Page 51 of The Lord of Whispers

“Magic was life. It was in everything and everywhere. This cart would have been propelled by lesser fae magic alone, and it would have taken us about a quarter of the time it will now take us now to get to the estate. And I…”

I ran my hand down his arm, intertwining my hand in his, waiting for him to continue.

“I wouldn’t need my elaborate network of eyes and ears because my ability to channel would deliver to me every word that every person ever whispered at the High Court.”

Channeling was simply the ability to channel magic and could take any number of forms. So, traveling, weaving, healing, and all magical abilities were a subsect of channeling. However, where an ability was so rare that it did not have its own category, it was simply referred to as channeling. It sounded as if Jay’s channeling ability was extraordinarily rare and particularly well-suited for a spymaster.

“How did it work, your ability?” I asked cautiously, knowing I was venturing into territory that no one ever spoke of.

I caressed the top of his hand with my thumb like I was trying to coax the answers I’d wanted for so long from him. But Jay didn’t hesitate to respond to my question.

“My ability to channel is based in air and darkness, so any time someone whispers something—it doesn’t have to be in the dark, that’s a bit of a red herring—those words or sometimes just feelings would find their way back to me. All the whispers would come back to me as a maddening mass of information, and I could sift through it in my mind to find out what I wanted. I could also send a whisper on the wind to whomever I wanted and only that person would be able to hear what I had to say,” Jay explained.

I let Jay’s admission wash over me. So much of what I’d witnessed at the High Court made sense—the way people almost seemed fearful to say anything in front of him, for instance. They didn’tseemfearful. Theywerefearful. I’d heard people refer to Jay as the Lord of Whispers and thought it was just a reference to his position as spymaster for the King. But he was, quite literally, a lord of whispers, I realized, stunned.

I knew enough about magic to know what Jay described as his ability was a wholly unique ability. Each ability had one or more affinity—air, water, fire, earth, light, and dark—but as the high lord alluded to, the affinities did not necessarily provide clear parameters to an ability. The only real rule was that an ability was never both light and dark. It could only be one or the other. So, an ability with a dark affinity, like Jay’s, could mean that the ability only worked in the darkness, or it could mean that it was just an ability that was associated with or worked better with darkness.

The ability to travel was a good example of the differences in affinities. Generally, a traveler could transport persons and things to separate locations with the power of their minds. This power varied greatly. Some travelers could only transport themselves. Some travelers could only transport objects and not people. Some travelers with a water affinity, for instance, could only transport people and things over a body of water.

I worked up the nerve to ask the question that was burning in my mind.

“Do you still have some of your power?” I asked, at last voicing the question I’d thought to myself many times before this moment.

“Some of it,” he whispered. “But it is all still there. I can feel it. It’s like there’s a wall between me and my power. I feel the entirety of it bustling on one side of the wall, but I’m stuck on the other side, and no matter what I do, I cannot break through. But there’s a tiny crack in the wall, I think, that allows just a trickle of my magic to come through. And lately”—he looked at me—“I feel a little closer to my magic.”

I sat next to my high lord, who must have been one of the most magically gifted high fae in the last several hundred years before his powers faded. My fingers laced between his, my heart broke for him. He had never been so vulnerable with me. I wanted to cover him with the assurance of my lips and tell him how absolutely amazing he still was, even without his full powers.

I detangled my hand from his and climbed into his lap. I had to hike up the long coral-colored cotton dress I wore in anticipation of the beach later that day so that I could straddle him. Sitting astride him, I looked into his penetrating gray eyes and tried to convey my thoughts to him.

You are so strong, even without your powers. I love you,I said with my gaze.

Jay wrapped his muscled arms around my petite waist, drawing me into his body, and kissed me. He didn’t say it, but I saw my love reflected in his eyes. I’d managed to penetrate the walls of the high-lord veneer he had presented to the world for hundreds of years. I continued to cover him with soft small kisses, kissing his mouth, his cheeks, his eyes. The length of him grew hard under me, and I ached for him to be covered in my wetness.

The tenderness of the moment gave way to something wild and carnal. He reached his hand under my little dress and ripped my panties off. Responding to his urgency, I clawed at his pants, anxious to remove the only barrier remaining between us. Jay parted my lips with his tongue and drove his tongue into my mouth at the same time he drove into me. My moan as he slid in and out of me was garbled by his mouth pressed punishingly over mine.

He ripped his mouth away from mine, his thrusts becoming deeper as he made room for himself within my core.

“Say it, Alarie. Say it for me,” he demanded, driving himself into me at the same time he pulled me down onto him.

“I love you, Jay,” I confessed, letting the words spill from my mouth for the first time in my entire life.

I’d never said those three words to any man.

Driven by my confession, he began to plunge himself into me faster. I responded to his rhythm, maddeningly circling my hips.

“I love you, Alarie,” he echoed, firmly grasping my chin, forcing me to look at him and see the love in his eyes.

We both raced toward our release, the emotion of our confessions urging us on. He began to lose his rhythm inside of me.

“Now come for me, my love,” he demanded.

“Oh fuck, Jay,” I said, my dirty mouth taking no reprieve, not even during the sweetness of our moments.

My legs began to shake, and I was pushed over the edge, finding my bliss. He came undone at the same time as me, and in that moment, it felt like we shared one pounding heartbeat.

25

Alarie

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