Then he pressed his lips to her forehead with extreme gentleness. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Not like this.”

Before she could protest her own edict, he rocked back on his heels and stood, and he drew her up along with him. At first her legs were too shaky to support her. She put her arms around his long, lean waist and leaned against him. They stood quietly together as he stroked the hair off her damp forehead, and for a moment she felt a crazed kind of desperate need to hang on to any part of him that she could before he slipped away and was lost to her for good.

Okay, now she was starting to scare herself. It was past time she got her careening harebrained self back on track.

She bit her lips and forced some iron into her spine. Then she stepped back, looked in the general direction of his face and gave him a sort of idiotic nod as if that meant anything. She turned away and—

His hand clamped down on her wrist. He yanked her back to him. The breath woofed out of her as she came up hard against his muscled torso. He grabbed her by the hair at the back of her head. Her mouth fell open. Before she could utter some version of the what the hell? that was ricocheting through her stuttering mind, he turned her face up and drove his mouth down onto hers.

There was nothing civilized about his kiss. He was rough, rampantly dominant, as he dug his hardened tongue into the soft crevices of her mouth, in and in and in, and it was such an invasive raw imitation of the sex act that desire roared through her like a runaway eight-thousand-pound freight train engine. Her inner muscles clamped down in involuntary need, and a high, thin whine broke out of her. She heard the desperate animal sound as if someone else had made it; it was that much beyond her control.

Tiago lifted his head. He was breathing hard as if he had just been sprinting, or as if he had just hurtled through the air in manic flight.

“Like that,” he said. The burning words came from the back of his throat and singed her nerve endings. “It’s going to be like that.”

So how did one recover from Tiago’s particular style of demolition and scrape together enough poise to meet with the senior officials of one of the oldest governments on Earth?

Along with Carling. Oh no, we mustn’t forget Carling.

Niniane sat on the bed and stared at the bedroom clock for several heartbeats. And in a half an hour, no less. Yes, apparently she and Tiago had squandered away that much time.

Well. Whatever else happened, she would meet her fate clean.

She dug through the shopping bags and grabbed items of underwear and outer clothing. There was certainly no point in agonizing over what to wear. It wasn’t like she had much from which to choose. She had two pairs of jeans, a polo shirt, a scooped neck tee, and a cashmere sweater. It was all Burberry Brit casual wear from Nordstrom and very nice, for what it was, but of course it wasn’t suitable. All of her suitable clothes were being held hostage by the people she was going to meet. That might not rank high on anybody’s list of affairs of state, but it ranked pretty high on the list of things she resented.

She went into the bathroom, closed the door and started the shower. When the water had warmed, she stripped off the peach lounge suit and stepped into the tub. She stretched and turned under the steaming cascade. It felt incredible to move freely and without pain. She could almost be grateful, except for that whole scaring-her-to-death thing when Carling—along with all of her people—had confronted Tiago.

Niniane knew herself pretty well. She read Elle and People magazines, not the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. She had half a dozen lipsticks in her purse, all of them varying shades of pink. She loved pretty clothes, chocolate truffles and a good Pinot Noir. Her genetic makeup, not her designer makeup, was the only thing that qualified her to be a potential head of anybody’s state. If the Dark Fae had a civil servant exam for the monarchy position, there was no way she could qualify even if they graded on a curve. She was not by any stretch of anybody’s imagination a weighty faerie, but she was an efficient one. It had taken her two minutes or less for her mind to gallop back to the object of her obsession.

It’s going to be like that, he had said. With such simple words and a single kiss, he shredded her sense of mission and all of the convictions she had held about herself like they were so much party-colored tissue paper.

She squirted a dollop of lilac-scented shampoo into one palm. As she worked it through her fine black hair, she let herself wonder what it would be like to walk into the upcoming meeting and announce she would not take the Dark Fae throne. She could do it too. She could drop everything to be with this man. The frenzied passion he roused in her was that overpowering.

