Dane (11 page)

“Of course you do,” she sighed. “Really, this is going to take all day if you don‟t allow me to take the lead.”

“Just one question more,” he assured her. “And that is—if my brothers and I are being pressured by the Council to wed humans and be fruitful‟—why aren‟t you?”

“I am. If I wish to stay in this world, I must wed within it.” She shrugged a shoulder in an innately French gesture. “But there is no hurry in my case. The Council only cares to rush weddings that will result in offspring.”

“You had the Sickness?”

She nodded and went on, explaining something of how she‟d become ill. But he was only half listening, concentrating instead on her body language and the rhythms of her speech, knowing he‟d learn more in these ways than in the content of her answer.

His eyes narrowed on her face, trying to more thoroughly pierce the mysteries of her veil. Her fingers rose to adjust it as if she were worried he might succeed. With the lifting of her hands came a metallic clatter as her wealth of bracelets fell toward her elbows.

There were abrasions encircling her wrists, he realized. Fresh, made by ropes. She‟d been bound. Recently. By a lover? Seeing the direction of his gaze, she covered both wrists with her bracelets again. His eyes caught hers, and beneath the veil a slow blush stole over her cheeks. An imagined scene came to him, appearing in flashes. Of her, restrained on the altar of the temple on his land instead of the nereid. Of him lifting her skirt, her petticoat. Of him spreading her thighs. Ripping her pantalets to get at her.. moving over her... in her.

And suddenly he was falling away, feeling as if the floor had just been pulled out from under his feet. Another‟s presence was rising in him.

Dante. The takeover had never begun so swiftly before. It was disorienting.

Not now, fool! he raged silently. They‟ll see and have us sent to an asylum again!

The matchmaker shoved back her chair and rose, her eyes wide on him. “What‟s happening to you?”

6

Dane bent forward, his head dropping between his knees, elbows planted on his widespread thighs. His eyes were screwed tight and his mind throbbed with the infusion of another‟s thoughts into his own as the interloper thrust his way in. He took his head in his hands, thumbs pressed at his temples to still the chaos within him that worsened by the second. He would have given anything for relief. But he would not give himself over to Dante without a fight.

“Fuck you,” he grunted.

The matchmaker‟s voice stiffened. “Pardon?”

Damn. Had he spoken aloud?

“Signor!” The serving woman had returned and now stood in the vicinity of the doorway to his left. The pixie‟s chair scraped the floor as the little man jumped to his feet.

But trapped in a terrible state of confusion, Dane didn‟t look their way. What the hell was going on? Dante had come, splitting his head open with an unseen ax and forcing himself in where he wasn‟t wanted.

But for some reason, the bastard didn‟t seem to be forcing Dane out as was his usual practice.

Dane wasn‟t himself anymore. Yet he wasn‟t completely Dante either. Unlike other similar incursions in the past, he still remained fully aware.

Why is it different this time? Dane demanded silently.

Because of her. Her presence is changing us. Blending us.

Dane‟s mind ached wretchedly as the intrusion proceeded. His dark lashes fluttered, and his head lowered until his chin brushed his chest. For a moment, swallowing became difficult as his body experienced a strange paralysis. In the background, he heard the other three occupants of the room discussing him. He groaned.

“What is it? Are you ill?”It was the matchmaker‟s voice, concerned now. Her soft fingers came at his elbow.

Instantly, his numbness passed and an unusual clarity filled him.

Always before, he and Dante had taken turns inhabiting this body. But now they shared it, co-existing in a state of awareness for the first time.

And the uppermost emotion simmering in that awareness was a fierce desire for the woman who now knelt before them. They wanted her. It was instinct, inexplicable and primitive and hungry.

“Evangeline,” Dane murmured, tasting her name. Savoring the fact that she was near.

“Eva,” she qualified.

“Eva.” He glanced up, needing to see her. She was kneeling on the carpet between his splayed thighs, her worried green eyes searching his.

But her eyes weren‟t just green. They were the color of.. clover in the early spring.

