He regarded me a long moment and then his eyes were molten amber, and he was the tawny Fae prince again. “Please,” he said, and from the way he said it, I knew there was no such word in the Fae tongue.

To the Tuatha Dé there is no difference between creating and destroying, Barrons had said. There is only stasis and change. Nor to these inhuman beings was there any such thing as apologizing. Would the ocean apologize for covering the head and filling the lungs of the man who fell in it?

He’d used the word for me. Perhaps learned it for me. He’d used it in supplication. It gave me pause, as he’d meant it to do.

“Please,” he said again. “Hear me out, MacKayla. Once more I have erred. I am trying to understand your ways, your wants.” If he’d been human I would have said he looked embarrassed. “I have never before been refused. I do not suffer it well.”

“You don’t give them the chance to refuse. You rape them all!”

“That is untrue. I have not used the Sidhba-jai on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years.”

I stared. V’lane was eighty-two thousand years old?

“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves.” He stepped back and waved a hand.

Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.

Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.

My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.

I blinked.

A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.

“Stop it,” I hissed.

“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs.”

“Don’t. It’s offensive.”

“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not…as you say…sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again.”

“You said that last time.”

“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either.”

I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”

“It will be returned to you when you leave.”

“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?

“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla.”

“Our?”

“The queen and I.”

“Barrons needs me,” I said again.

“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won’t be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one.”

That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look.”

A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he’d peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.

“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”

I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I’d almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.

I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.

“As real as yours.” The window closed.

“Is it mine?”

He shook his head.

“Are we in Faery?”

He nodded.

For the first time since I’d so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying It’s so beautiful here. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn’t belong on our planet. Mine did.

Still…the sun has always been my drug of choice. And if he would play fair—meaning not try to rape me again—who knew what I might learn? “If you touch me, or in any way try to affect my will, our time together stops. Got it?”

“Your will, my command.” His lips curved with victory.

I took off my shades and glanced briefly at the sun, hoping to sear the devastating beauty of that smile from my retinas, scorch it from my memory.