Forbidden (A New Adult Paranormal Romance) (21 page)

“You were right about me,” he admitted. “I am not a spy, but I did come to your realms with the intention of bringing your people harm.”

At first, she thought she hadn’t heard properly, then a wall slammed into her full frontal. Here he was, finally
admitting
what she had been trying to get him to admit for weeks, and all she felt was a bewildering weightlessness. She had to grab the cold railing for support. Beneath her, the floor boards felt like quicksand.

“I am a Judge from a different realm. My people wish to colonize your land. But an ancient law prevents us from simply coming in to wage war.”

Snow White’s tongue shriveled.

I
know
you’re the enemy, and yet I love you, she thought desperately. What’s the matter with me?

“So you need a pretext,” she forced herself to say for the sake of something to say. Her nerves were clawing at her fingertips, causing them to flutter to her throat.

“What is that?”

“An excuse to wage war against us. Such as taking sides with a kingdom’s fugitive princess and declaring war against her Queen.”

“It is not what you think,” Aein said hotly. “I did not rescue you so that my armies can swoop in to retake your kingdom and occupy it thereafter with you as a puppet regent.”

She did not reply.

“I have an ancestor called Fytenach the Fair. This is his law. Before we take a realm as a colony, he mandates that several chosen Judges, usually royal princes, must travel through the land and mingle with the natives.”

“So you’re a prince,” Snow White accused.

Aein’s expression was sober. “Should a Judge encounter more evil than good among the natives, the scales of his justice will tip towards colonization. We call it the negative balance.”

“I hope it works both ways,” Snow White said sarcastically.

Aein sighed. “More often than not, the Judges are tasked to find the would-be colony guilty. I know it is against everything my ancestor preached, but as our resources dwindle, it is beginning to be common.”

Although the waves crashed against the bows, Snow White swore she could hear a pin drop.

“I suppose,” she finally said, “you’re going to say that we're in the negative balance.” She thought of all the things that had gone wrong in her world where Aein was concerned. Dread clung to the sky like a thundercloud.

“No.” Aein turned to her. “As well as my ancestor meant, we have no right to judge your people. We have no right to judge anyone or declare any race inferior. This is why I must find the mountain on the green lake, the rendezvous point my brothers and I agreed to meet. I must persuade them of my reasoning.”

The hairs on Snow White’s arms rose at the thought of more godlike young men roaming the Enchanted Forest, prey to all kinds of cruelty that would sway their balance to the negative.

“How many of you are here?”

“Five. We were each dropped off in different . . . ” Aein paused, suddenly unsure.

“Go on,” Snow White urged. Different places in the Enchanted Forest? Different cities?

“There are some things I cannot reveal.” His voice was desperate.

She shook her head slowly. “I feel like I’m beginning to know you, and then you pull away. That makes me so . . . ” she searched for the word, then shook her head again, despairing.

“I am sorry. I have something else to tell you.”

Snow White felt as though she were drowning. “I don’t think I can take much more tonight.”

Aein’s face was filled with pain. “I was just going to tell you . . . what I told you when you were asleep.” He took a deep breath, and flinched, like he expected her to physically strike him.

She hesitated for a long while. “I don’t remember anything.”

He stared out into the sea. She noticed his thumbs massaging the railing absently.

“Where I come from,” he finally said, “I’m not considered attractive. I loved someone – my cousin. But she is betrothed to someone else.”

The sea air felt sharper all of a sudden, as though the salt wind had shards. Snow White braced herself for pain, but kept her face straight.

“Do you still love her?”

Aein shifted on his feet. “You do not fall out of love with someone that easily.” His eyes did not meet hers. “I would lie if I said I no longer love Gnomica. But my love for her has been encompassed by something greater.”

He looked down at floor boards, then gripped the railing again. His gestures were a mess of stilted movements and tics. She had never seen him so uncomfortable before.

“I promised myself that I would tell you,” he said, “even if your answer is like a knife to my chest.”

“Tell me what?”

“That I love you.” He muttered this last quickly, as though the words burned his tongue.

Below, the waves crushed against the bows and receded. She trembled.

“Why tell me now?” she demanded.

“Because I have loved you for a while, only I refused to give in to it, thinking we would have no future together.” The moon played on the angles of his face and made him seem ethereal. He was so uncertain, so desperate, like an angel being told he was cursed with mortality.

“I needed to tell you before I continue my journey to the rendezvous point,” he continued. “I do not know if I would be alive in two days or two weeks. But I do know that I will do everything in my power to keep you safe.”

Laughter floated from aft. Ivar and his crew were having a party.

Snow White’s shaking hand left the railing. Before she lost her nerve, she took his face in her hands and kissed him fiercely on the lips. She could feel the blood draining from her head into the soles of her feet, which felt like they were floating above deck.

The kiss was different this time, something that took her by surprise. There was purpose in it, and texture, and a dozen nuances in the movements of his jaw that made her desperately hunger for more. His lips molded into hers, their pressure firm, their feel like the soft flesh of a peach. She greedily sucked him in and threw all caution to the softly blowing breeze on the deck. Her plain cotton caftan, a gift from Ravanne, fluttered against her bare ankles, but she barely felt anything but his warmth. His arms left his sides and crept around her quivering body. She drew him close, running her fingers through his hair and the smooth contours of his neck. A hole ached in the center of her body.

When they both came up for air, he whispered, “I liked that . . . very much.”

Her head hung limply from her neck. Her knees buckled as he held her close.

