Wicked Wonderland (8 page)

Kris’s eyes lit up. “Oh hey, Lilly, do you still do that fabulous plus-size modeling? I saw you in a catalogue about five years ago. You looked fierce!”

Lilly grinned at his enthusiasm. “I actually didn’t find much work as a model. I did do a few ads for plus-size bras for Ruben’s lingerie. That’s probably what you saw me in.”

Nick raised an eyebrow and pulled a face. “You pervert, Kris. What were you doing looking at women’s underwear catalogue?”

Kris flipped a hand. “It was junk mail in our mailbox at our Long Island place. You were away on business at the time. I saved it to show you, but I think you must have put it out with the recycling, because I was never able to find it after you came home.” Kris turned to her. “Why don’t you model anymore, angel?”

Lilly grimaced. “I’m twenty-eight. I’m a bit old for plus-size modeling now. And God knows I was never really comfortable with it. Mom kind of bullied me into it, to be honest. Some friend of hers wanted to ‘discover’ me.”

Lilly paused, and Nick noticed her swallowing uncomfortably. “Are you okay?”

“My throat’s a little dry.”

“We’re terrible hosts, Kris,” Nick said. “We’ve offered her nothing to eat or drink. Magic up something for her.”

Kris snapped his fingers and hummed a few high notes. He raised his palm upward, and golden-yellow light shot out of his hand. A bottle of Dom Pérignon suddenly hung above Lilly’s head, and a black lacquered plate full of sushi floated gently into her lap. In the air above her floated a plate of mini toasted baguettes and a little dish of caviar, with a little silver knife for spreading.

Nick rolled his eyes at Kris’s pretentious choice of food, but Lilly seemed to like it. She reached for some sushi eagerly, licking her lips. Her eyes were wide, and she seemed overwhelmed with wonder at Kris’s simple culinary conjuring.

Her enjoyment of the food stirred Nick’s libido. A fierce urge to kiss her seized him. He longed to grab her voluptuous, very real body and never let her go, but he held himself in check. He would
not
frighten her again.

“Some champagne, Lilly?” Kris asked, reaching for the bottle. “Alcohol doesn’t affect us much, but we do like the taste.”

“Well, maybe that proves I’m not part fae. Alcohol usually affects me.” She took a sip of champagne from the elegant crystal flute Kris had conjured.

“If your fae powers are weak, your resistance to alcohol will be weakened too,” Nick said with a half frown.

Kris took one of the baguettes from the plate and used the little silver knife to spread on some caviar.

Lilly took another sip of champagne. “I remember how much you always loved caviar, Kris.”

Nick grinned. One of the amazing things about Lilly was that she could always remember the tiniest details about people who interested her, even down to their favorite ice-cream flavor. He loved that.

“You remembered!” Kris laughed and, with a point of his finger, shot the plate of baguettes back to her side in a wave of golden light.

“My God, you can conjure up food out of thin air and command a flying sleigh. It’s like you two are all-powerful!” There was a little shudder to her voice.

Kris shook his head. “Oh, sweetie, sylphs are far from all-powerful, especially rogue half sylphs like us with mortal blood running through our veins. We’re good at conjuring objects. That’s about all, really. And we know different ways to fly when we have to.”

“Kris is especially good at conjuring up food and drink,” Nick added.

“Thanks, dear!” Kris smiled at Nick. “Now, as I was saying, please don’t imagine Nick and I are all-powerful. We can’t use magic to defeat other enchanted creatures in battles. And believe me, Nick and I have had to engage in a few violent ones against the dark fae. We’ve chosen to be Warriors of the Light, but we can’t influence water like the Undines, the water fae, can. Or influence fire like the fire fae, and I can’t do scrying to save my life.”

Nick gave a snort. “If either of us could scry, we would have known you were in trouble and found you years ago, Lilly. Count on it.”

She started and looked into his eyes with surprise and slight suspicion. He knew she’d heard the darkness in his voice.

Perhaps now she’ll finally start to understand how much I’ve missed her.

Kris broke into his thoughts. “We also aren’t much good at healing. We’re okay if an injury isn’t too serious, like when Nick fixed your nose, but if the injury involves something as serious as damage to the human heart, the magical energy needed to complete the healing process can completely drain us, cause us to pass out or get very ill.”

