the forest.
I stretch myself back out along the bed, dragging Des down with me. Reluctantly, he lets me pull him to the mattress, tucking me against his side.
I’m not ready to wake up, but I’m not sure I can fall back asleep either.
“Tell me a secret,” I murmur.
He plays with a strand of my hair, not saying anything for a long time.
Finally, “My mother’s hair was exactly this color.”
“It was?” I ask, tilting my head to peer up at him.
He smooths the lock of hair back down. “Sometimes,” he says, lost in his own thoughts, “when I’m feeling particularly superstitious, I think that’s no coincidence.”
I don’t know what he means by that, but the confession raises the gooseflesh along my arms. This was the woman who raised Des, the scribe whose death he blames on his father.
“Tell me about her—your mother.”
He holds me close. “What do you want to know, cherub?”
I draw circles into his chest. “Anything—everything.”
“Demanding thing,” he says fondly. His tone sobers when he speaks again. “Her name was Larissa, and she was someone I loved deeply …”
I feel something thick
rise in my throat. It’s not so much what he says as it is how he says it, like his mother fashioned all the stars in his sky.
His chest rises and falls as he swallows. “It was always my mother and me, ever since my earliest memory.”
I notice he conveniently skirts any mention of his father.
“She was my guardian, my teacher, and my closest confidante. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been that way—I’m sure she didn’t want it to be that way—but in Arestys … my mother and I were seen as oddities.”
My finger pauses on his chest.
Des, an oddity? And in the Otherworld of all places?
“Even by Arestys’ standards, we were poor,” he says. “We couldn’t afford lodgings, so we lived in the caves I showed you. And under my mother’s roof, I had to live by two hard and fast rules: one, I must never use my magic, and two, I must control my temper.”
I don’t know where Des is taking this story, but his eyes are far away. For once, he isn’t mincing his words.
“Naturally, I worked my way around both rules.”
The Bargainer bent someone’s words to fit his needs? How shocking.
“I couldn’t wield magic, so I learned to bargain with magical creatures for bits of theirs.”
So that’s where Des came by his affinity for deals. I never stood a chance against him.
“There are few things that will get you ostracized in the Otherworld as quickly as being poor and being weak. And growing up, that’s what people thought of me and my mother—that she was a scribe because she could only wield weak amounts of magic, and her son couldn’t wield any at all.”
My heart is beginning to hurt. I didn’t expect this when I asked about his mother.
“Being seen as poor and weak made us targets,” he continues. “For my mother, it came in the shape of bad men. There were several fairies who went missing on our island after they encountered my mother. She never breathed a word about what happened, and I didn’t know better at the time, but … I don’t doubt that my mother did something to them.”
“And what about you?” I ask.
“What about me?” Des responds.
“How did you get around being a target?”
Des smiles, but it’s a little malicious.
“I didn’t, cherub. I just got around my mother’s second rule.”
Rule number two: Des must control his temper.
“Fairy children love nothing more than picking on the vulnerable,” he says. “My mother couldn’t stop the bullying and she couldn’t prevent me from defending myself, so she coached me on how to fight and how to separate my emotions from a battle.”
Who was this woman who was once a part of the royal harem before she became a lowly scribe? Who made her son control his magic and his temper, but still taught him to fight?
“I don’t understand,” I say, “why hide your power in the first place?”
Des strokes a hand down my back. “That is a question for another time. But for now, I will tell you this: Ill-fated mothers, cruel fathers, and friendless childhoods. You and I, cherub, really do share similar tragedies.”
Chapter 24
“You’re going to have to roll me out of here,” I tell Des.
The two of us sit in a large atrium among a throng of other Solstice guests, all of us dining on tea, fruit, nuts, and breakfast pastries as the sun glitters in the large glass windows.
I lean back in my seat, kicking my feet up on the edge of the table before I realize I’m wearing a dress.
Whoops. This is why I don’t usually do dresses. They’re not terribly versatile. Also, this bodice is totally constricting my stomach.
I pull at it as I take in the fairies around us. Des and I are at our own private table; his guards and the nobles of the Night Kingdom sit at the tables surroundings ours. Farther out, members of the Flora and Fauna kingdoms also dine.
On a whole, the crowd looks just a smidge worse for the wear. There might be lazy smiles and casual touches, but I’ve seen several fairies hide a yawn behind their hand, and the conversations are somewhat muted.
Noticeably absent from the group breakfast are Mara and the Green Man. Their raised table sits at the far end of the room, looking lonely.
I’m about to ask Des what’s up with the Flora rulers’ relationship when, out of nowhere, my training leathers materialize in midair, falling to the table a split second later. They knock over a container of cream and the last of my coffee, the majority of the outfit landing in a bowl of honey.
