Chapter Twenty-One
The wedding was amazing. The feast went on too long for Taz’s taste.
He was looking forward to what came after.
Leaving Sephie last night after their kisses had been nearly impossible.
Tonight, he need not do so, and though he must stay at the feast for politeness’s sake, he hoped it would not be for long.
His impatience melted as he watched his wife. She was happy—contented, relaxed, enjoying herself. When he compared Sephie this evening to the prickly female he’d first met in the garden of the Baradine manor, he found it easy to wait until she was ready to leave.
Back then, she masked her unhappiness behind pride and temper.
Dignity, too. He had been drawn to her dignity as much as to the sense that a beautiful woman hid behind her thorns.
Here in the forest, she had slowly thrown off her anger and reserve, and tonight, he was seeing the woman she really was.
Taz would relax and enjoy the pleasure that his heart-bonded beloved was taking in her own wedding. Other pleasures could wait until later.
Someone started playing a violin—or the fae equivalent. Acha and Ligard led a shout for Owl and Rose to begin the dancing, and Sephie was the first to move, laughing as she grabbed Taz’s hand and pulled him out into the space the fae had cleared for the dancing.
They were not left to dance alone for long, but Taz was barely aware of the fae crowding the floor.
His mind and his heart were fixed on his Sephie.
On the delectable shape of her revealed as she swayed to the music and her robes brushed her curves.
On the touch of her hand in a twirl, the feel of her waist as he spanned it to assist a jump, the way she leaned into him when the figures of the dance called for them to link arms.
One dance became another and then another.
They danced only with one another. On any other evening, their fae friends would have suggested changing partners, but tonight, the pair of them stayed together for dance after dance, until Sephie, and only Sephie, filled all of Taz’s senses.
Even his mage sense was overflowing with her—the glow of her magic, its rose scent.
The need in him was rising to levels he’d never before known. Temperate by nature and training, he had long taught himself to subdue the wilder impulses of his body, but never before had the urge been so great, and so focused on one person.
And yet, as long as she was enjoying herself, he wanted to be here, in the clearing, fulfilling her desire to dance.
Then she pulled him to the edge of the clearing, well clear of the clusters of fae that watched the dancers. “Taz, my darling, would it be rude for us to leave? Dancing with you is sweet torture, when what I want is for you to bed me.”
He was thrown off-balance, as well as thrilled to know she felt the way he did. “For us to bed each other,” he corrected. “It is our wedding day, my love. No one will mind or be at all surprised.”
And so it proved. When they found Ligard and Acha, and said they were leaving, Acha said, “I win,” and Ligard laughed. “We had a bet on how long you would last,” he said. “I lost two dances ago!”
He raised his voice and shouted something in the fae tongue, and in the next moment, they were at the heart of a procession, with those dancing in front and behind them laughing almost as much as they were singing, and with fae fireworks once more lighting up the forest.
Ligard put his arm around Taz’s shoulders, and said, “It is as well you are still living under the hill, Bard Owl, for you and your Rose are having a powerful effect on us. The hill should dampen it somewhat. I cannot speak for the others, but Acha and I are heading straight home to affirm our bond after we leave you.”
Another of the men who frequently kept them company leaned in and said, “If you project your feelings onto us this strongly while the pair of you are just thinking about what comes next, I doubt the forest would survive you actually completing your bond without yards of rock between you and us.”
Sephie heard them, for her face was bright scarlet when she turned it toward Taz. “They can feel what I’m thinking?” she asked.
“If you are thinking what I am thinking,” Taz said, “then it is our right. We are married now, you and I.”
But she buried her face in his shoulder, and would not look at the laughing fae. He shrugged Ligard off, hugged Sephie close to him, and put his other hand up to shelter her blushing face as he led her the last few steps to the cave.
He managed to keep his own laughter out of his voice as he scolded their friends. “Be off with you. You are embarrassing my heart-bonded. We can find our own way from here.”
“Ligard and I shall come with you to make certain you don’t get caught in a confusion spell,” said Acha. “You don’t want to spend your wedding night roaming the tunnels.”
Which was certainly true, though Taz had a notion that he and his wife were a match for most fae magic. However, he accepted the offer, and a few minutes later, he and Sephie were at their door, saying good night to the fae couple.
“Ligard did not mean to offend you,” Taz offered, once they were safely behind their door and alone together.
“I know,” Sephie acknowledged. “I was not offended. Just a little embarrassed that we are broadcasting our feelings for one another.”
“Even if the fae didn’t sense what we want to do, they would guess, sweetheart. It is our wedding night.”
