Trailing from the room in a daze, she bent to gather the scattered feathers. So, she had not imagined his wings the night they’d met. She’d always known that he was magical, but she had purposely not looked further into it. Brushing the quill across her bottom lip, and lost in thought, she found herself standing in the center of her bedroom with no memory of walking there. His kilt hung half off the edge of the bed and she rolled herself into it as she crawled onto the mattress. Curled on her side with his scent surrounding her, the tears began. There were no heart-wrenching sobs or fits of drama; only the quiet shattering of her soul. Was this how her mother had felt? The bed dipped beside her as Freddie scooted in next to her. Wrapping her in his embrace, she settled against his chest as he smoothed the hair away from her face. This was truly what that curse had stolen from her. This was the thing she had missed the most; the security that only her big brother could bring to her. He was the only steady person in her life since her mother shoved them through the mirror when she was only a little girl. It seemed he would always be the only comfort in her life.
A shuffling in the doorway caught her attention and she spotted Tam looking unsure of her welcome. Opening her arms, Ella invited Tam to join them, and the pixie gingerly climbed in on the other side of her.
“I wish that I could tell him that I love him too,” she said, after the tears stopped.
“Wish granted,” Tam whispered, and Ella found herself standing in an unfamiliar room staring at a frozen Samuel.
***
Ella disappeared, leaving the space between Tam and Freddie empty. They stared at each other in silence.
“You kissed me,” Tam said when the lack of noise almost became a tangible thing that was suffocating her.
“You kissed me back.”
His voice was like having her skin stroked by velvet. Freddie was very different as a human. His sparkling eyes, shining hair, and firm skin came together to paint a picture of masculine beauty that she’d been unprepared for. The kiss had been pretty awesome too. Even though Tam didn’t have much to compare it to, she knew from witnessing the pure sexual talent that lived in the Hall of the Gods that expertise had shown itself in Freddie’s kiss.
Expertise that landed in the zombie hot seat, Tam reminded herself firmly.
“Yeah, well, don’t plan on it happening again, bub,” she warned.
Freddie held his tongue, but his eyes roamed the length of her body, making her feel all warm in places that she shouldn’t.
“Alrighty,” Tam said cheerfully, leaping from the bed. “I say we go fix up your room and make it all fit for your humanlike deliciousness again.” Tam paused. “I just said ‘deliciousness’ out loud, didn’t I?”
Instead of embarrassing her further, Freddie stood as well. He moved at a slower pace than Tam had, and she wondered if it was out of habit, or if he was still adjusting to his old form.
“Am I going to get good mattresses?”
“Sure thing, babe,” Tam answered with a smile. She never got tired of making Freddie happy. “If super-duper mattresses is what you wish, then that is what you shall have.”
Heading for the door, Tam welcomed the relief from his stare as she focused on imagining the amazing room that she would create for him.
“When you’re done with those mattresses, I wish you would let me eat you for real.”
Tam gripped the doorframe in order to stay upright when her knees went weak at Freddie’s words. She didn’t turn and look at him. She couldn’t.
“Wish granted,” she said, sealing her own fate.
***
The room was tiny and was made even more so by the massive black wings that stood out from Samuel’s shoulder blades. An array weapons hung from his waist and more from the walls. He looked twice as dangerous as ever before.
“Where are we?” she asked, and his eyes fell closed as if he was in pain.
“I’m going to kill Tam,” he growled.
“It’s not her fault. I wished for it,” she confessed, but he shook his head.
“She did not have to grant your wish.”
When he opened his eyes, she flinched against the coldness inside of them.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said with a sweeping bow. “May the Gods have mercy on your soul should any of them catch you here.”
Turning in a slow circle, she took in every detail. She was reminded of Freddie’s bare living quarters, except Samuel’s room had something that Freddie’s did not. The painting she’d done of the mirror world, the one with compass as its center, hung on his wall. She had not known it was missing, but she didn’t catalog her paintings every day, so that wasn’t a surprise.
Walking over to it, she stroked the canvas lovingly before stepping away from it.
“I would have given it to you,” she told him as she moved back to him. “I would have given you anything.”
Ella watched as if from a distance as her hand lifted to touch his skin. His chest felt ten degrees warmer than the rest of the room and so hard that it did not give at all underneath her palm. The coldness left his face, replaced by sharp planes of lust.
“Do not toy with me.”
She shook her head. His voice was every bit as hard as the muscles in his chest, and she knew that she had truly hurt him.
“I no longer wish to be a plaything,” he confessed, sounding as if the words had been ripped from his throat. She knew there was nothing she could say that would prove to him that she didn’t feel that way. Samuel could never be anything less than everything.
Stepping closer, she prayed that he would not pull away as she leaned in, pressing her lips to the skin next to her hand. His chest shuddered underneath her kiss.
“I’ll beg,” she whispered against his skin as she encircled his waist with her free arm. “I’ll drop to my knees right now and plead for you not to send me away. I don’t care. I have never had any pride when it came to you.”
