by Keri Arthur
“You couldn’t escape me now, even if you wanted to,” he added, then leaned forward and kissed me. “You complete me, Destiny. There’s no other place I want to be, and nothing else I’d rather do than walk into that water with you and celebrate your mother’s life. I just wish it wasn’t so fucking cold.”
I laughed, gloriously, deliriously happy for the first time in years and years, and threw my hands around his neck. “God, I’m so glad you said that, because I’ve been in love with you for what seems like forever. I was just too chicken to say anything.”
He kissed me, soft and slow and oh-so gloriously, and then I helped him strip. When he was finally naked, we walked into the deeper water. It was cold, but I didn’t care, and he didn’t seem to, either.
He pulled me close. I melted against him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and kissed him again, hard and fierce, until my head was spinning and I wasn’t sure whether it was lack of air or sheer happiness.
After that, his touch and his lips seemed to be everywhere, fueled by urgency and yet filled with passion. I let my fingers roam, giving them the freedom of his glorious body, touching and tasting and teasing, even as he touched and teased. The deep-down ache blossomed and grew, becoming such a sweet agony that I groaned, arching my back, pressing into his touch, wanting him as fiercely as I’d wanted anything in my life.
Finally, he slid deep inside and it felt so good, so right, I could only groan. I wrapped my legs around him, holding him tight against me, wanting every bit of him. He wrapped his arms around me and leaned forward, kissing my nose gently.
“This is how I’ll always remember you,” he said softly, his eyes the blue of the rising day, bright with the wildness and need. “With the dark waters at your back, the heat of passion in your face, and the power of the dawn shining in your eyes.”
“Not dawn,” I whispered, “the loch. And she is getting frustrated that you won’t get down to business.”
“Sweetheart, she’s not the only one. But teasing is good for the soul.”
“Not my soul.”
He laughed, a sound that curled joyously around us, filling the air with sheer happiness.
He began to move—not urgently, not desperately, but slowly, passionately. And I answered in kind, kissing him deeply, my arms tightening against his neck, as if I never, ever meant to let him go.
“Look at me,” he ordered, after a while.
I opened my eyes, looked into his. And again I felt like I was falling deep into those wild pools of blue, slipping deep under the surface, captured and secured, never to be free from his grip again. And I couldn’t have been happier.
He began to move, sliding in and out, and the feel of him penetrated every fiber, enveloping me in a heat that was so basic, and yet so very pure. His hands were on my hips, supporting my butt, holding me steady as he rocked deep, his touch seeming to brand my skin as his thrusts gradually became more and more urgent, until passion and desire and need became a wildfire that burned through every part of me.
“Come with me, sweetheart.”
His words were hoarse, urgent, his breath hot as it whispered past my cheek. His powerful body stroked fast and deep, driving me insane with need. I tightened my legs around him, urging him deeper still, wanting, needing, every inch of him. He groaned, and thrust harder, and it felt so good I cried out in pleasure. Then the sweet pressure broke, and I was drowning, shuddering, under the force of a glorious release.
“Oh God, yes!”
He came with me, his roar echoing across the silence, making the dark waters shimmer and dance at the glory of it all as his body slammed mine so hard waves rolled away from our bodies and went racing across the loch.
For several seconds, we remained locked in each other’s embrace. Our breathing was ragged and despite the chill of the water, sweat pooled where our flesh still met. Then he sighed, and kissed my neck.
“So do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?” he asked, amusement crinkling the corners of his bright eyes. “And will they take after their mother or their father?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
He kissed my nose, and gave me a smile that was happiness itself. “Well, there’s one thing I do care about. I’m just about to have my nuts frozen off, so if we want to have more than one child, we had better be getting out of this water.”
I sighed softly. “I’d love to move right into bed, but we have kids to look after first.”
His smile faded. “It’s not going to be easy to find all their parents. Especially little Carli’s.”
“It’s not even going to be easy to get them out of Scotland. Not with the remaining scientists still sniffing around.”
He kissed my nose, then splashed out of the water with me still in his arms. “Let me worry about all that. Right now, we need to get dressed, then get back and see if the vultures have left us any pizza.”
Epilogue
In the end, getting the kids out of Scotland wasn’t the problem I thought it would be. I’d forgotten that Trae was a thief by trade, and any thief who could get a will-o’-the-wisp to steal a ring wasn’t going to find it all that troublesome to get help transporting stolen kids back to their country of birth.
Nor was it hard to find most of their parents. Jace and Cooper had both been snatched when they were older, and knew their home addresses. Their reunion with their parents had been a joyful thing, and just as many tears had flowed down my cheeks as theirs—especially when it came time to say good-bye.
Tate and Marco were both several years younger, but they’d also been captured more recently. Armed with their surnames and the descriptions of their cliques and the surrounding lands, Trae and his friends had tracked down their families pretty quickly.
