Edge Of Oblivion

8

Angry, she reminded herself. Angry.

“I know this is important to you,” he said in that soft bedroom voice, stroking his palms up and down her arms, slowly rocking her back and forth in his strong embrace. “And I know once you have your mind made up, well...” He lowered his lips to her neck again, opened his mouth over the column of her throat, heat and softness and a gentle suck that fluttered her eyelids. “...I might as well try and stop the north wind.”

“Exactly,” she said, scowling now at the carved figurines that decorated the long mantel, row after row of obsidian and porcelain and glass panthers in miniature, crouching, leaping, lazing in the limbs of a tree.

His muffled laughter shook them both. He turned her in a practiced, fluid motion, his hands gently coercing her hips, his palms flattening against the small of her back, drawing her in again. In spite of herself, her arms reached up and twined around his shoulders. He bent his head and pressed his lips to her temple, her cheek, one corner of her mouth.

“But perhaps, great Queen, you might allow me one or two conditions of my own,” he murmured, spreading his hand around the back of her neck. He tilted her head up and rained feathered kisses over her eyelids, her brow.

She made a wordless noise of protest and kept her eyes closed, frowning, feeling the heat and muscle of him burn her straight through their clothes. “Stop trying to bribe me.”

“Never bribing,” he breathed, skimming his lips over hers, lightly, oh so lightly, just enough to make her pulse jump and have her rising on her toes to better meet them. Her lips parted and she felt the fleet, electric shock of his tongue against hers. His arm tightened around her so she felt his heartbeat drumming against her chest, staccato and strong, to match her own. “Only asking.”

With one hand still cradling her head and the other wound hard around her body, he covered her mouth with his and kissed her deeply, making her forget all about the difference between a bribe and a simple question, making her sorry there was a manor full of restless, feral-eyed Ikati waiting for their decision, making her regret the terrible inconvenience of their fine and formal clothes.

She pulled away first, breathless and flushed, and gazed up at him from beneath her lashes. “One or two,” she said, still stubborn, alight in the dark, glowing burn of his eyes. “But we agree she can try?”

A figure tottered by outside the sun-hazed windows, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, stumbling blindly over the manicured lawn, headed toward the dark line of trees in the distance where the forest began. Without looking she knew it was Viscount Weymouth, wandering aimlessly in his mustard waistcoat and old-fashioned cravat, completely naked below the waist.

Leander smiled down at her, wolfish, and the flush spread over her cheeks and down her neck. “She can try,” he relented, tilting his head to hers again. “And when she wakes up from that shock Weymouth gave her, maybe you can get her to Suggest to him that he put back on his pants.”

“He’s lucky. If I had her Gift and he’d shocked me with that thing, he’d be naked and lying in a pool of his own blood.” Jenna sighed, leaning into Leander, pressing her lips to his again. “Shall we retire to the bedroom, my love?” she murmured, fingering the knot of his silk tie. “I find myself in need of...a change of clothes.”

The assassin stood gazing out the same tall expanse of Tudor windows in the East Library that Jenna had looked out the day before, watching the mass of black thunderclouds that hulked overhead, ominous and opaque. Rain sheeted down in a silver, sideways slant in the wind and smeared the view of the fields and misted forest beyond to plots of muted gray and brown and green. A flash of lightning forked through the clouds, brilliant white, and illuminated the hills and trees in spare, pagan lines before dissolving again to smoke and shadow. A low rumble of thunder shivered the glass.

The storm had broken just as he’d disembarked from the Earl of Sommerley’s private plane at Heathrow this morning and showed no signs of letting up. It reminded him of the monsoons that drenched his own colony in Brazil every summer. But this squall, vigorous and lusty as it was, seemed somehow less primal. More predictable. More...restrained.

Everything in this sophisticated, sprawling English colony was so restrained. The architecture, the people, the land—even the weather. Only their Law was the same, he mused. He’d seen the evidence of that in the medieval-looking device still standing in the great hall. It exuded an animal hunger all its own, just as the machines kept by his tribe did.

“I don’t follow,” he said to the windows. “If you know where they are, why not send a garrison? Why not send a full force to wipe them out?”