The Trouble with Fate (28 page)

I might not be his One True Love, but he would always be mine.

Now I understood the terrible burn in my eyes at the sight of him. Why my flare reached
for his. The reason my mother had given up her princess crown, her family, and her
future. I saw the yin and yang of it all. The yearning and regret. The instinct battling
the common sense. Mum had said that she knew when she found her love, and that one
day I would too. She hadn’t told me I wouldn’t be able to keep him once I did. I felt
my eyes burn, but it was different pain. Not across my eyeballs, but deep in my tear
ducts. I’d seen Mum cry twice. The first time when she and Dad had a fight of epic
proportions and the last time—the image of which I’ll never rid from my memory—a minute
before she died. I knew what was coming. I waited, fists on my knees, breath caught
behind my teeth. My tear ducts filled and stretched. The agony of passing my first
real Tear made me suck in my belly and bow to it. I whined, high through the nose,
as it fought its way out.

He reached out to my face, and knuckled away the thin stream of blood trickling from
my eyes. “Stronghold?”

My nails dug into my palms. The Tear squeezed out and hung, pink-glazed on my lower
lid, before it fell.

“Shit.” His eyes opened in surprise as its wetness bit through the almost healed skin
on his knuckles. “It burns,” he said in a hushed voice. Bitter as acid, cold as ice,
my Tear glittered and rolled off his hand, leaving behind a residue of splintered
diamond chips that shimmered through the red glaze of his fresh blood. He wiped his
hand on a towel, and watched me with a frown.

Another one rolled down to my chin and hung from it.

He caught it in his palm.

Pink water turned to brilliant white ice. It shone as bright as the brightest light,
lit from the fire of love and pain, before turning hard. He let it roll in his palm.
“Tink?”

In his palm lay a small pebble of perfect diamond, truly tear-shaped.

“What—”

“Fae Tears,” I whispered.

*   *   *

I needed to be clean and alone—for once I needed time to think—but I only got clean.
Trowbridge had his shower first, and I refused to get into it, even when he smiled
his most devilish smile, and cocked up his eyebrow. That wasn’t the only thing that
had been all cocked up.

I tried not to look, and failed.

He left the shower curtain open. When my socks were wet from the growing puddle, I
rolled another of Cordelia’s white towels into a footrest. His head pivoted with my
movement, and for a second the air was perfumed by a scent I began to pinpoint as
“me-predator.”

He didn’t say anything though, and went back to soaping his chest. I didn’t say anything
either. Too much had gone on, all of it silently, before he’d gotten up and turned
on the shower. We’d rested quietly on the floor, leg to leg, hip to hip, and had given
ourselves a mental time-out as his body fully healed. I’d shifted my leg away from
him and his had followed, searching for my warmth again. I’d concentrated on breathing,
and studying Cordelia’s shiny soap dispenser between taking glances at him underneath
my lashes. He hadn’t rolled his head in my direction. Not once. But there had been
a faraway expression on his face as he’d rolled my second Fae Tear between his fingers,
like it was one jewel too many on a long string of worry beads.

Once the water had warmed he said, “You first.” But I’d just shaken my head wordlessly
and he’d stepped in alone.

Still now, he wouldn’t go and leave me, not even after he’d showered and rinsed the
conditioner out of his hair. He sat on the seat of the toilet, the towel wrapped around
his narrow hips tenting at his groin, watching me as I stepped fully clothed into
the humid shower.

There were questions coming, and worse, answers that had to be created out of half-lies
and half-truths. I thought I needed time alone to figure stuff out, but maybe it was
better this way. With him here, I couldn’t think of anything else but what I wanted
and why I shouldn’t take it.

I pulled the curtain over, and adjusted the tap, and waited at the dry end of the
tub for it to feel warm enough for my Fae skin’s comfort. I didn’t know what to do
about Mum’s bride belt. There weren’t many places to hide it. After a bit of indecision,
I took it off and hooked it over the shower rod, as far away from the wet as I could
get. I’d trusted him so far with my life; I could probably trust him not to snatch
my mum’s belt.

I hoped the steam cloaked me in invisibility as I unzipped my pants and dragged the
sucking length of them down my legs. Water was running in two dirty streams from my
bare feet. I pulled off Barry Manilow and threw him on the tub floor. Panties or bra
next? Bra. I turned my back and took it off. I hooked my fingers on my panties, feeling
the elastic stretch like my good intentions. My panties landed on top of Barry, and
I spent a nanosecond thinking,
How perverse was that?
before I got under the spray.

