CHAPTER 17
The room cleared out in three seconds flat. It took a lot longer than that for Fiona’s head to stop spinning and her heart to start beating again. “What did you say?”
“You heard me well enough.” Her hands pushed against his shoulders, and he grabbed her wrists to pin them above her head. “I will not stand aside and allow my mate to put herself in danger, Fiona of the Sidhe, whether she tells me she can handle it herself or not.”
The buzzing in her ears wasn’t going away, and she shook her head as if that could clear it. She couldn’t have heard him right. Mate? Her? A royal princess of Faerie the mate of a mortal werewolf? It was impossible.
“You’re out of your mind,” she finally said, the sound strangled in her throat. “You’re completely insane. I am not your mate.”
Walker laughed, but he didn’t sound amused. “Don’t kid yourself, Princess. It’s not like either of us got to choose. And it’s not like either of us gets to just say, ‘No thanks.’ “
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” She squirmed beneath him, but with her wrists pinned and her legs dangling off the ottoman, she couldn’t get any leverage against him. “There has to be a choice. You don’t just get to say I’m your mate and think that makes it true!”
“I don’t think saying it makes it true.” He shifted both her wrists to one of his large hands and used the other to jerk aside the collar of her shirt until he could see his mark against her skin. “I think that makes it true.”
She tried to ignore the way the spot seemed to ache and throb just from his looking at it. The way her heart began to beat faster. She sneered. “That? It’s just a hickey. Trust me, I’ve had them before.”
“Right. Does this usually happen when you have a hickey?”
Eyes blazing, he leaned down and drew his tongue in a long, rough line over the mark. It may as well have been over her clit. Her entire body clenched in sudden, debilitating need and a hungry moan broke through her clenched lips. Her head fell back and her breath shuddered out of her chest. She could feel herself going soft and damp in welcome, and she fought desperately to remember the point she’d been trying to make.
“It’s… just… chemistry.” She panted, but she didn’t give in. “Lust. A… shallow physical… reaction.”
“Uh-huh.”
He shifted and the lick became a nibble that had her heart pounding in time to the throbbing between her legs. Her mind reeled. It was impossible that he could do this to her, make her feel this way without even touching her. Sure, the side of her neck was an erogenous zone, but this was ridiculous.
“Doesn’t… prove anything.”
His voice sounded muffled against her skin. “Of course not.”
The nibbling ceased, and Fiona gasped for air. Goddess, she felt like hot running wax. It had to be lack of oxygen making her this dizzy. She knew about magic, but even magic couldn’t do this to her.
She struggled, trying to turn her head or slide out from under him or do anything that would help her return to sanity. This had to stop before he started thinking she believed him about this mate thing.
“Walker, st—”
She never did get the word out. It hovered on the edge of her tongue, ready to tumble off, but he stole it from her along with her breath, her self, and the sound of her scream when he sank his teeth into the mark on her neck and shoved her hard into orgasm.
Her body arched and spasmed, shaking as if a bolt of electricity coursed through her. Stars exploded behind her eyes, blue and yellow and crimson with fire. She went blind, dumb, deaf to everything but the sound of his rumble of satisfaction, the harsh rasp of his breath. Numb to everything but his teeth against her skin, his mark on her body, and the hot, unbearable pulses of ecstasy that turned her mind and her willpower to ashes.
How did he do this to her?
She had no breath to ask, even when she could think well enough to form the question. Walker, though, didn’t look interested in answering.
“More,” he rasped. “Again.”
“Can’t.”
“Can. Now.”
A sound, half a moan, half a sob, tore from her. She had ceased to struggle, had neither the strength nor the will to do it. She lay draped over the ottoman like an offering to a pagan god, and Walker prepared her as such, ripping away her clothing until her skin glowed pale and smooth and naked beneath his devouring gaze.
Face harsh and set, he kneed her legs apart and braced himself over her. His hand raced over her, claiming and heating. It dived between her legs, fingers parting and probing and sinking deep, deep into her tight sheath.
“Now,” he repeated, and he pressed his thumb rough and high against her clit, fingertips scraping over her sensitive inner tissues. His teeth sank again into her neck, and she had no choice but to obey.
She fragmented as violently as the stained glass, but her destruction felt more like a blessing than a curse. Free-falling into exaltation, she thought her lungs might burst, knew her heart had. She had become nothing but her pleasure and the knowledge that she pleased him. There was nothing else.
