The Wolf

by Jean Johnson

  Morganen came back, grabbed the intrigued, voyeuristic Kelly, and dragged her into the stairwell. That moved both of them out of view, giving the two on the floor some privacy. Of course, Kelly and Morganen were grinning all the way at such fortuitous, Destiny-inspiring luck. There was nothing quite like an injured warrior and a concerned maiden willing to fuss over him to cement a romance, after all.

  Wolfer, stunned from the blow to his head, blinked and looked up at the curly haired woman bent so tenderly over him. A woman who was straddling his armored waist like a sexy hallucination. His wits were elsewhere, surely; that was the only possible explanation for what he did next. Dropping his sword, he reached up, cupped that dark golden head, and dragged her mouth down to his. Boldly claiming those sweet lips with his own.

  Sucking in a startled breath, Alys stilled and resisted for a moment as his mouth claimed hers without any gentle preliminaries in a hungry, hot, devouring kiss. He seemed to sense her hesitation and gentled his mouth against hers accordingly. Instead of pressuring them into yielding, his lips coaxed hers to soften. Instead of invading, his tongue licked at her lips, teasing her into parting them on her own.

  “Alys? Wolfer!” Evanor’s voice cut through their kiss, jerking both of them apart. Alys scrambled off of the armored brother and bolted to her feet, blushing. The other Nightfall brother stalked up to them and glared down at the armored man on the floor. “What were you doing to her, just now?”

  Wolfer flushed at the demand, too flustered to reply with the truth under Evanor’s disapproving glare. He slumped back against the floor, closing his eyes and going completely limp, the picture of a man slumped insensate on the floor.

  “Wolfer?” he heard Alys ask with a touch of concern. Feeling her crouch and nudge his shoulder, he slowly “roused” when she nudged him again.

  “Unh . . . Alys?” Cracking open his eyes, he looked up at the ceiling, then around him, sitting up gingerly, lifting his hand to the back of his head. “I don’t remember . . . how did I get here? Why am I on the floor?”

  Alys flushed, her gray eyes widening. But not in concern. They narrowed a moment later—she knew when a man was faking! He had just kissed her for the first time since she was a curious twelve years old and he an obliging seventeen, and that had only been a single, quick peck of their lips—and he pretended not to know what he had been doing just now? “You—you—ooh!”

  Shoving at him hard, thrusting him back onto the floor, Alys stood up again. Literally stomping on his breastplate, she stalked off in a huff, her curls bouncing where they had escaped from the braid Wolfer had disheveled during their interlude.

  “That was smart,” Evanor drawled. In just three words, he managed to make Wolfer feel even more like a fool. “No woman likes being insulted that way, Wolfer—you don’t know a thing about courting, do you?”

  His face heated as he sat up again. “I’m not courting her!”

  Evanor crouched next to him and hooked his finger under the braid of hair just visible between armguard and gauntlet. “Then why have you been wearing this all along . . . which might be interpreted as a ‘chain of silk’?”

  Wolfer growled, baring his teeth. Evanor, no fool, removed his touch. He didn’t back off, though. Cradling his wrist and its bracelet, Wolfer glared down at it. “There is no silk in it! No chain. It’s just a bit of braided hair she cut from her head and gave to me. As a friend.”

  “She wasn’t kissing you back as a friend,” his blond-haired brother pointed out, crouching by him with his forearms on his knees. “She doesn’t look at you the way she looks at the rest of us . . . and you don’t look at her like I’ve ever seen a friend look at another friend.”

  Evanor stood and looked down at him. “She looks at you and you look at her like a woman and a man who are interested in each other.

  “Destiny is Destiny, Brother. And you’re next in line for the fall. Don’t screw it up.”

  I hate it when he’s right. Groaning, Wolfer dropped back to the floor, eyes squeezing shut. In doing so, he missed the little smile curving Evanor’s mouth, the first real smile he had given since his twin had been captured. Wolfer stayed there while his brother stepped over him and continued down the hall, wondering to Jinga and back how his life could have gotten so complicated.

