“None of this makes any sense to me. Why would anyone want to hurt Dageus or Chloe? What could they possibly want?”
“I doona ken,” Drustan growled. “But you may rest assured we’ll be finding out.”
• 21 •
It was stuffy in the chamber library and Dageus shifted restlessly in his chair, then dropped to the floor and leaned his back against the cool stone wall. He glanced at Chloe and smiled wryly. Her mere presence made it damned hard for him to concentrate on the work at hand.
She was sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions in a corner of the underground chamber, poring, as she had been for some time now, over the fourth Book of Manannán. A few days ago, he’d swapped her for the fifth volume, so he might search that tome himself, since she was slower translating than he. Much to her extreme and oft-voiced consternation, she was unable to read most of the lore in the chamber. Scribed in forgotten dialects, using archaic alphabets compounded by grossly inconsistent spelling, the majority of them were impossible for her to decipher.
His hot gaze raked her from head to toe and he swallowed a little growl of ever-present desire. Dressed in a thin, clinging lilac gown—one of several Nell had altered for her, and he suspected Nellie was deliberately choosing ones to drive him to distraction—with a deeply scooped neckline and snug bodice, she was a vision. Her tousled curls spilled about her face and she was pinching her luscious lower lip, deep in thought. She got as lost as his da did in the old tales, becoming absorbed to the point of deafness.
When she shifted position, curling on her side on the soft cushions, her breasts pushed together above the neckline of her gown and lust quickened within him. Though he’d loved her upon awakening, as he did each morn, he ached anew to bury his face in that lush valley, kiss and lick and nibble till she was panting and crying his name.
The past ten days had passed swiftly, far too swiftly for Dageus’s taste. He wanted to halt time, to elongate each day, stretch it to the length of a year. To cram a lifetime into the now, suck it dry of the bittersweet joy of being mated.
Sweet because he had his woman.
Bitter because he had to stay his tongue, and not make promises he burned to speak. Promises that weren’t his to give because his future was uncertain. To his immense frustration, he couldn’t offer what small truths he possessed either, because Chloe still hadn’t asked him about the “curse.”
He wanted to tell her. He needed to tell her. Needed to know that she knew what he was and could accept it. Thrice he’d tested the waters, once in her dream, once later, while strolling the gardens with her beneath a silvery half-full moon. In her dream, she’d flinched and evaded. In her waking, she’d done the same.
The third time he’d begun speaking of it, she’d tugged his head down and used one of his tactics: She’d silenced him with a kiss and made him forget not only what he was about to say but what century he was in.
It wasn’t like him to fail to confront a difficult situation, but he’d reluctantly ceded to her resistance and let it go for the time being.
He had no doubt that, eventually, she would ask. Chloe was nothing if not tenaciously curious. He knew he’d burdened her with a great many new things in a very short time: time-travel, Druids, legendary races, new relics, the demands of his insatiable lusty appetites. She’d proven remarkably resilient. If she needed a bit of time to work her way around to beginning to ask questions again, he certainly couldn’t begrudge her the respite.
So for the past ten days, he’d focused instead on the sweet half of bittersweet, drawing succor from her sunny optimism and endless enthusiasm. Each day that passed, he grew ever more fascinated by her. He’d known she was intelligent, strong, and had a true heart, but it was the small things about her that truly enchanted him. The way her eyes went wide and excited whenever Silvan read a choice bit from one of the texts. The way she’d stood hovering above The Compact for half an hour, hands curling, but refusing to touch because she wouldn’t risk marring the soft gold with so much as a fingerprint. The way she chased his young half brothers around the hall in the evenings after supper, pretending she was “a wee fierce beastie,” until they were shrieking with excitement and mock-fear. The way she teased his cantankerous da, flirting with him in a winsome way, until she succeeded in bringing a blush to his wrinkled cheeks and a smile to his lips, chasing some of the worry from his somber brown eyes.
He was proud of the woman she was, and savagely possessive of her. He was fiercely glad that he’d been the one to awaken her to intimacy, that he was the one to whom she’d entrusted a small part of her heart.