by Nadine Mutas
Not yet, his magic whispered. Not like this.
Over and over he let his power sing a song of cajoling persuasion laced with the force of his command, his authority. The beast, yet hidden in the black of its confinement but for its talons scratching at the edges, writhed and rumbled, bucked against his voice.
Not yet, he repeated. Wait until she calls you.
Because she wasn’t consciously doing so at this moment. This staggering blast and her surrender to the power that lived inside her were nothing but side effects of the battle she was waging with herself, with the horrors of her past. It was not her choice to loose the beast from its leash.
But it should be.
And so he worked and wove and twined his magic around her core, whispering the beast to sleep once more. All the while, his wards limited the firestorm to the cabin, his innate power making him immune to her scorching heat.
When, finally, the blaze died down, he held her amid whorls of ash and smoke, her body a light weight in his arms. Cradling her to his chest, her head tucked against his shoulder, he stood, stepped over soot and charred wood, and wrapped his magic around her like a cloak of black mist as he walked.
No one would see her like this. No one but him.
Through the shadows of the night he carried her, under the earth and past the main hub of his dominion, down to the most private center of his lair. Through wards so heavy they chafed at his own skin, to the safest place in the entire world.
He laid her down in the heart of his home, laying both of them at her feet.
Chapter 30
Maeve woke to dark, dark energy enveloping her senses, stroking sinuously around her mind, over her skin. She opened heavy lids to a gloom of a different sort. A warm semi-darkness.
A windowless room?
Just as that thought beat along her nerves with panic building in its wake, she made out the twinkling lights above her. Stars were scattered amid swirls of indigo on a sea of black und midnight blue. Shooting stars went swishing across the vast space, and the full moon hung overhead, bathing everything in its soft glow.
Staring up at this incredible canopy of the night sky, she frowned at the lack of a chill on her skin, no breeze tickling her hair. If she was under the open sky, why was she not feeling the cold?
“Because you are, indeed, inside.”
She jerked at Arawn’s voice, rolled over to see him lying next to her—on a bed?
“Yes. My bed.” Moonlight kissed his bronze skin with strokes of silver, dark sheets covering the lower half of him. He was lying on his side, head propped on his hand, his weight braced on his elbow. “The one I use for sleeping,” he added with a smirk. “Although I would gladly make an exception and give it another use with you.”
“Are you just plucking my thoughts out of my brain?” A defiantly flippant question, ignoring the pulse of some harrowing truth lurking just outside her awareness.
“No. You are throwing them at me.”
She threw another, less well-mannered thought at him, and he chuckled.
“Is this your private lair, then?” she asked, her eyes flicking back to the tempting sight of his mostly naked body right next to her, eclipsing even the allure of the spectacle above her.
“Yes.”
“The one no one but you has ever set foot in?”
He inclined his head, and a warm tingle spread in her chest, made her stomach do a flip. He’d brought her here, to this secret place, revealed to her the part he kept hidden from everyone else.
“Why?” she whispered, her eyes prickling hot. She couldn’t be that important to him…
“It is fitting.” Those eyes of shadowed forests, the wild evergreen of the lands he made his home, glowed with an intensity that branded every cell of her being. “This is the safest place I know, and how better to protect my heart than to bring it here?”
She blinked, uncomprehending.
“You heard right,” he said, amusement deepening the lines around his eyes.
Something inside her stretched and spread, reaching with tendrils out to every aspect of her, and it had nothing to do with the ancient presence in her core. It was a hurt so refined, so raw, it veered right into pleasure sublime enough to steal her breath.
“Say it again,” she whispered.
“You are my heart.”
On a choked sigh, she touched her hand to his face, stroked down to those lips that were such an impossibly soft part in a face of harsh angles and hard planes. And knowing she had the right to touch those lips, to feel their kiss was a thrill in her veins.
Leaning forward, she claimed that right to kiss, tugged him to her with her hand curved around his nape—
A flash of memory. Arawn’s hand on the back of her neck. Thoughts and impressions and images flickering by, centering on a storm of fire and the scorched remains of the people she loved.
She jerked when it rushed back in full. Sobbed when it broke over her yet again, that knowledge of how this lethal thing within her had tainted her childhood with the ashes of her mom and sister, had taken them from her—along with her dad. She was responsible for his state as well.
She was responsible for all of it.
My fault, my fault, my fault…
“No.” Arawn’s voice cut through the sickening haze in her thoughts, his hands a hot brand on her as he pulled her on top of him. “That is not true.”
“I killed them.” A broken whisper, barbed wire raking across her heart.
He cupped her face with both hands, forced her to meet and hold his gaze when her eyes wanted to skitter away, to stare unfocused at nothing while the guilt and horror consumed her. “It was an accident.”
“They’re dead because of me. Because of that beast in me.”
“Which you had no chance of controlling back then”—he tightened his grip—“when you were a child.”
Hiccuping on a building sob, she shook her head—or rather, wanted to, but found his grasp kept her still. Kept her focused. On him, on the heat between them. All the minute details of how it felt to lie on top of him, on Arawn. The tickle of his chest hair against her breasts. His power seeping into her cells. His slow, steady breaths under her arms. His heartbeat under her hands.