  Alys was still mad at him at the evening meal and didn’t once look his way. She even smiled a few times at Rydan, who grunted and did his best to ignore her, though the rest of Wolfer’s brothers responded to her shy charm. But she didn’t once acknowledge his presence. And because he had scullery duty, Wolfer couldn’t follow her when she left immediately after the meal was over.

  Banging the pots and pans, dunking the dishes with force into the soapy, quick-cleaning enspelled water that filled the largest scullery sink, Wolfer growled under his breath. Koranen, whose turn it also was to help, kept himself strictly in the kitchen, cleaning it up and only bringing his elder brother dirty dishes and utensils when he absolutely had to enter the scullery next door. Wolfer wasn’t in a mood to be sociable, so it was just as well the second youngest was being cautious around him.

  The glass water pitcher broke when he thoughtlessly banged it about. Cursing, Wolfer closed his eyes, calmed his mind, focused his will, and muttered the glass-mending spell their mother had insisted all of them learn as soon as they developed their magic. Broken pieces leaped up out of the water, realigning themselves as the spell worked.

  Lady Annia had possessed a small amount of magic herself, mostly household oriented . . . but she had refused to use it to repair yet another object her sons had broken in and about Corvis Castle, training the boys from the moment the two eldest twins had developed their very first speck of magic inside. That had essentially made each brother responsible for what they had all done, all the way to the flowering of Koranen and Morganen’s own magics. She had insisted on responsibility being shared among all eight of them. When the glass pitcher was whole again, Wolfer washed it much more carefully, and the rest of the dishes, too.

  There was a reason why he was so mad. Alys. And her behavior toward him at dinner. She had fumed and been silent toward him, when all he wanted was for her to smile at him, to lift those soft gray eyes to his. To lift those sweet, pink lips for him to taste, and only him.

  Lifting the last dish out of the rinsing water, he set it very gently on the drying rack with the others, pulled the cork from the drain, and wiped down his hands and arms. Patting the braid of her hair a little drier with the drying cloth, he slowed his movements and looked down at it, really looked at it.

  It can’t possibly be the “chain of silk” . . . can it? And yet, when he thought about it . . .

  “When claw would strike and cut to bone/A chain of silk shall bind his hand . . .” My hand. I didn’t see her put any silken chain in the braid—I saw her braid it from a lock of hair she separated out from behind her ear. Watched her select and braid that lock with my own eyes, and cut it on the spot! She couldn’t have bound me by anything . . . except . . . Except I have stayed my hand in anger many a time from cutting into someone, literally or figuratively, by the thought of her and this braided bracelet, remembering how kind she was, and how gentle she made me feel . . .

  It kinked, as it always wanted to do when it started to dry, legacy of the thumb-sized curls it was made from. He smoothed it automatically. “. . . So Wolf is caught in marriage-band.” Marriage . . . Alys, married . . . to me?

  He thought about it. It didn’t feel very odd—no more so than the realization that she was a fully sensual adult woman felt odd, compared with his long-standing memories of her as a half-shy, half-bold playmate, then later as a withdrawn, half-grown girl . . . who had always played most of all with him, when she played with him and his brothers. Who had always followed him with little sneaking peeks of her eyes, some soft, puzzling emotion in her gaze that had made him uncomfortable, because he didn’t know what it was.

  It hadn’t been the same sort of pleasure a couple of
the Corvis castle servants had introduced him to when he was old enough, the kind that could be found in a bed. Pleasures he had felt uncomfortable associating her with . . . because of that admiring look in her eyes, Wolfer now realized. He hadn’t been ready to accept her admiration of him.

  She was always mine, wasn’t she? The realization first painfully tightened, then released something within his chest. That brought him an almost giddy sense of freedom, of anticipation. Everything she did—when she was brave and adventuresome, was to be with me. Not my brothers. Not for anything else. She always wanted to be with me. She escaped her horrible uncle, and she came here to Nightfall, where she would feel safe with me.

  The revelation turned him away from the dish-draining rack without bothering to wipe and put the dishes away.

  “Hey! Aren’t you going to put those away?” Koranen called out.

  Wolfer shook his head. He had to find her. He would find her, and they would . . . they would . . .

