The idea of any other man taking his place did not sit well with Ryn. In fact, it roused an anger that usually came only with the wolf. If he was not willing to allow another to take on his duties as Queen’s consort, how could he consider leaving her?
Juliet had not yet claimed the apartment of the old Queen, an apartment which encompassed the entire third floor of the palace. She had become comfortable here, in the rooms she had first been assigned. She met him at the door, dressed in a simple gold satin gown that hugged her curves. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips full and anxious, her hair curling around her face and down her back. Her golden eyes danced, anxious and lively, as she stepped back and invited him to enter.
The window was open, and a cold breeze made the curtains dance and filled the room with a welcome chill. A few months ago, even a few weeks ago, such a chill would have made Juliet shake. Now she welcomed the cold. She needed it.
Without preface, she grabbed the front of his new blue shirt and pulled him toward her. “I have been eager to see you all day,” she said softly, not loosening her grip on his shirt.
“Have you?”
“I have.” She pressed her body to his and laid her cheek against his chest. “I can’t stop thinking about you, and I keep remembering the way I feel when you’re inside me. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember,” he answered hoarsely.
“I want that again, Ryn. I want it now.” She tilted her head back and looked up at him. “Why have you pulled away from me?”
“You know why.”
“Just because I am Queen that doesn’t mean I can’t be your mate.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
There was an added flush to her cheeks, a wicked sparkle to her golden eyes. “You look so stern, not at all like yourself. That ridiculous prophecy has stolen your smile.” Her voice was too bright too quick. “Whatever seer told of that prophecy was in a drunken stupor. I don’t want any man but you to touch me, Ryn. No one but you, ever.”
It was what he wanted, too, but he still wasn’t convinced it was likely. “You don’t see your own future clearly,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “We don’t know what the years to come will bring.”
“I see with great clarity that I love you.”
She didn’t understand what was happening to her. “What you’re feeling right now isn’t love.”
“If I say it’s love, then it’s love. I’m Queen, remember?”
He brushed a curl away from her cheek. “You have embraced your right to command very well, for a woman who swore she did not wish to be Queen.”
She licked her lips; her gold eyes danced. “I don’t want to argue with you, Ryn, I don’t, but this must be love. I miss you. I can’t stop thinking about you.” She fit her body against his and undulated gently. “I want you so much I hurt with it, and I would kill or die to get you into my bed. At this moment, I don’t care if a foolish old curse takes your life three years from now, not when I can have you with me until then. Is that not love?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
He pushed the thin strap at her shoulder down and lowered his head to kiss her creamy flesh. Walking away from her was impossible, as he had known it would be. She wanted him and she would have him. Reasoning with her at this point was a waste of breath. Tonight he would need his energy for other things. “It is need, my Queen.”
“A need you will fill?”
“Yes.” He had not tasted her for days. It had been too many days and too many nights since he’d raked his tongue across her flesh. He pressed his mouth to her throat and tasted her sweat and her desire while he pushed her golden gown down so that her breasts were bared. He teased the nipples with his fingertips while he sucked gently on her throat, and her answering moan was all he needed to push him over the edge.
The gown ripped as he pushed it off and down. She kicked it aside without a care. When she was naked, she began to unfasten the buttons of his trousers, all the while touching and tasting and demanding. Not content to have this done too soon, Ryn stopped Juliet before her job was done. He laid her over his arm and took a nipple into his mouth, drawing it deep and teasing with his tongue. She shuddered and bucked slightly, and the moan that escaped from her lips was low and sweet and arousing.
He had almost forgotten how beautiful and passionate she could be, how sweet her skin tasted, how he craved the feel of her flesh. A fine soft bed waited in the next room. A few steps, and they would be there. But the bed seemed too far away; the walk to the bedchamber would surely be too long.
Juliet agreed. “Now,” she said hoarsely.
He placed her on the edge of the table where they sometimes shared a meal, where she sometimes perused boring papers submitted by her advisors. The desk was almost bare tonight; he had only to push aside one small stack of papers that were surely unimportant. He freed himself, and Juliet wrapped her legs around his hips and guided him to her wet, hot center.
When he was deep inside her, she closed her eyes and seemed to be satisfied, for a moment. Then she began to move, gyrating against him, urging him deeper. Had he really considered leaving this behind for the sake of his wounded pride? This moment was so fine, so exciting and right and pleasurable, he could not imagine ever walking away from this woman. She grasped his hair in her small, tight fist and moaned. Her hips ground against him and he pushed deep inside her.
She pulsed around him and cried out, her body jerking and shuddering and milking him, when he joined her in completion. For a moment he was blinded, the pleasure was so great, and then he was taken beyond anything resembling normal pleasure.
In her desire, Juliet had forgotten to block herself. For a moment, just a moment, the barrier he had been maintaining between them crumbled. While their bodies shook and found release, he was inside her in a way that went past the physical. Their bodies were joined, but so were their spirits. Their minds. Even their hearts.
