He grunted then called up his heat.No.It was not like calling up heat at all.The heat was already there, ready and willing, and he used it to reshape the lump.
“There.”He handed it to her.
“What’s it supposed to be?”
“My cock and balls.So you can carry them with you?—”
She smacked his shoulder.“Apollo!”
“Ow.”But he chuckled.
And her heat was waiting, too, there sizzling beneath the skin.She brought it up and reshaped the gold well, taking more care than he had done, making sure every curve of it was perfectly smooth.As she worked, he rolled into her, kissed and tasted her shoulder, lazily teased her body into arousal once more.
When she was done, she rolled the gold across his skin.
“What’s that?”he mumbled.He caught her hand, took the gold.“A marble?A bit too big for that.”
“A sun.”
“I think I win.A sun’s much easier to shape than a co?—”
She kissed him, tried to tell him without words that it was more than a sun.It was what she thought of when she was with him—light and brightness and life.He was beautiful and well-hidden, like the sun hidden behind the fog in these gently rolling hills.And she swore the very grass they laid on knew it, curled around them, stroked against him, seeking his warmth as a chill stole through the air.
His hand wandered lower, stopped on her hip.“Damn.Looks like you need cleaning off, princess.”
He didn’t give her time to respond, merely hauled her up and into his arms and strode with her out into the lake.When they were thigh deep, he grinned.
And dropped her.
As she sank beneath the water, her laugh cut in half, she grinned, too.
18
HONEY
Sybil was becoming used to the sound of Apollo talking to plants.And to the sight of him doing it shirtless.
He cooed at a pink flower of some sort and started stripping right as Mrs.Collins brought them tea in the conservatory.There went the jacket.There the cravat.
The housekeeper looked at Sybil with a silent plea for her to tame herbrother, but Sybil merely shrugged and said, “Alchemists care little for propriety in this way.Heat work cannot be done in flammable garments, after all.”
Apollo smirked.Ah, and there went his waistcoat.
The housekeeper said, “You’re not in theforge.”Oh yes, Sybil heard the distaste rolling off that last word.She’d long been appalled at what they’d done to the back parlor.She shuffled off with a sniff.
Sybil picked up the prototype from where it rested among the tea things, notebooks, and pencils on the table.It matched the sketches perfectly—round tubing with four bulbous chambers, one with an opening in the top.It was the second she’d made.The first had been exactly to the notebook’s vague specifications.It sat in the forge still, in the center of the worktable.This one was her own updated design, sleeker and still useless.“All I can think is that you put the lead in the open chamber.But then what?”She held it up to the sun filtering through the glass ceiling.
“Transfiguration.”Apollo was behind her, rustling about in his plants.“A common enough concept for you, isn’t it darling.”He was speaking to a plant.
She’d come to recognize that particular tone of voice, as if the long fronds and bright blooms were a beloved lapdog instead of a fern or a daisy.“What do you mean?”
He ran a careful caress along a long leaf, and the plant—whatever it was—shivered like a lover.Holy Hestia, he’d ruined her.He’d left her bed before daylight that morning, and she had already begun to crave his attentions, so much so she imagined a plant shivering—like she always did—from his touch.
He straightened and poured them both tea, an amazing gesture.Surely before the last year, he’d never poured tea in his life.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that plants begin as one thing—a hard seed.But under the right conditions—rich soil, adequate water”—he reached a palm toward the ceiling and closed his eyes in the sunlight—“plenty of sun.They transform.”
He glowed.He always did in the sun, that warm skin of his gulping up all the light and giving it back out again.The plants seemed to lean toward his brightness, to need it.
