King of the Wilds - Tasha Black Page 0,17

struggled for control.

Whatever was happening with Miranda, it was driving him mad.

He was beginning to realize he wanted more than to bed her, but he couldn’t imagine what more there could be for them.

She’s mortal, she’s mortal, she’s mortal…

But it didn’t seem to matter. He adored her. She was as sweet as ice cream, and the idea of seeing her in danger again terrified him.

It certainly hadn’t mattered for his brothers.

“Get in, Bron,” Dorian hissed from the passenger side of Sara’s car.

“I’m going with Miranda,” he decided.

She nodded and he moved around and got in beside her.

“Do you think the lifeguard is in danger?” Miranda asked.

By the gods, he did not want to admit his fear, but the folk could not lie.

“It is impossible for us to know for sure,” he told her.

She glanced at him.

“But yes,” he admitted. “I do think he’s in danger. It will be good if we can get back there quickly and try to find him.”

“Good idea,” she said, nodding.

She was very brave. Injury at the hands of one of these monsters could be fatal to her. Yet she was ready to fling herself into danger to save someone she didn’t know, and help people she had just met.

“Hopefully, we can find it quickly,” she said. “Do you have an advantage? Being… who you are?”

“That depends,” he told her. “All living things are known at least a little bit to me. But it is the simpler side of nature that is most mine. Plants, animals, and… other simple creatures.”

“You were going to say humans, weren’t you?” He could see the little dimple on her right cheek. She wasn’t angry.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Though you are not entirely under my rule.”

“That’s good news,” she said, quirking an eyebrow.

“Your kind has more complexity, generally,” he said.

“But not always?”

“Not always,” he agreed.

She was silent and he could hear her unasked question hanging between them.

“You are more complex, Miranda Cannon,” he told her gruffly. “You do not belong to me wholly.”

Not yet.

“But I do a little bit?” she asked.

He wasn’t sure whether she thought that was a good or a bad thing. But he had no time to puzzle it out. She was pulling the car over behind Sara’s.

They got out and joined their friends.

“This way,” Tabitha said, heading for a ditch on the edge of the road.

“Are you sure?” Sara asked.

“I used to sneak into the pool sometimes in high school,” Tabitha said over her shoulder.

Sara’s eyes widened and Miranda tried to hide her smile under her hand.

“What is funny?” Bron whispered to Miranda as they followed Tabitha into the ditch.

“Even in Tarker’s Hollow I knew all about the Barnes family,” she whispered. “They’re kind of… proper. It seems wild that Tabitha ever snuck into a pool.”

“Tabitha is not proper,” Bron informed her. “At least not in the way you’re thinking.”

“I’m starting to get that,” Miranda admitted.

They stepped out of the ditch and into the woods and the trees closed in all around them.

Bron took in a deep breath of the rich air. He was learning to appreciate his own realm more in this strange place where the sounds and scents of nature were often missing or covered with chemicals.

Tabitha led the way and Bron brought up the rear.

He kept his eyes on Miranda, who was just in front of him. Though he told himself he was merely making sure she didn’t fall behind, his need to protect her was something much more than that.

He felt a sort of mournful admiration for the human woman, a feeling that he had never experienced so acutely before.

His brothers’ queens were mortal too, but to him that felt inevitable. They were as they had been made.

But this woman, who was so like him in stature and coloring, every moment with her felt both beautiful and tragic.

“Okay, here we go,” Tabitha whispered, slipping through a break in the fence.

Tristan had a decidedly harder time fitting through after her, but he held the material back to help the others.

“Well done, brother,” Bron told him on his way through.

Tristan nodded.

There was an easy accord between the brothers now. Bron had not known this ease in the faerie realm, and he certainly wouldn’t have expected it, not after they had all stood by and watched Dorian’s imprisonment without lifting a finger to help him.

Perhaps it was his weakness for the mortal woman, but Bron suddenly had a much better understanding of his brother’s sympathy for these creatures.

Though he knew it was wrong to harbor such mischief