“Are you all right?”
His voice was low, husky, rough in all the right ways. She shuddered as every feminine muscle in her body clenched tight. Her fingers flexed.
Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! For Halla’s sake, Summer, don’t touch him!
She wet her suddenly parched lips. “F-fine. I’m fine,” she somehow managed to stammer. Sweet Helos! Dilys Merimydion wasn’t just a terrible danger to her; he was a potently appealing poison she longed to consume. Every moment he sat there, crouched over her, edged her closer to the abyss.
He reached for her right hand, ran a thumb over the slightly raised rose-shaped, red birthmark on her inner wrist, then turned over his own left wrist to reveal a golden, trident-shaped mark.
It was not uncommon in Mystral for children of a particularly gifted—usually royal—bloodline to bear proof of that gift on their inner wrists. Females were born with the mark of their birthright on their right wrist. Males on their left. Wynter, Khamsin’s husband, for instance, bore a white wolf on his inner left wrist.
Summer had never given her Rose a second thought, except when it grew hot and warned her of an impending breech of her inner barriers. But she recalled something odd happening at Wynter and Khamsin’s wedding. Something powerful and elemental when their marks met.
Something not too unlike what had just happened in the water between Dilys and herself.
Something, Khamsin had admitted to her sisters in a giggling afternoon of girl talk, that still happened between them in private moments with the most scandalously delicious results. She had decided it was some sort of proof of compatibility between mates—sort of a divine confirmation that “this is the one for you”—as well as a little extra “oomph” to help certain things along, she confessed with rosy cheeks.
Intrigued, Spring had insisted on conducting a series of preliminary experiments to test the theory. Nothing happened when the sisters touched their marks to one another. Nor had anything happened when Spring “inadvertently” brushed her mark against Wynter’s. Autumn had tried it, too, with the same lack of results. They’d tried to get Summer to do the same, but by then, Wynter had become a little unnerved by his new sisters randomly bumping into him and rubbing their arms against his and Summer found it a bit disturbing to test for sexual compatibility with her youngest sister’s husband, so she’d declined.
Now, however, Gabriella had a sinking suspicion that Khamsin’s theory might be correct.
She tried to tug her arm out of Dilys’s grip, but he didn’t let go.
“You can get off me now,” she ordered, mimicking Autumn’s haughtiest tone.
He didn’t move. Instead, he locked his gaze on hers and, with slow deliberation, laid his left wrist flat against her right.
Summer sucked in a breath and went rigid beneath him as a fresh surge of energy shot through her. Only this time, instead of an electric thunderclap that stunned the senses, this surge fired up every sensual cell in her body. If Dilys hadn’t been straddling her, she would have wrapped her legs around his waist and dragged him down atop her. As it was, she burned for him in the worst way. The way his nostrils flared and his tattoos went bright with a fresh burst of phosphorescent blue light only fanned the flames of her desire. She wanted to command him to touch her... to kiss her. Her gift of Persuasion flared, bringing the words and the magic to the tip of her tongue.
“Your eyes have gone gold,” Dilys murmured, and there was something about the way he said it the stopped her cold. A sort of dazed confusion and wonder. All the Coruscate siblings’ eyes changed when they drew upon their power. Khamsin’s eyes went a shifting silver, sort of like swirling storm clouds. Spring’s turned an electric green. Autumn’s looked like flames. And Summer’s went golden—the more power she summoned, the brighter and more obvious the gold. Her sisters had always likened it to the sun shining from her eyes, a mark of Helos, but Dilys, clearly, found it significant in some other way.
The shocking moment when their gazes had first met... that explosive moment in the fjord... and now, again, her uncharacteristically powerful sexual hunger just from the brush of his mark against hers... suspicion hardened to certainty.
Khamsin was right. The reaction of marksdidmean something.
Summer suspected it didn’t just mean she’d found someone compatible with her... she suspected it meant she’d foundthesomeone most compatible with her. Her life’s mate. The man with whom Gabriella could have the sort of love Khamsin had found with Wynter.
The sort of love her mother had found with her father.
A love the loss of which had driven Verdan of Summerlea so mad with grief he’d destroyed himself, his son, his kingdom, and very nearly the whole world.
Gods help her.
She wanted it—oh, not the destruction and misery her father had caused, but the love he’d had. The love Khamsin and Wynter had. That perfect, deep, consuming love. She wanted it so badly the hunger was a burning fire inside her soul.
And here it was. Hers for the taking.
“Dilys,” she whispered, saying his name for the first time, and his eyes glittered bright as a gleaming gold idol atop a god’s altar.
It felt right to say his name, right in a way nothing had ever felt before. The syllables whispered across her skin like a warm, languid caress, sinking into her flesh, into her very bones. As if his name was a lost part of herself that had finally found its way home. The hunger for him burned brighter, becoming a sweet and terrible ache.
There was a voice in her head, crying out a warning, but it was only a dim echo, the caution drowned out by a seductive song that beckoned to her, ensnaring her soul in golden bands of honeyed light.
“Call me,” the song whispered, only it didn’t speak in words but rather in powerful swells of emotion, warm currents so strong she could feel resistance being drained away. A man’s song.Hissong. “Sing my Name. Claim me as thine own. For I am thine before all others.”
And deep inside, a powerful voice welled up inside her, whispering urgently,Claim him. Make him yours.
Certainty flowered in her soul. She could do it. She could bind him to her for all eternity. Every part of her being wanted exactly that.