You are my heart.
This thought, the knowledge helped push back against the despair threatening to pull her under. She dug her fingertips into his chest and… Everything ground to a halt as realization swept through her.
She was naked on top of him, skin to skin but for the sheet covering his lower half, the only barrier between their bodies.
She waited for the panic to set in, for one of the land mines in her mind to explode and shred her. Nothing happened. Nothing but sinuous heat sinking into her very bones, melting the jagged edges of pain from her recently recovered memory.
“This will not break you,” Arawn said, unwavering faith in his voice. “It did not break you when I unlocked your memories, and it will not do so now…or ever.”
“But—” Flashes of flames in her mind. “I exploded. In the cabin. When I found out. I exploded.”
“You feel very much in one piece to me.” He slid one hand from her head down over her back, to the curve of her waist…lower.
With a gasp, she stiffened—and relaxed when the touch of his fingers on her butt didn’t cause an avalanche of fear to bury her. Because this was Arawn under her, caressing her. The male who’d allowed her, with endless patience, to familiarize herself with his body, his touch, who’d been so incredibly gentle with her through it all, yet pushed her at all the right moments and in ways she hadn’t known she needed.
But he’d known.
He’d seen her pain, her fear, her scars—especially the ones in her mind—and he’d known just how to navigate them all. She wanted to laugh at how she once believed him to be entirely and utterly wrong for her, hadn’t believed him to be the right man to help her rediscover her sexuality.
Turned out he was exactly right.
&n
bsp; The smile playing about his mouth said he knew it too. And his hand caressed her butt, squeezed…his fingers sliding lower.
She had to catch her breath when he brushed so close to the pulsing heat between her legs. Her heart jumped into her throat, her fingers digging harder into his chest.
And the icy grip of the harrowing truth she’d learned loosened a little more around her soul.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” she whispered. “To distract me.” From the stain in her past, to keep its oily sickness from spreading into her present, her future.
“That,” he said on a silken murmur that had her curling her toes, his hand stroking with languid intent down her thigh, up again, “is not the only reason.”
She trembled in just the right way, and in all the right places.
“In fact,” he went on, using his hand on her hip to shift her position on him, “I am far more selfish in this than you might believe.”
Her new position on top of him let her feel the evidence of that selfish interest caressing her mindless. The hard length of him was unmistakable through the thin sheet…and it cranked her simmering arousal into a blaze.
She knew there was still a reckoning to come, that she’d have to face the newly opened wound of her childhood, would have to fight to come to terms with what she’d learned, but right now, every single part of her wanted nothing more than to follow the pulsing pull of her desire for Arawn, and let it drown out everything else.
Later. She’d deal with her pain and guilt later.
This, here, was the pleasure she’d been waiting to reclaim for herself, and having Arawn hard and naked under her was too much of a temptation to ignore.
So she wiggled a bit, and watched with rapt fascination—and not a little feminine pride—how his eyes became sharper with sensual intent while his lips parted in reaction to her rubbing over him.
She did that. To him. It kicked her pulse up a notch.
“Tell me,” he said, one finger under her chin, “what you like.”
A throb of lust between her thighs at the sheer purpose in his attention, at the hint of steely authority beneath the deceptively soft velvet of his voice. Oh, sure, one might think his question and his restraint so far indicated he’d let her take the wheel, but her instincts told her the thought was dangerously misleading. He was still fully in control, simply giving her the opportunity to set certain boundaries…within which he would play.
His next comment was proof of the strategy behind his asking. “I also need you to tell me what may be an issue for you.”
Her breath caught on the bolt of visceral fear at the flash of memory, though it didn’t pull her under. “You can’t be on top of me.” She swallowed. “Not yet.” Maybe not ever.
He smiled, stroked both hands back down to the curve of her butt, pressed her to him, causing a shiver of finest pleasure to arc through her. “I rather like having you hot and shivering on top of me.”
Easy. He made it so easy for her. And she loved him all the more for it.
Arawn stilled beneath her. He didn’t even breathe anymore, gone preternaturally quiet, his focus on her searing in its intensity. And she realized…
Her heart thumping madly in her chest, she deliberately thought, You heard right.
A glint of amusement in his eyes, though his expression remained all harsh concentration and predatory hunger. “Say it. Out loud.”
Her voice soft but steady, she said, “I love you.”
She felt the ping of the wild response in his emotions along the bond inside her, the echoes of it flickering across his face, as he pulled her head down for a bruising kiss of feral passion. A claiming. Mine, it said. You are mine.
Breathless, she broke the kiss with a gentle bite on his lower lip—making his cock twitch against her thigh—and murmured, “I’m claiming you, too, just so you know. You’re mine. My Arawn.”
His eyes flashed. “I have no issue with that,” he purred. “As long as you do not expect me to walk on a leash.”
“Likewise.”
One side of his mouth tilted up, his hand tangling in her hair. “Deal.”