As if the muscles in his neck ceased working, he dropped his forehead to the top of her head, but he made no other move to touch her.
“Only secrets,” he whispered.
His deep breaths fanned across her hair. Clinging desperately to the last shards of her breaking heart, she clutched him tighter. Frantically, she tried to memorize every detail. The texture of his skin, the smell that was his own, and exact measurement of how far her arms needed to spread in order to accommodate his large frame became the most important details in the world to her. When he was gone from her life, she would only have these memories of him.
However, she had not lied. She would drop to her knees and beg. If Samuel wanted to send her away, then he would have to drag her body from this place in order to do so.
Anxiety gripped ahold of her, threatening to choke the air from her lungs.
“I love you. Please don’t leave me?”
Samuel jerked backwards as if she’d punched him. Ella let her hands fall helplessly to her sides.
“What?” His lips peeled away from his teeth in a snarl.
“Please don’t leave me,” she repeated. She would beg. She really would.
“What did you say to me?” he growled.
Her mind scrambled to understand the reason for his sudden hostility, but she came up blank.
In an unconscious motion, she lifted her hand to her chest, attempting to rub away the pain building there.
“It’s right here,” she admitted. Tears sprang to her eyes. “It is killing me right here.”
With a single step, he was invading her space and crowding her with his body. Burying his fingers in the hair at her nape, he tugged her head back roughly.
“Do not fuck with me on this, Ella.”
Her eyes fell closed at the sound of her name on his tongue.
“What did you say to me?” he demanded, once more.
In a whisper so low that she wasn’t sure she even made a sound, she confessed, “I love you. I’m so in love with . . .” His mouth descended upon hers, cutting of
f her words.
His tongue fought hers for domination, but she would not back down. If he needed to strip away the last shreds of her being, then he could do so. At least she would know that she tried.
Samuel wanted Ella to hurt. He needed her to feel the sting of his pain and bleed for him the way he bled for her. Only the knowledge that her body was more fragile than his own kept him from tossing her through the air to his bed. He feared himself more in that moment than ever before. Stripping the tiny shorts from her body, he lifted her up until she wrapped her legs around his waist. At the last second, he remembered his sword and willed it away. Purposely, he did not hide his wings or remove his plaid. He would not give her more of himself than he already had. A few short steps had her back against the wall and he was buried inside of her. He punished her mouth with his teeth as he ground his hips against her core. Despite the pain stabbing him in the chest, he needed her pleasure this one last time. When her body tightened in his arms and her pussy clenched around his cock, he disengaged his body from hers without seeking his own release. Her eyes seemed unable to focus and her lips were swollen from his kisses. It was a look that made a man want to pat himself on the back, but he was no man.
Tugging a plaid from the end of his bed, he wrapped her body inside and clutched her tighter to his chest. Spreading his wings wide, he shot into the air, and the walls of the palace disappeared into a fog. Ella grappled to hold him tighter as solid ground no longer existed.
“I would never let you fall,” he assured her and she relaxed in his arms.
Samuel moved through the realms in a matter of seconds and was back inside her bedroom with barely a beat of his wings.
Settling her on the bed, he kissed her cheek. She didn’t beg as she’d claimed she would, and he was grateful for that. There was only so much that his heart could stand. She had Freddie back now, and after everything she had been through in order to achieve it, she would eventually choose him. Samuel had no intentions of watching her slip away. It was better this way.
He could feel that she knew it was it over. He stood to leave and she touched his arm, capturing his attention.
“I love you.”
“And I believe you,” Samuel admitted. “But you love Freddie more, and I don’t want to be your second choice.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, but he disappeared before she had the chance. He’d been nothing all his life and it was easier to accept that than a half-life with someone else.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Randall was the first to notice the change in Ella. She could have kept her secret longer if she had not become so efficient at getting to work on time since Freddie’s curse had been broken. In hindsight, she realized it would have only taken her an extra fifteen minutes at home to get past the morning sickness, but arriving to work five minutes early had become a huge part of her survival routine.
Hugging the porcelain throne, she pressed her head to the cool surface, uncaring of any germs. She was immune to most mortal diseases, and there wasn’t anything that she could catch at this point that could make her feel worse.
“Oh dear. Oh dear,” Randall chanted while hovering in the doorway of the bathroom. Any other time, she would have been mortified by anyone seeing her like this, but now she felt too bad to care.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You can kick Samuel in the balls,” she answered, refusing to lift her head. Well, it wasn’t as much a refusal as an inability, but either way it wasn’t happening.
“Is there anything I can do that doesn’t involve coming in contact with another man’s testicles?” Randall tried again. “Perhaps, I can call someone.”
Finally managing to tilt her head at an angle, she met his eyes. “I would rather you didn’t,” she said after a minute.
He made a face as if to argue, but gave her a short nod instead. “I think this calls for an old remedy rather than a medicinal one. How about some soda and crackers?”
