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Connell stepped closer. “You used to like it when I called you that.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Elspeth couldn’t back away any further, so she straightened her spine. And you used to say it with love in your voice.

  Connell’s eyes flashed in the starlight, and a moment later, his teeth as he grinned. “Aye, and so it was. A long time ago and a place far away. But you haven’t changed, have you? You’re still counting.”

  He’d moved so close to her she could smell him, and it made her weak. He’d used to smell of the sea. Salt. Sun. Sand. The tang of sweat.

  Now he smelled of ale and smoke, but underlying it still a hint of sun and wind and sand. He was different and yet the same; the remembered taste of him flooded her mouth and made her heart thump in her chest.

  “I’m still counting.” Her voice scratched and cracked, embarrassed her.

  His hand came out to twirl a strand of hair that had fallen over her shoulder. A handspan separated them, no more. He tucked the hair behind her ear. His fingers cupped her cheek, then trailed along her jaw, down the line of her neck and came to rest upon her shoulder.

  She shivered, not from cold but heat, which had sprung up along the path of his fingers. Shadows veiled his face again, but she heard his breath, felt it on her face, and she could almost taste his lips on hers.

  Connell didn’t kiss her. “I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw you sitting in my pub. After all this time and there you were, looking like an angel. I thought for sure I was dreaming.”

  She wanted to tell him she was sorry. She hadn’t meant to run away. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. She hadn’t meant any of it, that long ago night when she’d told him she could never love him… But unlike numbers, words never came to her rescue when she needed them.

  Closer still he moved, his body against hers, pinning her against the fence, and Elspeth shuddered with a sudden force of desire so strong it forced a low cry from her throat. Ten years, and he still affected her this way. The only man who ever could.

  She was already opening her mouth to his kiss when he pulled away, leaving her cold instead of hot. Connell backed away with a muttered curse. She blinked, trying to see his expression, but could make out nothing more than the flash of his eyes again in starlight.

  “Why?” he asked her, one word that meant so much and had so many answers.

  She didn’t know which to give him. “Connell…”

  He backed away from her reaching hand, putting both his own up as though to make sure there was no way they could possibly touch her.

  “Why, Ella?” The agony in his voice broke her heart all over again. “Why now, after all this time, when I finally thought—”

  But he’d say no more, just backed away another step. This time, she was the one pursuing, moving across the slate path toward him. “Connell, wait.”

  “You’re still afraid of me!” he cried. “I saw it inside, and I felt you shaking just now! You’re afraid of me, even now, when I’d never do aught to hurt you!”

  “I know that. I know it. Connell, love, please…”

  He’d backed into a patch of moonlight, and to her horror, she saw tears glimmering in his eyes. She’d made him cry before, and it seemed unfair now that she’d made him weep again when tears would never come for her no matter how much she might wish for the relief they brought.

  He ran a hand through his hair, messing it, and let his hand rest on the back of his neck, his eyes turned away from her. “Why?”

  “Because I was a fool,” she answered. “I didn’t deserve you.”

  She reached for him again, a hesitant hand that did not quite touch him. “I was a fool who did not know the gift she held, Connell. And I plead your mercy.”

  He shook his head. “You left without a word. I never knew where you’d gone, or if you were all right. I never knew if you were alive or dead, sick or well. I never knew if you were happy.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was all she had to say, and it was not enough.

  “All I ever did was love you,” he said in a low voice. “And you treated me like I wasn’t even worth it.”

  Then she was in his arms and his mouth was on hers, bruising. She didn’t resist, didn’t protest, just let him walk her backward and put her up against the fence, his hands on her waist and his mouth crushing, crushing.

  She opened beneath him and his tongue swept inside. She tasted ale and smoke. She tasted Connell, a flavor she’d never forgotten, and it made her gasp as she put her arms around his neck and clung to him.

  He pushed hard against her, the way he used to when they were in her garden and desperate to steal one more kiss before she had to go inside. He bunched the fabric of her skirt in his hands and slid beneath it to the bare skin of her thighs atop her stockings. His hands cupped her rear and he lifted her, holding her so tight she had no fear of falling. The heat and hardness of him pressed against her, and she gasped and tightened her thighs around his hips.

  She tasted blood from the force of his kiss, from a spot where her teeth had caught the inside of her lip. The metallic, salty taste of it made her think of the way they’d been, and how she’d once taken him in her mouth while the ocean crashed so close to them the spray had wet their clothes.

  Desire, unaccustomed and overwhelming, flooded her, but she didn’t fight it. Her arms tightened on his neck and she kissed him as fiercely as he did her, their mouths meeting again and again, reminding her of the way eagles mated in the sky, soaring and plummeting as they screeched their pleasure.

  He held her against the splintered wood with one hand while the other slid between them to fumble with the laces at his waistband. His hand rubbed her through the thin material of her undergarment, and she shuddered with want.

  He’d be inside her in another moment, and oh, by the Astria, she wanted him there. Inside her. Filling her. Making this feeling grow until she exploded the way she used to when they were young, before it had all gone so wrong.

