Again, Corinne woke to the feel of teeth delicately nibbling at her skin, but this time it was accompanied by the sweet, sleepy feel of a warm, familiar body joining with hers. She gave a drowsy moan and arched her back to deepen the contact. Strong, callused hands slid around her body to cup her breasts and knead gently.
“Good morning.” Luc’s raspy morning voice rumbled against her ear, the vibrations traveling all the way down to where their bodies were linked and making her contract around him in pleasure.
“Mm.” It was the only answer she could manage.
Instead of struggling to speak, she reached up behind her and buried her fingers in his hair, pulling the long strands forward until they blanketed both of them, covering them in a thick, silken sheet that smelled of woodland and spice and strong, vibrant male. She heard Luc’s purr, and his hands shifted. One continued to cup her breast, teasing her nipples alternately with soft caresses and gentle pinches. The other hand slid down her torso, over her ribs, and down to rest on her belly. His fingers spread wide, spanning the space between her hip bones and pressing her back against him as he began to move his hips in a deep, lazy rhythm.
Corinne hummed and let her head fall back against his shoulder as she surrendered herself totally to his loving. She let his hand guide her hips, rocking her bottom against his pelvis with sleepy pleasure.
“So sweet,” he whispered, his breath another caress against the curve of her ear. “So precious to me. Heartmate. We have all the time in the worlds, and nothing in Ithiror in Faerie can compare to the feel of you next to me, or the smell of your warm, soft skin.”
His words sent shivers racing through her and she shifted in an attempt to get closer to him. She reached one hand back, curling her fingers around his firm behind to urge him to a quicker rhythm.
“Sweet girl.” He licked the soft hollow just behind her ear and smiled into the curve of her neck when she shivered in response. “You make the most adorable little noises while you’re sleeping, did you know that? But I think I like the ones you make when you’re awake even better.”
She parted her thighs, curling one closer to her chest and draping her top leg over his. The position sent him stroking so deep, she had to fight for breath. She’d gone from dreaming to needing so fast, she thought her head was going to drift right off her shoulders. He was driving her crazy.
She tried to press her hips harder against him, but they were already so close that not even the dew on their skin could separate them. She whimpered and pressed her head hard against his shoulder. “Luc,” she whispered. “I need you.”
He stroked deeply. “You have me.”
Shudder. “I want you.”
He shifted his hips just a fraction, but it was enough to send him sliding against a sweet, special spot deep inside her. “You have me.”
She came with a quiet gasp and a rolling wave of pleasure, her body clenching around his, dragging him with her into the whirlpool.
“I love you,” he whispered into the quiet of aftermath.
She smiled sleepily. “You have me.”
The second time Corinne woke that morning wasn’t nearly as pleasant. Instead of Luc making love to her, she heard a heavy fist pounding on her front door.
“Shit. Fergus.”
Luc, already out of bed and pulling on his jeans, looked at her curiously. “What makes you think it’s Fergus?”
She gave him a sour look. “I have a doorbell. Who else would be rude enough to ignore it?”
Luc laughed, tugged his T-shirt into place, and leaned down to kiss her. “Go ahead and get dressed. I’ll answer the door. And if it’s Fergus, I’ll make him promise to mind his manners.”
“Good luck,” she snorted.
He patted her ass affectionately before heading into the living room to answer the door. Corinne sighed and dragged herself out of bed, feeling a little stiff, a moderate amount sore, and a whole lot content. She and Luc hadn’t actually managed all that much sleep last night, but they’d managed to stay energized despite it. In fact, she couldn’t wait to take care of Seoc so they could come back here and burn off the rest of that energy in a more satisfying manner than chasing naughty Fae.
She felt her mouth curve in a cream-licking smile. There was only one naughty Fae she wanted to waste her time on, and he fell into a whole different category of naughtiness.
