The Dark Matters Quartet

by Claire Robyns

  Seemed Greyston’s paramour had left him high and dry.

  Kelan wasn’t jealous, but he wouldn’t play the fool to any man…or woman. If this was what Lily waited for to decide her readiness, then instruction on lesson number five would begin tonight.

  After supper that evening, Kelan retired to the library with Greyston. When Lily heard they intended to discuss terrains and efficient search patterns from the skies, she declined the invitation to join them and made her way to bed.

  Kelan poured them each a whiskey. “I appreciate your help.”

  Greyston took one glass and raised it. His unspoken mantra hung in the air. I’m not doing this for you.

  “I have men scouring Glasgow,” Kelan went on. “I suggest you start there, on the northern outskirts, and work your way up, then east.”

  “I’ll criss-cross your skies and we won’t leave an inch of Scotland uncovered.” Greyston sipped from his glass, his brown gaze studying Kelan. “But please tell me the future of our world doesn’t rest on me finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “The Gossamer isn’t an immediate—or the whole—threat,” Kelan said. “I’m laying plans on the ground, but I’d be happier once we’ve unwrapped all our surprises.”

  It was over an hour later when Kelan made his way upstairs. He paused outside his bedroom when he saw light flickering at shadows beneath Lily’s door, then crossed the passage to knock.

  No answer.

  He knocked again and entered, wondering if she’d fallen asleep without dousing the gas lamp.

  Lily sat cross-legged beneath the covers, a leather-bound notebook pressed to her breast; her eyes filled with unshed tears.

  His heart constricted without consent.

  He crossed the room in long strides, his mouth set in a grim line. “What has happened?”

  “My father’s dead,” she said softly.

  Kelan could count the times he’d been completely confounded on one hand, and most of those came after he’d met and married Lily.

  He lowered himself to the edge of the bed beside her and fed tenderness into his tone. “Lily, didn’t your father pass away twenty years ago?”

  “Lord, you don’t know.” Her lower lip trembled around a smile. “Pierre d'Bulier wasn’t my father. I suspected as much, and now my mother’s journal confirms it.” She closed the journal and slid it onto the bedside table. “You’re not far wrong. My father died…well, it must be close to twenty-three years ago.”

  “For you, he died today,” Kelan said as understanding hit. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” She gave a slow shake of her head. “I’m not sad… At least, it’s more than sadness. I feel as if there are a hundred emotions bursting to get out of me, but I want to keep them here.” She patted a spot above her breast. “Just for a while longer.”

  “Take as long as you need.” He took her hand in his, his thumb stroking her wrist. “Would you like me to sit with you, or would you prefer to be alone?”

  The hand he held turned over, her fingers twining with his. Her eyes flickered away from his, and then returned after a long, long moment. “I don’t want you to go.”

  She looked so lost, as if everything she’d ever known was being cast off and she couldn’t decide if she should grab at stray fragments before they turned to dust or embrace some new awareness, understanding about life and herself, with both hands.

  Kelan didn’t know what all she battled with. He wasn’t a natural consoler; he seldom delved too deep beneath his own surface, let alone anyone else’s. But he wanted to help, he needed to soothe. He could sit here all night with Lily, but she’d still be utterly alone unless he gave more than his physical presence.

  For a reason tugging deep inside, a reason he’d given up trying to fathom, he peeled back the shields that guarded his soul. Ice-cold detachment. Cynical humour. Aloof disdain. Giving of himself in the only way he knew how.

  She held his gaze with sombre intensity, as if caught within the depths of a sunken labyrinth.

  “I’ll stay.” He lifted her hand to his, his eyes never leaving hers as brushed his lips over her knuckles. “I’ll stay as long as you want me here.”

  “And if I want you to stay through the night?” The breathless whisper rolled through him and then punched.

  “Not like this,” he said. “You’re not thinking straight.”

  “All I’ve done my entire life is think straight.” She blew out a frustrated sigh. “I’m not overwrought, Kelan, I’m not looking for a place to drown my sadness.”

