The Goblin King (17 page)

She was tender and malleable under the force of his kiss. Her body responded to his just as he’d imagined it would. She opened to him, melted under him, and tasted like promise.

His own desire reared its head like a dragon, reacting to her innocence and warmth like a moth to a flame. He moved in, deepening the kiss, his mind spinning with images of blissful and forbidden things –

And then she broke the kiss, pulling away with tremendous, willful force and shoving her hands against his chest.
It was sudden and harsh, shocking him to his core and awakening the predator inside.

He straightened, his
eyes flashed like gasoline on an open flame, and his blood boiled.

Diana got her feet under her,
springing up out of the chair with a discombobulated breathlessness that only told him she wanted him as much as he did her – and only helped to fan the flames already consuming him. But he held his ground, recognizing the tumultuous emotions racing across her beautiful features.

“That’s enough!” she told him, teeth bared,
stormy eyes flashing. “We can’t do this! I don’t even
know
you, for Christ’s sake! I don’t care how incredible your kisses are, I
can’t
be your queen! I
won’t!
For the love of god, this is ridiculous!” She was trembling, her shoulders heaving with big, great, dramatic breaths. He’d pushed her over some sort of edge – or come close. “I have a life to live in my own world, Damon Chroi! People
depend
on me! I can’t abandon them! I actually make a
difference
there!”

She stopped screaming at hi
m long enough to catch up on those heaving breaths, her chest rising and falling in fast, painful succession, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Damon watched her very slowly uncurl one fist and shakily run that hand through her hair. Once she did, she distractedly glanced down at her fingers – and her expression darkened considerably.

With
sudden, fierce impatience, she shook her right hand out, dislodging several strands of her beautiful, strawberry blonde hair. They drifted to the cold, hard floor like spun gold in a Rumpelstiltskin dungeon.

“I have to go,” she stated again, this time much more quietly.
But her words were laced with an acidic note of bitterness that bewildered Damon. She looked up at him and took a deep, tremulous breath. “
Please
.”

In that moment, Damon fought with his own will, mind and body as he’d never fought a
gainst anything else in his life. No goblin had ever been this hard to tame. The young woman before him was turning him inside out.

There was no way in hell he was letting her out of his sights. She’d given up her normal life and its normal routine the moment they’d walked into each other’s lives. She had a destiny t
o fulfill now, and so help him, she
would
fulfill it.

If it was the last thing he did as a living, breathing man, he was going to make Diana Piper his wife. He was going to make her his queen.

But there was some small sense of decency inside Damon that whistled softly and waved its hand at him and quietly begged him to keep his calm and handle this like a gentleman. So he took a deep breath and corralled his strength.

“There are a thousand different bonds and a hundred different spells I could use to keep you here with me,” he told her, somehow managing to keep his tone level even while
his soul pitched one hell of a fit. “And returning to your home right now would amount to no more than suicide for you. But you are a free woman, Diana Piper. More importantly, you are a
queen
, no matter what you might believe. Your will is your own.”
For the moment
. “And you will do what you feel is the right thing to do.”

He turned away from her –
had
to – because the memory of her lips on his was making him slightly crazy.

After a few moments, the world eased out of its stark contrasts and the pain in
his eyes began to subside as their flames slowly shrank. Without turning back to face her, he said, “All I ask is that you grant me one boon before I return you.”

And if that doesn’t work, I’ll damn well knock you senseless and tie you to my bed.

Fuck.

He was beginning to understand the
dominating actions and desires of a few of the other 13 Kings all too well.

It took Diana
a long while to respond, which did not surprise Damon. She was smart, and only a fool would accept that kind of compromise without first gathering more information.

“What kind of
boon?” she finally asked.

Now he did turn around. “I want to show you something.”
He hesitated, and then he offered her his hand. “You claim that you can make a difference in your world as if your world is the only one where you can do so.”

Diana looked down at his hand. Her dark gray eyes were very large in her be
autiful face. She looked tired, probably overworked. He thought of all he’d learned about her that night. She
was
overworked. And a little haunted.

But
also strong.

Her big eyes narrowed,
questioning but curious. “And you plan to prove me wrong?”