Without waiting for an answer, he disappeared and Ella was pretty sure that she blacked out for a minute, because when a pair of shoes came into her line of sight once more, they were Freddie’s instead of Randall’s.
“Traitor,” Ella whispered, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“Come on, baby girl. Let’s get you home,” he said as he lifted her from the floor and into his arms. Wrapping her arms around Freddie’s shoulders, she tucked her head into the crook of his neck.
“I wish you would have said something,” he told her quietly as he carried her to the car. She knew that was as far as any lecture from him would ever go, and she didn’t know how to respond.
There was no good explanation for why she held so tightly to her secret, other than it was Samuel’s baby, and this was all she had left of him.
“I’m sorry,” she said lamely as he clicked her seat belt in place. His gaze met hers and a muscle in his cheek flexed as if he was grounding his back teeth.
“You shouldn’t be sorry. You should be pissed,” he told her before moving away and slamming the door closed.
“Why?” she asked the empty car. Why should she only be pissed when she was already furious?
***
Going in search of Tam, he found her in the great room, sitting alone. She didn’t look up as he entered, but he knew she knew that he was there. Tam wasn’t one ever to get caught off guard. Throwing himself down in a seat against the wall, he decided to confess all.
“I miss Ella.”
“‘Bout time, stupid,” Tam answered, sounding as if she wasn’t really listening. Instead, she kept her focus on a big ball of thread and appeared to be knitting. He cast away that ridiculous notion, since she had never knitted a day in her life.
“She chose another man over me,” he added, choosing to ignore her earlier slander of his intelligence. The ball of yarn bounced off the side of his head. She had not given him time to react and he’d not seen it coming. It didn’t help matters that one of the needles was still stuck down in the ball and pinged off his head.
“Um. What the hell?”
“I’ve recently realized something,” she answered. “You’re a big ass idiot.”
“Damn, Tam. I am pouring my heart out to you while you call me names and throw things at my head.”
“It could only help your fat ass head,” she shot back, and Samuel didn’t know how to react. Tam had never been truly angry with him a day in her life, but it was obvious that she was now.
Reaching down, he scooped up the pink and blue mixture of yarn where it had landed on the floor, and turned it over in his hands.
“What are you making anyhow?” he asked in a valiant attempt to salvage their conversation.
“It’s a baby blanket,” she answered with an offended sniff.
They knew very few people capable of producing offspring and his curiosity was effectively piqued. “Do we know someone having a baby?”
“We know them very well,” she answered. “Freddie is going to be an uncle,” she added slyly.
“How odd,” Samuel remarked, swallowing down the taste of bitterness that coated his tongue. When that didn’t work, it spilled over into his words. “One would think if he had a sibling to care for him, then Ella would not have been forced…” he trailed off as everything became remarkably clear.
Dropping the ball into his lap, he covered his face with both hands and let his head fall back against the wall behind him. When it didn’t do enough to shut out the screaming in his brain, he banged his head twice more as hard as he could until a spike of pain shot through him that caused his ears to ring. Every time he thought he had nothing else to lose, he learned that there was still more. Rock bottom always seemed to have a rock bottom basement that he didn’t know about until he was sitting in it.
Moving to stand over him, Tam snatched up her thread and kicked him in his shin.
“Fuck, Tam! What was that for?”
“I don’t think you beat yourself up enough for my liking,�
�� she answered. Popping her hands on her hips, she drew herself up to her full height as he rubbed his bruised shin.
“And for your information,” she added. “While you were having your hissy fit about Ella killing herself, you should have stopped to wonder why. Did you ever think that she was doing it so that Freddie could have his freedom and the two of you could have a life? Not to mention, my magic is mostly bound by words, but you could have cured Freddie any damn time that you like. However, you chose not to, so don’t you think it’s about time you stop playing the damn victim?”
Tam’s rant stunned him speechless, which was probably a good thing in the face of her anger.
***
It was a feather. A lone quill that caught her attention, and she knew that she wasn’t alone. She could feel his presence even though he remained hidden. Pretending not to notice, Ella tugged the covering from the mirror and stared at her own reflection.
“This was my mother’s speculum, her portal between the realms. It’s almost as old as time itself and it has been hidden in almost every country around the world at some point. This house belonged to my parents, or rather the reflection of this house did. I left out a few details that night at the café.”
The room fell away as she pictured the crystal land she’d once lived in. Her father’s long hair was so blond that it almost appeared white and his eyes were the color of the sky. As if his light needed a balance, her mother had been dark haired, dark eyed, and dark in complexion. She could remember every detail of their appearance as if it had only been a day since she’d last seen them as opposed to years.
“As I said, my mother did indeed fall in love with my father when she attempted to lead him to his end, but it wasn’t due to a long journey, and when she’d gone to collect him, he wasn’t alone. She told me once that she loved him and his son instantly.”
The Sexy & The Undead Page 7