Sanat was tougher. The littlest of the boys, he’d come into the cells only six months after Carli, and he really couldn’t remember all that much about his family. We had their names, of course, but that wasn’t a whole lot of help when it was a common surname. And all he could recall about where he lived was a bell. A shiny silver bell that had rung out every dusk.
It took us a month to find his home—a tiny cliff-top village. His clique was not connected to any of the thirteen major ones. He’d been the only son in a family of fourteen, and the party had gone on for days.
Which left us with little Carli, who couldn’t remember anything except her mom’s pretty smile and long brown hair, and her dad’s blue eyes and bad singing voice.
Then one of Trae’s friends came through with a list of missing air dragons—how, I have no idea, when all the cliques seemed determined not to help out more than necessary—and there she was. Carli Symmonds, whose small clique owned a two-thousand-acre ranch over near Wolf Creek in Montana.
We stayed there for a week, and leaving her was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. In so many ways, that little girl had kept me sane in a place of madness, just as she and all the kids had kept me going once I was out. If Egan had been my rock and my strength, then the kids had been my sanity.
I’d miss them all—which is why I made them promise to write to me. And why I told their parents to contact me if there were ever any problems.
Which left us with one task—returning the ring.
And I just had to hope that the two-month delay in finally getting the ring back to his father hadn’t affected Trae’s sister in any way.
I looked out the car’s side window, seeing nothing but the shadows of dusk and huge redwood trunks. We’d taken the fastest and quickest route to get his clique’s base in Stewarts Point from his home in San Francisco, and had been driving for nearly two and half hours. Now, we were finally on clique lands. And better yet, I could smell the sea.
“Is your mother still planning a meet and greet with the rest of your family?” It was a question I’d probably asked before, but I swear the pregnancy was sapping brain cells, because my memory just wasn’t up to scratch lately. And if it was this bad now, how bad wa
s it going to be when I neared full term?
He snorted softly. “She’s planned a whole damn party, and invited every relation she could think of. Some of them I don’t even remember.”
I glanced at him. In the growing dusky light of the oncoming evening, his hair gleamed with slivers of sunlight, and gold speckled his unshaven chin.
It was a look I was seeing a whole lot more of lately, simply because I loved it. And, gorgeous man that he was, he was willing to indulge my fantasies.
“I thought you told her we didn’t want anything big?”
His smile touched his eyes, crinkling the corners and easing the tension that had been gaining ground since we entered clique grounds.
“Oh, I did, but when she gets something in her mind, there’s no persuading her otherwise.” He glanced at me, blue eyes bright. “You know she thinks it’s twins. A boy born of water and a girl born of sun. Her words, not mine.”
I touched my stomach, and the barely there bulge. “If she’s right, you’ll be doing your fair share of diaper changing.”
“Love to.”
I snorted softly. We’d see how positive he was when actually faced with the task.
We came out of the trees and into the fading remnants of the day. The rugged coastline curved away to our left and the surge of the sea was high, the waves riding high up the cliffs. A weapon I could call if things went wrong with Trae’s dad.
We swept up a slight incline and, at the top, the heart of the clique became evident. The buildings were a mix of wood and stone structures and, in many ways, the whole place reminded me of an ancient walled village. It even had a wall, in the form of a post and wire fence that separated the housing area from the rest of the valley.
The main house was a two-story stone affair that was big and formidable looking. The houses that clustered closest to it were also stone, but as the ring of houses moved farther away, they became a mix of wood and stone, and then finally just wood. The outer ring looked just like houses you’d see in any suburban city.
“This is more feudal than what I expected,” I said, after a moment.
“Yeah, the Jamieson clique is one of the originals.” His voice was dry. “If my father had his way, there’d only be originals. He can’t abide having the line diluted.”
“So he’s not going to be happy about you further diluting the precious bloodline by mating with a half-breed sea dragon?”
“Not at all.” His voice was decidedly cheery, although the look he gave me was full of concern. “If you’re at all worried about him, you can stay in the car. Or go see Mom.”
“No, I want to meet the bastard who made your and Egan’s lives such a living hell.”
He nodded, and drove into the nearest parking space. He helped me out of the car, then, with an arm around my waist, guided me into the cavernous stone entranceway. The huge wood and iron doors were open and led into a room that could have easily stepped out of the medieval era. Stone walls, huge tapestries, and heavy wooden furniture that looked worn with time and living.
Our footsteps echoed as we crossed the room, but no one came running out to see or greet us.
“He does know we’re coming?” I whispered, studying the growing shadows uneasily.
“Yeah, but he’s making a big deal of it,” Trae said, his voice filling the silence with contempt.
“This isn’t exactly what I’d call a big deal,” I muttered. “I think it’s more the cold shoulder the unwanted relatives get.”
“Oh, it’s that, too.”
The set of doors at the far end of the room began to open as we approached them. The next room was warmer, but it was almost as empty. Almost. A red carpet led the eye down the length of the room to the steps and the huge gilded throne that dominated the top of them. On it sat a man.
