CHAPTER 10
Fiona tipped her head back and surveyed the elegant black tower that rose in front of her. At her back, the sounds of Manhattan traffic mingled with the rustling of Central Park. Subdued bronze numbers glowed against the building’s dark edifice, and the dark green awning that stretched out from the entrance cast a cool, sheltering shadow across the sidewalk. “Yup.” She nodded. “This looks like Uncle Dionnu.” At her side, Walker had ceased to vibrate with frustration, but she almost would have preferred that to the granite silence of disapproval he’d been carrying around ever since. He stood at her side, silent and stoic, and said not a word.
“Not that Uncle Dionnu looks like a high-rise,” she continued, filling in the silence. “I mean, he’s Fae. Have you ever seen a bulky Fae? But he certainly likes the better things in life, and since he seems to consider the human world to be a slum to begin with, if he were going to spend time here, it would definitely be in a place like this.”
She looked up into Walker’s face, pursed her lips, and returned her gaze forward. “Right, then. Maybe we should go in?”
She took his rumbled grunt for an assent. No matter how he might have meant it.
Five steps took her up to the smoked-glass doors at the building’s entrance, but the doorman prevented her taking any more. He stepped into her path, his scarlet and gold frock coat covering shoulders of intimidating breadth. His gloved hands remained clasped loosely in front of him, but his meaning came across loud and clear. He intended to keep his own gate well secured.
“Can I help you, miss?”
His tone was coolly polite, his accent pure Brooklyn. Fiona tried a charming smile. “I just stopped by to pop in on my uncle. He’s staying in the building while he’s in the city.”
“His name?”
“Mr. MacLir.”
The face didn’t move. “Is he expecting you?”
She added a few bats of her eyelashes and cursed the damn demon for taking up so much of her magic. “I’m sure he must be. I always visit when we’re both in Manhattan.”
“And your name is?”
“Fiona… Malcomson.”
“One moment, please.”
Keeping one eye on her, or more specifically on her and the decidedly menacing male beside her, the doorman stepped over to the stand at the right of the entrance and pulled out a clipboard. He began rifling through the pages, and Fiona turned to Walker, her smile fixed in place. As soon as the doorman looked through the admittance list and failed to find her name, their chances of getting in the door would go up in smoke. There was only one way to deal with this.
She sidled closer beside Walker and wrapped her arms around an unyielding one of his. “Walker,” she murmured through clenched teeth. “I need you to do me an itty-bitty favor.”
His eyes blazed down at her, reflecting all the ruthlessly controlled aggravation he’d stuffed down inside him. If he kept that up, he was just begging for an ulcer. “I don’t think this is the time to—”
She rolled her eyes and reached up to cup one hand around the back of his neck. “Okay, two favors. First of all, shut up. Second…”
Rising up on tiptoes, she gave a sharp tug and dragged him into the kiss before he had time to think of a way to stop her.
She should try the ambush tactic more often. It certainly got results. By the time he convinced himself he ought to be protesting, even he had to realize it was way too late for that. She already had her fingers wound up in his hair, her tongue tangled with his, and her body pressed up against his stiff frame. He had no choice but to stand there and take it like a man.
If Fiona’s lips hadn’t already been occupied, she never could have kept them from curving. Instead, she kept them busy. Above them, Walker’s mouth felt firm and warm and tasted of heat and irritation. She ignored the irritation and nurtured the heat with strokes of her tongue, teasing nips of her teeth, and the soft, sweet welcome of her body.
His groan broke against her mouth the instant before he seized control of the kiss. The clenching of his hands into fists turned into the clenching of his arms around her. One arm wrapped around her waist and jerked her more tightly against him, while the other snaked around her shoulders, his hand tunneling through her hair until he could cradle the back of her head in his broad palm and hold her still as he ravished her mouth.
