She wanted him. Oh, how she wanted him. Everything about him. Even if she ripped him apart to have him. He would die here. She knew that.
And like it or not she was the weapon that would kill him.
The guardian of the wild woods would die and become…other. Become the god, its new vessel, its new toy. It would be free at last.
‘And oh, the fun we’ll have,’it cackled in the back of Alex’s mind.‘The things we’ll do. The three of us. Oh, the pleasure-pain and the agony of release, and all the glory of blood and seed you’ll both pour out for me. You and all you touch.’
Around her wrist, something tightened, insistent and alive, a touch of green and growing things. Alex stared as the grass bracelet Maeve had given her unfurled strands of new life, tendrils which wound tighter against her skin, flowers which opened as if to the sun.
Nick gasped her name once more.
Tell me you’re mine, she’d demanded. And Nick said her name.Hername! Not Crom. He’d called out to her.
‘No,’ she whispered. She didn’t even know where that word came from let alone what it might mean. This wasn’t something she could stop. She was just one woman, already given over toits vile touch. Her family had made this bargain long ago. For power. For wealth. For this piece of land. She was a de Wilde.
‘No,’ Alex said again, this time more certain, more sure of herself. ‘I’m not…’
She was Alex O’Neill. She’d given up the de Wildes twenty years ago.
The entity laughed, a bitter mocking laugh which made her flinch. As her motion stilled, Nick tore free of the bonds holding him. His hands closed on her hips, digging into her skin, a bruising grip which would not be broken. He cried out again, words she didn’t know, couldn’t hope to know. It wasn’t English, or Irish, but something from long before any of those languages had names, let alone a place here. He pulled her to him and fucked her as if his life depended on it.
She cried out as a wave of sensation swept through her, as her body clenched around his and she came, her mind shattering and reforming only to shatter again.
‘Give yourself to us,’Crom howled in the wind and the rain and the roar of the fire.
This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right.
‘No! I’m not a de Wilde. I’m Alex O’Neill and you will not take me!’
Green tendrils of the bracelet binding the two of them together burst into flower, the growth moving faster now, rushing up around them. The grass rose, hungry and all-consuming, and the wild woods closed in on them, smothering and swallowing them up. The world around her tore itself apart.
And all of a sudden she was back in the room, with the storm still battering at the windows and the fire dying in the grate, and Nick underneath her so still and quiet. He gazed sightlessly at the stucco ceiling.
Oh God, what had they done? What hadshedone to him?
‘Nick?’ Her voice came out as little more than a whisper. ‘Nick? Are you—?’ She couldn’t say okay. He didn’t look okay. ‘Nick, please talk to me.’
He heaved in a breath, let it out so slowly. When he finally spoke, he sounded dazed. Lost. ‘Alex?’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s me. I…’
A slow smile spread over his lips, the lips she had kissed, and tormented. The lips she wanted on her again. A lazy smile, too knowing to belong there. She watched it develop with a dawning horror.
‘Alexandra,’ he said, in a low drawl that didn’t sound like Nick at all.
Alex tore herself away from him, grabbing her clothes where they were scattered around them both, pulling them on as fast as she possibly could.
Nick propped himself up on one elbow and watched her, in no hurry to mimic her dressing. Why would he?
Naked, bathed in firelight, hair still damp from the storm…
Alex almost fell over as she pulled on the jeans again.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, his voice teasing, mocking, and not like Nick’s voice at all. ‘Come back. We have so much to finish, you and I. Endless experiences to explore. Your guardian is mine. The witch may have created him to protect this place, but you broke him for me, Alexandra. You lured him in and shattered him to pieces. You made him bleed.’
She needed silver and salt. She needed daylight. She needed…
Oh God, what had she done?
