Page 10 of Dark Hunter's Touch
But the breeze fluttered around his shorts again. He glanced down. “The wind brings youlittlepresents, huh? Should I be offended?”
“I couldn’t say. I would need to find out, first, which parts are real…” She clamped her hand over her mouth. “Babbling,” she muttered behind her palm.
“I like it,” he said. “And you should know, the smallest breath can herald the fiercest storm.”
One more half step brought him closer still, so that the circling breeze carried the fall of cherry blossoms in a helix around them both.
He tilted his head in the opposite direction of his crooked smile, giving him a charming-bordering-on-roguish air. “Your cheeks blush petal-pink. What other parts of you do that?” He reached out to pluck a blossom from the swirling air and tucked it behind her ear. “I suppose I’ll need to find what is real and true myself.”
She took his hand and led him through the fall of petals. “Then come in.”
***
She let him use the cramped shower in the minuscule bathroom. After ducking under the low lintel of the front door, he’d taken one look around the A-frame cottage’s tiny, rustic confines and said, “If there’s going to be a song and dance number with talking forest creatures, I don’t want to kiss the frog.”
His wry glance startled a laugh out of her…but when he disappeared through the doorway, she wondered how someone like him knew all the old stories.
She frowned to herself. Of course he must’ve been a child once, with someone to tell him the tales, some twisted, some true.
Outside the bathroom door, she left him her baggiest pair of boy’s jeans—and her silly sylfana sisters thought diaphanous gowns of spider silk were comfortable—before she stepped out onto the back patio with its ancient wooden picnic table to shake the last of the sand from her wings. One whisper to the night breeze carried the dust and sweat away. Thanks to her heritage and her knack, she didn’t usually need showers.
What a pity.
While she nibbled on a piece of a chocolate bar, she imagined the water coursing down the hard planes of Vaile’s chest, feathering rivulets through the rings of his hair like the streams coursed through the dark woods. Down the water would go, around the pillar of his flesh… In the cottage, the pipes groaned before she could.
By the time he stepped out to join her, she had her breath under control.
Until he crossed under the dim patio light…then her breath was gone again. Oh, such a human pleasure!
What were lazy sags of denim on her was skintight midnight-blue over his lean hips. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. He had pulled the zipper barely to half mast, and the shadow behind the fly teased her with sights unseen.
She dragged her gaze up. When she had grabbed herself an open back halter dress, she hadn’t found anything that would fit him better—not that he had seemed ill at ease with his state of undress out on the beach. Now the crisscross straps that normally felt so free and left her wings exposed seemed a strangling confinement.
He halted beside her on the edge of the pavers where the pine duff softened the stone. He hadn’t put his shoes back on, but he didn’t seem bothered by the damp night on his bare toes. Instead, he gestured at the pale will-o’-the-wisps that danced among the closest pines.
“I thought maybe you would hide your wings and weird lights again,” he said. “Try to make me think I imagined it all.”
“You’ll forget soon enough once you leave. Humans can’t sustain the memory of us without our presence. Yet another symptom of our nothingness.” Which was worse? Being nothing, or being forgotten by him? She tilted her face toward the drifting sparkles that were only a shade lighter than her moon-green dress. “Besides, the wisps go where they please. Even our queen with all her power can’t command them.”
“They follow you everywhere, though. I saw them trailing after you on our beach runs.” He snorted. “I thought I was hyperventilating.”
She slanted a glance at him. “Do you often breathe heavy?”
He grinned. “Only when watching you.”
The heat in her cheeks felt nice in the cool air. “The wisps actually gave me the idea to run away. They would dance in on my breezes. And then dance out again. As far as the fae are concerned, I am not much more significant than they are. I thought if they could just float off so could I.”
“You aren’t insignificant. You aren’t nothing.”
She shook her head, surprised at the intensity in his voice.
He was silent a moment, seeming to gather himself. “What will you do next?”
“Run again. They haven’t caught me yet.” This time, the thought of escape didn’t ratchet up her heartbeat with the thrill of fooling the hunters. Instead, a twinge, sharp as a runner’s cramp, made her cover her heart with her hand. The blue stone pressed against the pulse of her wrist.
“Not tonight anyway.”
A grim note in his voice made her stiffen.
