He stood alone and silent as she approached, his hair spilling down his back. He wore a pristine whiteshuma,his belt pure platinum encrusted with diamonds. He watched her with unblinking eyes, drinking in her gentle, soothing beauty. She was garbed in soft lavender, a pretty pastel shade that gave her beautiful eyes a faintly violet hue. The thick, black mass of her hair had been artfully piled atop her head in a confection of curls and braids, with long curls left to cascade down her back to her waist. She wore narrow lavender slippers on her feet.
“You look exceptionally beautiful this evening, Gabriella. Lavender suits you.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was crisp, no-nonsense. “Sealord Merimydion, I thought I’d made myself perfectly clear that this—”
“Dilys,” he corrected. “I am Dilys to you.” He pitched his voice deliberately low, making his name a murmur so husky it was almost a purr. Bright, watchful eyes noted the tiny catch in her breath, the little shiver she couldn’t manage to suppress. He hid a smile. Oh, yes, she thought she’d come to end his courtship once and for all.
He had no intention of letting her.
“Come,moa leia,sit.” He walked to the waiting table set out beneath the arbor and pulled out a chair, but she made no move to take it.
“Sealord... Dilys,” she modified when he flicked a warning glance her way. “This must stop.”
“Of what do you speak, Gabriella?”
“The flowers, the notes, the gifts. This!” She waved to the beautifully set table beneath the arbor, to the servants waiting crisply for Dilys’s command. “All of this!”
He lifted her hand. It was so slight compared to his, the slender fingers so delicate, almost bird-like. The creamy, burnished brown of her Summerlander skin was soft and satiny. Carrying that hand to his lips, he pressed a lingering kiss against the deliciously fragrant skin, then calmly told her, “No.”
Her lips parted in surprise. Such soft, pink, delectable lips. He wanted to kiss them so badly.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” she demanded.
He kissed her hand once more—a poor substitute for her plump, moist lips, but better than nothing—and said, “I mean no, Gabriella. I will not surrender my right to court you.”
“Yourright?” Her nostrils flared. Her eyes flashed. He’d never seen her eyes go quite that shade of blue. More fire than sky, hot and electric. He loved it.
“If you think you have the right to any part of me, you are mistaken, sir!” Summer continued. “My sister,QueenKhamsin”—Her emphasis on the word “queen” almost made him smile. As if her sister’s title could persuade him to alter his course. Him, the son of theMyerial,grandson of too manyMyerialsto count—“made it very clear that neither I nor either of my other two sisters are required to accept your suit. And I most definitely choose not to accept it. So thank you very much for the dinner invitation, but I must regrettably decline this and any such future invitations as you should desire to make.” She gave her hand a tug, trying to free herself from his grip.
His fingers remained curled around her delicate wrist, the grip gentle but as unyielding as stone.
She yanked harder. Yanked again. Tried to pry his fingers off her wrist.
He remained a rock. The air around them grew warmer and the breeze kicked up. Summer didn’t often manifest her weathergifts unintentionally—probably because she’d spent her whole life keeping her emotions and her gifts in tight check—but she was starting to manifest them now. The breeze made the fabric of hisshumaflutter, but Dilys himself could have been a statue carved from bedrock. When she lunged back, putting the full weight of her slender body behind her efforts to escape, no part of him swayed even a fraction of an inch.
“Let me go!” she exclaimed.
He gave her a lazy smile. “No.”
Sweet lady of the sea, she was lovely. Her face was flushed, her eyes starbright. Her beautiful breasts heaved from her exertions, the soft swell of her bosom pressing against the confines of her lavender gown as she struggled to catch her breath. If he thought for one instant that she would allow it, he would bear her down to the sweet garden grass this very instant, tear that gown off her body, and devour every soft, delicious, intoxicating inch of her until that volcano inside her erupted and she drowned him in all that beautiful, powerful, searing fire she kept so tightly contained.
“You have no right to keep me here,” she told him.
The smile faded from his face. In complete seriousness and with all the tenderness in the world, he told her, “But I do, Gabriella. I paid for that right with the blood I spilled and the men I lost in the ice and snow of Wintercraig’s battlefields.”
She went still, her fiery passion momentarily banked.
“The contract I made with your brother gave me the right to take you as myliana,with or without your consent. I surrendered that right when I broke my contract with your brother, but my contract with your sister still guarantees me the right to court you. Three months to court the Seasons of Summerlea. That is what was I bought for myself when I joined your sister to defeat the Ice King. I have been patient, because I made so many mistakes with you from the start. But from this day forward, I intend to collect every day of courtship that is due me.”
He’d spent the last seven days deciding how best to proceed with her. Now that he had a better understanding of why she was so determined to refuse him, he had come up with a different plan to win her. She was a Siren. All the gifts he had selected with such care and showered upon her had been reflections of his ever-increasing devotion, gifts of love, given freely, which had only fed her strength and enabled her to bolster her resolve to refuse him. He had, unwittingly, been reinforcing the very gates he was trying to break down. And he’d been doing it from afar—without the personal interaction and companionship that might have helped weaken those adamantine walls of hers.
So he’d changed tactics. He’d cut off the deluge, hoping to create a vacuum of need that would work for him rather than against him. Withholding himself from her this past week had been difficult in the extreme. He was already bound to her, and staying completely away—not even allowing himself a glimpse of her lest his own resolve crumble—was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. It physically hurt him to be away from her for so long while things were still unsettled between them.
But yesterday, when she’d sought out Ryll to ask if Dilys had left the city, he’d known the strategy had worked. And now it was time for the next phase of his new plan: forcing her to face her fears, with him by her side to help her through it.
He gestured to the chair beside him. “Please,moa kiri,sit. Your brother-in-law’s chef, Ingarra, has prepared something special for us. You would not want her efforts to go to waste.”
Summer sat. Some other woman might have plopped into the chair in a fit of pique, but Gabriella was, as in all things, exquisitely graceful. She sank into the chair with a smooth, effortless elegance that seemed totally at odds with the smoldering look in her eyes and the clench of her delicate jaw.
