CHAPTER 7
Within two hours of Walker’s disappearance into the bedroom, Jake had managed to find and immerse himself in a college basketball game, and Fiona was seven seconds and half a breath away from climbing the apartment’s Spartan walls.
“You know, if you add short bursts of jogging every quarter mile or so, you’ll get a better cardiovascular workout.”
Fiona kept pacing, but she still managed an irritated grumble in the werewolf’s direction. “If I’m bothering you, feel free to call me a cab. I’ll be out of your hair before the meter starts running.”
“Right. Sorry, but I’m really too young to die. Besides, if my uncle kicks my ass hard enough that I miss my statistics exam tomorrow, my mom will be happy to finish me off.” He grinned at her. “You’re hot, but you’re not worth facing the wrath of a Lupine mother paying NYU tuition.”
“Gee, thanks. I see charm runs in your family.” Tightening her mouth to keep him from seeing her almost smile, she turned away and went back to pacing. He was a cute kid all right, or he would be if he’d just stop being so uncooperative. Kind of like his uncle, who was way too sexy for her peace of mind when he wasn’t being a stubborn jerk.
“What did you do to piss him off anyway?”
Tugged away from her thoughts, Fiona turned back to the sofa and frowned at Jake. “What are you talking about?”
“My uncle. What did you do to piss him off? He looked ready to chew metal when he went to bed.”
“You mean that wasn’t just his normal sunny disposition?” She shrugged. “I think he objects to my breathing the air of ‘his’ city. But he’s gonna have to learn to deal.”
Jake raised an eyebrow, his amber gaze much too insightful for the pup he was. “Not that it’s my place to give advice to a princess, but just so you know, he can get even crankier when he thinks you’re being deliberately disobedient. Trust me. I speak from experience.”
“Okay, number one, what is this obsession you folk have with idiotic titles? And letter b, in order for me to be ‘disobedient,’ your uncle would need to have some kind of authority over me that required me to obey. Which is, by the way, a four-letter word. I don’t do obedience.”
The werewolf’s bark of laughter stopped Fiona mid-pace. She crossed her arms over her chest and gave him her unamused look.
“Sorry,” Jake chuckled. “It’s just that for someone who seems to be touchy about being called a princess, you sure don’t have a problem acting like one.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Jake grinned and focused back on the game, while Fiona brooded at the reflection of his good cheer in the television screen. Obnoxious brat. That had solidified the family resemblance. Two damned werewolf peas in a pod. But at least the pup didn’t get her hormones raging. Which would have just been weird. And kind of creepy. It was bad enough that she should lust after Walker, in spite of his nasty attitude. Was that kinky? Did that make her some sort of masochist? Maybe heading back to Faerie was a good idea after all.
“Not to be all nosy or anything, but what are you doing here in the first place? I thought Fae weren’t allowed on this side of the veil without the queen’s permission.”
“Not to be all nosy?” He just nodded and kept grinning. Fiona sighed. “It’s really none of your business, but I was trying to get away and relax. Fat lot of good that’s done me.”
“What did you need to get away from? Tiara too tight?”
She gave him a look that should have eviscerated him. He winked at her. She beat back the urge to strangle him. “Not what. Who. Though now I think I just traded in one form of torture for another. Your uncle could give my entire family a run for its money, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
“Yeah, well, running things is kind of my family’s specialty.” He flipped off the remote control and resettled on the sofa facing her. “So who in your family drove you off?”
“Are you sure you’re Lupine? ‘Cause you’re as curious as any cat I’ve ever met.” She sighed and dropped onto the sofa next to him, since it didn’t look like he was giving up anytime soon. “It was kind of a culmination of events. The last straw was one of my cousins. He let all the court intrigue go to his head. He thinks that if we get married, we’ll each move up a few slots on the list of Aunt Mab’s heirs.”
“Would you?” Jake had already asked the question before her words actually sank in. He did a double take. “Wait a second. Queen Mab is your aunt?”
“My father’s sister.”
He gave a low whistle. “Wow. No wonder Uncle Tobe is so pissy.”
“I don’t think it’s much of an excuse. It’s none of his business what I do, and no one appointed him in charge of enforcing Mab’s rules.”
“Right. You really believe that?”
“Why shouldn’t I? He’s not Fae, he’s never been to Faerie, so what business is it of his if I break some Fae rules?”
“I think he could care less if you’re breaking rules in Faerie,” Jake said. “But he does care about how it affects us here. It’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility for the queen to take it out on us for not guarding the borders if she finds out you’re missing. And that’s not the kind of trouble Uncle Tobe needs right now.”
Fiona sneered. “What? Am I jeopardizing his golfing schedule?”
“No, the negotiations with the humans.”
She froze. “What negotiations?”