  Kelan wasn’t convinced.

  “Your sudden change of mind has everything to do with that.” He nudged his chin at the slim journal on the table.

  “It’s made me realise life isn’t one long stretch of perfect and guarantees. Life is a string of the snatched moments we’re willing to reach for.” She pulled her hand from his and fell back against the headboard. “You’re building an army to battle demons, for goodness sake. This is our world, where the only moments we can be assured of are the ones already passed. I don’t want to die waiting for perfection. I want to live messy.”

  The look in her eyes went from sombre to sultry. “Kelan, what I’m trying to say is… I think—no, I know… I’m ready.”

  He looked at her through eyes hooded with the weight of unleashed desire and intent. He was done objecting.

  His lips curled at one end. “You want to add me to your string of snatched moments like some notch on a bedpost.”

  Her mouth slackened. “That sounds terrible.”

  “I’m not complaining.” He rose and walked around the bed, his hungry gaze pinning her. He threw back his half of the cover and spread himself alongside her, opening an arm in invitation.

  She looked at his arm, then slanted that look to him. She swallowed hard. “Aren’t you going to take your boots off?”

  “Not yet.” He saw the fright lurking in her eyes, reminded this was all brand new to her.

  “When I make love to you for the first time, it will be in my bed,” he said gently. “Come here, Lily.”

  She slid lower beneath her covers and an inch closer.

  Kelan closed the gap, rolling up onto one elbow. He pushed a tendril of hair from her cheek and brought his mouth down over hers. The tip of his tongue prodded, and gained entry on a soft moan. His lips captured hers and his tongue stroked that moan in a slow kiss designed to claim her senses and her fears. Her taste filled him with want, hot need wrapped around his veins. He’d been patient so long…too long, and now he needed to summon a little more.

  When he felt her resistance melt, his kiss drifted along the line of her jaw and then lifted so he could look at her. “Tell me about your father.”

  Thick lashes fluttered as her eyes opened on him. “You want to talk about my father?”

  He hooked the edge of the cover and dragged it down, revealing precious little. She was buttoned up in cotton and lace from head to toe. “I want to talk about you, and that seems like a good place to start.”

  “Oh,” she breathed out on a sigh.

  Minutes passed, holding each other’s eyes, before she started talking.

  “His name was Thomas Cunningham.” She folded one arm beneath her head, distracted and starting to relax. “His family was landed gentry, but he was the firstborn of a third-born son.”

  His fingers started at her throat, slowly working the buttons down to her waist while his gaze drank her in. “Was that important?”

  “Not to my mother.”

  A gasp fluttered from her lips as he trailed a finger down the exposed valley of her breasts. Her skin was alabaster, silken to his touch. “Obviously not.”

  “My mother wrote her journal like fragments of disconnected thoughts.” Lily stretched her limbs in pleasure. “I’ve puzzled out the largest pieces, but you need to understand the history. My mother’s father was a viscount; both her parents died in a carriage accident when she and Aunt Beatrice were young, and they were raised by the u
ncle who inherited the title. My mother never spoke of him, Aunt Beatrice only rarely, and now I know why.”

  The hunger coiled inside him thickened his blood, demanding more. His hand explored beneath the thin cotton, his palm moulding her firm, heavy breast.

  Lily arched her back on a flustered sigh.

  Lust splintered through him and throbbed in his shaft.

  He’d mastered control of thought, action and emotion before he’d passed through puberty, but the feel of Lily pressed to him undid it all. He tempered the compelling, primal urge to tear away the excess material and seat himself deep within her sweet body, to finally make her his, but it took every fibre of restraint and self-will to do so.

  “Let me guess.” Kelan bit down on his back teeth and trailed his gaze up to hers. “The uncle felt his niece deserved better than a third-born son?”

  “He refused to allow them to marry, but my mother didn’t care.”

  “They eloped?” He strummed her nipple, watching the desire tug from her hardened pebble to her eyes.