My ride-alongs were deeply divided. Merry was stiff, even under the warm spray of
the shower, and my Were-bitch was feeling like hot spice rubbed into my skin, but
from the inside. I turned my back to Trowbridge, but there was no keeping him out
anymore. He was in my head as surely as Lou’s thoughts, as surely as the Were-bitch
who wiggled against my vertebrae. He was there, everywhere.

His eyes were obviously open, because his side of the curtain was lit by pulsing blue.
My own eyes were reacting to his; the tiles around me were bright with my flare. But
he’d changed even that, hadn’t he? My Fae light had flavored itself with Trowbridge
blue. What had been green ice was now the color of the Caribbean. Inexplicable.

I want him
. My body knew it. It was welcoming him already; breasts swelling, skin growing taut
and sensitive, feminine core turning slick and heated.

I had always wanted him
—the girl in me had burgeoned, hovered at the threshold of womanhood, just by inhaling
his aroma and observing his body as it flexed and stretched. My uncharted desire had
recognized him. Known him in a way that was not of mind but of instinct. Goddess,
every time I spied upon him, I’d fancied that I’d developed a scent of my own—musky
and heavy, as tantalizing as his.

I would always want him
. My yearning for his body couldn’t be extinguished by self-will. He’d been the bare-chested
hero of my dreams; the man with the simmering glower in every romance novel I’d ever
read, the body I’d superimposed over any male substitute that had ever caused my vagina
to twitch. Goddess knows how much I had tried to shed this longing. But it was part
of me, as if somehow my settings had been permanently fused to his, the dials frozen
in one position, so that no other creature could ever call to the sexual urges buried
deep within me.

Thinking about how much I burned for him was like conjugating verbs, except figuring
out French tenses wouldn’t hurt this much. I closed my eyes as I washed my hair. When
I opened them I could see a spotlight of blue focused bust level on the plastic liner.

Merry was quiet. Too quiet and too dull, but for once, for one bloody minute of this
last terrible day, I wasn’t going to think about her, or Lou, or the whole yawning
hole of stupidity of a Were/Fae union. I had twigs to ferret out of my tangled hair.
I had some serious scrubbing ahead.

“You about done?”

“Soon.” I picked up the soap to rewash every part that hadn’t been washed twice already.

“I’m hungry. We should raid Cordelia’s kitchen.”

“Do you think she has any chocolate?” I ran my fingers over my scalp, searching for
any seeds I’d missed.

I heard him pull in some air through his teeth.

Suddenly the curtain was pulled back. Trowbridge stood scowling on the other side.
He turned the water off, and yanked a towel off the rack with enough force to make
it shudder. He sucked in another hard breath, and his towel fell to the floor, and
then I drew in a deep breath of my own. The bride belt slithered off the rail and
fell, landing in a heap of gold at his feet. He picked it up, and held it out to me.
When I didn’t reach for it, he shook his hair to one side, and bent to fasten it around
my waist. His fingers were trembling.

He clumsily patted me dry with the towel before he picked me up. Not the pretty way.
The efficient way, because he was not only a man in motion, he was a man on a mission.
He grabbed my midsection and the back of my legs and hauled me out of there like I
was a three-year-old ready for my nap.

Trowbridge fumbled for the door with one hand, and then we were out of the bathroom,
and making good time down the hall. To where, I couldn’t tell. I was too busy cataloguing
things, like how it felt to be skin on skin (the underside of my arm against the top
of his shoulder) or to smell him so clean and so near (goddamn aphrodisiac, they should
bottle it) or how tiny he made me feel (a freakin’ princess in his arms, no less).

The apartment was dark. I got a fleeting impression of light off stainless steel as
we booked it past the kitchen. Trowbridge was comfortable in the apartment. He knew
enough to veer sharply left when we hit the living room to avoid the side table, and
he knew where the sofa bed was. He hesitated before lowering me to it.

Music played in the apartment behind Cordelia’s closed bedroom door. A man’s voice,
bluesy and sad, singing about his Little Valentine.

“I want you,” he said in a harsh whisper.

“I know.”

“I’m going to have you.” His voice was firm, but his smile was tentative.

“I know.”

“Tell me you’re not a virgin.”

“Oh Fae Stars.” I raked my fingers through his hair, and pulled it backward until
his head was tipped back. His lips curved. “Do you always talk this much?”

He laughed, and I did too, even though I was in midair, and the towel was parting
from my body. There was a brief moment where I was naked and needing, right before
his body met mine.

Skin to skin. I know they write poems about it, but they really should write more.
Long stanzas about the sweet friction of woman-skin sliding against man-skin, words
woven into blushing praise about the steely slopes of strong man’s muscles, perhaps
a few short ditties about the sweet roughness of callused fingers against a breast.