She heard the sound of her door opening, and Fergus’s voice followed by the even deeper rumble of Luc’s before she shut the bedroom door. She used the bathroom quickly, then pulled out underwear, a black T-shirt, and her beat-up old camouflage cargo pants and began to dress. The trousers were slightly ridiculous in a civilian context, but they were enormously comfortable and made her feel like kicking ass, which she thought might come in handy, given their planned activities for the day. They also had a plethora of pockets so she wouldn’t have to bring her backpack or a purse to the park. Something about taking a purse to a stakeout just seemed wrong to her.
Once dressed, she pulled on socks and laced up her black Doc Marten boots—perfect for hiking—and began to load her pockets. Since she couldn’t hear anything from the other room, she figured the men were being macho together and discussing strategy or something, so she took the time to get everything she thought she’d need now.
She grabbed tissues and ChapStick first, then her cell phone, a mini flashlight, and her keys. She was about to head for the other room when she remembered Fergus, so she grabbed her bottle of aspirin. Figuring the rattle might drive her almost as crazy as he did, she emptied a huge handful into her palm and dropped them into a clean pocket. Better lint-covered tablets than a breakdown mid-stakeout.
Finally ready, she opened the bedroom door and found herself face-to-face with Fergus. She raised an eyebrow. “Do you have a problem? I’m all ready to go, and that couldn’t have taken me more than five minutes, so save your bitching.” She frowned. “Where’s Luc?”
The Fae didn’t say a word, but something about his silence made Corinne look down, and that’s when she saw the knife clutched in Fergus’s hand. The sharp, glittering, blood-soaked knife. Her eyes flew wide open, and she opened her mouth to scream, but she never managed a sound. She saw a fist coming toward her, and then she didn’t see anything else for quite a while.
She came to swinging, which just earned her a hard slap and a warning growl. Fergus loomed over her, his handsome face twisted in a snarl before he dropped her to the ground with a thud.
Corinne felt the air whoosh out of her lungs as she landed on a conveniently placed root that threatened to give her an impromptu appendectomy. She rolled to the side with a moan. “What the hell is going on?”
Fergus didn’t bother to answer. He was too busy consulting an ancient-looking map and then glancing down at an object in his palm that seemed to be glowing a sickly green color. Corinne opened her mouth to repeat her question—only louder and with stronger language—but she changed her mind. Better to take a look at her surroundings and figure out where she was before she started asking him what was going on.
She was definitely outdoors—the tree root that had dug into her side could attest to that—and judging by what little she could see of the surroundings in the deepening gloom of twilight, she was in a hilly wooded area with her hands tied in front of her and a whole lot of New York spread out below her. Making an educated guess, she decided she was in Inwood Hill Park, and Fergus was a lousy, no-good son of a bitch.
With that four-foot sword strapped to his back.
“It wasn’t Seoc trying to open the Faerie door at all,” she said suddenly as realization flashed through her. Her voice sounded unusually loud in the quiet surroundings. “It was you. Luc was on a wild goose chase looking for the Queen’s nephew while you were off testing the old doorways to see if any of them still worked. You little shit.”
Fergus looked up from his map to sneer at her. “Is this where I’m supposed to tell you the details of my dastardly plan while you saw through the ropes binding you wi
th a carefully concealed dagger? I hate to disappoint you, human, but I’m not that stupid, and you don’t have a dagger. I searched you before we ever left your apartment. I even took away your keys. So shut up and let me work.”
Corinne snorted. “Right. Sure. Let me make this as easy for you as possible, ’cause that’s my main goal whenever someone kidnaps me.”
He stared down at her with contempt, his lip curled in a malicious smile. “If I were in your position, and I had seen my heartmate’s blood staining the blade of the enemy’s dagger, I think I’d reevaluate my main goal.”
Corinne stilled, her mind flashing to that moment when she’d opened the door to find Luc out of sight and Fergus standing in front of her with a knife and an evil intent. She waited for the sickening wave of grief to wash over her, and blinked when none did. After she and Luc had talked last night about heartmates and the bonds they shared, she expected his death to devastate her. So that meant one of two things: either Luc had been lying about being heartmates, or he wasn’t really dead. Since even the Queen of Faerie had gone with the heartmate scenario, she decided she would, too.