Nick gritted his teeth at the memory. “I wish you hadn’t brought that up.” Nick noticed the confused look on Lilly’s face and sighed. He’d tell the sad story rather than leave her bewildered, though it made him feel ill to think about Cat. Nick set down the reins and licked his dry lips. Hell! Before he told this story, he needed a drink. The reindeer were flying on autopilot at this point. They knew this part of the route fairly well. It made Nick a little nervous not to guide them, and he mentally sent out a magic summons for their helper, Bockle. But for now, the reindeer would be all right.

Nick hummed and motioned for the champagne to fly back to him. He poured himself a glass.

“It’s like this, Lilly.” He stopped and took a large gulp. The liquid was a cool fire trickling down his throat and warming his insides. When he finished drinking, he spoke again. “We had a lady friend once, half sylph and half mortal like us. Not a girlfriend, just a platonic friend we hung out with. Her name was Caterina. She tried to save her mortal boyfriend when he got in a car crash, but the man had damage to a few vital organs, including his heart. The amount of magical energy it took to try to heal him was too much for her. Other sylphs tried to warn Caterina, but she was too in love and wouldn’t listen. Her boyfriend died, despite her attempts to heal him, and she fell into a coma from which she’s never recovered. She’s still languishing in a mortal hospital. It’s been five years now.”

Lilly’s expression softened. “I’m sorry to hear that. How’s your friend’s family coping?”

Kris frowned. “Oh, she’s like the three of us, another half fae who’s basically an orphan. We have a roster back at the North Pole that makes sure she has visitors every week of the year.”

Half reluctantly, Nick spread a little of the caviar on a baguette and tried it. The intense saltiness assaulted his taste buds. He grabbed for the bottle and wondered if the saltiness of the caviar would lead Lilly to drink a lot. After taking another gulp of champagne, he decided to broach a question he’d wanted to ask for a very long time.

“Speaking of family, baby, I have to wonder why you never wrote to Santa when you were a kid the way Kris and I did, asking for a family. Kris wrote to Santa from the orphanage he lived in, and I wrote to Santa when I was stuck living with my bastard of an uncle. It’s the way most half fae who’ve been abandoned get brought to Santa’s home or back to the Fae Realm.”

Lilly flinched. “Nick, I had a family. I lived with my mom. I still have that family.” She turned her body away from his, her shoulders hunched.

A muscle twitched in Nick’s jaw.

Obviously wanting to diffuse the tension in the air, Kris interrupted. “While we’re catching up, I heard you were living with Cody Nixon, the violinist. Are you still involved with him?”

Nick’s stomach tightened at Kris’s words. He hadn’t heard any such rumors himself.

Lilly finished swallowing a bite of sushi and shook her head. She reached for the caviar and spread some on a mini baguette. “No, we broke up a year ago. He cheated on me, for one thing.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “And when I confronted him, guess who dumped whom? He told me he’d been meaning to break up with me because he’d decided he preferred slimmer women and because my life was too ‘complicated’.” Lilly glanced at Nick and blushed. “He meant my mother’s gambling and everything.”

Nick had to admire her honesty; he’d fought with her about her mother enough times, even during the brief period when they were happily dating. Even now, thoughts of her mother’s selfish behavior burned him. He couldn’t tolerate seeing her used by her adoptive mother for the money she could earn. But he’d fought with her enough about that issue. “I’m sorry to hear your ex-boyfriend was such a prick.”

Lilly bit into a baguette, then took another sip of champagne and paused. Nick knew her well enough to recognize she was reluctant to tell him something. Finally, she whispered, “He couldn’t handle anything about my life, to be honest. He couldn’t handle the fact I was being stalked, the constant vandalism of our apartment…”

“What?” Nick felt like someone had knocked the wind out of him. He remembered the damage done to her dorm room twice in college; some asshole stalker and vandal had trashed Lilly’s dorm and left nasty messages calling her a bitch and a whore on the walls. The bastard had never been caught.

“Are you telling me that stalker you had came back?”

