Chapter 14 Tamsyn
TAMSYN
I JERKED UPRIGHT WITH A SCREAM, THICK AND URGENT, bursting past my lips, rattling off the walls of my den. The taste of ash sat on my tongue, gritty as sand, lining the roof of my mouth and teeth.
I cut the sound off, my cry ending like the death of a sudden wind.
Violent shudders racked me. I swayed and then fell on my back in bed, gasping, swallowing hard against the acrid tang, fighting down the fire that threatened to escape.
Sobs broke loose from inside my body, making their way around the crackling flames and out of my mouth.
A nightmare. Another one.
I was riddled with them during my svefn, and it seemed they followed me still.
I held out the fingers of my hand, flexing them before me, stretching and wiggling them in the murky air that blurred with a rainbow of colors from the gems in the wall. At night the colors muted and softened, as though with consciousness, knowing they needed to dim for the allowance of sleep.
My palm throbbed, the X carved into my skin smarting, sparking to life as though the nightmare had awakened it, disturbing it, too. The sensation traveled all the way to the pads of my fingers, to the very blunted ends of my nails.
My chest rose and fell with hard pants, like I had just sprinted a great distance. I closed my eyes and forced my hand into a tight ball, squeezing, attempting to suppress the tingling pressure there.
I shook my head, trying to chase away the shadowy remnants of my nightmare, but still it clung, a twisting vine, strong as rope around my mind, refusing to let go.
Fell had been there, standing before me in my dream, reaching out a hand, but just before I could get to him, he was snatched away, pulled into darkness, his face contorting into a jumble of fractured shadows, leaving nothing but his voice calling my name from some dark abyss.
A void where I could not venture … could not see within.
“Fell.” My voice came out feeble and thin, hardly the voice of someone who could rescue anyone.
The dream had felt so … real.
He had felt real.
It was impossible, of course. He couldn’t be here. He wasn’t anywhere. Not anymore.
Still, I spoke into the room, my words a tremulous, questioning whisper: “Are you there?”
There would be no answer, no response. Logically, I knew that, but still I asked and now I waited, trying not to feel silly as I listened and hoped.
This world was a magical place, after all.
I was magic. Fell was magic … I could spend a few protracted moments in the night hoping for the impossible.
Just then, the drape at my threshold was flung wide. The dark outline of a body passed through the opening before the covering fell back into place with a whisper.
I tensed, my gaze shifting, vision sharpening, acclimating to the gloom as heat rose from my core, swelling, lifting to my throat, ready to defend myself against the intruder. Not everyone was my friend in this pride, after all.
The body moved in closer, encroaching where I huddled in my bed of furs, his steps light over the rug covering the stone floor.
His face came into focus, and all the tightness, the brutal squeeze of my chest, released, snapping loose like a band breaking.
Fell.
Fell was here, as though I had conjured him myself. It wasn’t a dream. No nightmare at all. He was real.
I choked out an elated sob as he dropped down beside me, gathering me up in his arms. He made soothing, shushing sounds, his lips vibrating against my hair.
His big hands swept up and down my back in a reassuring motion that lit sparks over my skin. One hand closed around my nape while the other brushed down the length of my arm, and I trembled from head to toe.
Fell.
Fell not dead. Not gone. Not lost to me. Here with me now.
A hot sob swelled in my contracting throat. My arms went around his neck, and I crawled into his lap, splaying myself over him … wishing I could climb inside him, merge with him until there was no distinction, no discerning where either one of us ended or began. No year lost between us at all.
I could never get close enough. Never be close enough.
My head buzzed, the dragon at my core vibrating, full of him, his scent, his touch, the delicious solidity of him.
He was here with me, a miracle come to life.
His breath landed warm and sweet on the side of my face, and I turned my head, seeking, claiming his mouth like a woman starved. Starved for him. Starved for a balm to the pain, to the ache, to the long-suffering loneliness.
For some incomprehensible reason, he stilled against my lips.
“Please, please,” I growled, shamelessly determined to have him, to keep him with me. Never lose him again.
“Tamsyn—” he muttered, but I would not let him finish.
Seizing his head between my hands, I renewed my efforts, kissing him, sliding my tongue against the seam of his mouth.