Luc was still alive, and if she knew him even a little, she guessed he would soon be making Fergus very, very sorry for his betrayal. In the meantime, she needed to stay alive and find a way out of this situation. Just in case.
“If you were going to kill me, you damned sure would have done it by now.” She used her elbows to push into a sitting position, making it seem like more work than it was so she could get her hands into her pocket for a second. She didn’t need a knife or her keys to make things tough for this jerk. “Which means you need me around for something. So forgive me for not kissing your ass.”
“Unlike the mighty Lucifer, I realize a human isn’t worthy to kiss my ass,” he snapped. “And don’t delude yourself. You’re only here in case your friends show up before I get the door open. Once I’m done with that, I’m done with you.”
She stiffened. This guy needed a class in Remedial Bad Guy 101. Telling a hostage you planned to kill her when you got what you wanted took away all her incentive to cooperate and made her that much more likely to fight every step of the way. But hey, Corinne wasn’t going to lose her advantage by telling him that.
She scoffed at him instead. “What? Didn’t you take care of them, too, before you dragged me up here? Some criminal mastermind you are.”
He ignored her taunt, holding the glowing green thing—which she could now see looked like some kind of stone—aloft and pointing it in different directions like a compass. When he faced the hill in front of them, even Corinne could see the stone glowing brighter.
“We’re close,” Fergus muttered, “but we have to get up higher. Come on.”
He grabbed Corinne by her arms and hauled her to her feet, shoving her along in front of him as he marched up the hill. She clenched her bound hands into fists and every few feet moved her middle finger to allow a white, buffered aspirin tablet to fall unnoticed to the ground. Hey, Hansel and Gretel had bread crumbs, she had aspirin. Folkloric German urchins didn’t get her kind of headaches.
They hiked over the rough terrain, which was harder than it sounded, especially given the fading light and the fact that one of them had her hands bound in front of her, but Fergus just watched the stone in his hand and pressed forward.
Corinne kept her eyes open for any chance to escape, but still bound, still walking in front of him, and still waiting to get a chance to stop him for opening the door, the chance didn’t come. If she was lucky, the cavalry would ride to the rescue and she wouldn’t end up having to run for her life. She liked that scenario.
Since the plan had been to meet up at Rafe’s place at three, and—judging by the advancing state of dusk—it was likely closer to eight, she knew Rafe, Dmitri, Graham, and her friends would already know something had gone wrong. If they bothered to check her apartment, they’d probably find Luc—and they’d damned well better take good care of him—and then they’d be after her. Provided any of them had used their supernatural mojo for a good cause this time, they’d have been on her trail by seven at the latest. They couldn’t be very far behind Corinne and Fergus, so she just crossed her fingers, kept dropping her aspirin trail, and hoped they’d hurry the hell up.
SEVENTEEN
Luc didn’t just wake up swinging; he awoke swinging, swearing, and strangling an unsuspecting Graham. That didn’t last long, since Missy immediately shouted something nasty and leapt forward to plant her foot on his arm. Graham used the opportunity to wrench himself out of the enraged Fae’s grip.
“Calm down before we decide to leave you to bleed to death,” Rafe said, speaking calmly over the sound of Missy’s furious chatter and Dmitri’s low chuckle. “Save the righteous rage for the one who tried to gut you.”
“Where’s Corinne?”
“Gone.” Graham rubbed his hand over his bruised neck. “Presumably with the one who tried to gut you. But there’s no blood or evidence she’s been hurt.”
“Fergus.” Luc spat the name like a bitter taste from his mouth. He relaxed a little, though, because now that he took the time to breathe, he could feel that she was still alive. He would know if his heartmate had been taken from him permanently.
Rafe nodded. “I could smell him here, but I don’t claim to understand what happened.”
“I’ve got my theories,” Luc growled as he pushed himself to his feet.
“Hey,” Reggie scolded, rushing to press a thick gauze pad to a sullenly bleeding wound in his side. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re wounded, here!”
