“You’re doing well,” Stella murmured, her voice throaty and soothing, a sensual purr she never used with him. Her warm hands stroked over his bare skin, and it just figured that the only time he’d get these crumbs of attention from her were under these circumstances.
It was enough to make a grown man weep. Oh wait, he already was, Danu take him for a sniveling fool.
“Still with me?” Stella asked, sounding truly concerned for him.
He stared up at the gray sky. The parting in the clouds hadn’t lasted long, and now a swirl of light snowflakes showered down on him. He shivered violently. “Right here where you left me,” he replied through chattering teeth.
“I’m sorry about the cold.” Her green healing magic intensified, a small sun over his chest, the delightful heat, so quintessentially her, flooding outward to suffuse him with well-being. “I am warming you, but some of what you’re feeling is the fever breaking. I’m almost done with the cracked ribs,” she murmured, “and now I’m purging the infection.”
Feeling slightly more human, he focused his gaze on her intent face again. Her eyes were half closed, fulminous silver through the lace of her dark lashes. She had a widow’s peak, he realized with considerable surprise. And here he’d thought he’d studied everything about her, but this was new to him, the fine dark hairs forming a point on her brow, elegantly gracing her high forehead. She usually pulled her hair down around her face, so that was why it didn’t normally show. But while she healed him, she’d tucked her hair back behind her ears to keep it out of her way, instead of hiding her face in the tenebrous depths of it like usual.
In wonder, he stretched out an unsteady finger to touch the fine point, careful to make contact only with the hair, even though she had her hands on his skin. He knew she’d be guarding against his thoughts and emotions, using the flow of healing magic to ward him out. Flicking her gaze to his face, she raised a brow.
“You have a widow’s peak,” he said, as if that explained anything, dropping his hand quickly.
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head so her hair fell heavily over her forehead again. “I know. I hate it.”
“It’s beautiful.” Like a natural diadem, crowning her queen without interference by mortal instruments.
She snorted in a decidedly unlovely way, making him laugh—which hurt, but not nearly so much as before. Unfortunately, with the recession of the pain and nausea, he began to experience the other notable effects of Tala healing, the spring-green vitality bubbling through his bloodstream and heating his loins. Not now, he told his cock sternly as it engorged, pressing hard against his pants, not listening in the least.
“My mother used to pluck it,” Stella confided, and for a wild moment of disconnect, Jak thought she meant his unruly cock.
“The widow’s peak,” he exclaimed in relief, drawing a puzzled half smile from her. “Queen Amelia would… pluck out your hair?”
“She thought it marred the line of my forehead when my hair was styled up for fancy balls and such. You know how Mother is about grooming.” Stella rolled her eyes a little. “Strong opinions.”
“I’m sorry,” he said impulsively. It galled that she’d had any reason to think she wasn’t perfect in every way.
Stella shrugged it off. “I hated the plucking—she’d have to sit on me to hold me still—so I put a stop to it when I got old enough.”
“But you hide it.”
“To be fair, now that she can’t make me, I simply don’t ever put up my hair.” She slanted him a mischievous smile. “An advantage of being an odd and awkward sorceress is people aren’t surprised when I don’t adhere to court fashion. I’m going to heal the bites and lacerations while I’m at it, unless you’d rather go in and get in bed for that part? You can walk without harming yourself now, and you’ll be wanting to sleep when I’m done with you.”
The way desire for her pumped through him, he had no intention of compounding the problem by going near a bed with her. “Leave them,” he said, feeling as desperate to escape her touch now as he’d ever been to have it. The warrior goddess Danu teaching him a lesson in being careful what he wished for. His cock, trapped in a bent position, ached furiously as it swelled, and he sincerely prayed that Stella wouldn’t sense that particular pain.
“I’m healing all of it, either way. Call it professional pride. Stay still, or I will sit on you.”
If only… “Do it here,” he grated out, wrenching his gaze to the sky and thinking hard—no, not that word—concentrating on chilling images. Snow, and ice, and freezing water. Stella lifted her hands from his burning flesh and began tracing the various lacerations with a light brush of her fingers. He suppressed a groan, forcing himself to stay still, banishing the fantasies of her bending to follow the caresses with her soft lips, perhaps nipping him with her kitten teeth and—With an involuntary twitch, he clapped a hand over his eyes, willing the sting to penetrate his lust-fogged brain.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he gritted, then considered he should’ve said yes, so she’d stop.
“Want to tell me why Rhy attacked you?”
Not particularly, but it gave him something else to think about, especially since, as she worked her way up his body, a lock of silken hair fell over her shoulder to trail over his bare chest. He wasn’t going to survive this torture. “Astar and I were getting the horses ready to take the carriage down to the lake—you and Gen were already on the wing, scouting—when Rhy plummeted from the sky in raven form. The horses spooked, which is how the carriage got wrecked. We all took a spill, and I must’ve landed wrong. None of that is really on Rhy. He was out of his head with worry about Lena, not in his right mind. He’d sensed that Lena was no longer in our same reality, and—”
“He did?” Stella asked, pausing in her considerable surprise. “How?”
Jak shrugged, taking the opportunity to wriggle a little, hoping to adjust his erection. Not enough. Gah. “I don’t think he knows.” Rhy had been gone for days, possibly never to rejoin their mission, so his sudden reappearance had come as a surprise to all of them. He’d also arrived when they were already in an uproar, since Lena had fallen through one of the rifts in reality the high queen had sent them to investigate—and repair—and Zeph had gone to rescue her.
“Hmm. So why attack you?”
“He thought we were holding out on him, not telling him where Lena went. It took a while to convince him we didn’t know either—and to subdue him. Then he talked trash about Lena and me, and I had to correct his stupid assumption.”
“Lena and you?” Stella paused infinitesimally.
“He found out I’ve been teaching Lena how to defend herself with a dagger.”
“Ah.” Stella relaxed, and he wondered if he should have fanned that little flame of jealousy, if that was what it had been. Knowing Stella, she’d been thinking about something else entirely. “I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” she said. “Astar thinks you should teach me to use the Silversteel daggers Ash gave me, so I don’t do something foolish and cut myself with them or something.”