I felt a shudder go through him. A great sigh lifted his broad chest, and then, as though an invisible thread snapped between us, he made a grunt of sound and lowered me down, stopping at the last moment to ease me onto my back carefully.
His weight came over me, bearing down, sinking us both into the soft furs.
The comforting weight, the sheer size and pressure of him engulfed me, ignited me.
Fire bubbled in my veins as his hands went to my hips, nudging me to lift up so that he could pull my shift up and over my head in one fluid move.
There was a brief wash of cool air and then he was there. Again. A pulsing, radiating wall that bore me down.
I welcomed him between my legs, feeling the swollen length of him, hot and prodding against the insides of my thighs.
I tilted my hips, seeking, hungry for him, whimpering for an end to the ache, longing to pick up where we left off a year ago.
We’d barely started before it was all ripped away.
I had wasted so much time keeping him at arm’s length, wary and afraid, when we could have been doing this all those nights together on the crossing, in the Borg …
His mouth ravaged mine, gliding down my throat, the slope of my shoulders …
I wriggled beneath him.
His hardness settled against my sex. He rolled his hips, rubbing against me where I was wet and aching.
He stoked my fire, building the want in me, the throbbing so deep that my need sharpened to pain. Only one layer of fabric between us, and I wanted it gone. I was gasping, desperate for that … for our bodies to join like before, again—to be more than memory, to be real, to be now.
I threaded my fingers through his long hair, following the strands down to the middle of his back. My nails scraped over the smooth dip of his spine, gratified by his hissing breath in my ear.
I frowned slightly, something rousing awake inside me, niggling through the fog of my mind like the stirring of a breeze.
A feeling. A sense. An awareness.
I lifted my hands back to the crown of his head and stroked my fingers through the length of his hair again, following the moonbeam strands that ran past his shoulders and down his back.
Fell’s hair had never been this long before. My frown deepened. It had stopped just at his shoulders.
I stilled beneath him, stopping my slippery grind against him.
Other things caught my notice then. I touched his neck, lightly stroking his skin, searching for the heavy chain of his opal necklace. It was gone. Had he lost it? I’d never seen him without it.
Fear trickled through me.
My marked hand …
I flexed my fingers, gave them a little shake, moving them as though I were playing an instrument, testing, seeking. My palm had gone silent, still and flat as a dormant wind. No warmth. No tingle. No buzz as when he was near.
Always when he was near.
Nothing.
His lips grazed my throat, sharp teeth lightly scoring my skin, his tongue licking, and then his mouth closing on me, sucking deep on my pulse point.
The sensation was too erotic, too distracting.
I moaned, arching into him, rubbing my breasts into the thick slab of his chest, and he growled against my skin, “Little Flame, could you burn any hotter?”
I froze beneath him.
He continued to love on my throat, unaware of my sudden withdrawal.
Clearing my throat, I whispered his name, letting it land tentatively on the air between us and our steaming breaths like a wish, a hope … a plea. “Fell?”
He stiffened. Turned to a block of stone over me, confirming my fear, my mistake.
My terrible, terrible mistake.
This was not Fell.
I shoved at the great breadth of shoulders and pushed him away, off me, breaking the contact of hard flesh against mine.
Not Fell. Of course not.
With a panicked whimper, I pulled back my arm and sent my fist crashing into his face.
He grunted.
I scrambled back on the bed and snatched up a pillow, slapping it over my body and hugging it close, using it as a shield to cover my nakedness, since my shift was now a ball somewhere on the floor.
I stared at him, my eyes wide and aching in my face, cutting through the darkness directly to him, looking him up and down and noting all the little things I had missed in my muddled state, the residue of a nightmare still clinging, betraying me, unkindly blinding me to what were now glaring differences.
The hair, yes, but also the set of his shoulders, somehow more predatory. The scent of him was not like Fell either. Loam and crisp snow swirled in my nose. How had I missed that?
“I am not Fell,” he growled in a voice that was different, too. It was still deep, but somehow more rolling, more lyrical … more aroused. He lightly fingered his chin where I’d landed the blow.
“Clearly,” I panted, my entire body quivering, suddenly drained, depleted as though I’d just run through sucking sand.
“Evidently not so clearly,” he countered, his voice possessing all the precision of a whip landing on its target. I winced at the toosoon comparison.