He was still crouched over her. All that smooth, delicious skin a scant arm length away, fragrant with decadent, tropical aromas and earthy richness that not even their unplanned plunge into the fjord had been able to wash away. Did he always smell thusly? Good enough to eat? Her tongue hungered for a taste and her palms itched to flatten against the swell of his pectoral muscles, to discover if his skin felt as delicious as it smelled.
“Are you all right?”
His voice was low, husky, rough in all the right ways. She shuddered as every feminine muscle in her body clenched tight. Her fingers flexed.
Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! For Halla’s sake, Summer, don’t touch him!
She wet her suddenly parched lips. “F-fine. I’m fine,” she somehow managed to stammer. Sweet Helos! Dilys Merimydion wasn’t just a terrible danger to her; he was a potently appealing poison she longed to consume. Every moment he sat there, crouched over her, edged her closer to the abyss.
He reached for her right hand, ran a thumb over the slightly raised rose-shaped, red birthmark on her inner wrist, then turned over his own left wrist to reveal a golden, trident-shaped mark.
It was not uncommon in Mystral for children of a particularly gifted—usually royal—bloodline to bear proof of that gift on their inner wrists. Females were born with the mark of their birthright on their right wrist. Males on their left. Wynter, Khamsin’s husband, for instance, bore a white wolf on his inner left wrist.
Summer had never given her Rose a second thought, except when it grew hot and warned her of an impending breech of her inner barriers. But she recalled something odd happening at Wynter and Khamsin’s wedding. Something powerful and elemental when their marks met.
Something not too unlike what had just happened in the water between Dilys and herself.
Something, Khamsin had admitted to her sisters in a giggling afternoon of girl talk, that still happened between them in private moments with the most scandalously delicious results. She had decided it was some sort of proof of compatibility between mates—sort of a divine confirmation that “this is the one for you”—as well as a little extra “oomph” to help certain things along, she confessed with rosy cheeks.
Intrigued, Spring had insisted on conducting a series of preliminary experiments to test the theory. Nothing happened when the sisters touched their marks to one another. Nor had anything happened when Spring “inadvertently” brushed her mark against Wynter’s. Autumn had tried it, too, with the same lack of results. They’d tried to get Summer to do the same, but by then, Wynter had become a little unnerved by his new sisters randomly bumping into him and rubbing their arms against his and Summer found it a bit disturbing to test for sexual compatibility with her youngest sister’s husband, so she’d declined.
Now, however, Gabriella had a sinking suspicion that Khamsin’s theory might be correct.
She tried to tug her arm out of Dilys’s grip, but he didn’t let go.
“You can get off me now,” she ordered, mimicking Autumn’s haughtiest tone.
He didn’t move. Instead, he locked his gaze on hers and, with slow deliberation, laid his left wrist flat against her right.
Summer sucked in a breath and went rigid beneath him as a fresh surge of energy shot through her. Only this time, instead of an electric thunderclap that stunned the senses, this surge fired up every sensual cell in her body. If Dilys hadn’t been straddling her, she would have wrapped her legs around his waist and dragged him down atop her. As it was, she burned for him in the worst way. The way his nostrils flared and his tattoos went bright with a fresh burst of phosphorescent blue light only fanned the flames of her desire. She wanted to command him to touch her . . . to kiss her. Her gift of Persuasion flared, bringing the words and the magic to the tip of her tongue.
“Your eyes have gone gold,” Dilys murmured, and there was something about the way he said it the stopped her cold. A sort of dazed confusion and wonder. All the Coruscate siblings’ eyes changed when they drew upon their power. Khamsin’s eyes went a shifting silver, sort of like swirling storm clouds. Spring’s turned an electric green. Autumn’s looked like flames. And Summer’s went golden—the more power she summoned, the brighter and more obvious the gold. Her sisters had always likened it to the sun shining from her eyes, a mark of Helos, but Dilys, clearly, found it significant in some other way.
The shocking moment when their gazes had first met . . . that explosive moment in the fjord . . . and now, again, her uncharacteristically powerful sexual hunger just from the brush of his mark against hers . . . suspicion hardened to certainty.
