Page 46 of Gemini Hunted
“Sweet Jesus. What. A.Mess.” Zara voices an unhappy groan and gives our feuding mates a pensive look. Her big aqua eyes are clouded with concern.
My precious queen. In our mating bond, she feels so sad.
My dragon growls in protest. Exerting all my will, I cease my pointless pacing, range myself close beside Zara, and wrap a protective arm around her tiny waist. She slips her arm around me and tucks into my side with a sigh of relief. Very discreetly, I spread a sheltering palm over her lower belly.
Beneath my hand, surely, she is clutching our dragonets.
The rich musk of caramel and vetiver and birchwood fills my head. Christ, she is drenched in Vasili’s mating scent. Under her bathrobe, I sense, her thighs are slick with Vasili’s seed. The fresh mating bite decorating her neck, too, is Vasili’s.
My Vasili.
But he is also her Vasili.
And he is Ronin’s Vasili.
This time, our vengeful, spiteful, secretly insecure Vasili has truly caused a mess.
As furious and alarmed as I remain to find a strange male lurking about our harem while both Zara and Vasili are (hopefully) breeding—as difficult as I find it to think clearlywith this truckload of testosterone flooding every cell and synapse in my mating rut—I am slowly grasping the reality that my outraged sentiments are not the current focus of anyone’s concern.
No.
The biggest danger by far to the integrity of my queen’s cobbled-together harem—as always—is the gaping rupture of distrust and suspicion the sex demon’s presence has not only exposed, but widened, between Vasili and Zephyr.
Lucius too takes his place beside Zara and addresses this crisis with his resolute voice. “My dears, let’s all be as practical as we can. What’s done is done. The demon is here. And he is, for the moment, our ally. The question now becomes, where do we all go next?”
Well.
As to that, after my midnight flight over Icarus Island, after what I saw from the air and learned on the ground, I have something to say.
“If we are speaking of battle tactics—” I begin.
The bedroom door flies open, and Neo drags Ash inside. Warily, I fall silent.
Asher Apollo Aurelius.
Prince of the Light Born Fae.
The Seelie Prince is Zephyr’s ally and thus Vasili’s rival (and, I suppose, mine), so I do not know him well. Wearing naught but a pair of faded jeans that cling to his thick thighs, with rainwater dripping down the broad slabs of his chest and trickling down his chiseled six-pack abs, the Seelie fills the doorframe with his wide shoulders. A circlet of black ivy, spiked with thorns and daubed with crimson blood, is inked around his bulging biceps. His spiky head of pewter hair nearly bumps the ceiling.
Ash drags a big hand down the craggy planes of his face, pushes rain out of his eyes, and blinks at the impasse. His keen silver stare shoots straight to Zephyr, bristling in the harness of his crossed swords, then to the lounging demon with his trident.
“Ash,” Zephyr breathes, low and lethal. “Did you know of this… this calumny?”
English is not my first language and that is not a word I know.
But I presumehe means the demon.
“Hiya, Sparrow. Good to see ya, kid. For real.” Ash slings a towel carelessly around his wet shoulders and saunters right over my defensive perimeter, pausing to press a tender kiss on Zara’s worried forehead. She rises on tiptoe and leans into his touch.
My possessive dragon rumbles a growl of warning.
“You too, Max.” Ash gives an easy nod to me and my growling dragon as he ambles past.
But he knows better than to touch me.
He knows I am Vasili’s ally (because I have sworn to be, and a dragon honors his word) and not his.
Clearly, Ash’s goal is to reach the fulminating Zephyr before the Dark Fae King combusts. As Ash closes the distance between them, I see the immediate effect of his nearness on his consort. The deep furrow smooths between Zephyr’s green brows. The worst of the deadly tension eases its grip on his lithe body.