He touched me. With gentle fingers on my jaw, and the backs of his knuckles on my
cheek, stroking, feeling, imprinting me forever. My inner Were was rejoicing. Yes!
There would be no man but this man. And no moment but this one.

He kissed me. Soft lips for such a hard man. Soft and quizzical, testing and urging,
pleading for me to follow. He sucked in my lower lip, and I fell. Crumbled and fell.

Kiss me forever. Just kiss me forever.

His hand drifted down, and left a trail, hot and his, along my collarbone, along my
throat. His lips followed; each kiss repeated by the soft echo of his hair. I was
liquid heat, and unthinking, until he did the unthinkable. He opened his mouth and
said something dumb.

“I can’t do this with that thing around your neck.” He gestured to Merry. I sat up
and covered my swollen breasts with my hands.

“Thanks for bringing up the issue of our total incompatibility,” I said, feeling my
lip turn mulish. “I can’t say much for your timing, but I guess it’s better late than
never. You’re right; we shouldn’t do this. You’re a Were, and I’m a Fae, and we shouldn’t
even contemplate having sex. What was I thinking?” I reached for the folded blanket
on the bottom of the sofa bed, deaf to my inner Were’s whine of distress.

“Stop.” He caught me by my shoulders and held me there. He put his teeth to the part
of my neck that was connected to my shoulder. The traitorous bitch in my belly shivered
with delight.

“Do not mark me,” I said.

“Never crossed my mind.” He kept nibbling and sucking on my flesh, right there. Right
where some part of me had been standing waiting, tapping its toes and scowling at
its watch.

I’ll count to forty and stop him then.

He had Merry’s chain in his hand in five. He eased her over my head by seven. He put
her on the side table by nine. And then his tongue moved over the spot he’d been tenderizing,
and my toes curled. Toes do that if the right man is sitting behind you, with his
legs wrapped around you and his hard cock pressed against the cheeks of your butt.

He slowed time down with Trowbridge kisses, and Trowbridge fingers. He stroked and
sucked, and licked and turned my leg this way, and moved my hip that way, until I
was weak and oblivious to anything else, not reason, not my soft belly, nothing else
but the need to reach for him and lick him too.

The music was louder. Much louder. Someone’s heart was breaking somewhere, but for
once it wasn’t mine. The taste of him. Salt. Woods. Man.

There reached a point where I got an opportunity to take a good look at him.
That
part of him. I mean, he was in my hand, and my face was just there, and I couldn’t
help but take his measure and starting thinking real hard about the moment coming
up. Would it fit?

I didn’t have a chance for doubt to turn to trepidation. He pulled me up his long,
hard body, drugged me with a few more kisses, and then he rolled me onto my back.
His cheeks were flushed as he propped himself up on his elbow and let his gaze roam
over the feast of Hedi. Instinctively, my hands flattened over my stomach. He growled,
but I don’t think he meant to, because there was a hint of cover-up to the mocking
“tsk-tsk” he uttered as his maimed hand lightly captured fluttering ones. With a hint
of Trowbridge twinkle, he gently lifted my arms over my head, and pinned them casually
there, not savagely, or hurtfully, more like someone unsnapping their folded napkin
before they set down to the business of consuming their meal.

I sucked in my breath, and held it there, maybe a little longer than I should have,
but I couldn’t have exhaled in that moment for the all the green tea in China, because
he was suddenly studying me in a way that made me want to arch my back and preen.
Gone was that annoying, light bantering humor that had marked his face just two seconds
before. It had been stripped away, and replaced by a far deeper one of intent. Yes,
his gaze was a little possessive—but not in the “I shall stalk you” manner, more in
the helpless “touch her and you die” way. And yes, I could see something else—an essence
both primal and instinctive. It called to my Were, and she told me to bend one leg,
and lift my chest a little higher. Feral heat simmered between us. Cheeks flushed,
he brushed his knuckles down my neck and then those skillful fingers uncurled to slip
sideways down the valley between my breasts. They slid under one silken mound and
cupped its weight as if testing a peach for its juiciness. I thought it filled his
large paw quite nicely, and he must have arrived at the same conclusion, because he
held my breast for another beat, his eyes mere slits, before his hand slowly opened—fingers
to cradle its weight, thumb to stroke its nipple.
I am woman. I am Were.
My head tipped back in pleasure. Who knew happy breasts could cause such a savage
ache down there?
Crap, I’m a string on his violin. Pluck one end, and the other part quivers.