We know her, Dante whispered, smug. He‟d known all along, Dane guessed, and had been keeping it from him. For his own good as usual, no doubt. The bastard.

With dizzying speed, Dane suddenly recalled meeting her in the grove at Moonful, only last night. Recalled wanting her. Recalled the feel of her against him. Warm and sweet. Lust burst in him and spread like a flash fire. If the pixie‟s eyes were on his crotch now, they were going to bug out of his head. Without looking away from her, he nodded to indicate the servants. “Tell them to go.”

“What?”Eva rocked back on her heels, startled. She seemed to be looking beyond him in that way of hers, on all sides of him, rather than directly at him. He could well imagine what his aura was telling her about his mood now.

“S-something‟s different about you,” she murmured.

“Whatever is happening to me has something to do with you,” he said.

He needed to keep her with him. Needed her. If she left, this wonderful lust that filled him would go with her.

“Stay with me.” He reached for one of her wrists, rubbing his thumb over the chafing on its vulnerable inside. Her pulse was rapid and warm. She somehow made him feel more connected to things. Were she to abandon him, he knew Dante would usurp him entirely, and Dane would be lost again to the tangled web that was his mind.

Her maidservant ventured closer, hovering just behind him. “Stop that, signor! Stop him, Eva. Pinot, do something!”

“Why not let her make her own choices for a change?”the pixie replied in support of him. The two servants began to squabble.

Ignoring them, Dane lifted Eva‟s wrist to his lips, kissing the delicate lacework of blue-white veins. Her scent was suddenly clear and delicious, like none he‟d ever experienced. His tongue flicked out, tasting her. He detected a hint of fey. And a hint of human, but that seemed false. What was she?

I don‟t know, Dante whispered. Was he lying? Impossible to know.

Born with a hyperability to detect scent, Dane had been trained to refine it when he‟d become a Tracker. For nearly a month, upon his induction at age thirteen, he‟d been exposed repeatedly to an almost infinite variety of scents in order to induce a sensitization to them. He‟d been obsessive, honing his olfactory abilities until they were the most acute in the entire force. Which made him extremely valuable to them now—a man they would not let go easily from their ranks.

Silver caught green and Eva shivered. Her pupils darkened with a comprehension of exactly what he wanted of her. Desire flashed across her face and battled there with good sense, as she struggled to decide on her reaction.

“Eva!” Her maid lay a hand on her shoulder, giving it a stern little shake.

“Tell them to go,” Dane commanded softly. His voice drifted off on the last syllable, grew more sensual.

We want her.

“I want you,” he murmured, low and urgent.

Awe lit her face, and need, and then acquiescence, all in quick succession. “Odette, please fetch some water to revive Monsieur Satyr,”

she instructed. “Pinot, locate the smelling salts.”

Odette‟s eyes darted between Dane and her, obviously not liking what she read on their faces. “He seems well enough.”

“Go,” Eva told her.

She wanted him! Through the veil, Dane could see it in the flush of her cheeks, in the rapid pulse at the base of her throat. Could see his own desire reflected in her eyes.

Abruptly, he was on his feet. Moving past her, he grabbed each of her servants by an arm. Firmly ushering them out of the room, he then slammed and bolted the door behind them. Then he turned back toward Eva.

Our Eva.

She‟d risen to stand beside her desk. His long legs ate up the floor between them in a half-dozen strides. Looking vaguely alarmed, she backed around her desk to trap herself neatly in the angle formed by a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and the large window where Lena had sat, which looked out on a pocket lemon orchard.

Without pause, he found her and drew her close, wrapping one arm around her waist and cupping her veiled cheek in his palm. Their bodies aligned and fit like two interlocking puzzle pieces, until they seemed to breathe as one. His mouth brushed hers through transparent gauze and his exhalation impressed the veil between her lips; then hers soughed it back between his.

Never before had he felt the joy of a sexual quickening. But now his cock was hard at her belly, caged within his trousers, full and heavy and wonderful. He‟d been a boy of twelve when he‟d been abducted, and in all the years since, Dante had wrested control of his body during every carnal experience. Now he was a man with a man‟s tremendous hunger. And in this room, he was going to knowingly fornicate for the first time in his life.