She rolled her eyes. “The stalker never left, Nick. I’ve been receiving odd messages from the time I was eight years old. Before that, someone tried to drown me at the lake one Christmas holiday when I was seven. I survived, but they never found out who pulled me under. The police decided it was one of the kids I was playing with, but they couldn’t get a confession out of anyone or any clear witness statements.” Lilly set her champagne flute down on the seat and turned toward him. “This stuff is really not something I want to talk about right now. Seriously. I’m trying to have fun here.”

“At least tell me they finally caught the son of a bitch.”

“No. He’s as slippery as an eel. And to tell the truth, my stalker has ruined every relationship I’ve tried to have. Cody was totally creeped out by him. The stalker even sent us videos he’d made of Cody and me together.”

Rage coiled in Nick’s gut, but he crushed it with his will so as not to scare her. In a moment, he found a calm tone of voice. “Well, who is it? Who’s doing it? Do you think it’s an ex-boyfriend?”

Lilly sighed. “Well, I’ve only had three. And no, I doubt it’s any of them. Like I said, strange stuff has been happening to me since I was a kid. Really, can we stop talking about this? I want to relax with you two. I promise I’ll tell you everything some other time.”

Her hand lightly brushed his elbow when she reached for more food, and Nick’s balls tightened in reaction. He was surprised he could feel aroused even when inwardly he still seethed about this asshole stalker. He’d bite his tongue for a while and work through the problem in his mind, but he wouldn’t be able to hold back for too long on this issue.

One way or another, he’d find out more and figure out a way to crucify the bastard. And he and Kris would help Lilly get over this if it was the last thing they did. She was like a wounded swan. She only needed to be nursed back to health, and she would soar; she would be triumphant.

“What do you think, Nick?” Kris’s question brought his mind back to the moment. “Come on, tell Lilly we don’t want to fly her home. We want her to spend the night with us in the sleigh.”

Lilly looked at Kris.

Nick placed his hand on her chin and turned her face toward him. “Look at me, Lilly. Understand we…I won’t pressure you about anything. Nothing happens between the three of us that you don’t want. I promise. Nothing sexual has to happen. We just want to spend time with you again.”

Lilly’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Nick held his breath, waiting for her answer. When he looked into her soft, sad blue-green eyes, he couldn’t hear anything over the knocking of his own heart.

Lilly felt sick inside. She hadn’t wanted to discuss her stalker at all tonight. Nick and Kris were making her feel so special and loved. But no one ever truly understood about her stalker when she tried to explain it to them, and somehow, she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the lack of comprehension in their eyes too. There were so many aspects to the situation that people didn’t understand. Like the way the creeper had used some kind of voice disguiser so it was impossible to tell who he was, even though she’d taped some of the messages for the police. And when they tried to trace the phone calls, they always went back to a cloned cell phone that couldn’t be located.

So many different feelings churned within her, vying for supremacy. When Nick had told her that nothing sexual had to happen, that they just wanted to spend time with her, it had taken her a moment to realize he was sincere. She searched his eyes for the light of mockery and found none. Of course, this was Nick, not Cody. Nick had never made fun of her, whereas Cody always mocked, joked, made catty fun of everyone. At first she’d laughed her ass off at his clever jokes and putdowns, but very gradually and slowly she’d realized Cody’s humor always had a mean quality that wore her down.

As for the idea of spending the whole night with Nick and Kris with “nothing sexual” happening… While it was considerate of them to suggest such a thing, she didn’t like the idea at all.

“Lilly?”

She turned to look into Kris’s concerned eyes. “Sorry, just wool-gathering.”

She heard a strange laugh in response. And when she glanced over, she got a fright.

Surely, I haven’t drunk that much!

There in the front seat, next to Nick, sat what looked like a wizened little goblin giggling away to himself. He wore brown suede clothing, and his skinny, wrinkled arms poked through the sleeves of a shirt that looked much too large for him. His mass of shaggy, wood-brown curls tumbled down over his small shoulders.

“Wh-what… Who is that?”

Kris laughed. “Relax, angel, it’s just Bockle. He’s an earth fae, a brownie. He can drive the sleigh while the three of us relax and talk.”

Lilly shook her head at the wonder of it all. Really, what was one more strange occurrence on a night like this?

Nick climbed over the seat to join them both in the back. His hazel eyes were dark and hot with need, and they swirled with another emotion Lilly wasn’t sure she understood.