Page 8

With no way out and no point in hiding, Kate summoned her courage and pushed the door open. She’d expected this to be some sort of bathroom, but nothing could have prepared her for what she actually saw.

A man sat in a large marble bathing pool, the water rising to the middle of his broad chest. The man was not unfamiliar.

She had seen him for a brief moment in her bedroom when the owl she’d rescued turned into an impossibly tall man with silver hair.

The water he lay soaking in was strewn with red and white petals that looked like they were dissolving slowly in shimmering trails over the water’s surface.

A dream... definitely had to be a dream. Owls didn’t simply turn into terrifyingly beautiful men in the middle of the night.

The heady scent of flowers filled the air, making her slightly dizzy.

Could you smell in dreams? Or was it the sight of the naked man that affected her?

Kate couldn’t look away from him. His silvery-white hair was partially pulled back by a black leather tie and the rest cascaded down just past his shoulders.

Despite the color of his hair, he didn’t appear to be any older than thirty-five.

His eyes were bright blue, the color of cloudless winter skies.

But they also held a hint of ice, as though he never smiled.

His features were beautiful, yet masculine in a way that did not seem possible.

The muscle and hard lines of his body seemed one moment away from turning him into a wild beast.

It almost hurt to look at him, because whoever this man was, he could never be hers.

A dream could not love her back. The deep ache inside her grew.

She would never know this man in the light of day, would never feel a true kiss from his lips.

When she woke, he would be just another half-forgotten dream that would leave her feeling empty inside.

“Awake at last.” The man’s deep voice caressed the air, made it vibrate, and sent tremors of desire through her body.

In that moment, she realized she’d never really known what it meant to want a man.

The sweet kisses stolen by the boys she had dated meant nothing compared to the long, caressing look the stranger now gave her.

It was a wild, dark feeling. She wanted to touch his skin, to feel his lips, to know what it meant to give her body, even her soul, to him.

She’d never wanted that with anyone before, but right now, she wanted it more than her next breath.

Somehow, she found her tongue and spoke. “Who are you? What is this place?”

She continued to focus on the water that formed beads upon the man’s skin. There was a faint smattering of dark hair on his chest and light scars upon his body. He seemed bigger than life somehow, filling the room with a presence that wasn’t simply physical.

“I am Roan Arun,” he said, drawing her focus to his lips. “I am the lord of the dark woods, master of the labyrinth, and king of the Unseelie. You are in my home, the palace of the Twilight Court.”

She tried to understand what he’d just said, but it made no sense.

Who were the Unseelie? The word felt familiar, but she couldn’t quite remember where she’d heard it.

He slowly stood up, and the water poured in silvery streams down his body, over enticing grooves and down to the V-shaped muscles that pointed to his.

.. Her gaze jerked back up to his face, and she saw the man’s smirk.

Kate swallowed hard. She’d never actually been in the same room with a naked man before. She’d never even had sex, and now all she could think about was this man tossing her onto the nearest bed and pinning her beneath him. The mere thought sent a wild, erotic flush through her entire body.

“This is a dream,” she said in a whisper. It had to be.

“In a way,” the man agreed as he climbed out of the bath.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” He turned away to grab a white towel that sat on top of a neat stack on a stone shelf, then wrapped it around his lean hips, giving her a glimpse of his muscled ass before he covered it.

“Have you read Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked, confused and curious.

“ Read , my dear mortal?” He snorted as if offended. “I am the one who gifted Edgar’s words to him.”

Roan turned back to face her as he walked around the edge of the bathing pool, coming toward her. She backed up out of instinct, her body pressed flat against the now closed door behind her.

When did it close?

“You are not wrong, who deem that my days have been a dream; yet if hope has flown away in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none, is it therefore the less gone?” He recited Poe’s poem, stopping just inches from her as he braced one forearm above her head.

The smell of those strange and beautiful flowers drifted off his skin, along with a scent that made her think of mahogany and amber.

He smelled like the woods at night, as if a fire had just burned somewhere nearby and the woodsmoke had left a tantalizing haze upon the leaves.

