“And my illusion offers absolution,” he says with a snort. “I am getting better at this.”
I drop onto his lap, slinging my legs, one over each side of the chair, and take his face in my hands, stare into his beautiful eyes, fire and ice, blood and steel. “Do I feel like an illusion to you?” My dress is hitched up nearly to the top of my thighs. I lower myself, slowly, firmly, against him. He’s hard. He’s so fucking hard. And I’m so fucking, painfully alive and starved to have him inside me. I don’t need foreplay. Not this time. I just need it done. Him. In. Me. Over and over. Maybe the next time I get to be human we’ll bother with foreplay. Maybe I’m not much of a foreplay kind of woman.
His hands close on my waist tightly, fingers digging in with anger, with grief. “You never do. I’ve spent hours touching you, holding you, days fucking you in my mind.”
I say lightly, “Do it again. But it’s me. I get to be a woman ha
lf the time. Dragon the other half. Still, I only have a week. Y’rill helped me change so I could come back and tell you I was okay, spend time with you until I learn to transform myself.”
“That’s the most lucid, coherent explanation you’ve offered yet,” he says dryly, gaze fixed on my lips.
“Because it’s the true one. Kiss me. See how real I am.”
I drop forward, brush my lips to his and my hands are at the top of his sweats and I’m so damned wet, it’s glistening on my thigh.
He inhales sharply, pulls back, glances down. Then his hand is on my thigh and he’s tracing the slick heat up my leg. He groans, “I don’t recall it ever being quite this real. Fuck!”
“Yes, please,” I say with a half laugh, half growl. “Now.”
Then he’s surging to his feet and he’s pushing me back on the floor on a thick fur rug, and I’m sprawling with my legs spread and his mouth is on my thigh, as he shoves my dress up over my hips, then his mouth closes, warm and wet between my legs and he’s licking and sucking and I hear someone screaming and realize it’s me and holy hell orgasm for me is a full mind-body explosion, my brain flies open and shatters into starry pieces and my body is electrified and I buck against his face as I writhe beneath him, then I’m surging up, still coming, desperate to get him inside me, because I’ve come too many times by my own hand thinking of him and this is real and I want it all and I’m launching myself on top of him, shoving him back to the floor and slamming down on him with violence and lust and need, and his eyes are flying wide and flashing bloodred as he snarls, “Fuck, you’re real!”
I have no idea what convinced him and I don’t care and I throw my head back and half laugh, half roar as I take Ryodan Killian St. James inside me and clench every muscle in my lower body that I’m so bloody grateful to have and I don’t have to be careful with him because I can never break this man in any way, and I can vibrate—
“Bloody hell, woman, don’t do that yet!”
But he’s on his back beneath me and I’m riding him and I’m in control, and I’m vibrating and goddamn, yes, he’s losing control and this is the only way I ever want to see this man lose his hold on reality.
“Paybacks are hell,” he snarls as he explodes inside me.
And all I can think is, I hope so. I hope he pays me back over and over again, my entire immortal life.
Then he’s shuddering and his head is back and he’s laughing up at me as he comes and I cup his face, that beautiful, sexy, familiar, challenging, stubborn, human skin poured over a beast face I will never tire of looking at and I catch his joy in my hands and it blazes inside my heart.
* * *
p
Later, I thumb up “Magic Man” on my cellphone and crank up the volume.
Later, I dance naked for him in the firelight and I tell him that I know it’s not a spell—but it’s truth that this woman-child-dragon has been waiting for him all her life.
Exaltation blazes in his eyes as he takes me down to the floor and he gets the top this time, the bastard, and he tells me something I file away but don’t ask about just then because my mouth is busy and I like it being busy in precisely that way.
He tells me he’s been waiting for me much longer than a lifetime. I have no idea what he means. I don’t care. He’s inside me and I’m inside him and the future is as vast and enormous as the starry skies that are half the time my home now.
* * *
p
Much later, I demand to know what happened at the abbey, and he tells me that Kat and the Shedon survived but we lost one hundred and forty-two sidhe-seers that day. I’d indeed killed Balor with my final blast and after I’d vanished, Ryodan scratched a long-chafing itch: Papa Roach was dead, slain at last by that lethal black blade Ryodan had been threatening him with for so long. AOZ was in the battle, too, but escaped and lived to torment us another day. Still, I was back, I was powerful, and one day that cooing little leprechaun would be mine.
Roisin had joined the women at the abbey, although she had no sidhe-seer gifts and was working with Enyo, recruiting other displaced, disenfranchised humans, molding them into an army, giving them purpose, a cause to fight for, a raison d’être. God knows we can all use one in times like these.
Mac and Barrons were still gone. No sign of the Fae in our city for months.
Yet I knew, although neither of us said it—
“Fuck that,” Ryodan says tightly. “I’ll say it. And we’ll print it in the Dublin Daily because the world needs to know and prepare. Our greatest battle is yet to come. It’ll be the Fae, not the old gods. Those bastards are going to turn our world into a war zone, and soon. There’s a scarce-contained violence in the earth, I feel it rumbling beneath my boots, a darkness on the wind, I can scent blood on the breeze. They’re planning, conspiring to seize this planet for their own. War’s coming, and if Mac doesn’t gain control of her power, it’s one we’ll lose.”