Besides, what if a spark jumped out and burned him? What if it burned his cock? She might not be sleeping with him anymore, but she wasn’t evil, and she didn’t want to ruin that body for other women.
“Okay,” she said. “You can sleep in my room, but I ain’t having sex with you. I have to get up early and…and…and besides, the sex would be bad. A bad idea, I mean. Because I don’t…I’m not…we’re not having sex again, all right?”
“Right,” Bael said, his eyes sparkling.
“Oh, shut up,” Kett said, and unlocked the door to the forge. It was quiet and dark but for the glow of the dormant fire, and she ushered Bael across the floor to her small room on the other side of the cottage.
As she’d told him, it was small, and there really wasn’t enough room for him on the floor.
Bael looked at the bed, looked at her, and his mouth twitched.
“No,” she said. “Look, maybe I should go sleep in Jarven’s room, so you can-”
She was cut off by Bael grabbing her and sliding his tongue inside her mouth.
“Okay,” she said breathlessly. “Maybe I’ll stay.”
When morning woke Bael, pale cracks of light filtering in through the gaps in the heavy metal shutters, the bed was empty of Kett. He stretched, smiling, and looked around the small room. It wasn’t what could ever be called pretty-it wasn’t even cozy. There were rugs on the stone floor, a couple of plain wooden trunks and some hooks on the wall for clothes, and that was about it. No mirror or any girlie accoutrements of any kind.
He couldn’t even see a hairbrush.
Noises from the outside room caught his attention and he pulled on his clothes to go investigate. Maybe his mate was making him breakfast!
Bael snorted. The idea of Kett making anything but trouble for him was pretty funny.
Jarven stood at the forge, pulling on heavy leather armor like Kett had been wearing. Bael smiled in greeting and got a nod in reply.
“Kett out with the dragons?” he asked, and could have sworn he saw the quirk of a smile on Jarven’s face.
“She’s out with a dragon,” he said.
Bael nodded and opened his mouth to say he’d go out to find her. Then, remembering her reaction to that yesterday, changed his mind and said, “I guess I’ll just wait here for her then.”
“Could be awhile,” Jarven advised.
Encouraged by this entirely voluntary input from the other man, Bael said, “How long? Couple of hours?” Maybe he could make her something to eat. It’d show willing, even if he was a crappy cook.
“More like weeks,” Jarven said.
“What? Where is she?”
“Elvyrn.”
Bael blinked. Elvyrn was a couple hundred miles to the south.
“Well, shit,” he said. “Why?”
“Family. Yule.”
Memories of Chance telling Bael he must come to the family Yule party came back to him. Of course. Kett hadn’t seemed wildly keen on the idea, and he’d wondered why. Dark had warned him the family might be tempestuous…
Which sounded like fun to him.
“Of course,” he said out loud, and smiled. “Are you going?”
Jarven shook his head.
“Are you invited?”
That earned him a sharp glance. “Yes,” Jarven said. “But Kett’s family is…a lot to take.”
“Are they like her?”
Jarven seemed to consider this as he fastened his gloves. “No,” he said eventually. “They’re worse.”
Kett chucked her kitbag on the ground and slapped the dragon’s hide, watching it rise into the air and head home. It, like all the others, was trained from birth to return to the mountains, several hundred miles away from Elvyrn, but just a few hours flight for a dragon.
She patted her damp shirt, throwing a filthy glare at her traveling companions. It was all very well and good having an aunt who’d shacked up with the Realms’ most evil man, but he tended to have a detrimental effect on, well, everyone. Including dragons. She’d had a fight on her hands ever since she’d picked up Striker and Chalia at the Bridge, and when they’d finally landed outside Elvyrn in the early twilight, the young dragon had thrown a hissy fit and tried to incinerate them.
Striker had remained totally impervious, as had his lover. Kett remained slightly scorched and, after Striker had laughingly conjured a bucket of icy water to douse the flames, she was also soaked through and utterly frozen.
As she pulled a blanket from her kitbag and wrapped it around her shoulders, Striker stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled twice. A minute later a horse thundered into the clearing at breakneck speed. It skidded to a halt when it saw Striker, flanks quivering. A second after that, another horse did the same thing.
Kett shook her head. She’d seen women react in much the same way. Striker-six feet of menace wrapped up in muscle and perfect bone structure-could make a happily married woman orgasm on the spot just by fixing her with his blue, blue eyes.
He’d passed the talent on to Chance. Magical ability and sexual magnetism. Kett had heard her cousin say she’d have preferred to inherit a house and some money, but she played the cards she’d been dealt.
They all did.
Striker looked smug as he slung his saddlebag over the first horse’s back. “Just a little move I’ve been messing with,” he said.
“Whose horses are they?” Kett asked.
“Who gives a fuck?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Does Kett get one?” Chalia asked, looking around. Striker shrugged a negative and Chalia sighed. “Okay then, you take one, Kett, and we’ll share.”
Kett didn’t argue. Chalia would probably lean on Striker for the return of the horses later, and if she didn’t, then Kett guessed she could probably send them back to the general vicinity and someone would claim them.
It seemed to be the way their relationship worked. Striker had no internal conscience of his own, and Chalia had none of the magical power that crackled around Striker, but they’d evolved to share what they had with each other. It had been Chalia who’d persuaded Striker to help Kett after the sabertooth-tiger incident, for which Striker had been extracting favors ever since. Favors such as picking him and Chalia up and flying them to Elvyrn for Yule.
It seemed impossible to consider, but once upon a time Striker had been a child, and a fairly normal one at that. He’d been school friends with Kett’s father, Tyrnan, which Kett figured probably explained a few things. Chalia, herself a childhood troublemaker, had turned out to be Tyrnan’s illegitimate sister. She’d been the one to track Kett down and force her brother to meet his teenaged daughter.
Kett still wasn’t sure she forgave Chalia for it.
She scowled at them as they rode on ahead. Despite being nearly twenty years older than Kett, they appeared years younger, which she considered to be monstrously unfair. Not for Chalia, the fear of getting older and older and the dread of dying alone…
Not that Kett suffered such a fear, because if she did then she’d have happily taken Bael up on his ridiculous suggestion that they were mates. But she hadn’t, because she wasn’t some pathetic creature who needed that sort of validation in her life, which was why she was feeling guilty. Because she’d had hot sex with him last night, twice, instead of just walking away…
Not because she felt bad about sneaking away and leaving him there with no explanation. Well, with Jarven, which was worse than no explanation.
They rode into Elvyrn, the Realm’s second city, picturesque in the early twilight as people bustled around getting ready for Yule. There was a light dusting of snow on the pink buildings, although the streets had been swept clean, and everywhere Kett looked seemed to have sprung straight from a Yule card.