Tabitha - Royal Rebel, Kiana Dreamfairy [best adventure books to read .TXT] 📗

looked too much like a human for him to identify my origins by sight.
He didn’t like that his sense of smell had failed him here. One good sniff ought to give him all the information he needed to place my species, but instead it only gave him a raging erection. He didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. Sure, just like any other male in existence, a good brush with death tended to bring out the horny in him, but this felt like more than that. He didn’t just want sex; he wanted sex with me, with this woman-or whatever I was-and he wanted it now. In fact, he seemed to want it more with every breath full of my scent that he inadvertently inhaled. He struggled to block the tantalizing aroma from his mind and pushed to his feet. If he didn’t get control of himself, I would end up getting a hell of an awakening. Maybe from the inside out.
Gritting his teeth and taking slow, shallow breaths through his mouth, Hex braced himself against his uncontrollable arousal and forced himself to take stock of my wounds. Starting at my feet seemed safest, and the ragged puncture marks in the leather of my high boots looked pretty nasty. He dealt efficiently with my laces and tugged the boots off, setting them aside under the coffee table. Without the heavy covering, my feet looked tiny and fragile beneath the veil of sheer black stockings, which were dotted with blood around the left ankle. The creature’s claws hadn’t bitten deeply, thanks to the leather, but the punctures would need a thorough cleaning.
Chapter VIII

His gaze moved up the length of the slim, graceful legs, which did totally inappropriate things to his libido, but they appeared to be free of further injury. The only other wound he could see was a slash across the stomach, and that was the injury that worried him. Carefully, he reached out to lift aside the hems of the skimpy tank tops, one eye on my face to be sure I hadn’t woken up. My eyelashes didn’t even flutter, and my expression remained tranquil. Hex wished he could say the same for himself, but one good look at the ragged gash in my pale, freckled skin had him cursing a blue streak and gritting his teeth against the urge to howl in anger.

The cut bled sluggishly, much less than he would have expected, but it looked nasty all the same, with jagged edges darkened to black by the poison on the creature’s claws. Jaw clenching, he dropped the hem and headed straight for the first-aid supplies in his bathroom. On the way back, he paused in the bedroom to grab a pair of jeans and ease himself into them. No reason to scare anyone to death by having me wake up eye to eye with the part of him most anxious to maker my acquaintance.

He stepped back into the living room with his hands full of disinfectant and bandages, and he froze. The blue-haired punk he’d left on his sofa had been replaced by a dark-haired goddess with skin like whipped cream and a torn and tattered gown of a fabric so light, if it hadn’t been for the pale lilac color, he couldn’t have sworn it even existed. The clothes I had been wearing had disappeared, and I slept on as if nothing had happened. Now he had proof I wasn’t quite human. A witch, maybe? That would explain my human appearance, since technically witches were humans who just happened to have evolved the ability to use magic, and a spell fading would explain the change in my appearance. At least, he thought it would. He wasn’t all that up on the rules of magic.

And none of the rules he had heard before explained why the very scent made him want to strip me naked and introduce himself to my womb, up close and personal.

Forcing his mind off his crotch, he returned to the sofa and knelt on the floor at my side. My wounds took precedence over his curiosity at the moment. Until he did find out who and what I was, he’d be better treating my injuries than speculating about the effect I had on him. When I woke up, he’d get his answers.

Still, he was frowning as he poured disinfectant liberally onto a sterile pad. He parted the cut in my dress, ripping it slightly wider to get at the injury. When he pressed the cotton to my skin, the muscles in my stomach clenched reflexively, and he heard a soft gasp whisper between my lips. His gaze shot immediately to my face, but my expression remained relaxed and tempting in sleep. Reluctantly, he looked back at his task, only to see that the wound in my abdomen appeared to be a lot less serious than he’d thought, now that he’d cleared the dried blood and dirt away. In fact, it almost looked as if it had begun healing even before he’d washed it.

Oh, this wasn’t good.

Swallowing a curse, Hex leaned back and took a really good look. One that had his stomach sinking into his toenails. He took in the moonlight-pale, velvet-smooth skin, the miraculously healing wounds, the magically transformed appearance, and saw that his bad day just gotten a hell of a lot worse.

“Aw, shit.”

Muttering to himself and whatever god currently watched and laughed at his predicament, Hex took a deep, bracing breath, eased his hands into the tumbled mass of my unconscious raven black hair, and lifted it gently away from the delicate shell of my ear. An ear that swept gracefully up from small, unadorned lobes to a distinct and elegant point.

Fae.

He realized that the currently passed out on his sofa, bleeding from an unexpected and determined creature attack, was Fae. As in full-blooded, non-Changeling, born-and-bred-beyond-the-gates-in-Faerie Fae. And high sidhe from the look of me. I wasn’t a sprite but one of the aristocratic race. So what the hell was a Fae doing in his living room?
Okay, he had carried me there, but that wasn’t the point. The Fae weren’t even supposed to be in this world. Their ruler, Queen Trinity, had made that long-standing custom a law after some kind of incident a few years ago, but the end result was that Hex could cont on one hand the number of Faerie’s he’d met in all of his thirty-five years. This one made number three. Not his lucky number.

Pushing to his feet, Hex shoved a hand through his already-rumpled hair and began to pace across the quiet room. He didn’t need a Lupine sense of smell to know this whole thing reeked of trouble, and he wasn’t just talking about the creature stench. He already had enough on his plate trying to keep the Others in the area from inadvertently starting a war with the humans. The last thing he needed was the Faerie’s and creatures putting in an appearance and throwing everything into chaos.

Hex bit back a curse and looked over at the sofa, directly into a pair of sleepy, darkly lashed eyes the color of African violets. It felt like taking a stone giant’s fist straight to his gut. Even the creature hadn’t packed this kind of punch. Asleep, I had been beautiful. Awake, I stole the breath from his lungs and the brains from his head. All he had left was the blood in his veins, and that was sure as hell easy enough to prove, considering it had all rushed right to his groin the minute I opened my eyes.

While he stood there, blinking like an idiot and probably drooling like one, I raised my arms over my head and arched my body in a lazy, feline stretch that left him cross-eyed and half-delirious. Then I collapsed back into the cushions and my full lips curved in a sensual smile.

“Hi.” I said in a sleep-husky voice had the same effed on his dick as the average Lupine female in heat waving her tail in his face, only magnified exponentially. He probably had zipper marks running up and down his shaft. “My name is Tabitha. Who are you?”

Hex groaned and rubbed his hand over his eyes, quickly discovering that the image of me stretching had been burned indelibly into his retinas.

“Shit. I’m screwed.”

Chapter IX

Tabitha felt her lips twitch, but she figured it might be considered rude to laugh at someone who had saved her life. “Ah, all right. Do you have a nickname?”

The werewolf scowled down at her. “Hex IceFly. But I think the more important question, lady, is what in the hell are you doing here?”


Pursing her lips, Tabitha swung herself into a sitting position and winced when the movement pulled at the slash in her belly. The wound had begun to heal, but with as much magic as she had expended, she guessed it would be a couple days at least before she did any dancing. Which was a shame. The idea of performing one of the seductive, erotic, hip-grinding dances of Faerie for her erstwhile rescuer held a definite appeal. And judging by the current fit of said rescuer’s jeans, she thought he might turn out to be an appreciative audience.

“Lady,” he growled, jerking her attention off his pants and back to his face. “You want to answer my