Cursed by Ice (30 page)

“What I need you cannot provide,” he told her honestly.

What he needed was Sarielle. It was a need that grew more intense with every passing day. And with that need came the desire to find a way to continue to be with her. Oh, it was a dangerous pastime to be sure. He was risking the wrath of a goddess. But surely there was some way he could satisfy both desires—his desire to serve Weysa and his desire to have Sarielle.

He had labored over and over this problem and had yet to find a solution. It was disheartening and frustrating, and on top of trying to manage two cities and his brother’s growing dissatisfaction with the situation, it was exhausting. His only solace was Sarielle. And now perhaps a brief massage by Davine.

He closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment of relaxation. Soon enough he would fall under the sway of his curse. He was allowed a brief respite, was he not?

But brief was all it could be. Dusk was almost upon him. After a minute or two he reached up and stopped Davine’s thoughtful work on his tension. He took her
hand in his and drew her around to his right side so he could see her.

“Thank you, Davine,” he said. “You have been a great treasure to me.”

And it was true. She had helped him gain control of this city and she had been kind to his Sarielle. She helped care for the twins when he and Sarielle were away and she was thoughtful in every other way.

He stood up and moved around her, leaving the room.

In the entryway on the other side of the hall, standing slightly in shadow, was Sarielle. She was blinking her eyes, trying to absorb what she had just seen. Trying to make sense of it. She had seen the intimacy of Davine’s massage and had heard the intimacy of Garreth’s words. It was everything she could do to keep herself from jumping to wild conclusions and a feeling of betrayal.

It was not possible that they could deceive her in such a way, she thought firmly. Garreth cared for her and so did Davine. She was reading too much into it.

Deciding that was the way of it, she turned away from the hall and left.

For Davine’s part, she had known all along that Sarielle was there, watching them. In fact, she had timed things just so Sarielle would see them. Which was no mean feat. But she had pulled it off.

Now she had an entirely different task to accomplish. When Sarielle had left the entryway, Davine hurried after Garreth. She swept a cloak out of the hands of the serving girl she’d had waiting in the shadows of the hall and put it on, pulling the hood over her head. She had called for a horse to be ready and brought to the side of the keep’s bailey. Garreth’s horse was in the bailey itself, awaiting its master just as it did every night before dusk. Garreth was out of the keep and onto his horse in a swift display of strength almost seconds after she had gotten herself in her saddle. She was not used to riding,
so she felt awkward in the saddle, but she did not care. She needed to find out the nature of Garreth’s nightly disappearances. She knew this was a point of contention in Sarielle’s relationship with him, and therefore it could be an effective weapon.

She did not think he went to meet a woman. No, if she was reading the situation right, he was definitely devoted to Sarielle. More so every day. But she was at a loss to explain what it was he could possibly be doing every night. She had decided there was only one way to find out and that was to follow him. Doing so with stealth was the only trick. She had to keep a good distance between them, and yet she was afraid of losing sight of him. She was grateful when they reached the orchard because the trees provided a good deal of cover that the open fields had not.

Once they reached the depths of the orchard, she realized he had stopped and dismounted. Some distance away, she did the same and held her horse, keeping it quiet as she watched him pace restlessly in a small circle in amongst the trees.

Was he waiting for someone? Perhaps he was meeting a lover after all. That would be a definitive nail in the coffin of his relationship with Sarielle. However, it would rob Davine of the opportunity to bring about such an end in a way that would make her appear indispensible to Dethan. But she was really good at reading people and she would truly be shocked if infidelity were the case. In fact, she would dare to say that Garreth would rather cut off a limb than do purposeful harm to Sarielle.

The sun dropped below the horizon and Garreth came to a halt. As she stood watching, she saw his breath begin to cloud on the air, which was odd because it was not that cold. Not right away, anyway. But as she stood there, hiding, she felt the temperature drop rapidly. So
rapidly she began to shiver with the shock of it. Though at a distance, both horses nickered with discomfort, but if Garreth heard them, he was not visibly reacting to it. Instead he seemed to be focused entirely within himself.

And that was when she heard the first crackle of sound, the sound of creaking wood under strain. Frost began to coat the ground at Garreth’s feet, a sheet of white that grew outward in a near perfect circle.

Then everything began to freeze. Sheets of ice began to form on the ground as Garreth shouted out in a sound of pure tormented pain. He fell to his knees as his body shook, and ice crept over him. He froze fast to the ground before Davine’s stunned eyes, his hair forming into icicles, his skin a frosted, frozen sheet of ice.

She saw him draw in a last breath before he was frozen into a solid, unmoving block of ice.

Davine did not dare move any closer, the cold of the area surrounding him beating her back, not to mention her pure fear of the situation. So this was his secret, she thought as the hours wore on. This … this … curse. This happened every night? He suffered this every night? It was beyond cruel. It was, she realized, the work of the gods. That was the only explanation. He was cursed by the gods themselves.

For a moment she was torn between the fear of getting too close to a man so cursed and the sudden sickening feeling that she was so incredibly wrong to be thinking of robbing him of the only solace he had in the face of this. Robbing him of Sarielle.

But his brother had to know all of this. Dethan had to know Garreth was cursed in such a way. He was far too sharp a man for something like this to go unnoticed by him. He knew of this and yet he still wanted to take Sarielle away from his brother.

