Page 18 of Dark Hunter's Touch
“It wasn’t enough.”
The low pitch of his voice reverberated through her, finding a yearning echo in places deep within her core.
“It was more than you deserved,” she said. “Even skin to skin, you lied.”
As she yanked the chain over her head, she swallowed against the hurt that cracked her voice. That was not a truth she would give him.
“I didn’t lie to you. You didn’t ask me anything.”
As if that made her feel less the fool. “You should have just let the hounds shred me yesterday when they caught us on the beach.”
“No.”
Without the softening human glamour he had worn, his skin shone like the backlit razor edge of an obsidian blade, highlighted against the velvety black of his wings and the darkly mellow gleam of his leather leggings. The steel-studded collar around his neck glinted like bared teeth. But his naked chest was the same, a broad expanse of flight-honed muscle where she had rested her head last night.
She squelched the memory and lifted her lip in a sneer. “I know the Lord Hunter keeps all his killers on a short leash. Did you need a night with a sylfana so badly?”
His bare shoulders squared against the arc of wings as he met her gaze without flinching. “No. I wanted you.”
The answer silenced her for a heartbeat. “Why?”
He shrugged, and his wings dipped in an almost bashful movement. “This.”
At first, she didn’t understand what he was showing her. Then he reached up to spread his long fingers in a V on both sides of a raised scar at the joint where his wing met his shoulder. Though the edges had knit well, the wound must have been horrific. In fact, his wing must have been nearly severed…
“You,” she whispered. “The hunter whelp.”
“I did not even have a name then.” His finger slid over the knot of scarring. “You told me I wouldn’t feel it forever. You were wrong. I still feel it. But it reminds me of what I wished for, what I wanted most.”
“To fly.”
“No, I wanted you,” he repeated. “Apparently it was you who decided to fly away.”
Her throat tightened. “Not soon enough, not far enough.”
“After I became a hunter fully fledged, I saw you at one of those never-ending feasts. The wisps danced around you, and the breeze tugged your hair into loops around your shoulders. You just stood there, but every part of you yearned for flight.”
That could have been any one of hundreds of nights. “The queen’s illusions are much too strong for me to see through, but her court always stinks of ashes when I face into the wind.”
“I never noticed anything except you. I wanted to make you dance.”
Olette narrowed her eyes. “You are probably a fae strong enough to force me to burn through my slippers.”
“No. I meant…” The hesitation went on long enough for even a long-lived fae to get impatient. “I wanted you to want to dance. With me.”
She wished she had seen him on that night, just another one of the queen’s hunters, keeping watch from the shadows—watching for trouble both beyond and within the faedrealii. They could have indulged in one of the court’s meaningless liaisons and parted ways without this pain. “You felt that longing? Then don’t you see that the Lord Hunter was right? The faeshould be free to want, to desire, to feel. It is a magic within us, and we have no right to steal it from others.”
He loosed a rough laugh. “You say the Lord Hunter was right? He killed my brothers, almost killed me. Wanting you as I did—until you filled all my senses and every path I took on the hunt brought me back to you—only proves the queen was right to outlaw the Undoing.”
She shook her head with bitter resignation. “So you told the queen you would hunt me down, show me the error of my ways.”
“I told them I could bring you back alive.”
“I won’t go back. Especially not with you. You are everything I finally left behind. Cold and unfeeling.”
His eyes darkened as he stepped into her space. The arc of his wings made his looming mass even more imposing. “Not cold at least,” he growled. “Didn’t I prove that last night?”
Rage at the reminder—and the sudden, fierce longing it roused in her that made her whole body clench with need—conjured one last burst of strength in her, and she hurled the necklace at him. The breeze spun up in answering agitation and flung an arc of sand with the chain. Vaile lifted one arm to shield his eyes.