“The Unveiling negotiations,” he responded easily. “They’ve been at it for almost six months now. The Council is trying to work out a deal to guarantee civil rights for the Others before we let the werecat out of the bag, so to speak.”
“Why in the Lady’s name would you want to?” Like most Fae, Fiona harbored a bias or two against humans. Not that she disliked them, but she viewed them a lot like humans viewed chimpanzees—as amusing but primitive.
“Not much choice.” Jake shrugged and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a minute later with a can of soda and a gargantuan bag of potato chips. “It’s getting too hard to keep the secret. Then last winter, there was a really close call with a group of human religious nuts who were trying to out us and simultaneously launch a crusade with Others in place of the infidels and Web pages spreading the word instead of troubadours.” He grinned and dug out a handful of chips. “I’m taking medieval European history this semester. The lecture hall is overflowing with women.”
Fiona laughed. Apparently some things were common to the male sex as a whole, regardless of species. Shaking her head, she grabbed a handful of chips herself. She was a sucker for sour cream and onion. “So your uncle is part of the negotiations?”
“Nah. The Council handles all that diplomatic stuff, but they appointed the pack to oversee security. The alpha is busy covering the summit itself, so he put Uncle Tobe in charge of making sure none of the folk in the city get out of hand and start trouble. It would be a really bad time for anyone in the Other community to do something that could scare off the humans. Uncle Walker and the security he put together are there to make sure no Others get out of hand, and if they do, to make sure we keep it quiet and take care of it ourselves. We won’t stand for anyone harming a human, but we’d rather punish the perpetrator than the entire Other community.”
She suppressed a wince. Hearing about the situation did kind of put her visit in a new light and made Walker’s reaction to it a lot more understandable. If the Others really wanted to try to live openly with the humans, setting the terms would not come easily. But it still didn’t explain why he was so determined to keep his hands off her. She was already there, so technically, the damage had been done.
“Okay, so I’ll give him some slack for being under a little stress, but I don’t see how that negates the need to act with a little common civility.”
Jake gave a short laugh. “The stress has nothing to do with the incivility, Princess.”
“Fiona.”
“Whatever.” He gave her a look that suggested she might want to be measured for a dunce cap. “You can’t really be so clueless that you haven’t noticed he’s foaming at the mouth over the desire to jump your bones.”
“Could have fooled me,” she muttered. “My bones were all happily bracing for impact. He’s the one who pulled the ‘no touch’ crap, not me.”
“Sheesh, sometimes you old folks are so slow.” He took a slug from his soda can and shook his head pityingly. “Of course he’s not touching you. The man’s wound so tight, it wouldn’t take more than you sneezing in his direction for his trigger to fire. He sure as hell wasn’t straining his zipper ‘cause he was all excited about seeing me.”
“Lady, you mortals can be so annoying.”
“Oh, like the Fae are all sweetness and light.”
Fiona dusted off her hands on the knees of Walker’s sweatpants and muttered, “I never claimed to be, but at least I’m capable of admitting when I want to wrap my legs around someone. And I’ve never teased anyone and then cut them off and immediately tried to shove them into another plane.”
Jake snickered. “I doubt my uncle has, either. But if it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure that if the circumstances had been different, I would be in my dorm room asleep right now, and you’d be covered by him instead of his clothes.”
“Right. That makes everything all better.”
The nap had sweetened Walker’s disposition a bit, at least enough to keep him from yelling at her as he led the way down the path toward the gate back to Faerie. Apparently, he was one of those types who really needed their beauty sleep.
Just because he no longer seemed angry with her, though, didn’t mean he’d become her best friend. He was civil and moderately pleasant, but he’d taken to speaking to her the minimum amount allowed by circumstance. When he’d been acting like a grumpy jerk, it had been a lot easier to keep from feeling slighted by his deliberately impersonal manners.
Over the course of the morning, she’d come to accept the fact that circumstances were going to prevent them from enjoying the kind of time together she would have liked. The kind where both of them got and stayed naked for a prolonged period. But it still smarted that he seemed so determined to treat her something like a great-aunt of whom he was not particularly fond. For someone used to being lavished with attention to the point of being fawned over, the lack of such treatment had stirred an unaccustomed feeling inside her. She felt hurt, and that made her angry.
If they had been alone, she probably would have taken that temper out on Walker’s broad back, but Jake had dutifully returned to the apartment after his exam and now brought up the rear of their little procession. While he looked and sounded as disgustingly good-humored as he’d been all night, she couldn’t help but feel less like the two Lupines were ensuring her safety on the trip back home and more like they were running her out of town on a rail. She kept getting this itch under her skin and feeling the urge to look down and make sure she hadn’t been covered in tar and feathers.
“Do you think you’ll have any trouble getting back into Faerie without being seen?” Jake asked, lengthening his strides until he walked almost next to her.