Actually, she wasn’t sure he could be accused of ravishing her, since she’d attacked him first, but she had better things to do than quibble. Like savor the taste of him, the feel of his hands on her, the scent of his woodsy, musky skin. Nerve and muscle fluttered and clenched in her belly, and her heart sped up, beating hard in the base of her throat. Lust and magic began to rise inside her in a great, swirling vortex of pulsing energy. It twined up from her stomach, through her lungs, and into her head, leaving her dizzy and exhilarated. Poured down her limbs until she thought the power must be dripping like water from her fingers and toes. It felt different from the magic that filled Faerie, not as thick, sleepier, younger, but it would do. It would be enough for now.
Of course, now that she’d given a small recharge to her battery, using it would require untangling herself from a werewolf who happened to be doing exactly what she wanted for the first time in their short and maddening acquaintance.
She gave a mental sigh. There always had to be a catch.
Bracing herself for the unpleasant task at hand, Fiona whimpered and moved her hands flat against Walker’s chest in preparation for disengagement. That’s when he launched a sneak attack of his own and slid his hand down the back of her neck to let his fingers draw random, bone-melting patterns against her ultrasensitive skin.
Her whimper turned into a moan, and she sank forward against him. Oh hell. Another minute wouldn’t hurt anything…
“Excuse me.”
One more glorious, breath-stealing, toe-curling minute…
“Excuse me. Miss.”
Damn all doormen.
Walker tore his mouth from hers and turned on the man with a feral snarl. Struggling to draw air, Fiona teetered on her feet until her brain kicked back into gear, reminding her where she was.
Reminding her who she was.
And why she was there.
The doorman held a clipboard in one hand, and his expression of polite blankness had morphed into one of thinly veiled disdain sometime in the past few earth-shattering moments. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see—”
Cutting him off in midsentence, Fiona gathered up a good bit of the energy from the kiss and sent it winging straight at the doorman’s thick skull. He never saw it coming, but his borderline belligerence melted into a jolly, welcoming grin.
“—any reason why you shouldn’t go straight up.” All but humming with the eagerness to serve, the doorman, now looking tickled to the tips of his wing-tipped toes, hurried to the entrance and held the door open wide. “Your uncle is in Seventeen-ten. The two of you have a nice visit, and when you finish, you just come back and see me, and I’ll make sure you get a cab home.” He waved them inside. “Go on now. Enjoy yourselves. And give your uncle my best.”
“Thanks so much.” Grinning in satisfaction, Fiona grabbed Walker’s hand and tugged him toward the door. “You’re a peach.”
Behind her, the werewolf glowered and grumped, but she ignored him and headed straight for the elevators.
“The minute I saw you,” he muttered, stepping in behind her and staring at the button panel as the car lurched upward, “I knew you were trouble.”
Fiona snorted. “You think that’s trouble? Sweetheart, you need to get out more. Save the disappointment for my uncle. It won’t do you any more good with him than it does with me, but at least he deserves it.”
Walker figured he’d pissed off somebody powerful. And vindictive. What else explained the misery of his current situation? Why else would he be tortured with a Faerie princess whom he absolutely couldn’t have and who refused to keep her hands, lips, and mouthwatering body off of him? He couldn’t possibly have done anything to deserve this.
“Just to let you know,” his walking penance said as the doors of the elevator slid open on the seventeenth floor, “my uncle can be… difficult. You might want to let me handle him, do the talking.”
Couldn’t possibly.
He stalked out of the elevator in her wake and followed her down the thickly carpeted hall, concentrating fiercely on keeping his expression blank and his eyes off the swing of her ass. These two activities left little energy over for anything else, so instead of protesting, he trailed behind her to the wide wooden door with the gleaming brass numbers designating Dionnu’s apartment and waited while she pressed the buzzer.
He fought a losing battle to look away from the smooth, pale skin of her upper chest and the hint of cleavage exposed by her sapphire blue velvet top. The material clung to her form in intriguing hills and valleys…
His expression snapped into a frown, and he raked his gaze over her petite form. Sometime between the building entrance and the apartment door, his sweatpants and button-down shirt that had bagged off of her so concealingly had disappeared and been replaced by the clinging velvet top and a slim-fitting skirt in charcoal gray that fell past her knees. For all its length, the garment shunned modesty with the way it cupped her ass and opened along a tantalizing slit in the side that offered peeks at smooth, silk-stockinged thigh.