Khamsin was right. The reaction of marks did mean something.
Summer suspected it didn’t just mean she’d found someone compatible with her . . . she suspected it meant she’d found the someone most compatible with her. Her life’s mate. The man with whom Gabriella could have the sort of love Khamsin had found with Wynter.
The sort of love her mother had found with her father.
A love the loss of which had driven Verdan of Summerlea so mad with grief he’d destroyed himself, his son, his kingdom, and very nearly the whole world.
Gods help her.
She wanted it—oh, not the destruction and misery her father had caused, but the love he’d had. The love Khamsin and Wynter had. That perfect, deep, consuming love. She wanted it so badly the hunger was a burning fire inside her soul.
And here it was. Hers for the taking.
“Dilys,” she whispered, saying his name for the first time, and his eyes glittered bright as a gleaming gold idol atop a god’s altar.
It felt right to say his name, right in a way nothing had ever felt before. The syllables whispered across her skin like a warm, languid caress, sinking into her flesh, into her very bones. As if his name was a lost part of herself that had finally found its way home. The hunger for him burned brighter, becoming a sweet and terrible ache.
There was a voice in her head, crying out a warning, but it was only a dim echo, the caution drowned out by a seductive song that beckoned to her, ensnaring her soul in golden bands of honeyed light.
“Call me,” the song whispered, only it didn’t speak in words but rather in powerful swells of emotion, warm currents so strong she could feel resistance being drained away. A man’s song. His song. “Sing my Name. Claim me as thine own. For I am thine before all others.”
And deep inside, a powerful voice welled up inside her, whispering urgently, Claim him. Make him yours.
Certainty flowered in her soul. She could do it. She could bind him to her for all eternity. Every part of her being wanted exactly that.
Her hands rose, splayed fingers sliding across the intoxicatingly warm, deliciously soft skin of his lean cheeks, cupping his face.
Her eyes never left his as she gently and inexorably tugged his face down and guided his lips to hers.
She’d never kissed a man. She’d wanted to a few times before, but she’d never allowed herself to do so. Now, the instant his mouth touched hers, she knew she’d never want to kiss any man but him for the rest of her life. He was her one and only. He was everything she would ever want, everything she could ever need.
His lips were smooth and firm and warm against hers. Velvety soft to the touch. She licked at them gently with the tip of her tongue, tasting him.
He shuddered, and his lips parted, opening against hers as his head tilted and he deepened the kiss. His legs stretched out, his long body lengthened, pressing down against hers, a delicious, heavy, warm weight supported by the powerful arms that flattened against the dock to frame her. The long, silken, fragrant coils of his hair spilled down to dance along the tops of her shoulders and caress her cheeks. They—like he—smelled of sultry, tropical nights and warm sea breezes, sweet, spicy, exotic, and he tasted like the answer to every wistful, aching dream she’d ever dreamt in the long, lonely dark of her aloneness.
She gave herself up to the kiss, luxuriated in it. Her hands slid around the hot, sleek,
hardness of his muscled chest, learning every swell and hollow, every texture. Satiny skin. The nubbly velvet of hardened nipples. The trembling steel of clenched muscle.
She could pet him like this for a lifetime and never grow tired of it. She dragged her nails down the bumpy line of his spine and reveled in the way he sucked in a sharp breath, shuddered against her, then ravaged her mouth with a kiss gone wild, licking her, tasting her, breathing her in. His fingers dove into the mass of her unbound curls, cupped her skull and pulled her closer, tighter into his kiss, and if by sheer strength and desire, he could drag her into his body and make her part of him.
He kissed her until she was dizzy and gasping for air, until he was gasping too. And when he finally pulled away to catch his breath, his eyes were dazed, his expression stunned.
“Blessed Numahao,” he whispered. “How can this be? You are . . . you are . . .”
She stared up at him, drinking in the sight of him, saturating her soul with the bittersweet wonder of this moment, committing every tiny detail to memory. Her thumbs slid across his skin, caressed the glowing blue sigil shining on his cheekbone, traced the planes and angles of his beautiful face.