“So where do we go from here?” she asked him.

#

In the warm nest of his cabin, she removed her gown before his burning eyes. Her newfound vigor pulsed in her veins, suffusing her skin with health. A single flame glowed upon a candle. It lit the entire room into a soft amber. She could feel his eyes raking her flesh, and the wanting core of her unexplored body opened wider to his gaze, melting into a pleasurable warmth she recognized as desire.

His eyes. The bridge of his nose. His lashes. The smooth turn of his cheekbones. His full, lush lips. His beauty tore at her eyes, made her shudder profoundly.

When she was naked before him, she flushed a deep scarlet. Fire lit every part of her body.

“You think me not beautiful,” she said, conscious of the soft light playing on her skin.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. “I am used to a different kind of beauty, but yours is beginning to grow on me.”

“Your honesty never fails to astound me.”

Haltingly, she went to where he sat on the bed. He laid his hands on her smooth belly, now tinged with a healthy pink, and roamed them upwards to cup her breasts. Her flesh tingled with the unaccustomed sensation.

She reached out to lift his tunic over his head. His glorious body was now even more toned with hardship. She ran her fingers lightly over the sleek muscles of his chest and arms, the ridges of his torso.

The blood rushed to her cheeks. “I must confess,” she said, “that I don’t really know how to do this.”

“I have not given it much thought either. But maybe it is not something one thinks about, but feels.” He touched the center of his chest lightly.

With that, he took her in his arms and lowered her gently upon his bed. She felt his mounting pressure on her, the weight and promise of his body as ripe as a forbidden apple.

They made awkward but sweet love into the night, and when they woke up with the morning sun’s rays on their bodies, they made love again. He was tender and gentle, frightened and solicitous, unsure and yet questing.

Afterward, they lay in each other’s arms. Snow White had never experienced intimacy on such a scale. She found it exhilarating, as though she were a gull coasting on a cloud, and yet all too frightening, because somehow, she knew this would end. There were too many question marks about Aein and what would happen to all of them.

Her thoughts darkened with images of Eastern armies overrunning her kingdom. The faces of Hanna and Tom Cherry cried out in the carnage. Aein tried to stave his own armies off, but he was one and they were many. In the end, his own handsome brothers, godlike upon their white chargers, put him to the sword.

She turned away from his sleeping form. Her body was drenched in sweat.

In the evening, they dressed and went out to the deck to see the dolphins frolic and splash upon the waves. Against the red ball of the setting sun, birds wheeled.

“What if you fail to convince your brothers?” she said.

“I must not. They are reasonable beings. They will listen to me.”

“Let me come with you.”

“No, it might be dangerous. I will see you safely to Lapland’s capital first. Wait for me there. I will come back for you.”

“I suppose that’s a promise,” she said bitterly.

“One I intend to keep. This is my bargaining stone.” Aein delved into his pants pocket to bring out something small, irregularly-shaped and light brown.

Snow White stared at the crystalline structure on his palm. “What is it?”

“Something Nevue gave me. The future of both our worlds may rest on what I make out of it.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Their newfound happiness obvious to everyone on board, Aein and Snow White spent their days enraptured with each other. The Bambenga were respectful at first, then teasing. The crew still could not take their eyes off Snow White, but this time, Aein saw it as a verification of her physical beauty, which he still could not discern, but was justifiably proud of.

When the port of Ursk dawned on the horizon, the lovers stared out at the sprawling docks and distant hills.

“Lapland,” Snow White murmured. Her hand crept to Aein’s. “It was what I chiefly wanted for the past few weeks, but now that I’m here, I feel . . . strange. Like it’s not really what I wanted after all.”

“We are not going to be parted, Snow White. We had diverging paths before, but now we want the same thing.”

“I’m scared.”

Aein thought of the odds against them succeeding, and agreed. “No matter what, I will always treasure our time together.”

“Don’t say that. You make it sound like we’ll never see each other again. In which case, I don’t want to go to Lapland’s capital. I’m going wherever you go.”

“But – ” Aein began.

“I don’t care what the plan is,” Snow White declared heatedly. “I’m not going to sit in some freezing Lapland castle waiting for you. If my kingdom is going to war against yours, I might as well die doing something useful.”

“Don’t say that.”

What Snow White said was true, of course. Their combined talents should be concentrated on turning his brothers’ votes. But his secret dread lurked like a sore that wouldn’t heal. He was having nightmares of Snow White finding out what species he really was, and find out she most certainly would if she came along.

He had been content to coast along these last few days, delighting in her love, but he knew he was deluding himself. Gnomica once told him that a relationship based on lies was worse than having no relationship at all.

Aein had listened bitterly, thinking of Dimynedon’s many vices. But Dimynedon never hid any of his shortcomings with Gnomica. It was an arranged betrothal, but one that they went in with both eyes open.

Something he hadn’t managed yet with Snow White.

The anxiety swarmed him again in little pinpricks.
She’s going to find out sooner or later.
He’d rather it be later. He hadn’t figured out yet how he would break it to her, only that right now, there was too much else to think about.
Coward
. As far as he knew, no coward he ever knew came to a good end.

Snow White’s hair lifted in the breeze. Her cheeks were pink, the very picture of health, such a contrast from her previous pallor. This had to be a good thing, right? Or was he deluding himself again? He thought uneasily of his Sporadean blood pulsing through her arteries. So far nothing had happened. Yet. But she was alive, and he prayed that it was all that mattered.