One of his most recently developed skills was that of deep-listening. He’d not yet told Drustan he could do it, was still learning to control it.
He’d never been able to manage it before, that meditative Druid regard his da had so excelled at, that listening that could peel away lies and see to the truth of a matter, to the heart of a man.
But in the past months of wedded bliss he’d discovered a new quietude, an inner peace that, coupled with the thirteen’s knowledge, had opened his Druid senses.
He’d deep-listened to Adam Black today when they’d ridden out, needing to know if he was speaking truth about his reasons for bringing the walls down. If the Keltar were to be breaking oaths again, Dageus had to know it was for a just cause. He’d delved lightly and in that shallow penetration had learned that Adam spoke true.
But then he’d sensed something else, something he’d not expected to find in an all-powerful immortal, not even one temporarily diminished; something he’d recognized, and he’d not been able to resist opening his senses wide and probing more deeply.
What he’d heard in the ancient one’s words—in what he’d said and in those spaces between what he’d said and not said—had stilled him to the core.
Once Dageus had thought himself a lonely man. Before he’d found his mate, before Chloe had pressed her wee hands to his heart and pledged herself to him with the binding vows.
But now he knew that what he’d thought of as loneliness he could compound by thousands of years and multiply by infinity and still not manage to quantify that darkness that lay so deceptively still within Adam Black.
Strange days, he mused, pushing open the door to his chamber, when the Tuatha Dé walked among them in human form.
Er . . . sort of.
For that was another unexpected thing he’d discovered about their otherworldly guest.
Adam was, as he’d said, no longer exactly Tuatha Dé.
Nor, however, was he human.
20
Gabby didn’t leave Adam’s bedchamber for three long, blissful days and nights. Three perfect, incredible days and nights. She abandoned herself to them, to him, completely.
Oh, they didn’t make love the entire time, her body—so delicate in comparison to his—couldn’t have withstood it.
But there were many ways to give and take pleasure, and he was a master of them all. They spent hours in the shower, lazily bathing each other, exploring each other’s bodies, tasting and teasing. Hours that she feasted on gold-velvet skin, rippling muscles, and silky black hair spilling across her naked body. More hours where she was spread on a rug before the fire while he rubbed her down with scented oils, making playful comparison of her to a mare that had been ridden too hard.
Sliding up behind her, riding her again. Rubbing her down again. More bathing, more playing in bed.
The only time he left her was to get food. Days and nights of eating and sleeping and sex. No woman, she decided, had ever lost her virginity more fantastically. There were many long hours where she was precisely as he’d said she would be: too languorously sated even to move. Convinced he couldn’t possibly arouse her again; yet aroused in a heartbeat from a mere gold-flecked dark glance from beneath dusky lashes and slanted brows.
She felt as if she’d slipped into some netherworld of crystals and heather-scented fire and sizzling eroticism. Though she’d not noticed at first, too fixated on the vision of the great, dark, naked man, she’d finally realized that his chamber was called the Crystal Chamber because it housed crystal sculptures of various fanciful beasts. Unicorns and dragons, chimeras and phoenixes, gryphons and centaurs dotted the mantels, side tables, and chests. Dainty prisms hung in windows, more suspended above the hearth, catching the firelight and turning it to brilliant splashes of color.
Ornate silver-framed mirrors hung on the walls amid lovely tapestries, and dark, beautifully carved mahogany furniture graced the suite. Plush lambskin rugs were strewn about the floor. The bed was a masterwork of antique craftsmanship, topped with satiny sheets, plump down ticks, and a plush black velvet coverlet. It sported four posters the size of small trees (posters to which he’d tied her hands at one point, kissing and tasting her, driving her wild with need).
There couldn’t have been a more fitting place for her to sleep with her Fae prince than this suite, surrounded by improbable creatures of legend, her improbable legend of a lover gilded by firelight, dappled with rainbow hues, rising above her, dark face taut with lust.
For those three days, she felt as if they existed in a place out of time, out of space, a fairy bower wherein nothing but the moment mattered, and the moments were so exquisite that, for a time, she forgot everything.