Perhaps, she thought with a feeling of total dread, it was because Dethan knew something that neither she
nor Sarielle was aware of. Regardless of his reasons, they had to be worth heeding. It was unwise to meddle in the affairs of the gods. Davine worried that Sarielle would be caught up in this curse along with Garreth. Perhaps that was Dethan’s worry as well.

That was when Davine realized a small part of her had actually grown to care for Sarielle. That, to her increasing shock, she had actually begun to feel like a genuine friend to the wrena. Sarielle was an innocent in all of this. She didn’t mean any harm to anyone. She was just a girl in love with a man.

But he was not just any man. He was a cursed soul. It was wrong of him to potentially expose her to such dangers. Very wrong. He knew it himself or he would have already told Sarielle about the curse. And Davine knew he had not told her. She knew that their friendship was one in which Sarielle trusted Davine with even the most intimate of details concerning Garreth. Sarielle would have told her.

Davine did not need to wait to see what would happen next. She needed to get back to Kith long before they closed the gates for the night, long before she would be missed. As she rode hard for the city, she was more determined than ever to drive a wedge between Sarielle and Garreth. And she was afraid she knew exactly how to do it.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

About a week later Sarielle was playing with the twins, but her mind was troubled. She continued to find herself coming around a corner here or there and running into Davine and Garreth, alone, together. It was now happening far too frequently for her to dismiss. She wanted to ask her friend about it, but she was afraid she was mistaken and asking might cost her the only friendship she had.

She was making herself sick over it. Very often she would be sick to her stomach after finding them together in yet another close situation. She also found herself unable to sleep. Her body was weary from head to toe from the lack of it. But then every night he would call her to him and make love to her so fiercely she realized she had to be mistaken. He could not possibly treat her with such ferocious devotion and yet be deceptive at the same time … could he? And Davine could not possibly laugh and keep secrets with her and help her learn more ways to seduce her lover each night when she might be trying to seduce him herself … could she?

No. It was impossible. She should not suspect either one of them, she thought as she gnawed on her lower lip. All she had to do was remember that very morning …

She had been sitting up in bed, watching Garreth sleep, the early morning sunlight spilling over him, turning his tanned skin to a beautiful golden color. He was lightly freckled in all the places the sun touched him. He was on his stomach, one of the thick, down pillows tucked up tightly under his unshaven cheek. His hair was curling softly around his ears and against the back of his neck. As he breathed deeply in sleep, she was amazed at how the sound of his breathing, his signs of life, made her feel so incredibly good and so alive herself. It should be against the laws of nature to feel this good about someone, and perhaps it was. Perhaps it was a very bad idea to be allowing herself to adore him this thoroughly.

“That is very unnerving,” he murmured sleepily.

She smiled. “What is?”

He stretched, rolled over onto his back, and smiled. His smile creasing across his face first thing in the morning had to be one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen.

“To awaken because I am being stared at.”

She scooted down so she could rest her cheek over his heart. “I cannot help myself. You are simply too beautiful to resist.”

“That amuses me because I was going to say the same thing,” he murmured against the top of her head.

She smiled again and blushed warmly, emotion blossoming through her like pure happiness. There couldn’t possibly be anything bad in the world that she couldn’t face when he made her feel like this.

“What else were you going to say?” she asked. “Tell me and I will tell you if I was going to say the same thing.”

She knew he was smiling. She heard it in his voice when he said, “I was going to say what a lovely day it is.”

“Mmm. Me too,” she said, lifting her head and beaming
down at him. Their mouths were now scant inches apart.

“I was going to say I have never seen anything as remarkable as your eyes.”

“Me too,” she said.

His tone lowered significantly. “I was going to say that how much I want to kiss you right now cannot possibly be measured.”

“Me too,” she breathed, just before he put a hand to the back of her head and drew her down to his mouth in a blistering kiss. He devoured her mouth easily and with great passion, as though he had not kissed her for many days of separation rather than a few hours of sleep.

He drew away from her to add, “And I was going to say how much I wanted to put my mouth on the most intimate areas of your body.”

“Me too,” she said on a sigh before she realized what she was saying. She did realize it when he chuckled though. “Oh! Very funny,” she said. Then she lifted herself a little, looked down into his eyes, and said silkily, “Me too.”

“I—” He cut himself off when her hand suddenly slid beneath the warm bedding and wrapped around his thickly rousing penis.

She licked her lips and his cock stiffened almost instantly in her hand.

“I was just teasing you,” he said, his voice low from more than just being awakened.

“Now so am I, teasing you,” she pointed out, her thumb coming to rim the crown of him. He sucked a breath in through his teeth and let it out slowly. His hips shifted, pushing him against her palm.

“And a fine job of it you are doing,” he praised her.

“This is merely a fine job,” she pointed out. “Wait until I do an excellent job.”

She pushed back the bedding, exposing him to the cool morning air. She slid down his body a little and the hand in her hair tightened instinctively. She breathed against him, inhaling the musky, masculine smell of him. The edges of her nails drifted down the length of him and she watched him lift into her touch as though he were a well-heeled pet answering to her every command. It was a powerful thought. A powerful feeling. To have such a man as this—one so strong and virile, so dominant and potent—submissive to her desires, it was beyond compare. And because she enjoyed the feeling so much, she was willing to do everything she could to experience more.

She licked her lips again, and again he twitched.

“Would you like my mouth on you?” she asked in a husky whisper.

“More than you will ever know,” he said intensely.

“Well, far be it for me to deny you anything,” she said with a sly smile.