She wrinkled her nose. Clearly, she didn’t find the thought consoling, and even when he pointed out the dampening and masking effects of stone, she still frowned.
Perhaps she could be distracted from whatever she was thinking. Taz stepped closer, rested one hand on her waist, and used the other to raise her chin.
Slowly, so that she could stop him if she wasn’t ready, he lowered his mouth, and she met him partway, rising on her toes so that their lips connected faster than he had intended.
He sank into the kiss, and her ardor rose to meet his, the music that was so much a part of them both swirling up into a duet that sang in their every muscle, vibrated through their bones, and thrilled along their nerves.
Discarding clothes as they went, stumbling a little in their absorption with one another, they made their way across the room to the closest bedchamber, and tumbled to the bed, where their serenade for one another took its physical expression to the limit, and the two became one.
In ecstasy, unable to clearly tell where he left off and Sephie began, Taz was still aware that she was with him as their music built to a crescendo and triumphed, both of them shouting at the same moment.
And as he floated down the other side of his climax, Sephie murmured, “The bond.”
What had been a tenuous thread connecting them was now a broad pathway, carrying a melody, complete with overtones and harmonics, that reflected his feelings to her and hers to him.
She was astounded, thrilled, shaken. He could hear it in their bond, feel it in his bones and sinews.
Well, and so was he. If their first time was amazing, how would it be now that the bond was fully in place, when he could feel what she felt, and know exactly how to touch her?
He kissed her again. It might take him a few minutes of recovery, but he was determined to find out.
*
Against Jasper’s strongest remonstrances, the meeting at the prince regent’s home in Brighton went ahead.
“Even if your information is correct, Jasper,” said the Duke of Findlater, “we cannot let the Red Dragon know we are on to him.”
“It is correct,” Jasper insisted. “We have confirmed all the details that we can without alerting the conspirators.”
“Then there is no danger, is there?” Findlater insisted. “You have men ready to arrest the perpetrators, do you not?”
“As soon as they do something openly illegal, sir.”
“Then let us give them the opportunity to do something illegal, my boy. I trust your preparations. They will not be able to hurt us.”
Jasper was not happy. If it turned out that Persephone had sent him the plans as part of the plot, then the real plans might still engender a catastrophe, and yet the prince regent and his advisers were still intending to gather, into one room, the most powerful mages, and the brightest minds in the United Kingdom.
“Then,” said Delia, when he grumbled to her about their obstinacy, “you must make certain that the Red Dragon is caught and the explosives rendered ineffective. But darling, I don’t think Persephone was lying to us in her letter. There was no dishonesty in the mage trace.”
That was true, when Jasper pulled the letter out of the files and checked it.
As a dragon lord, he could sense lies, and wouldn’t the mage trace on the letter—a far more powerful one than he expected for a supposedly weak mage—wouldn’t it carry the sour taint of a lie, if Persephone’s words were false?
Although it was true that Persephone herself might have been deceived. Either way, Jasper’s only path forward was to treat the plans as true, while carefully watching for any signs that the conspirators were doing something else.
Meanwhile, his mind had not been able to let go of Delia’s words about the explosives.
Rendered ineffective. And perhaps he was inspired by the fact that she would be present in the ballroom at the prince’s reception.
He called on Findlater again, this time with a plan of his own.
Fortunately, the Red Dragon intended to move the explosives at the last minute, under cover of the multitude of deliveries for the event.
Jasper would have the cellars to himself for what he needed to do.
When the crucial evening came, everything was ready.
A cohort of royal guards under the leadership of Jasper’s friend, Captain Harewood, waited to arrest those who delivered the explosives.
Another was hiding outside the warehouse where most of the conspirators were expected to be waiting for news of their success, and a third waited to board the escape ship and take the captain and crew into custody.
As for those who set off the explosives, they would not need to be arrested.
Jasper had set a trap—a containment bubble around the cellars that would snap into place as soon as a spark was detected, preventing anything—and anyone—from escaping.
It would contain any explosion, so that the only people to suffer from it would be those who set it off.
Jasper had made the containment bubble as strong as he could.
He had tested it, and so had the College of Mages.
It would hold. He was trusting his prince’s and his government’s lives to its integrity.
Even more, he was trusting Delia. But he was still standing beside her in the ballroom, ready to throw up a secondary barrier if anything went wrong.
In the end, his work was so successful that the only evidence of an explosion twenty yards under their feet was the flare of magic as the bubble did its work.
Jasper translocated his voice to his captains, ordering the arrests.
The plot had unfolded according to the plan in the papers Persephone had sent. And now it was done.