This was what she’d wanted, this togetherness, this hunger to be with another person. She’d thought she’d lost the chance at it when she’d believed Keenan’s lies, and now, she couldn’t imagine life without it. Someday, this would pass. Unless they were cursed, mortals didn’t become faeries, so Jayce would leave her someday. Rika hadn’t told him that, not wanting to bring up how fleeting their time was. For now, she had found the heady mix of like and want that she’d been dreaming of for years.

She smiled, and they started across the desert . . . fading to invisible as they walked away from the people in town. Things might be unstable in the desert, and she had no doubt that there would be conflict until Maili realized that she couldn’t become Alpha. Right now, though, Sionnach was alive and healing, and Jayce was at Rika’s side. Both her faery friend and her mortal boyfriend were safe, and Rika couldn’t stop the smile that came over her.

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

Sionnach knew that the Summer King was standing nearby: Keenan didn’t exactly try to hide the heat that radiated from his body. No one else, save for the newly ascended Summer Queen, would exude such heat, and there was no reason that the new queen would visit the home of a former Winter Girl. So without opening his eyes, Sionnach knew that the Summer King stood in the mouth of the room in Rika’s cave where Sionnach was reclining, half-propped on the mound of pillows Rika had arranged behind him.

When he did open his eyes, Sionnach had to resist the urge to grin. The wide-eyed shock on the Summer King’s face was enough to improve even the lowest of moods, and his temper was accompanied by eddies of heat that made the air shimmer.

“What are you doing there?” Keenan didn’t gesture, but the disdain and possessiveness were both clear in his tone. Even now, the Summer King did not expect to see someone else in the bed of one of his former pseudo-beloveds.

Sionnach offered his practiced expression of wide-eyed innocence and said, “Recovering.”

The bowl with the hilt of the knife in it was hidden on the opposite side of Sionnach’s body, so Keenan wouldn’t see it. To keep the Summer King’s temper pricked and his attention diverted, Sionnach smiled in the way of the falsely modest and added, “Forgive me for not standing, but I can’t find the energy just yet.”