A small, frail man with golden hair that was thick with gray and golden eyes that held a malicious glint.
“And Egan couldn’t beat this?” I whispered, as we walked toward him.
“What you see is the result of the ring being gone too long.” His voice was clipped, and there was tension in the arm that held me so protectively. “My father in his prime was a dangerous man to cross.”
I stared into his father’s golden eyes and saw the anger and hatred hiding there. He was still a dangerous man, even if the shell was failing.
We stopped in front of him. His gaze skimmed Trae, his expression one of cold contempt, then he looked at me. A long, lingering look that slipped down my body and made me want a shower to wash away the feel of it.
“What news do you have of my sister?” Trae snapped, his voice full of ice and his grip on my waist tightening a fraction more.
“What news do you have of the ring?” the old man said, his voice a mocking echo of Trae’s.
“We have it.”
“Then give it to me.”
Trae glanced at me briefly, then said, “Do you think I would be foolish enough to bring it into this place, without first getting the information I need?” He snorted softly. “If you taught me one thing, Father, it’s not to trust your fucking promises.”
The old man laughed. It was a cold, cruel sound. “Ah, if only my real son had half your balls, he would have made a grand king.”
Trae’s hands retreated into a fist and dug slightly into my side. But he didn’t give in to the anger I could feel in him, and simply said, “And if you’d had half the honor and courage that Egan had, this clique could have been a great one.”
The old man lurched forward in the seat. Trae released me and stepped forward, his body slightly in front of mine. I began moving my fingers, feeling the magic of the dusk swirl around me, fireflies of energy only I could feel.
“Give me the ring,” the old man said, voice soft and all the more deadly because of it, “or I’ll fry that pretty little thing by your side to cinders.”
“If I see even a spark, I’ll drown the lot of you,” I said, keeping slightly behind Trae regardless of my threat. I wasn’t a fool, and he could protect me from fire, as Egan once had.
“Drown?” The old man laughed again. “Lady, we’re a long way from the cliffs and the sea here. As threats go, that’s pretty empty.”
“Not if you bother looking out the windows, old man,” Trae said quietly.
The old man’s gaze darted sideways, and his mouth dropped. Because the sea had answered my call, and she was rushing over the cliffs and down into their valley home in ever-increasing waves.
“Give me what you promised,” Trae said.
“She’s a sea dragon?” He sat back in his chair, annoyance and a surprising touch of humor in his expression. For one brief moment, he oddly reminded me of Egan. “I didn’t think any of them were left.”
“More than you might think,” I said, “and that water is almost here. You might want to hurry up and give us the information, before people start drowning.”
They wouldn’t, of course. I hadn’t called that much water. It just looked like it from the vantage points of the smaller windows—a point we’d counted on when we’d first planned this.
“She’s been moving around a bit, but she’s currently in Fallon, Nevada. Staying in the Econo Lodge, I believe.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. “You can call them and confirm, if you’d like.”
Trae grabbed the phone. “I will. What’s the number?”
The old man gave it to him, then glanced at me. “Where’s the ring, little sea dragon?”
As Trae dialed the number, I raised an eyebrow and flicked two fingers outward, letting some of the seawater recede back to the cliffs while continuing to call the main arm.
It began trickling through the doorways and across the stone floor, pooling around Trae’s and my feet, a whirlpool of silvery blue that began to rise up our legs without ever touching us.
Trae spoke into the phone for several seconds, then hung up and handed the phone back to his father. “She’s there,” he said, glancing at me. “Give him the ring.”
I flicked the rest of my fingers outward. The whirlpool surged upward and water splashed. Silver glittered in the middle of the spout—silver with ruby red eyes and a heart as cold as the man who had worn it for so long.
Trae caught the ring and the water splashed down, soaking the carpet but not our feet.
“The ring,” Trae said, and handed it to him.
He snatched it from Trae’s fingers like a man stranded in the desert for too long might snatch at a glass of water.
He slid it over his fingers and leaned back in the throne with a sigh. Trae shook his head and looked at me. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
We were almost out the door when the old man said, “I want you off these lands within the hour.”
Trae didn’t say anything, just kept on walking.
I held my tongue until we were out of the old stone building, then said, “He’s dying, isn’t he?”
Trae smiled. “Yes. The ring has been gone for too long. It won’t help him now.”
“So Egan got his wish in the end.”
“Yes. The bastard we call father will soon be dead.”
I splashed through a puddle of seawater, then asked, “But with Egan gone, who will take over the clique? One of the other full-blood brothers?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I have my own life and my own family to worry about.” He stopped at the car and opened the passenger door. “And the sooner we can get away from the grip of Mom and the relatives, the sooner we can get on with said life.”
I laughed and threw my arms around his neck. “After all the trouble your mom has gone to, you can at least give her a couple of hours.”
“Three hours tops, then,” he said, his arms going around my waist and pulling me closer.
“And then?” I murmured, my lips brushing his.