With a woman. This woman. He wanted to see her.

His fingers gathered her veil into a fist, yanked it off, and then thrust it away. Beneath it her skin was soft and smooth, her hair a rich blue-black. Eyes that were lined in heavy kohl regarded him with naked longing.

She‟s ours.

“Mine.”

Dane‟s lips curved and he smiled into the beautiful face of a miracle.

Lord Dane Satyr sent her a sexy, beguiling smile that Eva would never have guessed him capable of when she‟d first found him in her salon. He was a conundrum. Last night in the grove, he‟d guessed she was satyr, and yet today he didn‟t remember and seemed instead to have accepted her claim to fey-human ancestry.

Even stranger was the fact that his aura had altered drastically over the last ten minutes. First, it had been a corona of translucent silver, then a mix of silver and gold, then it had swung to pure gold, and then it had moved back and forth along the same spectrum. Something similar had happened when they‟d met under the full moon last night. It was as if he were a mix of two men, and was in continuous transition between them.

But whatever was happening to him—it didn‟t matter. Not now.

She wouldn‟t let it. For this stolen instant of time, this was what mattered. This magical thing that sizzled between them. She wanted more of it. Feared it would be snatched away if she didn‟t act quickly.

She put her hands to his shoulders and rose on tiptoe, her lips searching his out again. She‟d refused him last night in the grove and then longed for him later with a soul-deep desperation. This was a second chance with him, and she would take it. The prospect of making love with one of her own kind was so appealing that it completely overwhelmed any arguments she might make with herself against the idea.

Odette hammered a fist on the door. “Let me in!”

“All is well,” Eva called to her over his shoulder. “I merely need a few moments with Monsieur Satyr in private.”She smiled up at him, feeling mischievous and excited. He‟d crowded her back against shelves thick with the fat spines of her books, his belly pressed to hers. She felt his male member between them, standing long and thick and rigid. Was he truly going to put himself inside her, here in the salon? High between her legs, her private flesh pulsed, wanting.

His lips caressed her cheek, her throat, her shoulder. The beat of her heart tripped as the backs of his long fingers tangled in her necklaces and slipped inside her bodice to stroke the warm curves of her breasts. And then came his mouth.

Odette banged upon the door again. “Evangeline! Are you to be his zoccola now? His puttana! Open this door! Send that bastardo away!”

“Tell me, mademoiselle,” Dane murmured, “is your woman right?”

His words were a seductive tease at her breast. His tongue swirled over a nipple. His teeth bit gently. “Are you my little slut now?”

Between her legs, the pulse turned into an ache. Her palms went up the hard contours of his ribs and chest, exploring them through fine lightweight linen. “Are you a bastard?”she challenged lightly.

“Sometimes,” he replied with an honesty that wooed her trust.

At the continued rapping upon the door, Eva fidgeted. “She‟ll upset the girls. I‟d better.. ” She sent him an apologetic look, beginning to pull away.

With a lift of a hand and a careless flick of his fingers in the direction of the door, he caused the shouts and knocking to fade away.

She glanced at him, startled. “What did you do?”

“Only made them forget us for a while and go about their own business.” His hot mouth captured a nipple, drawing on it and sending sensation thrumming straight to her clit. Big hands bunched her skirts and lifted them. “Now, I wonder—will you spread your legs for me, pretty puttana?” The low, beguiling words were a summons to carnal pleasure.

It was his voice, and yet in an odd way she didn‟t understand, it was not. Not entirely. But any concerns or curiosity about this were washed away by the rising tide of her lust to have him.

Through fabric, she drew a fingertip up the length of his manhood.

“If I do, what will you give me?”she whispered.

Silver glinted and he smiled into her eyes. “What you need.” Their eyes clung as he flipped up a froth of petticoat and skirt, and his knee pushed between hers. What he was offering was what she craved. A stolen interlude with one of her own kind. No promises, no regrets. She would make herself vulnerable to him. Would savor every moment of this, every touch, for who knew if such a chance might ever come again?