She screamed. It might have been his name. It definitely was a plea. Mercifully, he answered, tearing away his own clothes, lifting and flipping her, arranging her on her belly across the ottoman. She barely had time to register the feel of the rough brocade upholstery against her skin when he grasped her hips and lifted. He fit himself against her, paused for a breathless, aching eternity, and then slammed home.
Goddess. How had she ever lived with the emptiness?
Nothing existed except for her and Walker and the heady, frantic rhythm of his movement inside her. He stretched and filled her, rode her with purpose and hunger and something akin to desperation. Her heart recognized it, and her body, even if her mind refused to work. Her body knew that his existed as another piece of her, too long held apart. Her heart knew that whatever she wanted to believe, he had already laid claim, moved in, and taken over.
Her heart knew Walker was right.
The choice had already been made.
When he tensed and roared and spilled himself into her, she knew. And when her body fractured and tumbled over after him, she almost began to believe.
Walker snuck them out of the back of the club, wrapping her in an afghan he found draped over the sofa because her clothes could no longer cover a gnat with any decency. He carried her because her legs refused to hold her weight. Plenty of other muscles had gone on strike as well, including the ones from the neck up. Her mind remained blank and fuzzy halfway across Manhattan and all the way up into Walker’s bed.
Okay, maybe not blank. She did have one thought, a question, that repeated over and over without even a hint of an answer.
How?
Fiona knew magic. She had grown with it, breathed it in, lived with it sparking and glowing and dancing all around her. She was magic. The power flowed in the veins of all Fae as surely as their blood. No one could deny it, and she had never wanted to try.
But this magic—this intense and dark and nearly violent magic that tied her to a mate she hadn’t wanted in a way she’d never expected—this magic was something she just couldn’t fathom.
The mattress gave beneath Walker’s weight as he knelt to lay her down on sheets still rumpled from that morning, still scented with their loving. She kept her eyes closed. She knew he could tell she hadn’t fallen asleep, but she needed some kind of barrier against him, and the darkness behind her eyelids was the best she could manage. He had just taken her grasp on reality, flipped it upside down, and then returned it to her as if everything were perfectly normal, but for Fiona, normal now looked a long way off.
What had happened to her glorious lack of a future? She had never understood the human penchant for planning and organizing and looking toward the path ahead of them. She was Fae. Sidhe. To her, only the path beneath her feet mattered. The feel of dirt and root and stone, the crackle of leaves and twigs, the cool shade cast by trees along the edges of the trail, and the little freckles of sunlight that dripped through the leaves to tease her with the hint of light and warmth. Fae didn’t look ahead. They didn’t make lifetime commitments or worry about what would happen in a hundred years.
But now all Fiona could think of was that in a hundred years the man lying beside her, stroking those warm, magical hands over her skin, would be dead and her immortality would stretch out before her. Blessing made curse.
“You can pretend I’m not here all night, if you think it will help.” He spoke so softly that she felt like a deaf woman, interpreting his speech by the vibration of the sound rather than the meaning of the words. “But it won’t, and I’m not going away.”
But he would, eventually. That was the problem, wasn’t it?
She turned her head away and kept her eyes squeezed shut.
“I apologize for being a jerk to you earlier, Princess, and if I came on too strong just now, I’ll apologize again. I admit I seem to have this small problem keeping my temper around you. But I’m not going to apologize for the fact that we’re mated,” he said, tracing a fingertip over the tendons at the side of her neck, playing with the pale skin. “First, because there’s no point, since it can’t be undone. Second, because I don’t want it undone. And third, because it wasn’t my doing.”
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see him; she could hear the rueful grin in his voice. “That mark you gave me feels a hell of a lot like your doing, Tobias.”
His hands shifted, now ringing the borders of the mark. “The mark is, but the reason it’s there isn’t.” She kept silent, and with a sigh, he continued. “I don’t know how much you know about Lupine mating, and I don’t know how well I can explain it to you. There aren’t a whole lot of philosophers among our kind. Some things just come down to instinct.”
She bit back the urge to voice a caustic agreement on that score.
“I can’t tell you why it happens, or even how. But every Lupine knows when it does. It’s like the first change, the first time I ever shifted. I just… knew. You smelled sweeter than anything I’d ever sniffed and you tasted better, too. And when I finally got inside you it was like puzzle pieces locking together. We just fit, like we were meant to. That’s how it happens. Lupines find the one perfect mate for them and they seize it. There was no way in hell I could have stopped it. Not even if I’d wanted to.”
