Chapter 45
Chapter
Forty-Five
We do two things as soon as we arrive at Granny Maggie’s thatch-roofed, two-story cottage in the southlands.
First, and after some very mild begging (the barest suggestion and a soft please), Lachlan fucks me standing up right inside the door.
It’s fast and frenzied and despite our efforts to draw it out, it’s been too long and we’re far too desperate for each other to make it last more than a few minutes.
Second, Lachlan steps back outside to use the moonlight to weave himself a glamour.
It’s not as powerful as it would have been in the Otherworld, so he’s only capable of a few minor adjustments.
Outwardly, he looks human; he’s rounded his ears and dulled his eyes, shortened his fangs and covered his piercings.
He left the tattoos, since most of them are hidden by his clothes anyway.
Even with the tweaks, he cuts a striking figure.
After the wall-fucking and the glamouring and a quick nap in my old bed—I never realized how small it was until it needed to hold a tall, strapping faerie knight—we woke before dawn and began our search.
Fortunately, the cottage is in excellent shape.
The furniture is covered, and there’s a layer of dust upon every surface, but not as much as one might expect after two years.
All the hinges have been well oiled, and the windows look clean.
Someone has been coming to check on the place.
Perhaps Uncle Edward is trying to sell it?
Lachlan and I decide to divide and conquer, so he begins downstairs in the small library while I start upstairs in Granny Maggie’s studio.
Of course, we don’t find the fragment anywhere. I am not surprised, really. If it were here, the ring would have heated the moment I laid eyes on the cottage.
Instead, we spend the morning gathering anything that might provide a clue—the faerie tale books she used to read me, documents pertaining to her life after the Otherworld (marriage certificates, birth announcements, family obituaries, and the like), plus a king’s ransom of sketchbooks.
Then in the afternoon, we sit at the kitchen table reviewing everything over a sad lunch of boiled eggs (pilfered from the neighbor’s chickens), apple slices (pilfered from the neighbor’s orchard), and bland tea (pilfered from the old tin I found in the cupboard).
“Anything?” He grimaces as he sips from his cup, then shakes it off as if he doesn’t want to insult my tea-making skills.
“Ring’s not warming at anything, yet.” I leaf through a sketchbook, crunching into an apple slice. “Although this book is nothing but drawings of me as a child—”
“Let me see.” He swipes it up despite my feeble protest, and his smile grows as he flies through the pages. “You were quite the little scamp, weren’t you?”
I know what he’s seeing—me, covered in mud, holding up a frog; me, screaming my head off outside a toy shop when Granny wouldn’t buy me the stuffed bear in the window; me, leaping over the creek out back, barefoot in a ripped pinafore.
I remember the painting in the Eyrie, of Lachlan as a sad, angry boy, and a throat-stinging rush of love for my grandmother overtakes me. I could have easily lost my spirit due to my mother’s abandonment. But Granny Maggie never made me feel anything less than supremely wanted.
“I was a great deal of trouble,” I say proudly, clearing my throat.
“Was?”
I gasp, mock-insulted. “If I am too much for you, Sir Cathal, I’ll happily take my trouble elsewhere.”
“I am a celestial knight, Miss Fitzroy.” He cocks his head and bites his lip ring. “I can handle you.”
I almost ask if he’d like to start right now.
“Speaking of trouble,” I say instead, “have there been any developments in the search for the Harvest Ball poisoner?”
He blows out a weary sigh. “They caught the man who did it.”
“Who?”
“Timothy Hopnell. One of Torvil’s valets found traces of the poison in his guestroom at the castle.”
I press a hand to my chest. “Why would he have done such a thing?”
“He claims he didn’t. But his father testified that he’d fallen in with the anti-monarchists.”
I cock a brow. “Really?”
“Must have. It was the same poison the crypt attacker tried to use on you.”
“Dreadful. And what will happen to him?” Concern wavers the question, and Lachlan levels me with a sharp stare.
“He tried to kill you, Charlotte. He’s being held at a prison in Tír na Lune for now. His sentence is to participate in the Hunt, where one of your suitors will have the honor of killing him on your behalf.”
I shudder, my overly active imagination picturing the sarcastic, intelligent, bespectacled man I remember from courtly dinners getting torn apart by Skadi or Torvil’s báshounds or Desmond’s gryffalcon.
I do not ponder it long, returning my attention to our task. Because if I can’t figure out where Granny Maggie hid this blasted horn fragment, none of it will matter anyway.
Lachlan and I spend the rest of the day, the gentle yet terrifying closure of the first of my two-and-a-half days in the human realm, quietly reviewing our materials.
The ring gently warms as I’m searching through a sketchbook I found tucked away in Granny’s nightstand. A small clue, finally. Inside, there are numerous etchings of two figures posed together. Like she was practicing something.
