Page 70 of Taken
If anything, it hummed approval.
And that terrifies me more than anything.
Dagan’s dry voice cut in from the crowd like a skewer through a roast.
“You two started the party without me?”
Alaric’s draconian grin flashes and smoke curls from his nostrils.
“He is fashionably late as always. And you, Lord of Earth? Where did you run off to this morning? And why are you still wearing winter in the middle of summer?” I frown at his apparel.
The Tidal Lands are usually warm and tepid, but he’s still in fur lined pants and a thick wool tunic.
“Always,” Dagan replied, deadpan, boots leaving large prints in the hard sand.
He peers at me then, a farmer’s curiosity in his gaze.
“So—viyella? Really, Kael? You’ve gone soft, then?”
“Not soft,” I said, because the word soft would be weaponized into a thousand court rumors if I let it linger. “Different. Moreaccurate.”
“Why isn’t he surprised by the Dragon?” Phoebe murmured at my elbow.
Before I could answer, Jules—already untying the harness with the casual confidence of someone who plants seeds and raises storms—calls out, “Kael! Dagan! A little help!”
Her voice had a maternal twang now, the rounded inflection of a woman who commands attention simply by speaking.
Alaric snaps to attention like a hound at a whistle. He stands and, with one fluid motion, shifts into his human grace infull Lordly regalia—no hesitation—and his arms catch Jules as though he’d always done so.
She gasps. He grins. And the way he settles into this possession of her is like a practiced thing.
It looks attractive all of a sudden—secure, warm, unavoidable.
“They will catch you over my dead body,” Alaric mutters as Dagan continues to walk as if to prod our brother. His words are a joke and a promise all at once.
“Alaric! They were being friendly,” Jules harrumphs and makes a show of peering down at her viyen as if he might be moved.
They kiss, and I feel like a voyeur, even though it lasts but a moment.
Then she squeals, shimmying in his hold, and I catch the soft curve of her swollen belly beneath her blouse—proof that whatever fierce storms they’ve fought, they’ve built something together.
And I realize I want that too. With my Telya.
Jules wriggles free eventually, laughing, and comes bounding toward us like a spring uncoiled.
I lean in close to Phoebe before she can be devoured by Jules’s orbit and say, low enough that only she feels the heat of my words, “This is Lady Jules. She’s Alaric’s viyella.”
“So, his wife?” she asks, earnest and literal in a way that made me grin.
I dip my chin, because formality steadies things.
“Alaric, Lord of Air, and Lady Jules of the Eyrie—may I present Lady Phoebe of Castletide.”
Phoebe’s answer was immediate and charmingly deflating.
“Oh, um, I’m just Phoebe from South Jersey.”
Jules hears the whisper—of course she does—and the sparkle in her eyes doubled. She lunges at Phoebe with the kind of warmth that makes strangers family.