“What if I had wanted to?”
He barked a laugh. “It might have been fun to watch you try, but it wouldn’t have worked. Like I said, neither of us got a choice. Lupines don’t pick their mates. Fate picks them for us.”
She frowned and jerked her shoulder. “That’s ridiculous. Aren’t you mortals the ones who are always going on about free will and self-determination? Goddess, it’s all any of you ever talked about for a few centuries.”
“Yeah. Those weren’t Lupines,” he snorted. “Or if they were, they were talking about self-determining where to go for dinner, not about mates. I don’t know why it happens, Princess, but I know that when Lupines mate, it’s because Fate decided they should.”
“But I’m not Lupine, and I didn’t decide on anything.”
“I noticed.” His hand stroked over her bare skin, as smooth and hairless as his was rough and dappled with fur. “That’s where this came in.” He pressed a kiss to the mark on her neck.
Her eyes opened enough to scowl at him. “What does that mean?”
“The mate mark. It’s there to prove you belong to me.”
“How Neanderthal.” She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t see one on Missy’s neck, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out she belongs to Graham.”
“She’s belonged to him for five years now, and I think the fact that she’s borne him two sons proves the same thing. The mark doesn’t last forever, anyway. And some mates never get them, but I know for a fact she did.”
“How do some of us get so lucky?”
“The ones who need proof get marked.” He took her hand, toyed with her fingers. “When two Lupines mate, usually no one gets marked. There’s no need. We all know what’s happening, so proof becomes redundant. But if one of the mates is reluctant or unwilling, the other marks her.”
“What? Like a cattle brand? What if the reluctant mate has a good reason to be reluctant? What if she doesn’t like the jerk who marked her? Is she forced to stay with him?”
“Of course not. There’s no need to force her.”
Her scowl deepened. “So she just leaves with a semipermanent hickey on her neck? No harm, no foul?”
“No. No one leaves.” He shook his head impatiently. “The mating is Fated. Fate knows the two mates belong together, that no one else will ever suit either of them.”
“No one leaves? Ever? In all of Lupine history?”
“Well, sure, it’s happened, but those are the stories we all hear about as cautionary tales when we’re growing up. They all end up miserable. Why would anyone leave their perfect partner?”
“A lot of words come to my mind when I’m with you, Tobias Walker, but let me make it clear that ‘perfect’ is not one of them.”
“Not to your mind maybe. But apparently Fate doesn’t agree.”
She sighed and turned to face him. His skull was much too thick to have this conversation any other way. “Walker, I almost get what you’re saying. Really. From what you’re telling me, it’s like magic. Fate casts a spell, and two people are bound by it, one of whom may or may not get bitten for her trouble. Okay, fine. If that’s the way it works for your people, good for you. But I’m not one of your people.”
Walker frowned. “Why should that matter? I’m not one of your people, but that doesn’t seem to stop you from charging up like a car battery hooked to jumper cables every time I touch you.”
“That’s not about you. It’s just the way things happen.”
“Exactly.”
She groaned in frustration and tried to sit up, but he draped a heavy arm across her waist to pin her in place. “Walker, listen to me for half a second, would you? This is impossible. It isn’t going to work. For the Goddess’s sake, we’re not even the same species!”
He rolled his eyes. “Is that what has your panties in a twist? For God’s sake, Fi, what couple have you met around here so far that is of the same species? Rafe and Tess? He’s Feline—a frickin’ werejaguar—and I know it’s hard to believe, but she’s human, you know.”
“She’s a witch.”
“Which is what we call human with magical abilities, to distinguish them from the ones without magical abilities. Graham is Lupine, but Missy’s about as human as you can get. Before they mated, she taught kindergarten!”
Fiona frowned. “That’s not the poi—”
“You want a few more? Fine.” His temper had started to rise again, but his touch stayed gentle, if implacable. “The guth of the Black Glen Clan from Ireland just paid us a visit a couple of months ago, and guess who he’s mated to? A Foxwoman. Fiona, it happens all the time.”
“Not with Fae it doesn’t.” She pushed at his arm and gritted her teeth when he refused to budge. “Will you let me up, damn it? I can’t yell at you when you have me pinned to a bed.”
