Page 47 of FoolSilver
“I don’t know.” I kept my voice level and my eyes on the tree line. “They had me cornered. Something released. A shockwave probably. It blasted out, and I haven’t been able to replicate it. I can’t access it on demand.”
No way was I going to tell him about the demon. Not because I didn’t trust the Fae heir, but because everything was at stake. Possessed. I was fucking possessed, and the consequences of that confession were unthinkable. He valued me now, but who intheir sane mind could trust a girl with an entity coiled inside her skull?
I said nothing and shoved the guilt past my bruised ribs.
Beneath the guilt, a practical worry churned: I was wasting his time. The shockwave came from the creature, and it had made its terms clear. Accept it fully. Unconditionally. Until then, I was a locked door Aelindor was trying to open from the wrong side.
“Two distinct channels,” he said, working through it like a tactical problem. “Your alchemy is innate. The shockwave is something else entirely—it surfaced under extreme survival stress.” His blue gaze locked on me, reading me with the patience of a man who had interrogated centuries’ worth of liars. I fought not to squirm. “Let me approach it differently.”
He sent his power out carefully.
Fae magic—cool and ancient, like wind off a glacier—pressed against something in the center of my chest. It pulled back. Pressed again. Testing.
It found something. And that something responded.
Heat flooded upward from my core without warning, nothing to do with exertion or the morning air. My hands curled at my sides. I was acutely aware of his proximity, of the clean male scent of him.
Something deep in my well strained toward his magic.
I locked my jaw and held the line. His magic pressed closer. The heat redoubled, my breath caught, and I looked at him.
The careful professional attention was still there, but something beneath it had cracked. His jaw was tight. His deep blue eyes had darkened, his chest rising and falling. He felt it too. Whatever my power was doing to his magic, it ran both ways.
A sound I hadn’t meant to make slipped from my lips.
Aelindor’s eyes dropped to my mouth. Then he rose, took three fast steps back, and turned away. His hands opened and closed once, the slow, deliberate movement of a man rebuilding control from the ground up. But I’d seen the front of his slacks before he turned. He was hard. Visibly, unmistakably hard.
I had never seen Aelindor lose a fight against himself. The sight shook me.
He stood with his back to me and we both breathed hard. If he came to me now, I would give him anything. Offer him everything. I knew it with a certainty that sat in my bones, the need to feel him, to have him inside me, overriding every sensible thing I knew about myself. The only reason I hadn’t crossed the distance was that he’d moved first, removing himself from my reach.
Aelindor walked to the edge of the clearing and through the tree line, and then he was gone.
I sat frozen in the empty ring. Shame arrived like a hailstorm.
Shit.I’d practically seduced the highest-ranking officer during a training session when all he’d done was try to help me sort out my power. How could he ever trust me again?
I was still sitting in the wreckage of that thought when Aelindor returned.
He was carrying two glasses of water, ice filling them halfway.
I wouldn’t have complained if he poured one over my head. I deserved it.
He held a glass out. I took it and drained half in one pull. The cold spread through my chest and settled.
“I’m so sorry, sir.” My face was still warm with shame. “I don’t know what happened. I behaved poorly, but I wasn’t trying to. It might be the pollen, sir. The trees are blooming and…” I stopped. That was a terrible excuse, and extending it was only making it worse. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
You know exactly what happened, little liar,the demon chose that moment to comment.You pictured him getting you on all fours and pounding into your swollen, aching cunt from behind. You saw it play out in his eyes too. If he hadn’t left, he’d have taken you and not taken no for an answer. And the first thrust alone?—
Anger rose on top of the embarrassment. I shoved the demon down hard. The tail of its laughter stung on the way out.
“Max.” He raised a finger. “You never need to apologize. I lost control. The fault is mine.”
“But sir?—”
He stepped closer and lifted his knuckles to my cheek, one brief brush of contact, then stepped back. The tenderness of it, after such rigid control, after his absence, hit me harder than the magic had.
“It happened, and it will happen again,” Aelindor said, his eyes warmer than before. He wasn’t pretending the last few minutes hadn’t occurred. “I pressed into unknown territory without adequate reconnaissance. What I found—I think I understand something I didn’t before. Your magic can’t be trained the way I’d planned. It has to be fulfilled.”