  “No.” She dragged her lower lip through her teeth. “My mother fell pregnant… If it was purposely done, she never got to dangle the prospect of a bastard child in her uncle’s face. There was an incident… From what I can deduce, she saw Thomas and her uncle riding together, talking, and then her uncle fired a shot—”

  “The uncle shot him?” Kelan slid his hand from her breast and smoothed over the thin fabric covering her stomach, over the flare of her hips and along her thigh.

  “He shot into the air, but Thomas’ horse took fright and threw him. He died later that day of a severe head injury.”

  Sadness bled through the dewy glaze of her eyes. “My mother fled to London the next day. I don’t think she ever told anyone about the child…about me; not even Aunt Beatrice.”

  “How did she end up with your—with Pierre d'Bulier?” On the return trip up her leg, he snagged the lace trim of her nightgown, his hand caressing bare skin.

  His erection pressed against constricting fabric to plunge between her satin soft thighs. She was a lodestone, and his blood was jagged with the edges of desire only she could glaze.

  “That part’s unclear.” Lily sucked in a shuddering breath.

  She moved languidly beneath his touch, her limbs loosening like a bud unfurling to a morning sun.

  Her words came quickly, as if she understood the game. “After some months in London, she found some sort of institution that catered to aristocratic indelicate problems. She made an appointment, but from what I can tell, she never went through with it. A short while later, a man contacted her with a different kind of solution.”

  “Duncan McAllister.” Kelan swore a bitter curse inside his head.

  He’d reached the top of her thigh, his palm spread around her waist. He watched her lids grow heavy as he slowly caressed inward, his blood tipped to boiling as his thumb whorled closer and closer to her centre. “That’s how he selected his noble born children. He probably set up the damn institution.”

  “She took the marriage and the demon blood in exchange for keeping me.” Lily gave a ragged laugh. “My mother was always fond of acting first and worrying later.”

  He stilled his exploration to simply look at her. “I know what drove Duncan, and I don’t often blame the man, but his methods were needlessly callous.”

  “Or desperate.” Lily brought a hand up, running her fingers lightly over his jaw. “If he hadn’t interfered, my mother would likely have been forced to give me up. I’m not sorry where I ended.” A sensual smile crossed her lips, beckoning him to come and play. “Not at all.”

  Kelan pushed aside all thoughts of his crazy family and hers.

  He folded one thigh between her legs and lowered himself over her, his mouth claiming that smile as his. His lips crushed hers while his tongue plunged and ravaged. She kissed him back with a desperate hunger that matched his own, her limbs moving beneath him, rubbing friction that ignited fires.

  His hand swept over her upper thigh, his finger sliding along the seam of her core; she bucked up on a fevered groan, and then again when he teased her swollen bud.

  When he dipped a tentative finger inside, she came up off the bed, flattening his hand between them.

  His shaft reared furiously and strained, demanding release.

  He rolled from Lily, gathering her in his arms as he swung off the bed. “Now, you’re ready,” he growled.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lily’s arms wrapped his neck, her breasts pushed to his hard chest, as Kelan carried her across the passage to his bedroom. I got exactly what I asked for. Her blood hummed, fire licked her skin and flamed between her legs, her limbs were lethargic, drunk with desire; her body was a conflicted mess.

  He kicked the door closed behind him and set her gently down on a massive bed. He captured her mouth in a possessive kiss before straightening. “Don’t move a muscle.”

  Lily couldn’t find the breath to reply. Her nightgown hung loose over her breasts, her skirts had ridden up her thigh. She couldn’t see a thing in the darkness, but she felt the heat of his gaze devouring her.

  She heard him move around the room. He opened the drapes to let in starlight, and left the gas lamp off.

  His thoughtfulness spun webs around her heart. He’d encouraged her to talk while he awoke a brazen hunger. When his touch had blazed a trail between her breasts, she was lost.

  Her eyes feasted on his shadowed form as he stripped his boots and undressed. Kelan consumed her; he hadn’t left a corner empty for coy and shy. The definition of his ribbed chest and lean abdomen took form as her vision adjusted to starlight. Every part of him was hard muscle. Her skin heated when she recalled the heavy length pressed to her thigh and her gaze travelled lower on its own accord. His shaft stood erect and proud against his stomach, thick and long and foreign. Her eyes snapped closed. She wasn’t quite as brazen as she’d thought. Yet.

