have to know. Just come for me now. You’re so close. Give yourself that little release. It’ll be our little secret.”
“No!” I roared. Releasing her shoulder, I grabbed her right wrist and pulled it as quickly and carefully out of my pants as I could. When my dick was free of her, I gave her a hard shove across the room. I didn’t see where she landed. Bending down, I grabbed the white envelope I had dropped and ran through the house. Demoiselle Noire’s furious shriek sliced through the air, chasing on my heels. As I hit the hallway, I pulled the hawthorn branch from my pocket and waved it with a quick burst of power that blew the front door off its hinges. Charging down the porch stairs, I started to run across the sidewalk when a rush of power swept across the front yard. The hawthorn hedges shifted and shivered a second before long branches lashed out at me. All the magpies took to the air at once, filling the silence with their loud cries. Ducking my head down under my arms, I kept running, a scream escaping me only when one branch hit my back and dragged the long thorns across my flesh.
I barely missed being hit by a car as I darted across the street, but I didn’t stop until I was back in the park. Struggling to catch my breath, I dropped to my knees in the soft grass before I fell on my face. Muscles screamed and my fucking dick was throbbing in time with my racing heart. You’d think with the pain burning in my back from the thorns that the damn erection would go away, but I had been so close that some part of me was still crying for sex. For half a breath I thought about stumbling into the nearby woods to finish what had been started, but why give the elves watching me a show? Instead, I dug the fingers of my left hand into a large cut on my right biceps, sending a fresh wave of pain through my body that in turn washed away the last of my erection.
The reasonable part of me knew that the queen had watched her people slaughtered by the Towers. I knew that she had to be hurting over the betrayal of her husband. I knew these things and that reasonable part could understand why she would attack Trixie and me like this. Yet the larger part of me that was in pain, and still trying to get over the horror that I had very nearly been raped by something evil, was pretty fucking pissed at the queen.
12
WHEN MY BREATHING had slowed to normal again and I was no longer worried about setting Demoiselle Noire’s house on fire, I pushed to my feet and walked to the white gazebo beside the concrete lake. Anger bubbled inside of me, helping to dull the worst of the pains in my back and along my arms. Before entering the gazebo, I was of half a mind to do a little Tower-style threatening to get Trixie free of the Summer Court, but there was no need.
Trixie gasped. She was already pale with worry, but her wide green eyes filled with tears at the sight of me. I was sweaty and bloody, but for the first time in my life, my soul felt dirty. Logically, I knew that my body’s reaction had been the result of magic and that I had been loyal to Trixie in my heart and in my head, but that logic failed to scrub away the gritty feeling on my soul.
She rushed across the gazebo, her arms open to embrace me. I opened my mouth to tell her not to touch me. That I was dirty. But the words never came up my throat. She crushed against me on a sob, her arms wrapping around my neck as she pressed her face into my throat.
“I love you,” she cried. She repeated the words over and over again, teary and soft.
They were the balm I had been looking for, healing the cuts on my heart and washing away the filth covering my soul. My arms came around her like a vise, clutching her as tightly as I could.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. Just had a little trouble with a hawthorn bush, that’s all,” I said in a light, teasing tone that was completely undermined by the ferocious hold I had on her.
“I love you,” Trixie