And then she smiled with aching gentleness, her heart savaged by the knowledge that if she let herself, she would love him as she would never love another soul . . . love him as no other being in Mystral could ever or would ever love another.
And she told him softly, the powerful gift of her Persuasion pulsing in her voice, “Nothing. I am nothing to you.” She had to wrap her fingers around the back of his neck and hold on tight as he tried instinctively to pull away, to reject the command threaded through each word she spoke. “You came here to court my sisters, not me. I am not the wife you need, and you will not pursue me.”
Her smile trembled, then broke. Unable to stop herself, she kissed him again, one last time. Kissed him with all the desperate longing that clawed her from the inside out, kissed him until tears of regret and sorrow spilled from the corners of her eyes. And then she pulled away to say, with an unwavering surge of even stronger Persuasive power, “You will not remember this. Not that you came to me, not that you saved my life, not that we kissed. You will not remember. And you will not pursue me.”
On the palace terrace, beneath the soft light of the stars and the glow of hundreds of candlelit lanterns strung about the garden, Ari Calmyria was enjoying the company of Lady Fern Goldenbanner. Bright-eyed, erudite, and admirably independent, the Summerlander Lady Fern had shocked her family and community by taking the small fortune her father had bequeathed to her upon his death and heading north to seek a future mate from among the Calbernans rather than wedding the dull-witted son of her closest neighbor after her family lands and titles had passed to a distant cousin.
“Or rather, wedding my money to him,” Lady Fern confessed with a wry twist of her lips. “It wasn’t until after the war put a sizable dent in their coffers that Lady Alder, Salix’s mother, even remotely considered me a potential match for her son.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t only your money that he was—” Ari broke off in mid-sentence as every cell in his body suddenly snapped to sharp attention. Something rippled across his senses, a whisper that resonated with power. A Voice. Female. Full of magic.
Before he could track the Voice back to its origin, it fell silent.
“Sealord Calmyria?”
The warm hand on his arm pulled his attention back to the slender, bespectacled Summerlander at his side. She was regarding him with obvious concern. “Forgive me, myerina. Where was I? Ah, yes, the foolish neighbor who could not see the true treasure before their eyes . . .”
“Never mind that,” Lady Fern exclaimed. “Are you quite all right? What just happened? You looked as if you’d been struck by lightning.”
He had, in a way, but it was nothing he was willing to discuss with oulani. Ari forced a smile. “It’s nothing. I thought I heard something, but I must have been mistaken.”
Lady Fern wasn’t so easily dissuaded. “What is it you thought that you heard? And why does it seem your countrymen all heard the same thing, while the rest of us appear to have heard nothing.” She gestured to the other guests with a wave of her hand.
Ari glanced around the terrace. Sure enough, the other officers looked as stunned as he felt and were doing an even worse job than he was in hiding it.
He caught Ryll’s eye and raised his brows in silent question. Ryll’s response was a shake of his head and a shrug. He didn’t know where the Voice had come from either.
Ari turned back to Fern and gave her a potent smile full of disarming charm. “The reason we heard something the rest of you did not is easily explained, myerina. Calbernans, you see, have extremely acute hearing. One of our many gifts from the sea. In fact, I have a rather humorous story about the time I tried to sneak past my father when I was a boy. . . .”
As he launched into his tale, not giving Lady Fern a chance to get a word in edgewise, he exchanged a speaking glance with Ryll over the top of Lady Fern’s head.
The situation here in Konumarr had just become exponentially more interesting. Because whoever owned that Voice they’d all just heard was in possession of a gift Ari had never run across outside of Calberna.
A great, magical gift. A power the greatest Houses of Mystral had spent millennia hoarding, consolidating, interbreeding in the hopes of bringing it back to its fullest potential: a vocal magic known as susirena.
Siren Song.