“No. The other side of the gate was in the middle of the woods when I left, and I doubt I’ve been gone long enough for it to have relocated. If anyone were going to see me go, it would be on this side.”
“That’s why we waited for twilight. Fewer people around and the low light will keep any who are from getting a good look at what’s going on. Uncle Tobe knows his stuff.”
Jake wasn’t shouting, but he hadn’t bothered to keep his voice down, either. Fiona knew Walker could hear what they were saying, but he didn’t even twitch a muscle to indicate he cared. Probably thought speaking would delay her departure by four nanoseconds.
“I have no doubt. He certainly seems efficient when he puts his mind to something.”
“That’s one way to put it.” Jake grinned.
They turned off the end of the path and broke through the area of trees and brambles that separated it from the clearing around the Faerie gate. The glade was bordered by the woods on one side and by tall rock formations on the other, and Fiona could see charred scars on the ground where the demon’s foulness had scorched the earth beneath it.
Walker halted and turned to face them, but his eyes were on his nephew, not Fiona. “Jake, keep an eye on the direction of the path. I don’t want any humans getting lost and wandering in to see this. The last thing we need is more trouble.”
Jake nodded, then turned and grinned down at Fiona, grabbing her to him for a quick hug. “It was nice meeting you, Fiona. Give us another couple of months and then come for a real visit. An authorized one, okay? I’ll take you to this great little Thai place. It’s BYOB, so you can buy the beer and contribute to my delinquency as a minor.”
She couldn’t help smiling back. “I might take you up on that, kid. And if not, you’ll have to come visit me sometime. If you think beer makes you delinquent, wait till I pour you a glass or two of Faerie wine.”
“Come on, Princess,” Walker cut in, his tone brisk. “Time to go. I’ve got to patrol tonight, and you need to get back home before any of us get in trouble.”
Fiona narrowed her eyes and turned on him. “Don’t worry, Fluffy; I’m going. We’re back at the gate, no one knows I was ever here, and in another seven seconds I’ll be out of your life for good. Which suits me fine, given what pleasant company you’ve been for most of my time here.”
Walker didn’t bother to look repentant. He just gazed down at her with his distant expression and his old-gold eyes and quirked an eyebrow.
Somehow, that one little gesture completely snapped her control.
Later, she might have to claim that she’d been having an epileptic fit or maybe that she’d just lost her balance and fallen onto his lips. Somehow she’d find a way to explain what had made her throw herself at the grumpy werewolf who barely seemed inclined to give her the time of day. But for now, she just needed one more taste of him.
It was exactly the way she remembered from that one brief tease in his apartment. He tasted like aged Faerie wine and felt like unfettered temptation. Inexplicably, he made her forget every single thing she wanted to lambaste him for and just sink fast beneath the deepening, drowning pleasure.
Damn, he played dirty. Especially given that she’d started the game.
That didn’t stop her from drawing every last drop of enjoyment she could get from the kiss, and she got a lot. The stroke of his tongue, the nip of his teeth, the dark, erotic flavor of him. She drank it all in until her head was spinning and her knees were weak and she felt the warmth of magic flaring between them. The spark eventually penetrated even Walker’s thick skull. She felt the tenor of the kiss change, felt him ease back. Then his hands were on her shoulders, and he pulled her away from him, stepping back for good measure. He seemed almost desperate to put some distance between them, but Fiona couldn’t help but notice that the fingers he had clenched around her shoulders were having trouble letting her go.
She smiled in satisfaction. Let him think about that on his patrol tonight.
Raising an eyebrow, she reached up and eased his hands off her shoulders, taking a path that skimmed the sides of her breasts so she could watch his eyes heat and his nostrils flare in reaction. A girl had to take her pleasures where she could find them.
“Thanks for everything, Spot.” She grinned and traced a finger over his lower lip, still damp and swollen from their kiss. “I can’t say it’s been fun, but it has been interesting. You should look me up if you’re ever in my neck of the woods. I could… show you the sights.”
This time, when Walker looked down at her, he didn’t look irritated. The glow in his eyes definitely had more to do with arousal than annoyance, and if she hadn’t known better, Fiona might even have thought his expression held something almost like regret.
The corner of his mouth kicked up and his hands squeezed her waist gently before dropping to his sides. “I’ll keep that in mind, Princess. Take care of yourself. Have a safe trip.”
He stepped back and slid his hands into his pockets. Fiona let her gaze linger as she looked him over one last time. Then, she blew him a kiss, waggled her fingers at Jake, and turned toward the gate for home. She look a step forward, leaned into the magic, and felt the slam of rejection as the power picked her up and hurled her away from Faerie and back into the world she had just attempted to leave.
Something was very, very wrong.