He raised his eyes to her face and lowered his brows into a scowl. “What the hell happened to your clothes?”
She slanted him a wry look. “Trust me. I can’t go to visit my uncle wearing your workout clothes. This would not be a good idea. Poor fashion sense is a sign of weakness where I come from.”
Walker didn’t think the sweats had expressed poor fashion sense. He’d actually liked the way she’d looked in his oversize garments. Sort of small and sexy and tasty.
Shit.
He was saved from thinking himself into deeper trouble when the door opened to reveal an exceedingly short man with unruly dark curls and skin the color of Dutch-process cocoa.
“May I help you?”
Fiona gave the brownie her patented sugar-sweet smile. “We’re here to see Dionnu.”
The brownie didn’t move. For someone so small, he did an admirable job of blocking the entrance. Maybe the Jets should consider him as an early draft pick.
“Is he expecting you?”
“Oh, I doubt it,” she breezed, “but you can tell him his niece is here.”
The brownie didn’t blink. He took a step backward and allowed them in, closing the door behind them and then ushering them a few steps down the hall to a sitting room. “If you will wait here, please, I will let the master know you have called.”
Master? What, had they wandered into an old episode of Upstairs Downstairs! Fiona seemed to take it in stride, wandering farther into the elegantly furnished room and taking a seat on one end of a sofa that looked as if it had come out of some little corner of Versailles. It also looked like it would snap in two if Walker tried to settle his 250 pounds on it. Lips tightening, he took a post at the end of it and leaned his hip against the back near Fiona’s head. Arms crossed over his chest, he waited for an audience with the king.
The concept struck Walker as a little surreal. He’d met plenty of important people in his life, and in his line of work he had spent a good amount of time with some of them. Beta of the Silverback Clan was a position of respect and a calling in its own right, but the pay sucked—meaning it didn’t exist. So he worked a day job as well, as chief of security for the Vircolac club. He’d taken over the job from the former pack beta, Logan Hunter, who had moved to Connecticut a couple of years ago and become alpha of his own pack. Before that, Walker had worked on Logan’s crew, bouncing unruly customers, installing and maintaining the club’s intricate and sophisticated security system, and taking a few private protection gigs on the side. He was good at it, not just because of his sharp Lupine senses, his strength and speed, but because he had the mind for it. And the nerves. He didn’t flinch and he didn’t fail in his duties. Ever.
Of course that had been BP. Before the Princess.
Since meeting her, he figured his nerves had frayed to bloody spaghetti strands, and now here he sat in the living room of the King of Faerie trying to determine if the guy might be up to something a little fishy.
Damn, he needed a vacation.
Eyes on the door and attention on his thoughts, Walker reflected on the potential badness of the current situation and declared it monumental. Part of that stemmed from Fiona’s suspicious and pessimistic reaction. After all, she was related to the king, which meant she knew him and what he was capable of a lot better than anyone else Walker knew. But the rest of the itch between his shoulder blades came at the prompting of his own instincts, and those told him—screamed at him, really—that trouble currently stampeded toward him like a herd of angry water buffalo. He couldn’t give much of a logical explanation for why he felt like that, but his instincts tended to be good ones, and he’d learned a long time ago to rely on them and listen to what they had to say.
He didn’t know all that much about the inner workings of the Fae courts. He knew there were two of them and that they traded power year in and year out, each monarch reigning supreme for six months before surrendering power to the other. He knew Queen Mab ruled the Seelie Court, as she had for the last nine hundred years, and he knew her people were renowned for their art and music, their capricious, merry natures, and their vain beauty.
