“Fuck, Dani, stop laughing!”
“Afraid you’ll lose control?” I tease and laugh again, a husky, wicked sound as I kicked it up a notch, and began to vibrate from head to toe.
“Son of a bitch!”
* * *
p
Later, I sprawl on top of him, staring into glittering, lazily sated silver eyes.
It’s a good thing the room was already wrecked, because we’d have wrecked it anyway. I have no idea how much time has passed down here where no light of day penetrates but am willing to bet we’ve spent twenty-four straight hours exploring each other’s bodies, testing limits, discovering what drives each other wild.
And this man is definitely wild. Hot and sexy and just the flavor of kink I like.
“I’ve only got one week,” I remind him softly.
He stiffens and growls as I fill him in on all that happened, explaining the parameters of my new existence; his silver eyes blaze with joy.
“Half the time we’ll be human. The other half, we’ll be beasts together,” he says, laughing softly. “What a fine fucking life.”
Indeed. Still, something’s bothering me. I need to know why he thought I wasn’t coming back, what Y’rill did with my “text.” “Ryodan, didn’t you get my message? I sent you—”
“A bloody chunk of star. Christ, that damned piece of rock has been the bane of my fucking existence.”
So, he did get it. “It was meant to set your mind at ease.”
“Your aim sucked, Stardust,” he growls. He rolls me off him, surges to his feet, stalks to the hearth where he collects something from a box on the floor and brings it back, handing it to me.
I peer at it in the low light and gasp.
It says:
I’M OKAY I’M
“But that’s only half of it!”
“I bloody well know that. What the fuck is the end of that sentence? You have no idea how many words I plugged in. I’m okay, I’m happy. I’m okay, I’m free. I’m okay, I’m never coming back. What the fuck, Dani?”
I turn the chunk of star over and study the edge. “It broke. It must have hit something on the way to you. Where were you when you got it?”
“On a beach.”
I frown. “A beach? You went to the beach?” Lor said he’d not come out of Chester’s since I left.
“I used to walk the ocean at night. It plunged from the sky and landed next to me.”
“When?”
He laughs but there’s a deep undercurrent of bitterness, a hint of torment in it. “Woman, you have driven me crazy far longer than you know. I got your bloody damned star three thousand, one hundred forty-one years, five months, nine days, and two hours before you turned into a Hunter at the abbey.”
I gasp. “Three thousand years ago?” What was Y’rill thinking? Was her aim that bad? Was manipulating time trickier than she’d cared to admit?
“You’re the reason I began to study linchpin theory, over three millennia ago. You’re the reason I began trying to project the future. You, Dani O’Malley, have been the greatest and most irritating mystery of my existence. I smelled you on the star that night on the beach. The scent of a woman I hungered to know, unlike any woman I’d ever met. I waited to meet her. And waited. And bloody fucking waited. Found her one night in Dublin, an uncontrollable, swaggering child with a bloody death wish, balls of steel, a superhero complex, and a teenage boyfriend.”
“Oh God, you knew I was the one who’d thrown the star when you saw me that night?”
“I’d given up on the whole matter long ago, decided the star was the equivalent of a text message sent to the wrong phone. Then I moved in behind you that night and smelled your scent. I knew you were her, the one who would one day throw a star at me, across time.