He tried to brush her away, but she clung like a barnacle, and with Dmitri watching closely he couldn’t exactly put his back into it. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine. We need to go find Corinne.”
“Fat lot of good you’ll do her. What are you going to do to rescue her from Fergus? Bleed all over him?”
He started to protest, but by then Missy had assured herself of Graham’s safety and climbed on board with Reggie. “You’ve got to take care of these wounds before you go anywhere, or you’re not going to be much good to Rinne or anybody else,” she scolded. “These stab wounds look awful.”
Luc scowled. “They’d look worse if he’d been smart enough to use iron, but these are from silver. They’ll heal fast enough. We need to go now, though. He’s already killed once. He won’t hesitate to hurt Corinne.”
“He’s already hurt you.” Reggie pushed hard enough against his wound to make the damned thing throb uncomfortably. “And I, for one, don’t want to be the one to explain to Corinne that we let you run off untended, and you bled to death before we could catch up with her. She gets mean when she’s angry.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
“Then do us a favor and sit down and shut up long enough for us to bandage you up. Then you can go after Corinne, okay?” Missy didn’t wait for his reply but headed back toward the bathroom.
“Bring lots of adhesive tape!” Reggie shouted after her before turning back to Luc. “Right. Now that shirt has to go. Strip.”
Luc’s eyes widened and shot to Dmitri’s face. The vampire looked somehow amused and jealous all at once.
“Why don’t you tell us about these theories you have regarding Fergus, my friend,” Dmitri suggested, crossing his arms over his chest and keeping an eagle eye on his tiny wife as she and Missy began mopping up Fae blood. “It will distract me so I do not give in to the urge to give you a few new wounds myself for having my wife’s hands on you.”
Luc could sympathize. He spread his arms wide to give the women access to his wounds. “I’m kicking myself that I never suspected,” he said, “but now I realize Fergus was the problem all along, not Seoc. It never did sit right with me to think that Seoc had killed that rabbi. He’s just not the violent type. Fergus, though, is a different story.”
“You mean you came here for nothing? Seoc was never wandering unattended through the city?”
“No
, the Queen’s nephew is irresponsible and annoying, and I don’t doubt he was the Fae all those witnesses reported seeing, but it was never him trying to open the doors. That was Fergus.”
“But why would he do that?” Graham asked. “Doesn’t he have as much to lose as any of the Fae if the doors open? At least with Seoc, I could see it as a revenge-against-his-controlling-aunt thing.”
“I haven’t decided on a why yet,” Luc said, “but I think I’ve nailed the how. Fergus was the guard on duty the night Seoc slipped into Ithir,and I think that not only did Fergus know about it, he helped, knowing that Seoc would provide the perfect distraction while Fergus went looking for the door. It wouldn’t be hard for a guard to slip through fairly regularly on his shifts without anyone suspecting. He had access, and no one would question the loyalty of the Queen’s guardsmen.”
“The perfect cover.” Dmitri scowled, and Luc just hoped it was at the idea of Fergus’s betrayal, and not the fact that Reggie was currently pressed up against his chest while she passed the roll of adhesive tape behind his back.
“Exactly,” he continued, figuring distracting the vampire with his theories couldn’t hurt. “It probably wasn’t even all that tough. All he had to do was nose around while Seoc provided a red herring; he could even use his place on the Guard to keep up-to-date on how close we were to finding Seoc. And yesterday, we gave him everything he needed to find the door.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “We practically handed the location to right to him.”
Reggie ripped off the last bit of tape and pressed it against his skin before stepping back and handing him a clean T-shirt. “True, but he doesn’t know any more than we do. We’ll get to him before anything happens.”
Graham nodded and handed Luc the duffel bag he’d left at Vircolac. They must have brought it with them when they came looking for him. “Regina is right. We know where he went, and we know what he’s planning. He’s an idiot if he thinks we won’t find him and stop him.”
Not Your Ordinary Faerie Tale Page 20