Her body responded, her nipples hardening against her button-up pajama top.

Her lips parted and she drew in a quivering breath.

The presence of this man, this king, was impossible to explain.

She felt like she was being pulled toward him like a moon dragged in by a planet’s gravity.

He leaned closer. He was tall... so very tall, easily towering over her by a head and a half.

“I am what you would call one of the dark Fae. Do you know the name?”

Fae? That was like a fairy. But they weren’t real, or this big.

“I thought fairies were small?” She couldn’t help but think of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan , but Roan was massive, muscled and terrifyingly attractive.

Even in stories she’d read of tall, human-sized fairies, they’ all be slender and delicate.

Roan was built like a warrior with broad shoulders and muscles everywhere .

Her mouth ran dry as his cruelly beautiful lips twisted into yet another smile.

“Fairy,” Roan chuckled. “Such a quaint twisting of words. But no, pixies, brownies, merrows, kobolds, dwarves—they are small. I am one of the Shining Ones. Everything about me is big.” He trailed a fingertip down the side of her neck, his glowing blue eyes holding hers. “ Everything .”

“What is a Shining One?” Kate’s thoughts were still muddled by the heat of his body and the way he had trapped her against the door, caging her in.

“The Shining Ones are the most ancient of the Fae. We were once gods in your land, in the time before time. We ruled the night and the day, the seasons, the flora and the fauna. All was ours to command. Your people called us the Sidhe .” He pronounced the word Sidhe as “shee,” and she recognized it from her mother’s book of fairy tales.

She breathed out a sigh of relief. “I am dreaming.”

Roan’s eyes still glowed. “What you think of as reality is but a veil between your world and mine. Dreams are but an instant when the cosmic winds disturb the veil in between, letting you glimpse this place.”

Was this another sort of reality, then? Was that what he was saying? Kate’s head ached as she tried to understand the immensity of his words .

“Wait.” She lifted her face a little, daring herself to eye him more boldly. “You never explained why the Sidhe are called the Shining Ones.”

“Because when we let our magic show, we shine . Even the darkest of us.”

“Shine? How?”

Roan was still smiling, but the expression turned almost sinister.

“To show a mortal our shine would be to destroy them. You cannot bear the light of one such as me.”

“Try me,” Kate replied. She wasn’t afraid of light.

Roan’s eyes narrowed. “No. I have no desire to see you destroyed, not when I have plans for you.”

“You can’t even show me a little?” She reached up to touch his chest without thinking.

The moment her palm touched his skin, Roan closed his eyes.

His features softened briefly as he let out a low growl of animal-like pleasure.

He drew in a deep breath, as if breathing in her essence.

Kate’s heart kicked into a mad rhythm as her own breathing sped up.

Roan caught her wrist with his free hand, holding it against his skin as he finally opened his eyes.

Gray lightning lit his blue eyes as he began to shine like a distant star, and moonlight shimmered around him like mercury, outlining his body as a pair of iridescent pale blue wings materialized behind his shoulders, trailing stardust as they moved.

An instant later, the beautiful shine and those mysterious wings were gone.

“Was that enough for you, little one?” His low, rough voice sent delicious shivers through her.

“Um... yes?” The shine had enhanced the hard lines of his jaw and cheekbones, and she wondered if perhaps the Shining Ones might have once been mistaken for angels in her world.

Roan loomed over her for another long moment, the scent of night blooms wafting around them as his gaze lowered to her lips and his eyes closed as if he was lost in a dream himself.

His fingers left the door and teased along her throat before closing on her neck in a gentle hold to keep her pinned against the door.

He opened his eyes again, and she was captivated by the brilliant blue of them.

His thumb stroked her pulse point, and Kate’s body responded.

Heat flooded beneath her skin and her heart raced madly.

She should be terrified, he could crush her throat with a single squeeze, but he didn’t…

and she wasn’t afraid. She was…turned on.

Her clit gave a hard throbbing pulse in response to this man’s controlling hold on her.