“Really? Now, I’m going to remember that handy little fact.” He didn’t let her go, but he did let her sit up. Then he yanked her right back down into his lap and wrapped his arms around her even tighter than before.
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not what I meant, fur face.”
“Tough.”
She gave his arms a few ineffectual tugs before giving up with a sigh and letting her head fall back onto his shoulder. She didn’t want to argue, didn’t have the energy for it, but somehow she had to make him understand that at least one of them had to maintain their sanity about this. “I’m telling you, this just won’t work. It’s great if Lupines can mate and have successful relationships with other kinds of mortals, whether they’re humans or shapeshifting aardvarks. I’m happy for you.”
“But?”
“But I’m not mortal. Fae don’t mate with mortals, Walker. I mean, how could we? We’re not even supposed to leave our own borders. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“But you are.” He squeezed her gently to cut off her protest. “Have you ever heard of a sidhe named Luc MacAnu?”
Fiona looked at him, confused. “Lucifer? Captain of the Queen’s Guard?” Walker nodded. “Of course I’ve heard of him. He was the commander of my aunt’s personal army from the time I was a little girl.”
“And where is he now?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. I know he resigned his commission a short while ago, but it was during one of my obligatory visits to the Unseelie Court. By the time I got back and heard about it, he was already gone.” She shook her head. “What in the world does that have to do with us?”
“Well, it was big news in the Council of Others when the Fae warrior Mab sent to New York to find her nephew and return him to Faerie ended up falling in love with one of the closest friends of the luna of the Silverback Clan.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“The human friend.”
Her jaw clicked shut.
“It turned out that Luc wasn’t thinking about mortality or immortality when he looked at Corinne D’ Alessandro. He only thought about having her. So he found a way to make it happen.”
Fiona steeled herself against temptation. “That’s lovely for them, Walker, but I’m not Lucifer MacAnu of the Queen’s Guard and you’re not a naive young human woman.”
“Glad you noticed.”
He grinned and leaned forward to nuzzle her ear. She had to grit her teeth to keep from melting. It still didn’t seem possible that he could affect her so deeply so fast. It shouldn’t have been possible.
She tried one last time to squirm out of his arms, and he sighed. Half a second later, she found herself sprawled back against the pillows with a stubborn and stubbled werewolf draped half over her to keep her in place.
“Sweetheart, I can see where this might all seem a little surreal to you.” She snorted with laughter, but he ignored it and watched her steadily, his expression both resolved and tender. “It’s happened pretty quickly, and you haven’t been expecting it for most of your life like I have. But that doesn’t make it any less real.”
“It can’t be.”
“It is.” He leaned down to brush a soft, lingering kiss against her lips. “I can understand if you’re not ready to deal with it right this second. There’s a lot of other stuff going on right now, so I’ll drop it. But Princess, this isn’t going to go away. Eventually, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you belong to me. And I belong to you.”
She stared up at him, feeling her heart clench inside her chest and remembering what it had felt like when he’d buried himself inside her with his mouth on the mark of their bond. Her entire world had changed in that moment, and no matter how desperately she wanted to deny the truth, she knew she couldn’t go back to the way things had been. They would never be the same.
She would never be the same.
But that didn’t mean he could get away with acting like a jackass.
She took a deep breath and told herself to be firm, but when she spoke, she could hear in her voice the echoes of the soft, unfamiliar emotion currently stirring in her chest. “I’m not certain I understand all of this, but if it’s true—” She held up a hand to stop his interruption. “If it’s true, it’s going to take adjustment on both our parts. I meant it when I said I can understand your protective instincts, Walker, but you have to understand that I mean it when I say I won’t be dictated to. When you’re concerned for my safety, tell me. But don’t order me around. It won’t work, and I won’t appreciate it.”
He met her gaze for a long moment before he gave a brief nod. “I’ll try, Princess, but I can’t promise anything. These are instincts we’re talking about. I can’t make them go away.”
She looked up into those warm golden eyes and let herself drown in them, feeling the exhaustion of physical exertion and emotional stress beginning to take their toll. Her muscles relaxed, sinking deeper into the mattress, softening beneath his in inevitable welcome.
Her hands slid off his shoulders, down his arms to twine her fingers with hers. “Nothing has ever been as complicated as this, mo fáell,” she whispered, reaching up for another kiss, “but nothing simple has ever touched my heart.”
And as their lips touched, her heart melted.