And he knew about the Unseelie Court, ruled for just as long by King Dionnu. Those Fae enjoyed a different sort of fame, one based on intrigue and mystery, dangerous machinations and dark seductions, wild midnight rides and raids, and dark, powerful magics. But that just about summed up his understanding of Faerie.
Because of the restrictions on travel between the two worlds, his exposure to the fair folk has been extremely limited before Fiona’s arrival. He’d met only one Fae before, a young man obsessed with his own entertainment and convinced of his own irresistible beauty. Now Walker realized the man had been a cousin of Fiona’s, but at the time he’d just thought of him as a pain in the ass. His self-indulgent and unauthorized jaunt around town had brought the wrath of Mab down on the head of the Others and caused a world of trouble. The Silverback Clan and the rest of the Council of Others had bid him a relieved farewell and hoped earnestly never to encounter his kind again.
Like everything else, that had also been BP, so Walker figured he could be forgiven for not having anticipated that he’d be dragged kicking and howling into the political life of a culture he knew no more about than how to spell it. The assumption didn’t seem out of line.
Oh, who the hell was he kidding? Since the princess had waltzed into his life, the lines had shifted so far out of whack, he couldn’t even be sure they still existed. Especially the one that had been drawn to keep the paws of scruffy beta werewolves off of elegant Faerie princesses. She seemed completely oblivious of that one, as she demonstrated every time she pressed that luscious little body against him.
His teeth clenched reflexively against the desire to lick his chops. Damn her for giving him a taste, because now he couldn’t stop remembering it. His fingers itched to touch her again, to fill themselves with sweet, subtle curves and silky soft skin, and it was all her fault.
She should know better than to tempt him, know better than he did that a relationship between a Lupine and a Fae was doomed from the beginning. Lupines mated for life, a life that lasted an average of seventy years or so, as opposed to the Fae’s virtual immortality. If that didn’t put a damper on the romance, other facts would, like the one about Lupine jealousy—which blazed out of control anytime someone so much as stared too long at a mate—juxtaposed against the notoriously fickle passions of the Fae. All in all, these two twains were destined never to meet, much less live happily ever after.
So why did Walker find himself struggling so hard not to pin the princess to the nearest flat surface and mark her as indisputably his? What kind of sick joke was that?
Blocking the intoxicating scent of her from his mind, he fixed his gaze on the sitting-room door just in time to see it open for a figure that defied all of his expectations about how a thousand-year-old king should look.
Instead of a distinguished figure who radiated wisdom and dignity, Walker found himself staring at a GQ cover model. Dionnu looked no more than thirty, with pale, unlined skin and the leanly muscled build of a runner. He stood tall, over six feet, and his erect posture brought the slim flexibility of birch trees incongruously to mind. He wore a pair of black denim jeans and a gauzy silk shirt almost the same sapphire shade as Fiona’s top. Like his niece, his black hair fell in glossy waves about his head, curling down over his collar in the kind of chic disarray only achievable through magic or expensive stylists. Unlike Fiona, he had black, empty eyes that reminded Walker of a reptile or a sorcerer.
Dionnu’s aura of elegant grace and lazy amusement really should have made him look effeminate or weak, but his eyes kept that from happening. This was not anyone Walker would show his back to in a dark alley. Or on a crowded street corner at high noon.
“Fiona, darling,” the Fae drawled as he stepped into the room. He spared a brief, dismissive glance for the brownie behind him, who scurried off as if on a mission. “I’m delighted to see you again, but I admit it is a surprise. I thought your aunt would sooner renounce her throne than allow one of her pets to be exposed to my corrupting influence.”
Fiona had risen to her feet when her uncle entered, and Walker watched her offer a small curtsy before she smiled at the king with her trademark sunny charm. “You know me, Uncle. I never was very good at following orders.”
Dionnu chuckled, an unmerry sound that made Walker’s hackles rise. “I do, and I like to credit my side of the family tree for that.” He took Fiona’s hands and kissed her lightly on each cheek. “I take it that explains your presence here in the human world? A little civil disobedience?”