  The bed dipped with his weight, and then that weight folded over her with the musky scent of ash and forest, lust and male. A granite thigh nudged her legs open.

  “Lily.” His voice was silken gravel. “Look at me.”

  Her eyes opened into his stormy, hungry gaze. His hair fell across the alpine ridges of his darkly beautiful face. An overwhelming need rose inside her with nothing to stop it. Her hands came up, her fingers pushing through his hair. The air between them thickened, hot and sluggish with the weight of desire pulsing and merging them into one being.

  Kelan came down on his elbows either side of her and his mouth crushed hers with absolute possession. His tongue sought hers in slow strokes that turned her limbs to molten bone.

  His mouth slid from hers and down the column of her throat. “God, you make me ache.” His weight shifted onto one elbow and his hand roamed down her thigh while his kisses scorched her skin. “Your body hums to mine.”

  His bristled jaw tingled the mound of her breast as he pulled the fabric aside with his teeth. His tongue whorled her nipple into a throbbing pebble and a fire lit her blood. When he took the peak of her breast into his mouth, sucking and licking, her skin flushed with raw cravings; the flush sunk into her blood and bones, no part of her left untouched by the wave of restless energy rippling through her. She wanted to scream, cry and laugh all at the same time.

  “Kelan,” she groaned, not knowing what she wanted…only more. Her fingers dug into his hair as she writhed beneath him.

  Her hands slipped from his hair as he rose up and straddled her. “I want to feel all of you against me,” he murmured, his gaze a hot caress.

  He tugged her nightgown from beneath her and then his arm wound around her waist, lifting her upright as he pulled it over her head. His arm stayed around her, pressing her to him as he put a hand out for support and brought them down as one.

  His warm skin, slightly rough, steel-hard, brushed sparks over her as he slid lower, nudged her legs apart and settled between her thighs. The length of his shaft grazed heat along her seam
and Lily almost came out of her skin.

  A moan escaped her throat as she arched up; the arm wrapped around her waist lifted her another inch. His head bent over her, his mouth capturing hers with raw intensity, the tip of his shaft prodding her core.

  She reached out wildly, and her hand closed over the roped muscle of his forearm. She marvelled at the textures beneath her fingertips, marble-hard but not glidingly smooth. Her other arm went around him as longing flooded her. His body was sculptured in stone and left to bake in the sun until just the right temperature.

  She ached for him with an intensity that no longer scared her. Kelan was all she’d feared he was. He’d never change, but she had. She’d seen the man beneath, and she’d grown into a woman who could accept and begin to understand all his parts. He was ruthless, but never cruel. He was relentless in his single-minded quest, but he’d brought her along with him. He trained her to stand strong and alone. He gentled when she couldn’t.

  As he kissed and stroked and adored every inch of her body, heat pooled and slicked his entry at her core.

  In one fluid, deliciously slow thrust, he pushed inside her. There was a tug on her inner wall—if there was any pain, she was too overcome with want and longing to feel it. Inch by molten fire inch, she stretched to accommodate the velvet throb until he filled her completely. Lily gasped and cried out his name.

  Kelan lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “You’re honey-spiced, inside and out.” His voice ragged, his jaw clenched to restrain the aching need mirrored within herself. “Am I hurting you?”

  She shook her head. The tears in her eyes gathered from pure ecstasy, emotions bathed in searing passion spiralled through her like a white-hot coil. Her fingers clawed his back. “Kelan, please…don’t stop.”

  His restraint collapsed on a primal growl. His gaze bound her, sealing a bond far more intimate than their joining. He moved within her, his arm still cradled her to him, rocking her to his rhythm, filling her from head to toe with his essence. Each thrust more powerful, deeper, more urgent, harder, sweeping her higher and higher until all she could do was close her eyes and cling to him.