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“I find that it does matter, yes. Do you?”
“I thought you weren’t sure what it even meant.”
“I’m learning. I’ve learned a great deal from you, passionate Gwynn. I did mean it when I said I loved you. This thing that throbs between us and makes your pleasure, your happiness, mine. It’s new to me, but I’m learning to like it. I like that it made you come after me, and it feels like a wound to contemplate that perhaps you don’t feel this same thing. Am I fool to have thought so?”
“No.” I said it softly. “I didn’t know you felt love is all.”
“I didn’t have a name for it. Call it love, if you will.”
I’d told him I wasn’t sure if it mattered. Hearing it then and now, I found it did. I even believed him, feeling the strength of it vibrating with a subsonic hum through his body into mine. Mesmerized by the look in his eye, I stepped off, fell, and let the water close over my head. “I’ll call it love too.”
His mouth took mine, fierce and triumphant. Breathless from my risky confession, I returned the kiss, feeling starved for him. That thing he’d named, that throbbed between us, became a shared song of desire and need. I clung to him, willing in this moment to give up thinking about it all. I wanted to be with him.
But he pulled back, smiling when I protested.
He held out his hand and showed me the earrings. They glittered like jewels, inverted Stargazer lilies, limpid blue and luminous in the soft light. The man never gave up. “Will you wear them?” His voice held a level of warning and wariness. I’d worn them before, but mainly so he’d grant a stay on the marriage thing. This just put us back to where’d we’d been before Titania tried to change the game.
I nodded, knowing he needed this from me—and because I liked them, though I wouldn’t tell him that—and he pressed them to my earlobes, the tendrils tickling and sending dark shivers through me as they attached.
“How did you get them off without me?” he asked, curious, since I should not have been able to undo his spell.
“A dragon’s egg.” The dragons—and all associated with them—nullified magic.
“Clever Gwynn.”
“How did the horseshoe earring I gave you come off?”
He fingered his left ear where I’d affixed my one and only gift to him. “Titania.”
Of course. Her power trumped mine. More powerful than a dragon?
“Do you have it still?” he asked, raising the eyebrow on the left side of his face, the black pattern snaking with the movement. He’d sent it to me, a message of his own. “I would have it back if so.”
“I’d had it in the dress Titania poofed off me, back at her castle. It might be gone.” That pained me, that I’d been so careless, but Rogue was already shaking his head.
“You made it. Only you can destroy it. Call it to you.”
“How?”
“Hold the image in your mind and reach out to it. Imagine it landing in the palm of your hand. You can consider this your lesson for the day,” he added archly, reminding me of our old bargain of exchanging daily lessons for kisses and him sleeping in my bed. My gaze went, as if of its own accord, to the big bed in the center of the room. It seemed we would be sharing it every night from now on. And more than kisses. The thought made me shiver.
“Problem?”
“No.” I said it firmly, for both him and myself. One day at a time, right? I followed his instructions, mentally reaching for the golden horseshoe, which seemed to have a niche in my mind. As if anchored there. Interesting. I called and it appeared in my palm. Fabulous trick. And it explained much of what Rogue could produce on a moment’s notice. Like, say, a creepy cyborg army.
Then, however, I was stuck.
I couldn’t pick the damn thing up and place it on his ear. Eventually I might get good at using the claws like pincers, but I couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Frustrated, I looked up to find Rogue patiently watching me.
“I’ll hold it in place.” He took it from me. “And you seal it there. Perhaps with a kiss,” he added, inviting me with a wicked glint in his eyes.
Did he think I wouldn’t? Carefully setting my palms on his shoulders, I stood on tiptoe, focusing the wish on my lips and bound the earring to his skin. He hissed at the sensation—I might have added more punch than I needed—and seized me by the hips, lifting me so I wrapped my legs around his narrow waist. I nipped at his earlobe, drawing it into my mouth and sucking on it, using my tongue to toy with the earring. Tasting his skin in lieu of burying my hands in his hair.
Rogue groaned and deposited me on the bed, coming down with me and pulling his ear from my mouth so he could kiss me, deep and full. “I believe we have unfinished business,” he muttered between kisses.
“I should probably clean up,” I protested.
“Do you think I care for such things?” He lightly bit the spot just under the corner of my jaw, pulling the skin into his mouth and making my head swim with need. “You taste delicious. Like yourself. Here you are in my bed, where I’ve dreamed for ages that you’d be. Don’t make me wait a moment longer, cruel Gwynn.”
