Page 42 of My Fae Lady

Maybe he was near the breaking point. Maybe he’d give up and flee back to his tree if I just held out for another quarter of an hour.

Maybe Rook Manor wouldn’t let him out of the room, even if he wanted to go.

I knew instinctively that, until the manor made up its own mind, one of us either had to renounce our claim to the manor or acknowledge the other’s claim before House would start following orders again. I also knew that renouncing Rook Manor was the one thing Sylvan would never do. My only hope was that House would choose me.

But that could take years, decades even, with a sentience formed of wild, Seelie, and Unseelie magics.

I wasn’t sure I could last through another hour of backlash.

I looked up at Sylvan. “How do we end the bargain?”

He held out a hand, and I took it, knowing I needed the help to stand at this point. I winced as I got to my feet, and he looked down at the bare toes peeking out under the hem of my gown. “Is your ankle still bothering you?”

Everything was bothering me, thanks to the bargain, so I nodded.

Sylvan somehow had me perched on the edge of the bed a moment later, and I blinked up at him in confusion. “How do we end the bargain?” I repeated.

He looked down at the floor. “The same way we created it.”

The first step in an Unseelie bargain, I remembered, despite my still foggy thoughts, was to set the terms. I dredged up the original terms from my memory. “I agree to break the bargain between us, in which you agreed to marry me in a fashion deemed suitable by Seelie and mortal custom, sign all required documentation, fool my cousin and his solicitors, and then return home and leave me in peace in exchange for my firstborn.”

“Agreed,” Sylvan said, his voice low—no doubt a side effect of the backlash. He stepped forward, and I had to crane my head back to look at his face. He stared down at me, then snarled, “You’re too short like this, but you shouldn’t be standing on that ankle.”

He was suddenly sitting on the bed next to me, the unexpected dip of the mattress causing me to fling out a hand for balance. That hand landed on his thigh, and it was only then, with our bodies pressed close, my fingers digging into firm muscle, that I remembered the second step in sealing an Unseelie bargain.

A kiss.

Sylvan gripped my chin, his hold gentle despite the sharp hint of talons, and lowered his lips to mine. The pressure from the bargain migrated lower, and where I froze, Sylvan burned. With each heartbeat, pleasure replaced pain until not even a phantom was left. Our lips moved, finding the unity that had eluded us since we’d arrived at Rook Manor. It wasn’t peace, but it was harmony, a melding of Seelie and Unseelie.

Without realizing it, I had turned and straddled his lap despite my skirts. My hands fisted in Sylvan’s waistcoat, then splayed flat when I realized I was crushing his feathers. His hands slid under my loose hair to grip my nape, angling my head to take the kiss deeper. My lips parted, and his tongue brushed out, and then a new sharp pain radiated up from my tailbone as I landed on the floor.

“Did you just push me off the bed?” I demanded.

“You weren’t on the bed!” Sylvan scrambled to his feet and backed away from me. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. It was just a kiss to seal our agreement.”

“I know that.” I rose to my feet with what little dignity remained to me. “I wasn’t the one moving my head this way and that in order to stick my tongue somewhere uninvited!”

“I wasn’t . . .” Sylvan continued talking, making his excuses, but his words no longer penetrated, for I had noticed something far more worrisome than that kiss behind him.

“Sylvan,” I interrupted, and he must have seen in my now yellow eyes that he needed to listen, for he cut himself off without hesitation. “The door is gone.”

He whirled to face the stretch of wall that used to hold a door and was now an uninterrupted span of green-papered wall.

“House.” He took a menacing step forward, but he couldn’t tower over the manor or flash his teeth and make the door reappear. “Return the door this instant.”

“Please,” I added.

Nothing happened. Sylvan stood with his back to me for several breaths, then he marched over to the window on the next wall. At least, he tried to. The window slid out of his reach, flowing directly onto the next wall, and then the next, and the next. Absently, I noted that the view stayed exactly the same no matter where the window went.

While House focused on Sylvan, I inched closer to the nearest wall. The next time the window came around, with Sylvan chasing after it, I slapped out my hand, intending to trap it between us. It shot directly up, the ceiling of the room stretching until even jumping from the tall bed, Sylvan wouldn’t be able to reach the lower edge of the window.

He tried anyway.

I sat down on the side of the bed again, the entire day catching up with me. I’d been attacked, sprained an ankle, had an Unseelie blackguard attempt to wrest away control of my house, been trapped in a bedroom with that same fae, and suffered magical backlash.

Not to mention the kiss, which deserved several stanzas of my pity poem all by itself. It was downright outrageous that Sylvan could kiss like that. Why him, of all the fae and humans in the world?

“That’s it, I’m going to sleep,” I announced.