Page 11 of Dark Hunter's Touch
“You can’t run tonight,” he clarified. “They are out there, looking, and this is as good a place as any to hide. Now, are you going to share that chocolate?” When she passed him the gold foil-wrapped bar, he broke off a square. “Ah, the good stuff.”
He creased the foil carefully over the remaining bar and then licked a chocolate sliver off his fingertip, as if even that tiny taste was a treat to be savored. The steel band of his ring glinted, but the view of his tongue roused a damp heat between her legs and banished her moment of disquiet. A man who knew chocolate was a man to be treasured.
She cleared her suddenly tight throat as he handed her back the bar. “Dark, seventy percent, shade-grown, single origin. You need only one piece. Not that the fae understand that. They prefer multi-night feasts with dozens of courses. The napkins alone would cover the beach in both directions.”
“That must be something to see.”
The intensity of his gaze over the chocolate made her think of the hunters’ hounds eyeing one of those courses. She laid the bar on the picnic table; if she put it in her pocket, the chocolate would melt in an instant from the heat of her flushed skin.
Her wings flexed forward, curving around her to hide her hands—a silly, nervous gesture. She smoothed back the edges self-consciously. “That is pretty much all you get…what you see. Most of the banquets are illusion. You can have endless courses when the food never fills your belly. The wine is water, and silty at that, or so you notice when you wake the next day with mud under your tongue. The napkins are only dead leaves.”
“Then why not just be happy with a piece of real chocolate? The good stuff, of course.”
“The fae would laugh at you for even suggesting it. Our queen comes to power based on the force of her illusions. She keeps the throne by her ability to hold the entire court under her spell.” She shrugged. “Besides, everything—even good chocolate—gets old after a century or so.”
He was silent a moment, letting the chocolate melt in his mouth. Finally he said, “Not everything.”
He took her in his arms, a slow embrace she could have fended off—if she wanted to.
“Tonight,” he murmured. “Tonight you can stop running.”
His kiss was even slower than his embrace. She tasted the chocolate first, of course: sweet complexity with a touch of bitterness. The night breeze flirted with the hem of her short dress, shifting over her thighs. His mouth slanted across hers, that full lower lip a soft and generous gift she accepted with delight.
His earthy desire wrapped around her, almost tighter than her own wings and so intense the hunters’ dogs would be hard pressed to find even a whiff of fae beneath his excitement…or her own.
Her pounding heart left no room for illusion. She wanted this. Wanted Vaile. She wanted him not just for the protection his touch offered but for the warmth that blazed from him, the life she could pretend to live as long as the night lasted.
“Come inside,” she whispered against his lips.
“Gladly.”
She led him to her room. The wisps outside the window provided the only illumination, dancing like silver and gold raindrops over the old glass.
He drew her close to kiss her again and then cast a dubious glance over his shoulder. “Will that bed hold us?”
“Side by side maybe.”
“Well, I don’t want you any farther away than that.” He stroked his hands down her arms, and his fingertips grazed the forward edges of her wings.
She closed her eyes and sighed.
“You like when I touch them?” His voice dropped with another stroke of his hand down her wings, more lingering this time.
“I…I didn’t realize how much.” She stretched against the broad expanse of his chest. “No one else has touched me like this.”
“Silly fairies. Why not?”
“I don’t know.” She fanned her fingers over his collarbone not to push him away but to steady herself. “The fae are afraid to touch, I think. It can be overwhelming, this feeling…”
“What feeling? This?” He ducked his head, and his tongue teased the pulse in the hollow of her throat.
“Anyfeeling,” she gasped. When he raised his head, she said more steadily, “The fae have always lived under the strict rule of our queen. For all the wildness of the faedrealiicourt, she allows no true freedoms. Feelings are too…”
His dark eyes glinted, reflecting the wisps outside. “Unruly?”
“Very.”
“And you want to be unruly too.”