Revelation nudges the back of my mind, but escapes before I can catch it.
I move on to a new sketchbook, the ring cooling once more, and pause to accept another cup of weak tea from Lachlan. Along with my third boiled egg of the day and a handful of walnuts from the tree out back.
The next time I glance up, the sun has set, Lachlan’s lit a few candles and a fire, and I realize we’ve been sitting together in silence for several hours. It’s been nice, actually. To exist in the same space as him.
For a moment, I let myself dream …
What would happen if I let the time expire? If I stayed here in the human realm? Would he want to stay with me? And when I lost my memories, would he be able to convince me of what we are to each other?
I doubt he could stomach abandoning his people—Garred, the children at the Eyrie, and all the fae of Campan’s Vale. I am the best chance they’ve had in years to regain peace and normalcy, a chance to rebuild. Am I selfish enough to take that away from them?
I look toward Lachlan, his auburn hair gilded by the candleglow, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, and I wish I were that selfish.
I do not want to give him up.
It is the first time I have allowed myself to think such a thing. The first time I’ve formed the words, if only in my mind.
It’s unlikely I’m going to find anything in these books. At least not right now. My brain is feeling rather mushy from hours and hours of searching for clues. I need a break.
And I can think of exactly how I want to spend it.
Lachlan comes very willingly when I take his hand and guide him upstairs.
Lachlan is so deep inside me that I cannot tell where he ends and I begin.
I’m on top but certainly not in charge. My palms are flat against his chest and he’s got one hand wrapped around my wrists while the other grips my hip, rocking me back and forth onto his cock.
It’s as good as it always is. Better even. If for no other reason than every time with him feels better than the last.
His sapphire eyes—bright and sparkling once again—rove from the place where our bodies are joined and up over my stomach, my breasts, my face while he whispers soft praise like exquisite and so fucking tight and could stay inside you forever and you’ll come for me again, won’t you?
I will. And I do.
As soon as I led him up here, I insisted he remove the glamour.
I love his wild parts, the attributes that remind me that it’s an entirely different species of man who’s splitting me apart and making me scream.
When he first entered me tonight, inch by inch in a way that no matter how wet I am is never not painful, I looked to his pointed ears, ran a fingertip over his fang, and I came instantly.
He laughed, tweaking my nipple to extend the aftershocks, and crooned, “Insatiable.”
It doesn’t bruise when he says it. Not like when men have said it to me before.
Or when I’ve thought it about myself. Lachlan makes me feel as though my appetites for food, for sex, for life, are perfectly normal.
That I should have whatever I want, whenever I want.
Like I could drink the world, and he’d be right beside me to refill my cup.
An enveloping, radiant heat sweeps through me that has nothing to do with the pleasure the beautiful knight moving beneath me has wrought and has more to do with—
“The Knight Departs!” I scream.
“What was that?” Lachlan, buried to the hilt, stills my hips, chuckling softly. “Did I break you? Is there too much pleasure flooding your brain?”
“No, no!” I smack my palm against his rock-hard pectoral, a different kind of excitement coursing through me. “The painting! In the south gallery at Stillwater. I can’t believe I never … Always knew there was a reason I was … Maybe there’s some kind of …”
Lachlan sits up, heavy-lidded and grinning, but does not yet pull out. “Charlotte.” It’s soft, fond, maybe a touch exasperated. He brushes my hair back from my face and cups my cheeks. “What are you babbling about, little queen?”
I take a deep breath, inadvertently tightening my core, and Lachlan sinks a groan of pleasure against my collarbone. “You’re killing me, sweetheart.”
“The old sketchbook I was looking through earlier. The ring reacted to it. And there were iterations of the same pose over and over again. I knew they looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out what they were until just now.
They’re from a painting called The Knight Departs.
I think … I think my Granny Maggie was the artist. And I think it might be an ode to her time in the Otherworld with Sabre.
Maybe there’s a clue about where she hid the fragment. We need to go there. Right now.”
“Right now?” His smile is incredulous. “May I finish first?”
I glance down between us, marveling at the way we fit together. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world for a human woman and a faerie man to be fused, one being, one body.
I lean in and bite his jaw. “Allow me, Sir Cathal.”
He wraps his arms around me, fingers splayed on my ribs, and lets me control the pace. I curl my hands around his nape, fisting his hair as leverage while I drag myself up and down his cock. Our faces are so close I can see every muscle twitch, feel every hitched breath upon my lips.
It’s a blissful eternity and yet no time at all before he’s the one throwing his head back and screaming my name—“Charlotte. Charlotte. CHARLOTTE!”—into the cozy silence of the cottage.
We clean ourselves up, get dressed, then use the obscura compass to return to Stillwater Hall.
Where this entire topsy-turvy Season started.