And yet, when that woman appeared before him, instead of courting her with the tools he’d spent a lifetime preparing, instead of winning her trust and her love with patience and skill, he’d bungled everything. From their very first day, he’d alienated her. He’d dismissed her, insulted her, wounded her feelings, and now, after realizing what she was—whoshe was, both to Calberna and to him—he’d rushed her. Instead of sliding into the chase with the sleek confidence of the Calbernan prince he was, he’d thrashed about with all the finesse of a frenzied shark. Had his mentors witnessed his behavior, they would have rightly turned their backs on him in shame.
If she refused to let him come within a thousand feet of her ever again, he wouldn’t be able to blame her!
His hands curled near his face, claws fully extended. It was all he could do not to tear theulumi-liafrom his own cheek in self-loathing. He wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. Even now, despite his years of training. But not once in his life had he blundered so many times and so badly as he had with Summer Coruscate.
His failure was all the more galling because his blunders had been withher.
He should never have followed her to the grotto. He’d known she wanted him. She couldn’t hide that. Even if she hadn’t lost herself almost as badly as he had in their kiss, he knew well enough how to read the signs of a woman’s body to know that he aroused her on the most basic and primitive of levels.
He should have used that to his advantage. Been patient. He should have baited his hook and dangled it before her untilshecame tohim.Instead, he’d cornered her, left her nowhere to run, overwhelmed her with his sheer physical presence and his own unbridled passion until she yielded.
And in doing so, he might just have lost everything.
There were some prizes brute force could not win. Some victories that required subtlety.
He needed to regroup, to set aside the wild, wave-tossed storm of emotion and desire and aching, painfulneedthat battered him from the inside out. He needed to find or force calm enough to think.
He could not afford to blunder again. From this point on, his hunt had to be flawless or he would lose her altogether, and that was unthinkable.
The only thing that gave him any hope at all was the sweet, wild way she’d come apart in his arms, after she’d Commanded him to end her torment, and in return, he’d Commanded her to surrender to theililia nua,the ocean of pleasure.
She was a Siren. He could not have compelled her just then with the weak shadow ofsusirenathat Calbernan males possessed unless she allowed it. And she would not have allowed it from any male except one with whom she shared a bond of trust.
She might lie to him, try to deny him, refuse to Call his Name, but at least on some basic level, the Siren in her recognized him as a male she could trust. Recognized him as a mate. Ashermate.
He clung to that realization as the beacon of hope it was.
From this moment forward, he was going to make up for all his past wrongs. He was going to woo her as she deserved. Until he won her trust, proved to her that she had his complete devotion, convinced her beyond all doubt that he was the right—theonly—mate for her. Until she Called his Name and bound him to her—and bound herself to him in return, body and soul.
Thiswas the mission he’d trained for all his life. Gabriella was the victory he’d spent a lifetime working to achieve.
Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Dilys shot for the ocean’s surface, instinctively summoning his seagifts to speed him along. He shouldn’t have gotten much of a response. Even though Ryll, Ari, and a number of his men had gifted him with enough of their own power each day that he was no longer struggling to make it through the day without collapsing, keeping Gabriella alive had drained away all the great magic his mother had given to him. He had no ability to replenish that power, and yet, now, he shot through the water at a speed that could only be powered by great magic.
That was when he realized that in their passion, the Siren in Gabriella given him power. A vast ocean of it. More power than even his mother had ever be able to share with him—and Alysaldria held within her the concentrated magic of generations of Calbernan queens.
He broke the surface of the ocean, leaping skyward, soaring weightlessly through the air. The warm golden rays of the sun enveloped him in a sea of light, and he gave a laughing shout of exultation before his body arched gracefully and speared back into the Varyan’s welcoming blue waves.
She was his. Deny it all she would, but she was his as surely as he was hers.
She had accepted his passion, his care, his devotion, and given him in exchange trust, passion, and her glorious, Siren-born magic, filling him with crackling energy and more strength than he had ever known. In doing so, whether she had intended to or not, she had completedmakura ri,the touch of giving and receiving, and committed herself toliakapua,the Calbernan mating ritual.
Chapter 12
Thanks to servants’ stairs and a judicious use of Persuasion, Gabriella managed to make it back to her room without anyone raising an alarm over her disheveled appearance. Once safely behind her bedroom’s closed and locked doors, she shed her torn blue gown and silk chemise, then stood there naked trying to figure out what to do with them. If there’d been a fire in the hearth, she would have tossed the clothes in and let them burn, but it was summer and the hearth was empty.
With no other obvious method of disposal available to her, she threw the dress and chemise in the corner of the room and began to pace with short, agitated steps. That lasted for perhaps five seconds before she groaned and covered her face with her hands.
Summer Sun! What had come over her?
He’d kissed her, touched her, and she’d lost all reason. He’dsuckled her fingers,for Halla’s sake! Then suckled something more scandalous than that. She covered her breasts with her hands, only to shudder as touching the still-sensitized tips made her muscles clench with remembered passion. She snatched her hands back and resumed pacing.
“It was magic,” she muttered. “It had to have been.”
There was no other explanation.
One kiss, one touch, and she’d practically begged Dilys Merimydion to ruin her right there on the bench in Snowbeard Falls Grotto!
She’d let him unlace her bodice, touch her breasts—kissthem! She’d wrapped her legs around his waist and rubbed the most intimate parts of her body against his. She’d let him put his hand up her skirt, let him stroke flesh so private not even the maids who tended her in the bath touched her there except through the barrier of a washcloth.