  He shifted her weight and she tensed, waiting for him to enter her. Then, in the next moment, she stood on her own, her skirt falling down around her ankles and the fence the only thing holding her up. She blinked, bereft and abandoned, her body not yet adjusted to the loss of his hands on her. She licked her lips and tasted more blood, and she lifted a shaking hand to wipe them clean.

  “You might not have changed,” he said in a shaking voice. “But I have. I’ll not be used like that again, no matter what treasure you hold between your legs.”

  His words hurt, that he thought she’d ever used him. He twisted away from her when she tried to touch his cheek, and she let her hand fall. He ran his hand again through his hair, then crossed his arms over his chest. The white moonlight made stark lines on his face, cast his eyes into shadow and highlighted his scowl.

  “All these years,” he told her. “You’ve no right to come here, to my place, looking as though naught’s changed. No right.”

  His words were unfair, but she accepted them with a nod. “I’ll go then, shall I?”

  “Aye, go.” He bit out the words like they tasted bad. “Get out of my place, and don’t come back here.”

  She didn’t move. They stared at each other until at last she nodded again. “I plead your mercy, Connell. I never meant to hurt you.”

  “No.” His reply was colder than the winter air. “And I can see by your tears how grieved you are.”

  His short, sharp burst of laughter pierced her heart.

  “Ah, but then, you’ve never wept, have you? Why should I expect you’d bother to cry for me?”

  “If I could have, believe me, I would.”

  He didn’t answer. She backed away from him, turned and left the courtyard, wishing desperately she could have given him tears but as always, finding none to give.

  She came to him in dreams, as she always did. The girl he’d loved so much it had been like dying when she left him. Tonight she was the woman she’d become, the one he did not know.

  The taste of her had
changed, as had the curve of her hips, the fullness of her breasts, the timbre of her voice. He took her in his arms and she yielded, offering her mouth to his kiss and her body to his hands.

  He took her without a word, as once they’d not needed to speak. She opened beneath him. His tongue stroked hers. His hands roamed her body. She linked her arms behind his neck, and he lifted her, laying her down upon a bed of flowers that filled the air with their scent as the weight of their bodies crushed the petals.

  His mouth traced the line of her chin and the slope of her throat. Her pulse beat under his lips and he licked the spot. Ella arched beneath him, murmuring the name only she had ever called him. To everyone else he was Conn. To her, he’d always been Connell, and she always made it sound noble.

  “The name of a prince.”

  Her smile made his heart thump inside his chest and he kissed her again, covering her with his body, the body of the man he was now and not the lad he’d been.

  “I’m no prince.”

  “You have ever been my prince.” Her eyes shone. “Ever and always.”

  And the thing of it was, with her he had always felt a prince, rather than the beggar he really was. A nobleman, not the son of a butler and a cook. Ella made him feel as though he could be and do anything, that he needn’t contort himself into the place his parents had expected him to take.

  “Everything I’ve become is because of you,” he told her.

  Her hands linked around the back of his neck, pulling him down to her mouth again, and he kissed her like it was the last thing he’d ever do on this earth.

  His hand slid up to cup her breast through the thin flaxene of her gown, and he passed a thumb over her nipple. In another moment, he slid down to take it in his mouth through the cloth, and in the next, the dream shifted and they were both naked on the bed of flowers which he knew from real life to be somewhat scratchy but here, in the dream realm, were as soft as feather bed.

  She tasted of sunshine, his Ella did. His mouth moved along her body, along the soft curve of her belly, the slope of her hip, the warm skin of her thighs. He found her center. The sound of her low cry when he kissed her there made his cock twitch in response. He licked her, and she arched upward. Her fingers tightened in his hair. He found the small button of her pleasure and stroked it with his tongue until she gasped his name over and over again.

  He had always loved making her shudder beneath him. He loved the taste of her desire, and the way her smooth folds swelled as she grew hot with passion. He loved the way her clit grew stiff between his lips, and the way it throbbed when she came.

  “I love you,” he said into her ear as once again he stretched his body along hers. “I’ll never love any woman the way I love you.”

  And because this was a dream, thank the Astria, she did not turn him away but looked into his eyes and put her arms around him, and she took him inside her body.

  “I love you too, Connell,” his dream-Ella told him as urged him to move with an upward shift of her hips. She said the words she’d said to him once before, long ago and far away, before it had all disintegrated around them. “Make love to me.”

  Long ago and far away, he had not been able to do as she’d asked. He’d made love to dozens of women since that night. Fair-haired and dark, with eyes of blue and green and brown and gray, with bodies of every shape and voices in every tone. Every one of them became Ella at the moment of his climax.

  But now, in this moment, as he moved within her, it really was Ella and he didn’t have to pretend. He kissed her, the taste of her spurring him on. Her nails raked down his back and he moaned, though the pain only enhanced his pleasure. He moved faster.

  “I love you,” she said, her blue-gray eyes never leaving his. “I always have. And I always will.”

  Ecstasy boiled inside him, making him shake, and he wanted to bury his face in her hair, but couldn’t pull himself from the sight of her eyes. He moved inside her heat, watching desire make her tilt her head on its pillow of lilies. Her gaze never left his, and he drowned in those eyes, the color of the sea on a cloudy day, her eyes that never wept, and he saw himself reflected there as he climaxed.