“Exactly. Every girl needs a vacation from the rules now and then. And since Aunt Mab is nowhere in sight, it’s the perfect place to relax.”
Still smiling, Dionnu turned and looked at Walker. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Niece?”
“If you insist.” Fiona laughed dismissively and glanced over her shoulder at Walker, her expression saying she paid him about as much attention as the average plant stand. “But he’s no one important. The Council of Others assigned him to me as a sort of bodyguard. Apparently, they’re a bit paranoid over the idea of something bad happening to a member of court on their watch. Just ignore him. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
Walker’s jaw clenched at that. If he hadn’t known it to be an outright lie, he would have been tempted to grab her and demonstrate graphically just how difficult he was to ignore, but this didn’t seem like an opportune time. Given she’d started off her meeting with her uncle by outright lying to him, Walker was willing to credit her with some sort of strategy. He just hoped it was a good one.
He kept his expression blank and his gaze focused straight ahead of him while Dionnu gave him a cursory evaluation. Behind the mask of boredom, Walker thought he saw the king’s eyes flicker, but Dionnu said nothing, just turned and led his niece to a grouping of furniture placed not around the room’s large, inviting fireplace but around a mirror the size of a small pond that took up most of the center of one wall.
Seating himself in a thronelike wing chair, Dionnu gestured for Fiona to make herself comfortable. “I have to confess I’m surprised that you would make the Council of Others a stop on a vacation visit to the city, Niece. I would have thought you would be eager to see more interesting sights.”
Fiona laughed lightly and perched back on a sofa nearly identical to the one she’d recently vacated. Figuring he might as well play along for the moment, Walker took up a sentry’s position just behind her shoulder. “You can be certain it wasn’t on my touring list, Uncle, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I had no idea you were here, too, or I’d have come straight to you, but I needed to get help somewhere when the Faerie gate didn’t open on my way back home.”
“The gate didn’t open?” Dionnu frowned and crossed his legs in another of those should-have-been-girlie moves. “What are you talking about?”
“The gate in Inwood Park. The one I came in through. When I went back and tried to cross back into Faerie, I couldn’t. The gate has been sealed somehow.”
Walker watched Dionnu’s expression out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t see much of anything beyond surprise and maybe a little irritation. Neither of them, though, made it as far as those blank eyes.
“I don’t see how it could happen. A gate has never spontaneously closed itself before. It doesn’t sound very likely.”
Fiona shrugged. “I know. I was surprised, but it’s still true. There’s no getting back to Faerie at the moment. So when I realized I was stuck here, I decided to contact the Council to see if there was anything they could do. I know they’re mortals and it was a long shot, but I didn’t have many options. They’re the ones who told me you were in town!” She beamed. “So of course, I had to come by and say hello. I should have thought of this years ago. It’s the perfect rendezvous point that Aunt Mab would never think of.”
The king smiled in a way Walker thought was supposed to indicate amusement and affection. It might even have succeeded, if it had been worn by someone with the facsimile of a soul behind his eyes. On Dionnu it made Walker wary.
“Well, I’m certainly glad the mortals at least proved useful enough to send you to me,” the king said. “Not only will it give us the chance to spend more time together, but it has brought the problem of the gate to my attention as well. You can be certain I will be looking into the cause of the problem.”
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Uncle—”
“It’s no trouble, I assure you. After all, I will need to use the gate when I’m ready to return, as well. As amusing as the mortal realm may be, I doubt I’ll be anxious to remain once my business here is done.”
“Business?” Fiona laughed again and settled back in her seat as the brownie who had opened the door to them earlier bustled in with a tea tray loaded with covered dishes and small silver pots. “What business could you possibly have here?”
Dionnu leaned forward and lifted one of the pots, pouring a stream of amber liquid into two cups. Discreetly, Walker sniffed and detected the scents of tea, apples, spices, and the kick of a potent spirit that smelled of flowers and fire. Faerie wine, if he wasn’t mistaken.