Oh God, please tell me I’m hallucinating.
“Seriously, Des?”
The two of us are garnering attention from other tables.
He stretches, completely unbothered by the stares, the smallest silver of his abs peeking out beneath the edge of his fitted shirt.
“Training begins in thirty minutes,” he announces.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
“Training Nazi,” I mutter under my breath.
“What was that?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
An hour later, I’m clad in my leathers, my daggers at my sides and a sword in my hand.
The two of us spar in one of the gardens near the great cedar tree that houses our rooms. The monstrous tree looms high above us, the stairs that wind around it currently filled with Night fairies who are coming and going.
In the gardens, wisteria and roses grow along trellises while heather and lilac grow in thick clusters beneath them. Well, that, and about a billion other plants, some that I recognize and some that I don’t.
I stomp on a hyacinth blossom as I back away from Des.
“You sure it’s okay to be training here?” I huff. “I’m destroying the queen’s gardens.”
Des strides towards me, his sword clutched in his hand.
He smirks, hopping off a rock as he stalks forward. “Don’t pretend like what you’re doing is an accident.”
Alright, so I haven’t been too careful with my footwork; I might still be a smidge bitter about the proprietary way she interacts with Des.
“And no,” he adds, “the queen is quite fine with us training here, destroyed flowers and all. The only place she cares about protecting—other than her cedarwood guest houses—is her sacred oak grove.”
A.k.a., the place I boned Des last night.
I glance over at the edge of the gardens, where part of the oak grove butts up against its outskirts. In the light of day, I can see that the vast, wooded forest circles the palace grounds.
Why, out of everything here, some ordinary oaks are worthy of protecting, I’ll never know.
Des swipes at me.
I yelp, hopping back to dodge the blow.
“Release your siren.” The order comes out of nowhere.
“Why?” I pant, ducking beneath another swing of his sword.
“I’m curious about something.”
I carve my own blade upwards at him, but he springs away before I can make contact.
“Leave her alone,” I say. She had a busy evening last night. Even evil bitches like my siren need their rest.
The Bargainer disappears. A moment later his breath fans against my neck. I go rigid, remembering my dream.
“We can do this the easy way—” he slides the hair off my shoulder, his lips skimming my skin, “or the fun way.”
He doesn’t know just how effective he’s being at the moment. There’s nothing that gets my siren stirring quite like fear and arousal, and I’m feeling a bit of both at the moment.
“I could undress you slowly and lay you out on the grass,” he breathes. “I’d spread your legs apart and give you the most sacred of kisses.”
A flush creeps up my cheeks.
His hand smooths down my torso. “I’d savor that sweet pussy of yours right until you were on the edge, but I wouldn’t give you that release,” he says. “Not until you wrapped your pretty legs around my waist and begged me to bury myself in you.”
I push away from him, my bo
dy crying out at the sudden distance between us. My siren batters against the walls of her cage, and my control on her is slipping.
“I’d take you right out here, right where anyone might find us, just as my ancestors used to do.”
Jesus, that is dirty.
He circles around to the front of me, one side of his mouth curves up. “I would want them to find us, to see me claiming you.”
Fuck it. I give up.
My siren surfaces, turned on by all his taboo suggestions.
“There she is,” he says, backing up, and I can hear the glee in his voice.
I begin to pace restlessly, my eyes trained on him.
All of that, all of what he just said, it was just to release me. The thing is, I don’t like being teased, manipulated. I like doing the teasing and the manipulating.
I roll my neck, power thrumming through me, and I swing the sword in my grip a few times.
Des raises his sword. “Hello, lovely,”
I slit my eyes, and he must understand my look because he says, “Do you know why I brought you out?”
I don’t bother answering him.
“I want you to fight me,” he explains.
That’s not going to be a problem.
Casually, I saunter towards Des, my earlier reticence gone. It’s been replaced by a primal need for vengeance and bloodlust.
This time, when I get close to him, I swing my blade without the same hesitation as before. Des parries it, then moves forward, his own sword brandished.
I block the next blow, our swords locked together. Beyond them, Des’s eyes dance with mirth.
“Does it bother you, love, to be toyed with?”
I flash him a lethal look, my nails sharpening. Gritting my teeth, I shove his sword off of mine, slashing out with my claws. He spins out of the way, just avoiding the kick I aim for his crouch.
“Silly fairy,” I say, mocking him. “You know better than to toy with me. I’ll always make you pay in the end.”
If anything, Des looks more exhilarated than ever, which only serves to rile me up more. With a growl, I come at him again.
The two of us block then strike, block then strike. At some point our battle feels less like a collection of steps and swings and more like a dance. I move fluidly, my instincts guiding me, my courage making each of my blows sure and swift.
A Strange Hymn (The Bargainer Book 2) Page 17