  And woke, sweating, the sheets a tangled mess around his ankles and his cock throbbing with a need for release so great it made his stomach hurt. Connell sat up and scrubbed his face with his palms, breathing hard. A dream was all it had been, but he mourned the loss of it anyway, because dreams were all he had of her.

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and went into his washroom, seeking the solace of a cold shower, the only relief he’d have that night. As he closed his eyes against the needling spray, he saw her face, and he whispered her name, letting his mouth fill with water that couldn’t wash away the memory of her flavor.

  “Mistress Valerin, sit.” Riordan de Cimmerian, Instructor Primus of Magical Theory and Practice, indicated the chair in front of his desk.

  Elspeth sat. She slid a sheaf of parchment across his desk. “I’ve completed the requirements for the Consummo degree, sir. I would request you review the work and approve it before I send it to the Arithmancy Accreditation Committee.”

  He nodded and pushed the papers to one side. “Quite a lot of work for you to be doing during the winter break. You’re entitled to some time away from your job, Mistress Valerin.”

  She gave a small smile. “As are you, sir, and yet here I find you at your desk.”

  The Instructor Primus had a reputation for being a man quick to anger and swift to disdain, and though Elspeth had seen him behave that way with many others, with her he seemed more often to maintain an air of quiet bemusement or consideration. What, exactly, he was considering about her she never dared ponder. She didn’t wish to know. It was enough for her that he had hired her knowing her control of the thrall was flawed, and that he never asked her of her past. He’d earned her loyalty for that alone, and Elspeth’s loyalty, once earned, was fierce and unrelenting.

  “Mistress Valerin,” de Cimmerian now said, “I must speak with you on a matter of some import.”

  “Sir?” Her stomach twisted. His dark eyes traveled over her face, and he had that look again. As though she were a puzzle he meant to decipher.

  “You have been a teacher here for seven years.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And in all that time, it has never come to my attention that you’ve taken a lover.”

  For a moment she didn’t know quite what to say. Her mouth parted in surprise before she closed it. Those words were the last she’d ever have expected from him. Of course the Instructor Primus would certainly be aware of any and all who formed bonds in the Keep…and of those who did not. It was his place to know such things. Still, his statement shocked her not because she was startled that he knew, but because she had never expected him to be concerned.

  “Sir, I fail to see—”

  His raised hand stopped her. “When I hired you, I understood your control of the thrall was…limited. But as your position didn’t require its use, I felt your inability to harness it properly was less of a deficiency than your extreme skills in your chosen field were an asset.”

  She drew in a breath, ready to explain though she had no idea of what she could possibly say to make any of this better. Again, the Instructor Primus raised a hand. He needed no orb of power, no use of the thrall to silence her. The power in his gaze was enough.

  “Mistress Valerin, I assumed your control of the thrall would grow in time and with practice. That you would acclimate yourself here at Somnus Keep, become a true member of our staff. You’ve held yourself back from us.” He paused. “Yet in all this time, I have watched you teach your craft to class after class. You are one of my finest instructors. You have an easy way about you that makes Arithmancy appeal to even those who find numbers appallingly difficult. You care for your students. I know you have open office hours longer than any of your colleagues, and I know as well the number of students you counsel.”

  “They come t
o me because I listen to them,” she said.

  “Because once you needed someone to listen to you and had nobody.”

  His assessment of her made her body stiffen so suddenly she pushed the chair back from the desk. “Sir—”

  Again, he raised his hand and she fell silent. “I’ve watched you teach, Mistress Valerin, and I’ve seen you are capable of passion. So tell me, please, why you can express it with equations and calculations, but not with a lover?”

  She wanted to run, but could not. His dark eyes pinned her in place. She shook her head slightly and had to wet her lips, but still could not speak.

  “Who hurt you so badly you can’t open yourself?”

  She had seen him be cold to others and had seen his sneer. This was worse, this penetrating insistence upon truth. Nobody else seemed to notice or care about what was inside her, but this man did. She couldn’t hide from him. He was the most powerful magicreator in the Keep, the strongest she’d ever known. Perhaps the strongest anyone had ever known.

  “I have never asked you why your control of the thrall is incomplete,” he told her, his voice gentler than she’d have expected from him. “But I don’t have to ask to know. I’ve seen it before. Rarely, thank the Astria, for it rarely happens. But I do know.”

  Her throat closed. Another woman would have cried, but again the release of tears was denied her. She ducked her head, eyes fixed upon her hands fisted in her lap. “I have worked hard, sir, to gain better control of it. I am much improved.”

  “You shouldn’t have had to work so hard.”

  The anger in his voice made her look up, but he was not angry with her. He was angry for her, and Elspeth understood something about him few probably did, for he hid his heart beneath an exterior of disdain as she did behind a mask of dispassion. Riordan de Cimmerian cared deeply about his students and his staff.

  He cared about her.

  “Who was he?” he asked. “The one who took from you instead of giving. Tell me, and I’ll see he’s punished for it, no matter where he is.”