6

TEN YEARS EARLIER

Behind the midnight-blue curtain of the willow, I'm sprawled out on my back, fresh juices from a plum staining my lips. My full basket of treasures and trinkets is perched on the grass above my head, within arm's reach, and that keeps me content.

Kneeling between my legs, Daxeel leans over me and licks the juices from my mouth with small flicks of his tongue and tender kisses.

My lashes flutter, not just the plum's effects, but I am utterly serene this night. "Why do your females come to this land," I mutter, but with his ministrations, I find it more of a challenge with each passing moment to keep to our chat, "but so few of mine go to yours?"

Between the gentle sucks of plum on my lips and the licks of the juiced trails down my chin, he murmurs his words to me, keeping his mind where mine is starting to slip to lust, "It can be hard for a light female to live in my world. How different it will be for her. Suppose that prevents too many romances from forming between your kind and mine."

It takes my mind a few sluggish seconds before it clicks. He means the difference in how females are regarded between our worlds.

The iilra should be the rulers of their lands, as our Sisters are our princesses. But their rulers, their royals, are the descendants of the best warriors, not the females most connected to the gods, to the world, to the lands, and in their case, to the darkness. Our royal bloodline is the appropriate one, where the females are divinely connected to all.

In his world, it sounds cold and harsh. There, females are to be kept, not unkindly, but kept all the same. They are beneath the males in those lands. It's another reason I don't fully embrace fantasies of running away with him into the cold, harsh darkness.

I murmur a question against his full lips, "Do you believe that?"

A gentle kiss grazed along the corner of my mouth before he answers, "Believe what?"

"That your males are superior?"

A flick of the tongue over my lips, then, "Yes."

The honesty of his simple answer silences me for a moment.

The tip of his nose grazes mine. "But I do not look down on females, I do not harm them, I do not disrespect them. Females merely have different gifts and require protection."

My frown is aimed up at the midnight leaves. "Females rule nature, males do not. How are you superior when you are in fact inferior?"

"Am I?" he whispers against my skin, like he's whispering the sweetest words of all. "We both have nature respond to us."

"I see animals and they come to me. They run from you. I touch a flower bud and it blooms. You touch it, it wilts. Nature responds to me, a female, because nature is herself a goddess."

"Your gifts are pretty petals—ours are blood and death." His tender kisses come with a dark smile as he draws back to kneel between my legs. "You think you are superior to me?" Stealing my ankles in his firm hands, he brings them up to rest on his chest. "That you, a female, should stand above me?" His dark smile turns to the arch of my foot. There, he grazes a kiss so tender and intimate that it wets my core instantly. "Am I not stronger, faster, larger, better?" He looks down at me, shadows of the night slithering down his face, darkening the look he gives me. "Is it not you who needs me, my protection?"

I narrow my eyes at him.

His voice is a husky murmur against the bone of my inner ankle, "I see animals and they run from me, because they fear me. A flower I touch will die in my hand if I choose it to, because it fears me."

Those splendid kisses down the inside of my leg have me completely melted on the blanket, and I fight to keep up with his words.

"My halfling falls onto her back and her words silence at my touch…" He looks at me for a moment from beneath his lashes—then he grins and presses his mouth to my inner thigh, "as I am above her," he growls the words softly. "And she, like all else, surrenders. If I am not superior, tell me why all around me submits?"

There, he lingers. At the apex of my thigh, he grazes kisses, soft licks, gentle bites.

"Males dominate nature, females nurture it," he tells me, but his husky voice is so soft that he must think I'm not hearing him at all, that I'm too wrapped up in the sensations of his touch. "Nature responds to us both, but differently. Both are valuable, and I have never thought any less of females than that. I respect them."

For a long moment, I just stare up at the willow that curtains us, the one that we've visited so many times now, and I watch it sway its leaves as though it's warmed to me, as though it greets me.

Daxeel travels his mouth to the edge of my core. He takes his time adoring me. We've done many things together, and he's touched every part of me. My heart and soul, included.

But there is one thing I haven't done—taken him into me. He has not yet been in my mouth or my sex.

This night, I will do both.

I'm no virgin, and I ache to do all the things with him, to give myself to him entirely. Maybe I held off because of how important he is to me—that it means more than a romp behind the curtains of an alcove.

I love him. He loves me. And once we do this, there's no going back—I'll carry him in my heart always.

He's never pushed me into it, never pressured me, never made a move that stretched that far. Like he knows, he knows I'm still just that bit afraid—too afraid to let him in all the way.

Not tonight.

He will have all of me tonight.

And that includes my sharp tongue—

"Yet here you are male, worshippingme," I manage a whisper against the swift flick of his tongue down the wetness of my cunt, and flames are devouring me whole, so much need and hunger that it should terrify me.

He grins against me, all ferocious teeth and wicked intentions. "Kindly shut those pretty lips of yours and come on my tongue."

"That's one way of losing an argument," I breathe out the words.

But his teeth are quick to nip at my inner thigh in warning.

I'm silenced.

Shut those pretty lips.

Come on my tongue…

I don't get the chance.

The leafy curtains of the willows disturb with a sudden rustle.

Daxeel stills against me.

On my back, I look up as the leaves hiss and shiver but without a breeze or sudden hit of wind to rattle them.

Nature is warning me…

I suck in a sharp breath at the same moment Daxeel shoves his hand down on my tummy. He pins me in place, his eyes dark and dangerous where mine are wide and wild. He swerves his gaze around the night of the field, stuck in his protective stance curved over me.

But against the one who steps into the rush of moonlight, Daxeel can't protect me. The only one he can't stop from punishing me.

Father.

The breath that escapes me feels like a fist punched my gut.

Father stands in the moonlight, two trees down, and just some steps from the path I always take to this field. And he looks right at me—he sees me like this, a dark male curved over me with a need to protect me, but knelt between my legs, and my scent in the air…

The shame has my gaze cutting down. It lands on him…

Knife, the little brownie demon, is tucked behind father's legs, peering around them with a sneer so twisted that his metallic teeth glint ferociously.

My mind flies to my impatient tapping on the floor of my bedchamber as I waited for Daxeel to toss stones at my window. He didn't, and I waited two hours, making all the impatient noise on that floor—right above Knife's closet.

The brownie must have followed me… then went back to tell father.

If Daxeel wasn't here, I have no doubt Knife would be hissing and gnashing at me. But he's smarter than that, so he just sneers, silent.

And father stares right through me… like he died. No, like I died.

I swallow my heart that seems to have lodged itself in my throat.

Under the fierce gaze glittering amber in the moonlight, the shame has my face the shade of a ripe plum.

My mouth opens, then shuts, opens, then shuts—

I find no words under the silent glare of my father.

Not when I lie here, my legs stretched up and feet resting on the pecs of the dark male knelt at my wet and licked core.

Daxeel's hand is still firm on my middle. He doesn't want to let go, let me go, and he makes no move to do the proper thing. He should rise and greet my father, explain away our position, declare intentions and love for me—

But father's order cuts any of that short before it can even come to be. "Home. Now."

I utter no words to Daxeel before I scoot back on the blanket.

His hand slips from my middle, and still I'm quiet as Daxeel's doubtful and stirred eyes swerve to me.

He looks to me for answers.

The heat on my face is answer enough, so I don't meet his calculating gaze. Please don't say anything, I beg of him with a single shake of the head before I snatch the basket of trinkets, grab my sandals, then rush out from under the leafy curtains to meet father.

Before I reach him and the brownie, silent tears have already started falling down my cheeks.

That was the last time I saw Daxeel before I broke him.