She itched to kiss that arrogant half-smile—so she did, tracing the curved line of his smile with her tongue, until he snapped at her with a playful growl. She snarled right back, and slid down to kiss a trail over his chest, luxuriating in the feel of his coarse hair against her cheeks, her chin, her nose.
His hand remained on her head with just enough of a tug on her hair to deliciously remind her of how he still held the reins. She explored the expanse of muscles and strokable skin beneath her, kissing, rubbing her cheeks over his skin, bathing in the scent of him.
Because smelling him, being wrapped in the aroma that was Arawn, was another way to root her in the present, to make sure she knew, down to her bones and the instinctive parts of her, who this was she was touching, and allowing to touch her. Another defense against the insidious conflation of male touch and sexual intimacy with the one who’d tried to break her.
A tug on her hair. She looked up, met eyes of dark green gleaming with anticipation.
“Any time,” he murmured, “you need a break, you tell me. Keep telling me what you need. Out loud or in thought.”
She buried her face against his hard stomach, and his muscles flexed in response. Thank you, she thought. Her chest would shatter under the pressure of what she felt for him.
The caress of his fingers over her scalp. “I had the distinct impression,” he said with silken precision, “you were going somewhere just now.”
Her eyes shot wide, and she jerked up her head to stare at him. His grin and the directive tug on her hair—down—might have irritated her were this any other man, but with Arawn, the sneaky move only fueled her desire.
And, yes, she had been going in that direction. With that intent.
Her thighs clenched at the mere thought of taking him in her mouth, tasting him. Hell, she’d been salivating for it ever since her naughty dream. Beyond that, though, she wanted to, needed to, feel him like this, on her own terms, before she could open to him another way.
His smile deepened.
Tug.
Narrowing her eyes at him, she moved down, vowing sensual retribution for his cockiness. Plenty of ways to take him to the edge without giving him exactly what he wanted.
Because he damn sure needed to be brought down a peg, or he’d start thinking he was some sort of god.
Chapter 31
Arawn had experienced various forms of pleasure over his long life, from light and fleeting to razor-edged and mixed with pain, but the way Maeve made him feel was new. It was a feat bordering on the impossible, but he’d resigned himself to the fact that she defied expectations.
And he’d never known pleasure to be infused with as much amusement as it was with her. The thoughts she continued to toss at him…they made him want to laugh in a way that seemed almost foreign to him, loosened parts in him that had become too rigid, too jagged.
So when she drew the sheet down off his hips with narrowed eyes and dared to teach a god a lesson—because she was fearless when it came to him, and he wouldn’t want to have it any other way, would hurt if she ever treated him with cowering awe—he grinned, free and open, with a kind of fun he hadn’t experienced in far too long.
White-hot lust washed over that sizzling amusement the instant she closed her hand around his cock. He nearly bucked in her grip, the need to feel her creating friction around his most sensitive body part a driving, maddening force.
Her eyes flicked to his face, burning amber and swirling smoke, holding him mesmerized as she lowered her head…and licked at the tip.
His power blotted out the magic-made night sky above.
At her soft gasp, he brought it right back, and stroked tendrils of his energy around her in apology. In addition to not wanting to frighten her, he made sure the pitch black didn’t return, because he wanted enough light on her while she sucked him. He could see in the unrele
nting darkness, but to have her creamy skin caressed by the glow of the moon and stars while she gave him such pleasure was a beauty in and of itself.
“So,” she asked in her sensually husky voice, her breath cooling the wetness that had gathered at the head of his cock, “is this like a light switch, then?”
His laugh broke from him on a flash of surprise and delight only she brought out in him. Her features softened in that way they did when she saw him laugh, her eyes glinting with sexual intent the next instant.
She licked him again, and this time he directed the excess push of his power in response to her touch to enhance the magic of the star-studded midnight above. Wide-eyed, she stared at the pulse of lights, looked back at him.
“It is a light switch,” she whispered, her expression a perfect pretense of serious awe.
He knew, at that moment, that he would fight a sky full of gods to keep Maeve his, to keep her wanting to tease him like this, unguarded and lovely and disarming with her charm.
“Keep flipping it, then,” he said, all sensual dare and unvarnished demand.
Her answering grin was a fleeting thing, giving way to renewed sexual focus as she gripped him harder, brushed her lips over the head, her tongue along the especially sensitive underside. She sucked at the vein there, and he felt that suction throughout his entire body, groaned low at the hint of teeth when she closed her mouth completely over his cock.
Bursts of starlight above them.
Down she went, and up again, keeping her eyes on his face, equal parts to remind her of his identity and to watch his pleasure—which he knew from the thoughts she didn’t quite throw at him, but nevertheless let him see.
And he didn’t hide his pleasure, allowed her to see what she did to him, and was rewarded with a lush boost of the most exquisite fragrance he’d ever smelled. He inhaled the heavy scent of her arousal, vowed to taste the source of it soon.
He tightened his grip on her hair, incrementally, carefully, a question in the tug he gave her.
Hair-pulling, she thought at him, is safe. He never did that. Heavy-lidded amber eyes held his. Don’t stop. I like it.