What would be the result?

Someone else would become Dark Fae King or Queen. Hell, as far as she knew, it would be someone far more qualified than she was. But it wouldn’t be someone closer to the throne. There was no one closer. That throne had cast a shadow over her all of her life. Whoever became monarch would always know she was out in the world, the real heir with the unshakeable claim. It would undermine everything he tried to do. At the first test of his ability or crisis in government, it could shake him to his foundation.

The smartest thing for a capable ruler would be to solidify his power and rid himself of the threat, but then she already knew that. Walking away would not stop the attempts on her life. But would it gain her anything else?

She sagged against tiled wall. No.

It’s going to be like that. With as many words Tiago signaled his intention to take her as his lover. She could follow him back to New York. She could work to make as much as she could out of the time they could have together—but sooner or later Tiago would go back to leading Dragos’s troops and living his nomadic warring lifestyle.

She could follow him, if he would let her, but she cringed to think it, silly woman that she was, with her fashion magazines and makeup and pink lipsticks and high-heeled shoes and purses. Sooner or later he would grow to resent her, or worse, he would become impatient, contemptuous and bored. Even if she abandoned her heritage and left everything behind, she could still hope to gain only a limited amount of time with him.

So she would stay her course, not because of her convictions since Tiago had destroyed those. She would stay her course because there wasn’t anything else to do. Days ago she had embarked upon a solitary road that had no turning point. She would be a good-hearted monarch, if not the most qualified or talented. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

It was time to take another step along that road. As she had said to Tiago, the innocent young Niniane of the past had been killed along with her family. She could never become that Niniane again, so she would just have to forge a different Niniane for the future.

She wiped her cheeks. What kind of time could she manage to get with Tiago? A couple of nights together, maybe at best a week? She would have to hoard every moment, to concentrate everything she had on remembering the slightest detail, because the memories were going to have to last her a very long while.

Faeries could live for thousands of years. If something didn’t kill them first.

That’s what it was going to be like.

Something had happened and Tiago didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one f**king bit.

She had gone to take a shower, smelling of an intoxicating blend of bewilderment and intense arousal. He liked putting that shattered look in those gorgeous gray eyes and being the one to lavish attention on all her sexy pieces. He didn’t like for her to walk away with that shattered look only to emerge again with the pieces put back together in a new unknown, cooler pattern. Unknown patterns meant something had happened in her head that might shut him out.

He was coming to understand why the other sentinels had nicknamed her Tricks. It wasn’t just because they had taught her all the dirty fighting tricks they knew. There was something about her that was just not bloody quantifiable. It was more than the effervescence that winked out of her like sunlight on water. It was an unpredictable feminine quality that could start off at say, point A but then jump to, hell, he didn’t know, an entirely different alphabet instead of going through a logical thought process that led from B to C then D and so forth.

That meant he couldn’t track from where she had been to where she was now.

He might have to break down and ask her what she was thinking.

He scowled.

While he was on the subject of things he didn’t like, he also didn’t like her disappearing from his sight. The last time that had happened, a freaking Djinn had made off with her. The memory caused him to break out in a cold sweat. It held him shackled to the outside of her door, straining to hear her slightest move, the rustle of her clothing, anything to reassure him that she was still safe and sound in the hotel suite.

He’d had a couple of bad moments when she had been in the shower. For a heart-stopping while she hadn’t seemed to move, and all he could hear was the steady sound of the water running. He had almost broken through the door to check on her. Then there had been a muffled clatter like she had dropped a shampoo bottle or bar of soap. The tight band around his chest had loosened, and he had been able to take a breath again.

It was okay when she ran the hair dryer. He could hear that all the way from the bathroom in the second bedroom where he dashed to tear out of his clothes, shower, towel dry and dress in clean black fatigues in five minutes flat. He was clean-shaven in just under two and a half minutes more. By the time she had clicked off the hair dryer he was back in the living room again with his steel-toed boots laced, buckling on his weapons.