  “I’m an idiot,” he muttered under his breath, turning back to the dishes in their drying rack. He couldn’t just go up to her and tell her he was ready to marry her. Especially not after his “performance” in the west hall, when he had been too embarrassed to admit kissing her.

  “I already knew that,” his second youngest brother quipped, as Wolfer mulled over what he was going to do. “But would you care to explain why you think that, at least?”

  Wolfer reversed course once more, heading out of the kitchen again. He leveled a finger at Kor and growled. “Just for that, you can finish the dishes!”

  “Hey!” His auburn-haired brother glared at him.

  But Wolfer was already striding out the kitchen door. He had some strategic planning to do.

  SEVEN

  Alys awoke instantly. There had always been the fear that her uncle would come to her room and catch her asleep, so she had forced herself to be a light sleeper. He had never caught her unaware, and she had disappointed his lust several times by sitting up just as he reached her bed and asking him blandly if he had given up his dreams of wealth and alliance with whomever bid the highest to have his virgin niece as their bride.

  Except . . . except she wasn’t in her old rooms, either at Devries Hall or in Corvis Castle. She was in her new room on Nightfall Isle. Still, the faint sound of the door easing open on near-silent hinges woke her, disorienting her for a few moments. She remained lying in the bed, straining with her ears, seeking to feel out the identity of the intruder with her meager mage senses.

  It wasn’t her Uncle Broger or her other uncle, Donnock.

  It was Wolfer.

  She almost pushed herself up onto her elbows and demanded to know what he was doing in there. Peeking with the one eye not half-buried in her pillow where she lay on her side, she saw him enter the room and close the door. A large basket hung from his hand. It was filled with flowers, of all things. Helped by the early morning sunlight filtering faintly through the curtains in her room, she recognized the flowers. They were from the gardens outside their wing of the castle, most of them barely beginning to bud.

  She shut her eyelid quickly, as he glanced warily her way.

  Ears straining for each sound, she heard his feet creep quietly across the floor. The scent of dew and pollen increased as he moved near her bed. His personal odor accompanied them, cleaner and fainter than he had smelled at the midday meal the day before, overlain with an aroma of soap and lingering moisture that said he had bathed not too long ago. The scent of flowers increased as she sensed him moving to stand right beside her, where she lay on one side of a bed much larger and softer than her previous ones had ever been. Then his feet padded quietly away, the door creaked softly, and quietly bumped shut . . . and the flower scent lingered, making her nose twitch.

  Opening her eye cautiously, Alys found herself staring at a rose. It was in that delicately graceful state she loved, between still-closed bud and full-opened bloom. The red petals were still lightly beaded with dew. Sitting up, Alys blinked in surprise when she dislodged a shower of stems and blossoms; he had laid them over her and the bedding, covering her so gently, she hadn’t even felt a thing.

  She didn’t know what to make of the silent offering. Alys didn’t think he knew she had been awake, not from his stealthy giving . . . which left her wondering why he had done it so secretively at all. Unless he was embarrassed to let his brothers know he was doing it . . .

  As he must have been as embarrassed as I was to have his brother catch us yesterday in the hall. She could see why he had pretended not to know what he had been doing now, as an excuse to explain away his actions at the fourth-born brother’s demands. Her lips firmed for a moment, wishing he’d had enough bravery to kiss her openly and not care who knew about it . . . and then her mouth curved.

  That’s the bowl calling the plate a dish! You’re about as much a coward as anyone, Alys of Devries, so you have little business calling him one.

  The flowers made her feel bold, though. Edging them gently aside, for she didn’t want to crush them, she got up, dressed in the trousers and tunic Kelly had given her, then gathered all of the flowers up again, except for the one rose. The roses, she noticed, all had their thorns removed; they had been mixed in with bluebells and tanzitas, marigolds and orchidaria sprays, which had no thorns. It was a considerate touch that made her smile. Bundling them into the crook of her arm, since he had taken his basket with him, she poked her head out into the hall then snuck down the corridor to his room.

  She knocked tentatively but received no answer.

