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His lips whispered over my jaw, his hands winding in my hair to tug my head back, allowing him to trail kisses down my throat, sweetly thrilling. Something about the emotion of the moment made every kiss penetrate my skin. As if he’d managed to reach inside and touch the deepest, most vulnerable part of me.
“I want to be inside you, my forever Gwynn.”
He lifted me, hands below my thighs, and lowered me onto his erect cock. Impossibly, he felt larger than ever, filling and stretching me. The pleasure reverberated, amplified between us. Holding my hips still, he pumped in and out of me, stoking me with sensation so keen it became a knife that might cut me open. It killed me that I couldn’t touch him, because I wanted to, to sink claws and teeth and take more of him inside me.
He laughed, breathlessly with rising desire. “Then take me.” Tipping back his head, he exposed his throat, laughing again when I fastened my mouth there, sinking my teeth into the muscle, releasing some of the powerful pressure in my groin. My platinum claws firmly on the stone ledge, I dug them in, too, holding on while Rogue worked me from the inside out.
Remarkably, he came before I did, with a wrenching spasm of his lean body, dissolving into incoherent cries of ecstasy that rippled through the skin in my mouth. I followed a moment after, releasing my teeth and throwing back my head with the uncontrollable arching of my spine.
Trusting Rogue to keep me from drowning altogether.
Trusting that, somehow, there would be a happy ending to all of this.
*
When we returnedto the bedchamber the great crystal dome was ablaze with sunlight. For the first time, I got a good look at Rogue’s domain.
Fascinated—and maybe needing a little distance due to the emotional earthquake that still had my heart feeling raw and my thighs watery—I went to the curved wall, my claws clinking as I reflexively put up a hand to keep myself from falling through the transparent surface. Not surprisingly, our room occupied the tallest tower of many that rose out of a massive assembly of rambling wings, courtyards and barrier walls with wide walkways atop them, all formed of brilliant black stone that glittered in the midmorning light.
The moat that circled the vast complex shone a silver blue with an abalone sheen. Not as wide as the Mississippi, but huge to my Westerner’s eye, it was formed of a natural loop in a river. A sense of premonition crept up my spine. Much like the geography around Devils Tower.
I’d fallen into Faerie from there, near that black, corrugated rock that rose from the circle of the Belle Fourche River. From a distance, the conglomerate of Rogue’s castle might look much the same as the tower. I’d known I’d come through somewhere nearby, but the intersection of the two worlds gave me a brief moment of dislocation, like an inadvertent double image. The overlap in look, feel and even name seemed portentous in a way I hadn’t yet grasped.
I scanned the green hillsides in the distance, wondering if I would recognize the exact hill where I’d awakened—a futile search, of course, as they all looked much the same.
At Devils Tower, the much smaller river made a partial loop around the monument. In this landscape, someone had created a channel between the river loops to form the circular moat. Probably at the front of the castle, where a somewhat narrower section would allow the drawbridge to span it, were it down. But it was up and the iridescent spiney hump of an elephant-sized moat monster lazily patrolled the waters.
Along with the secured drawbridge, every wall and tower bristled with the Cylon-esque soldiers, like the ones Rogue sent to escort my friends. Everything I spied showed that Rogue was braced for attack.
“Do you expect her soon?” I asked him, without taking my eyes from the view, scanning the horizon for any indication of my crew. They would be days in arriving, however, if Rogue’s estimate had been correct. Still I couldn’t help worrying about them. Not that I’d given them much thought during the past twelve hours or so of sex-drenched mindlessness.
“Expect? No. But I would be a fool to be careless at this point.” Rogue, who’d been standing back, giving me time to absorb it all, came up behind me and stroked a soothing hand down my hair. “Titania is unlikely to come at us with a direct physical attack. However, because she knows I know that, it pays to cover that avenue as well.”
I nodded absently. To my left, the river streamed away from a great waterfall, which dropped over a sheer cliff in a single unblemished sheet. It looked as though it could have been engineered, like those falls from infinity pools—if humans could design one that fell a mile or more without breaking up or vaporizing. After circling the Castle of the Dark Gods, the river meandered off to my right, slow and lazy after circumnavigating the loop, winding through an endless meadow of indigo flowers.
I knew they would be blue stargazer lilies.
“Do you like what you see?” Rogue asked, much as he’d asked if I liked the room. It both gratified me, that he cared if I liked everything, and also worried me, as if the other shoe had yet to drop. Something I didn’t think I should tell him.
“It’s beautiful—but mostly satisfies my curiosity, since I couldn’t see anything before. Everything out my windows was gray.”
“It seemed wiser to conceal the location of my castle from you.”
I looked over my shoulder at him, raising my eyebrows. “In case of what?”
His mouth quirked, but he didn’t smile, just wound a lock of my hair around his finger. “In case I failed to exact an appropriate bargain from you and my enemies managed to turn you against me. Or should you have come after me yourself.”
“What did you think I could possibly have done against you or this fortress?”
He gave me a cagey look, then wound my hair several more times around his finger, drawing me closer. “I didn’t know, did I? You were an unknown quantity with enough power to yank yon river out of its banks.”
“And now?”
“Now?” He tilted his head, studying me. “I suspect you could do most anything you set your mind to.” His mouth brushed mine in a lazy kiss that, impossible as it seemed, roused my blood yet again. “So it’s good to have you on my side. If,” he qualified, “you remember to keep your wits about you. You still have a great deal to learn.”
Okay, that dampened my enthusiasm. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I assume that lessons will resume?”
“Yes.” He let go of my hair, leaving it draped in a perfect ringlet over the breast of my robe, as if it had been wrapped around a curling iron. “Though we should plan the wedding first. Invitations will need to go out.”