He glanced up as she stepped out of the bedroom. In an instant he was so hard for her it nearly doubled him over. She wore jeans that molded to every inch of her tight, round little ass, a pretty shirt with a scooped neck, and a thin sweater that molded the sides of her curvaceous br**sts, looked butter-soft and begged to be stroked. She wore the tiny flat slip-on shoes she had worn earlier. Her black hair was clean and shiny, and she had put on makeup. Somehow she had made her high cheekbones stand out, and glossy pink color emphasized those soft, plush lips. She had used a dark smoky gray eyeliner to devastating effect. It made her eyes even more enormous and compelling. They seemed to gather and reflect all the light in the room.

They also held an expression of distant composure that drove him insane. He stared at her in baffled fury. He was as hard as a rock from wanting her, and everything he had done to bring her to the peak of sensual awareness and desire—it had vanished as if it had never been.

“Are you ready?” she asked. She came to a stop beside him, and those breathtaking luminous eyes of hers narrowed on him. “What is it?”

He glared at what he held in his hands. It was a leather custom-made knife sheath with a leg tie.

He said between his teeth, “You’re so goddamn beautiful it’s about all I can do not to throw you down on the floor and take you right here and now, and even I know that’s not acceptable behavior.”

Dead silence. He shot a glance at her from under lowered brows. That fine clear skin of hers had gone white, the expression in her eyes turned stricken. Then she flushed a deep betraying red and her stricken look turned into a scandalized sparkle. She clapped her hands over her mouth and giggled.

Giggled. What a foreign, feminine sound. And he loved it.

One corner of his mouth lifted in response, and his fury dissipated and blew away on an intangible wind. He threaded the knife sheath onto his belt and buckled it. When he bent to fasten the leg tie, her hands came over his.

“Let me do it,” she said. Her voice was breathless.

He froze and then straightened slowly as he stared at her.

Her eyes dancing, her piquant face alive with mischievous sensuality, she put those sweet, delicate little hands on his thighs as she sank into a kneeling position in front of him. She tilted her head back and looked up at him.

Holy f**k. His abdominal muscles clenched and the blood in his veins transmuted to slow-moving lava.

She reached between his legs. Her slender wrist brushed against the heavy muscles of his inner thighs. He broke into a fine sweat, his thinking crumbled into a wasteland, and his rigid c**k strained toward her plump, smiling lips.

She pulled the two lengths of leather around his thigh and tied them together. “We’re supposed to be upstairs in five minutes,” she whispered. “We have no time right now. But when we do—”

She leaned forward to put her arms around his hips. His hands fisted in the air above her head, and he broke into a fine trembling as she nuzzled the pulsing bulge at his crotch. She rubbed her cheek against his cloth-covered erection, and it was such a happy, sensual, affectionate thing for her to do, he almost fell to his knees in dumbfounded worship.

He gasped her name, an incoherent hymn.

“When we do have time,” she said against him, her breath warming and moistening the cloth over his cock, “I want it to be just like this.”

The penthouse suite was just three flights up from their floor, but one needed a key to access it by elevator. Rogers was still doing guard duty in the hall. The tall policewoman offered the penthouse key to Niniane as they stepped out of the suite. Niniane paused to have a brief exchange with the other woman that had Rogers’s pleasant freckle-sprinkled face alight with pleasure.

He didn’t pay attention to what the females said. He was too busy struggling to get his raging hormones under control, to actually let Niniane walk away from the hotel suite and not drag her back inside, throw her on the floor and do what he had threatened to do. Each step they took down the hall was an uncertain, hard-won triumph.

Then his brain started working again, really working, and he began to think about the attendees of the upcoming meeting.

Not one of those elegant elderly piranhas was going to welcome his presence, and wasn’t that just too f**king bad. There wasn’t a Power on Earth that could keep him from guarding Niniane’s back.