He disturbed her a lot.
Moreover, there’d been nothing shy or timid in her voice when she told him so. Instead, there’d been fire. Snapping, sparking whips of it. Underlaid with a sound that made his toes curl and his body sing with tense anticipation.
That hook and line that had pierced him from the first moment of their meeting? The same hook and line that had grown to the size of a whaling harpoon when her Siren’s voice had dragged across an entire city to her side? Still there.
Now burning like a freshly stoked forge.
He’d been worried when she’d continued to refuse to see him even after she’d Called him and every other Calbernan in the city. He’d begun to think that somehow he’d made a mistake. That he wasn’t hers. That the feelings eating him alive were not reciprocated.
But now he knew that wasn’t the case. That what he felt wasn’t a misunderstanding made in the heat of a wild, shocking moment when a Siren’s Voice rang out for the first time in more than two thousand years.
He was hers. He was hers and she knew it.
And she was his, too. She was just fighting it, as he had initially done.
Because that hook and line? Apparently, it worked both ways.
He watched the bright, sky-blue flows of Summer’s long skirts disappear through the garden gate.
A slow smile curved his lips.
Any one of his cousins or his men would have recognized that slow, determined, predatory smile in an instant, just as they would have recognized the honed purpose carved into his features as he raced down the terraces of the palace gardens and dove into the Llaskroner Fjord.
Dilys Merimydion was going hunting.
Chapter 11
The cold water of the fjord slid over Dilys like a lover’s caress as he swam beneath the surface. Had he been a cat, he would have been purring. Water—like love—was a vital nutrient to Calbernans, but apart from an occasional nighttime swim when the rest of the palace and city was sleeping, Dilys had kept his need for the sea under tight wraps since coming to Wintercraig. He’d come to woo an outlander bride, and he’d not wanted to appear too foreign or off-putting to his future wife.
All that had changed now. Dilys was no longer courting a mereoulaniprincess. He was in pursuit of a Siren, one who thought she could outrun her own desires by denying them—and him. He intended to prove otherwise, and he would need every advantage he could muster to do so. Including the strength and revitalization he derived from the sea.
She was walking—all but running—towards the grotto under the waterfall. It was, he knew from Ari and Ryll, one of her favorite places to go.
In the water, the thin membranes grew between his fingers and toes, a translucent but highly tensile webbing that gave him speed in the fluid world of the sea. The muscles in his body flexed and pulled as he swam. He could outswim a dolphin, if need be, but for now he maintained an even, leisurely pace. He swam on his side beneath the water’s surface and watched Gabriella’s bright blue skirts as she hurried down the beautifully landscaped walkway toward the waterfall grotto.
She wanted him. So badly she could hardly keep her hands off him. So badly, she would flee him rather than face the truth.
That knowledge was a potent aphrodisiac that roused every predatory, territorial, and possessive male instinct he possessed. And every one of those sharply honed instincts was now fixed, entirely and immutably, on the princess Summer Coruscate.
Time to see exactly how hot her fire burned.
He swam deep enough to hide himself from view. He didn’t need to surface for air. The gill slits that had opened along his ribs filtered oxygen from the water itself. Still, every hundred yards or so, he swam closer to the surface just to get a better view. Each time he did so, he was careful never to disturb the water in a way that would betray his position.
Calbernans knew how to hunt in the sea.
The roar and turbulence of the falls grew closer, and Dilys slowed. His prey had reached the grotto.
Summer Sun! Gabriella paced across the damp, moss-covered stone floor of the grotto tucked away beneath Snowbeard Falls, the main feeder river that carried runoff from the snowcaps and the glaciers of the Skoerr Mountains into the Llaskroner Fjord. A westerly breeze blew the cool mist from the fall back into the grotto, bathing Summer’s hot cheeks, but the normally refreshing mist burned off the instant it touched her skin.
Tension coiled tight inside her, dread snaking around the nervous knots. Why had she opened her mouth back there in the gardens and snapped at him over his manner of dress? What maggot had invaded her brain, and caused her to cast away an entire lifetime of self-preservation with a few foolish, unthinking words? She’d doomed herself as surely as a doe leaping out of the brush into the direct path of a hunter’s bow.
Gabriella wasn’t a hunter. Summerlanders, in general, weren’t. They were farmers, gardeners, nurturers. But she’d spent the last several months in Wintercraig. Hunting was a way of life here. Every man a natural-born predator. And she’d come to understand a more than a little about their natures. She’d seen that subtle tension that gripped them all when they sighted their prey. Sensed the electric thrill that rushed through their veins as they stalked. Heard the eagerness and satisfaction in their voices when they spoke of their hunts.
And she had just roused those exact responses in Dilys Merimydion.
Why, oh, why, hadn’t she just kept her mouth shut and kept whimpering and flinching away from him until she’d made a clean escape? When he thought she feared him, she’d been safe. Both his pride and his protective instincts would have seen to that.
But now he knew that her fear wasn’t of him but of what he made her feel.
