“Lark, stop.” He stood, lifted his hands over his head and stretched out his six-foot frame, drawing my eyes to him like a bee to honey. Lean, muscled lines, and the rippled abs that came from not only hard work but great genetics, that dark hair spilling over his forehead, and then those deep green eyes framed with long dark lashes and deeply tanned skin—all of it called to my body. Coal was, if nothing else, as hot as they came. He held a hand out to me, beckoned me to him. Reluctantly, I went, and he folded me into his arms, and kissed the top of my head. “I don’t want to fight. I’m sorry. This isn’t just killing your sleep, you now that, right? And guarding the Edge to keep the humans out isn’t the same as planting seeds all day. Those damn hippies keep getting closer, wanting to commune with nature as they smoke the funky weed to connect with the mother goddess.” He snorted. “It’s my job to keep them away, and it’s hard to do if I’m sleeping on the job, you know? It’s not like planting, which you can do in your sleep.”
Keeping my breathing even was all I could focus on. Damn him for belittling me—again. Like working with the earth wasn’t good enough. “Yeah, I know I’m waking you up. Look, I’ve got to go.”
His hands rubbed up and down my arms, then lower to slide under the frayed edge of the jean shorts to the crease between my butt and thighs, tickling the sensitive skin. “Sure you can’t stay a bit longer?”
My heart began to pound for a different reason and I struggled to shake the hormones off. Was he good in bed? Of that, there was no question.
A memory flooded over me of the night before, the slow, burning kisses he’d trailed from the soles of my feet, biting and sucking the tender skin on the back of my knees, sweeping along my inner thighs with the tip of his tongue and then higher, slower—
“I’ve got to go.” I pulled away and all but ran to the door. “Go home, Coal, and sleep at your own place tonight.”
“Lark, don’t do that. Don’t be like that. Come on!”
I didn’t hear anything else he had to say because I slammed the door between us. I trotted down the stairs to the lower level, then opened the door that would take me out. My home was different than the rest of the families. Mine was a hollowed out redwood that had been converted into a tree house. Most everyone else had more traditional homes, log houses built snug against the side of a redwood. But not in a redwood like mine.
All around me, the gigantic trees seemed to sway, though I knew they didn’t do anything of the sort. The cloudbank had lifted just above my house and it gave the illusion of movement. I tucked my bare foot into the loop of woven rope that ran through a system of pulleys and stepped off the platform at the edge of the door. My weight was just enough to take me to the ground thirty feet below in a slow circle that gave me a view of our home.
The Spiral was at the far end of the Rim, what a human would call a city, or maybe a village. The Spiral, the central part of our little world, was a twist of multiple trees bound together by my father’s power. From the outside, it didn’t look that big, but looks could be extremely deceiving in the Redwoods.
Inside the Spiral was a sprawling manse with hundreds of rooms, banquet halls, kitchens, and game rooms. Even a full lake on the lowest level, made from a spring that warmed the water, and perfect white sand that was always warm no matter the time of year. The Spiral was my home for a time after my mother died. But that had changed. Jaw tight, I looked to the other buildings around the Spiral. The Enders, my father’s enforcers, had a barracks to the left. Like the Spiral, it seemed small on the exterior, but I knew from my one visit there that the interior was huge, a complex with a central area designed for fighting, training, and lessons. The lower levels consisted of the healers’ rooms, and holding cells that had been out of use for longer than I’d been alive.
I shuddered at the thought. My mother had taken me to the prison once, the one time I’d been in the barracks.
“These cells cut you off from all creation, Lark. You don’t want to ever find yourself in them. So always be a good girl. Don’t fight with your siblings, listen to your father, and always be kind to those around you.” Those were some of her last words to me, before the lung burrowers claimed her and Bramley.
The homes closest to my father and his Enders housed the members of our elemental family who were the strongest; the ones who had the power to make a difference in our world, the ones who held rank and were a real benefit to our family.
I sighed and looked at the ground as it came up to greet me. “And here I am, at the farthest edge of the Rim.” Pretty much, I was as far away as one could get from my father. And not because I wanted to be.
My foot touched the earth, warm and comforting on my bare soles.
I let go of the rope when a sharp ‘cluck, cluck, cluck’ of a raven turned my head up. Coal hung from my window, bare-chested and frowning. The frown slowly turned up, and I knew him well enough to know he was about to be a jerk. “You need help, Lark. Like serious therapy. Maybe you should see one of the human shrinks, let them examine your head and prescribe you some really, really good drugs.”
My back stiffened and I glared up at him and his smirking face, as three ladies in my planting group came around the corner and started to titter. Well, if they wanted to laugh, I’d better give them something to laugh about.
“You know, that sounds like good a plan, Coal. Maybe I can get something for you too. Something to help you in the stamina department. You and I both know it isn’t normal to last only two minutes.”