Chapter 41 #4
The glade seemed to breathe with him. A deep current of his Draoth moved outward, slow and far-reaching, and she felt it pass through the trees like heat traveling through banked coals.
The little sounds of the spring altered at once—the insect hum thinning, the hot channel softening to a murmur, the leaves above them settling—as though the whole of the grove had sensed him and softened with reverence.
Elara’s gaze flicked once around the water and found they were alone but for light and leaf and the spring holding its breath.
His hand tightened slightly at the nape of her neck. “Are you certain?”
“Are you afraid, my lord?”
She said it only to force the moment forward.
Already every instinct in her was threatening retreat—out of the water, across the grass, into the safety of movement and distance.
And she knew, with a terrible certainty, that if she gave him even the smallest opening, he would step back.
He would do the gallant thing. He would leave her a thousand more chances to refuse.
His hand closed at the back of her neck and pulled her to him, though not into a kiss; something more undoing than that. His forehead dropped to hers, and he drew a long, unsteady breath that stirred the hair at her temple.
Her pulse was in her throat. Her pulse was in his hand.
Then he bent and set his mouth to the side of her neck.
She was trembling, and a low sound rose from him against her skin. The Cara hurled itself against the walls she had built around it as his canines traced the length of her throat.
The world tipped.
She was going to come, she understood distantly, from this alone—from his mouth at her throat and his hand in her hair and nothing else of him touching her.
Her knees gave.
He caught her at once and drew her flush against him, and the contact lit through her like flame.
His bare chest pressed to hers, hot even through the cling of her soaked shirt.
The wet linen dragged across her breasts when she breathed, and suddenly she was aware of every place they touched—every inch of him, every answering ache of her own body.
The length of him pressed against her hip through the thin, wet cloth of his undergarments, and some wild part of her went bright with it, astonished and hungry and half undone.
She fought the urge to move against him, to answer that heat with one treacherous shift of her body and let the whole world burn.
His mouth found the other side of her throat.
This time, the sound that left her was unmistakable—soft and torn from her all the same.
He answered with a low, rough growl against her skin that seemed to travel through her chest and down into the deepest parts of her.
Above them, birds burst from the trees in a dark, fluttering cloud.
Through half-lowered eyes, she saw it ripple outward from him: a muted wash of gold passing over the spring, his Draoth widening around them until the water itself seemed to hold them inside a circle apart from the world.
A barrier.
No one would come near.
Her hand tightened on his arm. She was going to say something—she did not know what, only that it was going to be please, or his name, or something worse—and then his mouth left her throat in a slow, reluctant drag.
He lifted his head without stepping back, holding her against him for a moment longer with his forehead resting against hers, his breath coming quick.
She opened her eyes.
His had darkened so completely the gold was all but gone, swallowed up until only the thinnest ring of amber remained—and he looked at her like a man who had walked himself back from a cliff at the last possible step and was not entirely certain he was glad of it.
His thumb moved, very lightly, over the place his mouth had been.
“Your scent will be hidden now,” he said, his voice a low rasp. “You’ll have nothing to conceal but your ears.” His fingers brushed them, gentle beyond reason.
It does not have to mean anything.
She did not tell him that the words had become a lie the moment he spoke them.
She did not tell him that what had passed between them had not felt like nothing.
It had felt—horribly, beautifully—exactly as it ought, as though she had been consumed by something that had been shaped, bar by bar and breath by breath, for no purpose other than this.
“All right,” she managed, and he pushed back toward the shore.
Somewhere beyond the hush of his Draoth, Aoife’s voice carried across the spring, dry with impatience.
Eamon answered her in a low tone that Elara could not make out.
One by one, the ordinary sounds of the glade returned—the rustle of leaves, the trickling water, the hum of insects—while the veil of Reynnar’s power softened and settled away.
Elara remained where she was, hair dripping against her cheeks, the mark at her throat burning where she could not see it, the Draoth Cara pacing inside her like something newly woken and ravenous. And with a clarity so complete it nearly made her laugh, she understood—
She was in a great deal of trouble.