  Feeling very bold, Alys opened his door and slipped inside. His was a suite with a sitting room, though Wolfer was not inside the front room. Tiptoeing to the next chamber, she peered past the edge of the door. No one was in the bedroom, either. Hurrying over to the bed, she started scattering the blossoms on the haphazardly straightened covers.

  A watery sound behind the other door in the room made her gasp and toss the remaining flowers on the bed in a lump, glancing about her quickly for a place to hide. She dove under the bed as the flushing of water in the refreshing room eased and stopped, grateful there was very little dust underneath the huge piece of furniture. A glance at the door showed it swinging open. A pair of boots strode into the room, the door closing behind them . . . and those boots abruptly stilled.

  Their owner was noticing the flowers on the bed! She squeezed her eyes shut, holding her breath, mortified and no longer brave. Not at the thought of being caught.

  Wolfer stared at the flowers on his bed, his fingers freezing in the act of tying his trouser laces. The very same flowers that he recognized as the ones he had picked and laid all around the sleeping Alys not minutes before now lay on his bed, just as he had placed them on hers.

  Almost as he had placed them on hers, rather; these were scattered over about half of his bed, and then just . . . dumped in a bundle. As if interrupted by his return from the refreshing room.

  His eyes shifted to the bedroom door. He was supposed to go down to the kitchen and help make breakfast, since that was his household chore this morning. But the door stood partly open, barely wide enough for someone slender to have slipped out through . . . maybe quickly enough for them to have escaped through before he had emerged from the refreshing room, and maybe not.

  Narrowing his eyes, he looked around the bedroom for any clues. Nothing. There really was no place for her to hide . . . except under the bed. Dropping in a quiet crouch by the refreshing room door, bracing his hands on the floor, he peered under the edge of his bed a couple yards away.

  Alys lay underneath it at an angle to him, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She looked like she was holding her breath, afraid of being caught. Acting as if putting flowers on his bed was a naughty child’s prank. Grinning, Wolfer crept closer across the floor on hands and feet, kneeling absolutely silently by the side of the bed. When he was ready, he reached under its edge—and grabbed her ankles with a yank.

  She yelped and scrabbled, kick
ing futilely. Wolfer laughed and slid her easily out from beneath his bed in spite of her struggles. Attempting to cling to the taut ropes holding his wool-stuffed pallet and its feather mattress up, even though her belly-down angle was awkward, she tried to stay under the bed. And failed. As he grinned, tugging on her a hand-length at a time, Alys kicked and squirmed even harder, shrieking as his hands deliberately groped up past her knees . . .

  “Wolfer!”

  He growled playfully, hauled her out completely, and flipped her over, pinning her writhing body with his own to the floor. Unable to suppress the mischief roused in him by her very presence, he did what he had once done to her as a young boy. Grinning, growling, nipping with his lips sheathing his teeth from her skin, he pretended to be a big wolf and “eat” her, lunging at her cheeks, her forehead, her ears, and her throat as she shrieked and threw up her arms to protect her face, then her torso.

  Wolfer stopped only when he got to her chest, which was no longer a flat, childish chest lying underneath the soft cotton of her clothes. No, his Alys had grown delectable, unmistakably womanly curves, ones that inspired a low, soft, hungry growl from deep within his chest. Alys gasped and stilled under his touch as soon as she felt his mouth stop there.

  He felt her nipple bead right through the material of tunic and under-corset support. Against the corner of his lips. Gray eyes met gold, in the quiet of early morning. Gazes locking, Wolfer shifted his head just a little, and took that cloth-wrapped bud in his mouth.

  With the cloth cushioning his grip, he rolled her nipple gently with a side-to-side twitch of his lower jaw.

  Her eyes closed, and her head arched back against the floor. Pushing her breast closer. He closed his lips around the full peak and suckled through the layers of cloth. Then growled at the ineffective, bland taste of cotton. A shift of his weight, and he pushed her tunic up. He growled softly again when she struggled, but it wasn’t to impede him; rather, she helped him pull the garment over her head. That bared her underlying corset bodice. It also bared a strange, finely edged diamond of metal embedded in her skin, melded with the flesh of her sternum.