Leaving a dazed Dilys Merimydion sitting alone on the pier, Summer made her way back through the gardens. She was careful to keep to the shadows, and she slipped into the palace via one of the side doors, taking one of the narrow, servant staircases to reach the second floor where her chambers were located. With her hair spilling down her back in unkempt curls, and her lips red and swollen from passionate kisses, anyone who saw her would have no doubt what she’d been up to. She wasn’t up to dealing with rampant speculation and scandalized whispers behind her back.
She also wasn’t certain how well the Persuasion she’d used on Dilys would hold up against rumors that Princess Summer had been kissing someone tonight.
Her maternal grandmother, Seahaven’s Queen Rosemary, with whom she’d corresponded over the years had warned her that the Persuasive gifts she’d inherited from her mother weren’t without limits. The gift worked best when trying to Persuade people to believe something they were inclined to want to believe anyway. In such cases, even a mild push could cement a person’s views so strongly nothing short of an apocalyptic cataclysm would shake their belief in whatever they’d been Persuaded to believe.
A strong push of Persuasion, like the one she’d used on Dilys, could erase blocks of time or entire tracts of memories, but depending on the strength of the memory or emotional significance of what was being erased, sometimes even the strongest push could only cloud the mind with a surreal haziness. In such cases, the person being Persuaded might remember everything, but believe it to be no more than a dream or a figment of his imagination. Unfortunately, those hazy figments could easily begin to feel a lot more real if everyone around him started speculating about the reasons a certain princess had been spotted with mussed hair, flushed cheeks, and bee-stung lips.
That she couldn’t allow. No matter what, Dilys Merimydion must not ever remember what had passed between the two of them tonight.
That she would never forget was her burden to bear.
It already hurt, of course. She had no doubt it would hurt even worse over the next weeks and months as she was forced to watch the man she now knew to be her own court her sisters—and worse, fall in love with one of them. Marry one of them. It would burn her soul like fire to think of him kissing one of her sisters the way he’d kissed her, to think of him lying his warm, heavy body atop Spring or Autumn, gazing into her eyes with the wonder and tenderness and devotion that should have been Summer’s. To think of him sharing that body with her sister, giving her the children that should
have been Gabriella’s own.
The Rose on Summer’s right wrist began to burn.
She clamped a hand over the hot, red birthmark, turned her thoughts away from their dangerous, angry, jealous path and hurried down the hall to the safety of her room.
She didn’t bother calling her maid to help her undress. Her temper was too close to the surface to risk having another person nearby. Removing her evening gown and layers of undergarments was no simple task, but she managed, and when she was done, she threw the pile of clothes onto a nearby chaise and donned her favorite nightgown, a lightweight linen that felt cool and soft and soothing on her skin. She then sat down at her vanity, closed her eyes and brushed her hair well over the usual hundred strokes. The soothing tug and pull of the brush helped settle her nerves, so she kept brushing while she meditated on peaceful, happy things.
When she was calm again, Summer rose from the vanity and walked around the room, blowing out the lamps her maid had left burning. Despite the late hour, Wintercraig’s summer-night sky was still light on the horizon, the sun not far enough below the horizon for full dark. And already it was growing lighter again. Dawn would be breaking soon. As she went to the windows to pull the night blinds, she saw Dilys Merimydion walking up the steps to the brightly lit terrace below.
Just that quick, all her meditation-reinforced calm, all her determination to block him from her heart and mind, went up in a puff of smoke. She couldn’t tear her gaze from him. He was so beautiful. It was as if the gods had created him to be her personal Halla, the walking, talking, breathing embodiment of everything she’d ever wanted, everything she would ever need or wish for.
Everything she could never have. Which made him, she supposed, more her personal Hel than Halla.
She’d deliberately misled him earlier, when she’d implied no suitor had ever come for her. They had. Scores of them—and not only suitors who knew they’d have no chance with Autumn and Spring. There’d even been at least a dozen of them she’d thought she could love. She’d sent each one of them away with a push of Persuasion. It always hurt. Sometimes more than others. But never had sending them away felt like this—like a white-hot knife to the chest—as if by turning away from Dilys Merimydion she was cutting out her own heart.