“I would have thought the Council had mentioned it to you.” The king handed one of the cups to Fiona and lifted the lid off of several plates of tiny delicacies, both human and Fae. His voice was casual as he offered his niece a snack. “I came for the negotiations with the humans. Just because your aunt couldn’t be bothered to make time for them doesn’t discount their importance.”
Fiona helped herself to two chocolate cookies, balancing one on the edge of her saucer while she nibbled the other. “The Council did mention something about you working on some sort of political cause, but I admit I didn’t pay much attention. Aunt Mab never mentioned anything, and you know diplomacy has never been my forte.”
“Which is such a shame, considering your family connections. I could help you go far, you know.” His black eyes sparked. “But I suppose one needs desire as well.”
“Which I altogether lack.”
“So you say. In any case, the purpose of our negotiations is quite simple. The Others of this world have determined the time has come to alert the humans to their presence, and it’s up to folk like me to make sure they don’t put themselves in an untenable position by doing so. If we want the Others to have rights in this world, we’re going to have to secure them now, before the human public has time to protest.”
“Uncle, that sounds positively philanthropic.”
Dionnu laughed. “Hardly. I just want to be sure that if any of our people decide to take a sojourn among the primitives here, they do so without risking some sort of witch hunt. You know how these humans can be. They’ve done it before. I think it’s in the best interest of the Fae that they not do so again.”
Fiona sipped her drink. “Mm. Maybe that’s why Aunt Mab didn’t mention it. You know how she feels about members of her court visiting the human realm. Even her own nieces and nephews have to sneak around to do it.”
“Perhaps. Either way, it’s a shame. After all, there is always strength in numbers, isn’t there?”
The king’s eyes glinted over the rim of his cup and Walker’s hackles stood up even straighter. This Fae was even creepier than he’d originally thought. He had to beat back the urge to place himself between Fiona and the king. Walker doubted that would go over well with either member of the royal family. Besides, Fiona seemed to have a plan. She hadn’t shared it with Walker, and damned if he quite knew what it was, but he knew her well enough to know she’d get pissed if he interfered with it. He would do so without hesitation the moment he sensed she was in real danger, but until then, he bided his time.
“If you say so.” Fiona grinned, biting into her second cookie. “Personally, I’ve always been more of the self-reliant type.”
“Another of my own traits I see in you. You and I have much in common, Fiona.” Dionnu smiled that skin-crawling smile. “So much that I still regret your lack of interest in accepting my offer.”
Walker fought to keep from frowning. What offer?
Fiona shook her head. “I’m happy just as I am, Uncle. The last thing I want infringing on my free time is the responsibility that comes with being anyone’s heir. Even yours.”
A dull buzzing droned in Walker’s ears. Dionnu had offered to name Fiona his heir? And she hadn’t felt it necessary to mention that earlier?
“Besides,” she continued, “if I accepted, I’d have to officially declare allegiance to a single court, and that would be just miserable. Right now, I can move freely between the two, which is a privilege I’m not eager to give up.” She smiled archly at her uncle. “You have no idea how many interesting things I hear when I travel between the courts.”
“No,” Dionnu agreed, eyebrows arching, “but I would dearly love to. Have another sip of hal, my dear, and tell your uncle Dionnu all about it.”
By the time he followed Fiona out of the apartment, Walker’s jaw had clenched so tight, he figured he had molars in his sinus cavities.
Doing an impression of wallpaper while the princess dabbled in palace intrigue had nearly driven him out of his mind. At least he retained enough common sense not to call her on it the second they stepped into the elevator. He knew a building like this would have cameras, and he wasn’t dumb enough to break character where there might be witnesses. He also wasn’t in any mood at the moment to ask her to tamper with the surveillance equipment. He played dumb and silent all the way to the building’s front doors, where the same doorman who had let them in barely glanced up from his newspaper when they strolled past.
Walker’s frown deepened. “What happened to Mr. Eager-to-Please?”
“The glamour wore off. It wasn’t a very strong one, but it only needed to last long enough to get us in. Which it did. No one cares much when someone leaves a building, as long as they’re not carrying someone else’s stereo.”