Juliet was powerful, more powerful than she had ever imagined she could be. Her connection to the earth and the Anwyn was almost beyond his comprehension. She was more than a Queen like the Anwyn women who had come before her. She was a goddess. The Anwyn would speak of her in hushed, worshipping tones for hundreds of years after she left this life.
And she loved him. Now, when he was inside her and pleasure still filled her world. As they’d walked into The City, afraid and unsure. When she had known that he was uncertain about his place here, when she had known that he was thinking of leaving her here alone. The love had always been there.
He had not wanted love when he’d claimed this woman as his wife. In fact, the emotion seemed to be a great complication. But feeling it now...fully inside her in every possible way...maybe it was a good thing, this love of hers.
Ryn swept Juliet from the table and carried her to the bedchamber that had, moments earlier, seemed so far away. He laid her on the center of the big bed, shed his clothes, and joined her.
Hovering above her, he brushed a strand of wild red hair away from her face.
“You’re smiling,” she said.
“I suppose I am.”
“I’ve missed that smile, Ryn. I’ve missed it so much. Does it mean...” She stopped, unable to ask the question.
“Vidara, my Queen,” he whispered, answering the question she could not ask. “I am yours.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ryn lay down beside her and placed one long, strong arm across her midsection. It took them both a few moments to regain their breath and find a regular heartbeat.
Vidara. Wife, only more, he’d told her on their journey to this place.
“You have not called me wife in a very long time,” she whispered.
“Not so that you could hear,” he confessed.
“You have not felt that I was truly your wife in a very long time.”
“I feel so now.”
A few candles burned in the room, casting enough light for her to see Ryn well. He was no
t the wild man she had first met. His long blond hair was caught in a thick braid, and the clothes he had removed were much more conventional than the leather kilt. And yet the wild man remained, locked inside this long, hard body, released only when the wolf or his mate called.
“Will you feel so when we are no longer naked?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He cupped her breast with one large hand and tweaked the nipple, and a spark shot through her body. She had just experienced a pleasure so intense she could barely move, and yet she had already begun to want him again.
“Do you think I’m already carrying a child?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“But I could be.”
“Perhaps,” he said again.
“On the journey here you said you knew I would not conceive because Anwyn are different in that respect. I thought you were talking about yourself, but you were talking about me.”
“Yes.”
“It’s time, isn’t it?” He gently spread her thighs and touched her intimately, and she quivered to her bones. Was that intense response her answer? “I did not know it was possible to want anyone or anything as much as I want you now,” Juliet whispered.
Ryn continued to stroke, to kiss, to arouse. “We need not leave this bed for days. Food will be left in the hallway for us, but no one will dare to interrupt.”
“Everyone knows?”
“Yes. The days of a Queen’s fertility are celebrated among the Anwyn.”
“That’s a little bit...” She started to say embarrassing, and then a particular stroke of a particular finger robbed all thoughts that did not concern Ryn from her mind.
It seemed he cared only for arousing her. He tasted her throat, caressed her breasts, raked his hand along her body as if he were memorizing every curve and swell. Her flesh had never felt so sensitive; no touch had ever felt so sensual. She could think of nothing but where he had just caressed her, and where he would next caress her.
She touched him, found him hard, stroked the length she longed to have inside her. Sparks of anticipation danced through her body, and she found herself arching against his touch and stroking him harder and harder. Nothing else mattered but this room, this bed, these two bodies. Ryn aroused her, and she could no longer think of anything but what was to come.
“Before, while we were traveling to The City, I asked you to maintain the barrier between us when you were inside me,” she said.
“I let it fall tonight,” Ryn answered. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she whispered. “It was very nice.”
“Yes,” he responded gruffly.
“I felt more of you, as we were truly one in every way. As if we were meant to celebrate our joining in that way. Completely.”
Ryn’s hands and fingers slowed, but did not stop stimulating her.
Her body arched and quivered. “From the day I learned how a husband and a wife make love, I’ve been worried that if a man were inside me in all ways, I would never be able to get him out. I had nightmares about taking so much of another into myself that it drove me crazy. I worried ceaselessly that if I ever took a man entirely into myself, I would never again be the same. Do you think that’s silly?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I take all of you, body and mind and spirit, with no barriers and no ties in the tendrils that connect us, will we ever again be separated?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not helping,” she said with a soft smile.
He rolled atop her, and she wrapped her legs around his hips once more. A push and he was inside her. The barrier he had built remained strong, and she did not attempt to break through it. Another thrust took him deep, and she shattered with a cry. She arched off the bed and clenched around Ryn’s length, while she whispered his name and trembled around him. He went very still, as the waves of her completion faded. He did not come with her; he did not give her the seed she needed to give him a son.
She lay boneless beneath him, spent and sated and warm to the pit of her soul. When she could speak, she asked, “Why didn’t you—”
Ryn hushed her with a deep kiss. Heaven above, she loved the way his mouth felt on hers. It was intimate and exciting and it made her insides do strange and wonderful things. While his mouth danced over hers, he began to move again, almost idly, kissing her, loving her.
