Her hands rose, splayed fingers sliding across the intoxicatingly warm, deliciously soft skin of his lean cheeks, cupping his face.
Her eyes never left his as she gently and inexorably tugged his face down and guided his lips to hers.
She’d never kissed a man. She’d wanted to a few times before, but she’d never allowed herself to do so. Now, the instant his mouth touched hers, she knew she’d never want to kiss any man but him for the rest of her life. He was her one and only. He was everything she would ever want, everything she could ever need.
His lips were smooth and firm and warm against hers. Velvety soft to the touch. She licked at them gently with the tip of her tongue, tasting him.
He shuddered, and his lips parted, opening against hers as his head tilted and he deepened the kiss. His legs stretched out, his long body lengthened, pressing down against hers, a delicious, heavy, warm weight supported by the powerful arms that flattened against the dock to frame her. The long, silken, fragrant coils of his hair spilled down to dance along the tops of her shoulders and caress her cheeks. They—like he—smelled of sultry, tropical nights and warm sea breezes, sweet, spicy, exotic, and he tasted like the answer to every wistful, aching dream she’d ever dreamt in the long, lonely dark of her aloneness.
She gave herself up to the kiss, luxuriated in it. Her hands slid around the hot, sleek, hardness of his muscled chest, learning every swell and hollow, every texture. Satiny skin. The nubbly velvet of hardened nipples. The trembling steel of clenched muscle.
She could pet him like this for a lifetime and never grow tired of it. She dragged her nails down the bumpy line of his spine and reveled in the way he sucked in a sharp breath, shuddered against her, then ravaged her mouth with a kiss gone wild, licking her, tasting her, breathing her in. His fingers dove into the mass of her unbound curls, cupped her skull and pulled her closer, tighter into his kiss, and if by sheer strength and desire, he could drag her into his body and make her part of him.
He kissed her until she was dizzy and gasping for air, until he was gasping too. And when he finally pulled away to catch his breath, his eyes were dazed, his expression stunned.
“Blessed Numahao,” he whispered. “How can this be? You are... you are...”
She stared up at him, drinking in the sight of him, saturating her soul with the bittersweet wonder of this moment, committing every tiny detail to memory. Her thumbs slid across his skin, caressed the glowing blue sigil shining on his cheekbone, traced the planes and angles of his beautiful face.
And then she smiled with aching gentleness, her heart savaged by the knowledge that if she let herself, she would love him as she would never love another soul... love him as no other being in Mystral could ever or would ever love another.
And she told him softly, the powerful gift of her Persuasion pulsing in her voice, “Nothing. I am nothing to you.” She had to wrap her fingers around the back of his neck and hold on tight as he tried instinctively to pull away, to reject the command threaded through each word she spoke. “You came here to court my sisters, not me. I am not the wife you need, and you will not pursue me.”
Her smile trembled, then broke. Unable to stop herself, she kissed him again, one last time. Kissed him with all the desperate longing that clawed her from the inside out, kissed him until tears of regret and sorrow spilled from the corners of her eyes. And then she pulled away to say, with an unwavering surge of even stronger Persuasive power, “You will not remember this. Not that you came to me, not that you saved my life, not that we kissed.You will not remember. And you willnotpursue me.”
On the palace terrace, beneath the soft light of the stars and the glow of hundreds of candlelit lanterns strung about the garden, Ari Calmyria was enjoying the company of Lady Fern Goldenbanner. Bright-eyed, erudite, and admirably independent, the Summerlander Lady Fern had shocked her family and community by taking the small fortune her father had bequeathed to her upon his death and heading north to seek a future mate from among the Calbernans rather than wedding the dull-witted son of her closest neighbor after her family lands and titles had passed to a distant cousin.
“Or rather, wedding my money to him,” Lady Fern confessed with a wry twist of her lips. “It wasn’t until after the war put a sizable dent in their coffers that Lady Alder, Salix’s mother, even remotely considered me a potential match for her son.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t only your money that he was—” Ari broke off in mid-sentence as every cell in his body suddenly snapped to sharp attention. Something rippled across his senses, a whisper that resonated with power. A Voice. Female. Full of magic.
Before he could track the Voice back to its origin, it fell silent.
“Sealord Calmyria?”
The warm hand on his arm pulled his attention back to the slender, bespectacled Summerlander at his side. She was regarding him with obvious concern. “Forgive me,myerina.Where was I? Ah, yes, the foolish neighbor who could not see the true treasure before their eyes...”
“Never mind that,” Lady Fern exclaimed. “Are you quite all right? What just happened? You looked as if you’d been struck by lightning.”
He had, in a way, but it was nothing he was willing to discuss withoulani.Ari forced a smile. “It’s nothing. I thought I heard something, but I must have been mistaken.”
Lady Fern wasn’t so easily dissuaded. “What is it you thought that you heard? And why does it seem your countrymen all heard the same thing, while the rest of us appear to have heard nothing.” She gestured to the other guests with a wave of her hand.
Ari glanced around the terrace. Sure enough, the other officers looked as stunned as he felt and were doing an even worse job than he was in hiding it.
He caught Ryll’s eye and raised his brows in silent question. Ryll’s response was a shake of his head and a shrug. He didn’t know where the Voice had come from either.
Ari turned back to Fern and gave her a potent smile full of disarming charm. “The reason we heard something the rest of you did not is easily explained,myerina.Calbernans, you see, have extremely acute hearing. One of our many gifts from the sea. In fact, I have a rather humorous story about the time I tried to sneak past my father when I was a boy....”
As he launched into his tale, not giving Lady Fern a chance to get a word in edgewise, he exchanged a speaking glance with Ryll over the top of Lady Fern’s head.
The situation here in Konumarr had just become exponentially more interesting. Because whoever owned that Voice they’d all just heard was in possession of a gift Ari had never run across outside of Calberna.
A great, magical gift. A power the greatest Houses of Mystral had spent millennia hoarding, consolidating, interbreeding in the hopes of bringing it back to its fullest potential: a vocal magic known assusirena.
Siren Song.
Leaving a dazed Dilys Merimydion sitting alone on the pier, Summer made her way back through the gardens. She was careful to keep to the shadows, and she slipped into the palace via one of the side doors, taking one of the narrow, servant staircases to reach the second floor where her chambers were located. With her hair spilling down her back in unkempt curls, and her lips red and swollen from passionate kisses, anyone who saw her would have no doubt what she’d been up to. She wasn’t up to dealing with rampant speculation and scandalized whispers behind her back.