He felt a muscle twitch in his temple. “Did you do a spell on your clothes, too?”
“Well, yeah.” She pushed out the building doors and turned to stride down the sidewalk. “I told you, it would not have been a good idea to show up in his sitting room wearing your cast-offs. Very bad form.”
Walker had no trouble matching his gait to hers. What he had trouble with was keeping his hands from wrapping around her throat. Or her hips. “Last night you said you’d used up all your magic. You said you couldn’t even bring back our clothes after you made them disappear.”
“And I couldn’t. I wasn’t lying.” She glanced over at him and frowned. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Then how did you get enough magic back today to cast two spells when just last night you couldn’t even do one?”
He saw her wince and wondered if calculating square roots in his head would keep him from tearing out his hair in the middle of Park Avenue. Or maybe just pinning her against the wall and pushing that flirtatious skirt up around her waist.
She pursed her lips and kept her eyes straight ahead. “I recharged.”
“How?”
She sighed. “Look, can we possibly wait to talk about this until we don’t have an audience of eight million watching us fight?”
He put his hand on the back of her neck beneath the fall of her hair and squeezed in warning. “Don’t think of them as eight million strangers watching us fight. Think of them as eight million eyewitnesses keeping me from choking you for fear of state prosecution.”
“Well, when you put it that way,” she muttered. She stepped out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and into the alley created by the service entrance behind the building.
“Look,” she said, “I wasn’t lying to you last night, and I wasn’t playing games. I did burn out my magic last night, and I did get a recharge this morning.”
He leaned over her and fought not to growl something insulting. “When? You haven’t been out of my sight since I woke up.”
She made a face. “I didn’t need to be out of your sight. In fact… you kinda helped.”
Oh, he suddenly really didn’t like where this was headed. Forcing himself to take a deep breath, he demanded, “How? How did I help you recharge your magical battery? I thought you said you couldn’t use the magic here?”
“I can’t. Not the way I can use what’s in Faerie. But if the magic is… changed a little, things are different.”
“Changed?”
“Filtered.”
Her meaning came through as clear as tar. He shook his head. “Filtered how? And even if that’s true, where did you get it? I’ve been with you all day. I would have noticed if you’d suddenly collected a shitload of energy that hadn’t been there a second—”
He froze.
The truth hit him with the impact of a meteor landing smack-dab in the middle of his forehead and bouncing twice for good luck. Him. He was the “filter.” Their kiss in front of her uncle’s building was what had charged up her battery. Even Walker had known their embrace had been electric, but he hadn’t guessed she could literally gather the energy that flared between them and use it to do magic. She had fed off of him, like a vampire. Only somehow what she’d taken bothered him more than a couple of tooth marks on his jugular.
His back stiffened and his hand fell from her neck. He didn’t even realize he’d taken a step away from her until he saw the look on her face. She gazed back at him with a mix of bravado, hurt, and disappointment.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said when he continued to stare at her. “I wasn’t planning it. I just needed to see my uncle, and when the doorman wouldn’t let us up… I panicked. I’m not used to having to deal without magic. I guess I’m spoiled. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. And then I looked at you and you looked so mad and irritated and sexy… and…” She broke off and looked down at the cement beneath her feet. “I’m sorry.”
Walker shook his head, not saying a word, and took another step away from her. Then he kept going, heading for the street and practically stepping in front of the first cab he spotted. When the driver squealed to a halt, Walker grabbed Fiona by the arm and hustled her into the taxi. He barked an address at the driver and walked around the hood to slide into the front seat. If he tried to get in back with the princess just then, he was afraid he’d do something stupid.
He was also afraid to look at her face in the sedan’s rearview mirror, so he kept his eyes on the streets that sped by outside his window and tried to ignore the sick feeling of knowing the kiss that had turned his world on its axis had only been the means to her end.
Serves you right, his inner voice sneered. That’s what you get for falling in lust with a princess.