He pushed deep inside her and held himself there as he lifted his lips from hers. “Tonight and tomorrow night and the next night, you will discover a new intensity to your sexuality. You will need me in a way you have never known before, and I want to give you everything I possibly can, Juliet.”
She smiled. “You called me Juliet. I’m so glad. I’m tired of being called Queen.”
“Tonight you are not Queen,” he said as he moved deeply and slowly inside her. “You are my woman, nothing more.”
“That’s all I want to be,” she said hoarsely. Ribbons of pleasure had begun again, but she held back. This part of making love, the just before, was extraordinary. She didn’t want to lose it. Not yet. As long as Ryn was moving as he did, languidly and with great control, she knew she could wait and enjoy.
And she did.
“Ryn,” she whispered as her body arched into his and completion danced just out of reach. “Vanir.”
“Yes.”
“I want everything from you, no matter what might come after. Let everything that stands between us fall away.”
The barrier crumbled, and she opened the tendril that connected her spirit to his. Like the moment when she’d laid her hand upon the Heart of the Anwyn, like the night when she’d run in the form of a wolf, she was overcome with sensation and beauty and wonder. Ryn was a part of her in so many ways. She drank him in, in body and spirit. She tasted him in a thousand ways and found pleasure in him in an entirely new manner.
And she knew him as she had never known another. He was a good man, strong and noble, loyal and honest. He would do anything for her, and for the children they would make together. His incredible strength was tempered with an equally incredible heart.
She saw glimpses of his past while he moved in and out of her. A fair-haired child playing in the street with a small ball of some sort laughing with his friends. A young man, dreaming of her, dreaming of this very moment. A determined man, searching for his mate. He was dedicated to her, and while he was not happy to be relegated to Queen’s consort he would not leave her. Not now, when he knew how deeply she cared for him. Not now, when he knew how she needed him.
And he did know, because she was no longer blocking him from her thoughts or her spirit. She not only didn’t shield herself from him, she drew him in and offered herself in a way she never had before. It was not frightening to be so united to another in body and spirit. It was beautiful, right and sacred. It was more powerful than anything she had ever known. When he began to move faster, she did the same, her hips rocking in time, her body drawing him deeper. When she shattered beneath him, he pushed harder and deeper than before, and their bodies clenched and quivered together, in their own rhythm and their own time.
The connection did not end, but instead grew to a more intimate level than she had known was possible. This man was a part of her in so many ways, she had been incomplete her entire life and had not realized it. He had known, though. Ryn had known all along that apart they were not whole.
He drifted down to cover her body with his, and she grabbed his braid and held on tight. “I love you,” she said breathlessly.
“I know.”
Ryn didn’t tell her that he loved her, too, but he was smart enough to know that a lie would not get past her. She saw too much, now more than ever. He did love her, but he hadn’t yet realized and accepted that love. He would, though. One day.
“You are a remarkable woman and you will be a wonderful Queen.”
She sounded a bit wistful when she asked, “Will I make a good mate, as well?”
“I believe so,�
� Ryn whispered. He lifted up his head and grinned at her. “Ask me again in a few days if you want a true answer. I cannot think when I am inside you.”
Sophie kept her eyes on the path as her horse carried her in a roundabout and maddeningly slow route toward Arthes. Rebels could not travel in the open, not without inviting warfare.
Many of the rebels were afraid of her now. Her despair at finding her family cabin burned to the ground had affected many of those around her, even though she did her best to keep her feelings corralled.
What she wouldn’t give for Juliet’s gift at this moment. She could not sense that her sisters were alive and well, but neither did she know that they were not. What would she do if they were gone? Her last words to them had been spoken in anger. She had told them she’d never forgive them for interfering in her relationship with Kane and that she never wanted to see them again. She would forgive them anything if she could see them now.
In a few days, perhaps a week, they would be in Arthes. The emperor had to be involved in whatever had happened to Isadora and Juliet. She would make him tell her where they were. They had to be alive. Somewhere, somehow.
The rebel army grew stronger every day. Whispers that the emperor had taken a concubine and made her empress had infuriated some of the common people and incited them to join the rebels. That former concubine was Liane, Sophie knew, even though she had not heard the new empress’ name spoken. She and Kane should have forced Liane to leave the palace with them, instead of allowing her to walk back into that cursed ballroom.
In addition to the Columbyanans who had joined the rebellion, members of a Tryfyn clan who wanted to see the Emperor Sebestyen unseated had joined Arik, and so his forces grew once again. There were even whispers that the Circle of Bacwyr, legendary Tryfyn warriors who had been silent for many years, would soon join the battle. If they chose to support the rebels, what had started as an annoyance to the emperor would soon become war.
Sophie hated the idea of war. It was not in her nature to accept violence of any kind.
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