“
I’ll let you judge that for yourself.”

Just as he knew she would, Diana
slowly raised her hand and placed it within his. He curled his fingers around her, gentle but firm – and this was the moment he would later realize his entire world changed.

Slowly, so as not to frighten her off again
, he pulled her close. She moved stiffly at first but then relinquished, permitting him to draw her near. When she was close enough, he allowed his magic to surround them.

As it did, Damon’s heart rate slowed. His blood settled down. His eyes closed.

In a way that it never had before, his magic transformed. He had intended a simple transportation spell. But rather than the twist in time and space he’d grown so accustomed to, he and Diana were surrounded with
music
. The thunder had stopped. Instead, there were chimes. Distant pipes played as if sounding from a field in the past or from the hills of a dream.

It reminded him of
a lullaby, Celtic and ancient, but one that was drawn from somewhere so deep within him, he had no conscious control over it. He felt no weight. Each note carried another pound, another century away. There was movement like a dance – and Damon opened his eyes.

They
were no longer in his great room, nor even in his castle. The world he’d ruled over for thousands of years now drifted far below them… as they rode through the twilight skies wrapped in a magic pure and a music timeless.

The clouds that had hung low across his kingdom like a mantle since the beginning of his rule had parted and thinned and drifted away. The
moon dominated the pre-dawn sky, and the colors were turning. He’d never seen such colors. Orange across the horizon melting to pink to purple to the deep indigo of the moon’s realm high above.

This
unknown spell that he had never before cast drew from absolutely nowhere and danced around them in blues and pinks and violets that shimmered and soothed. Diana’s frown was long gone. Her beautiful, freshly kissed lips were spread in a brilliant smile. She laughed aloud as the wind curled softly through her hair and shooting stars cascaded across the deep indigo far above. The sound of that laugh was like a magic all its own – and in that moment, he vowed to bring it forth as often as he possibly could.

The hope that Damon had sensed
before now returned and swelled like a balloon inside him. He had thought he’d felt wings unfurling…. He’d been right.

The world moved in perfect slow motion far below. There was no pain, no cold, nothing but the song of magic that carried
them on their walk through dawn’s ametrine colored sky.

He would have let it go on forever. There could be no tomorrow, no landing, no coming down from the literal and unexpected high that had found two unbeknownst soul mates flying together over a strange and mythical land –
and he would not mind.

But even through the haze of
infinite bliss that had wrapped tight around him, he saw what it was he’d been originally aiming for. On the ground, the forest parted to make way for a bramble-filled field that then led to a cliff face filled with cave entrances.

A familiar sadness entered his chest, bringing back that weight he’d let go of only moments ago.
He wanted to shove it away again and return to the happiness he’d never thought he would be lucky enough to find.

But he l
et the weight stay. The loneliness. It had to.

Because ultimately
he needed to show Diana why he’d brought her out here.

With no more than a
thought, he lowered them gradually toward the ground between the brambles and the cave entrances. Diana looked away from the night sky and the moon and gazed down at their destination as they descended. The smile she’d graced him with slowly slipped until they gently touched down, and she stared at the nearest cavern mouth . It was tall and dark and foreboding.

He knew she would have given almost anything in that moment to be back up in the sky. He would have too.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” he told her. He still held her hand in his, and she had not yet attempted to pull away. Most likely, she was scared.

S
he had good reason to be.

“This is where the xenobe goblins live. Beyond these cave entrances are
hundreds of them,” he told her. “
Thousands
. They hide in the caves because rock walls don’t get caught in their claws.”

Diana now pulled her hand from his. She stared at the caves for a long, long while without saying anything. Finally, she rolled her shoulders back, stood a little straighter, and turned to peer up at him. “You brought me here to heal them.”

“No,” he told her honestly. “I brought you here to
see
them. I brought you here so that you would know there are creatures in
this
realm who could use your help as well. Your world is not the only world to know pain. You are a healer, a creature possessing of a magic that until now was so rare, it was thought to belong only to one woman. You’ve opened a new door, Diana.”

He
took a step back and gestured to the cliff wall, dotted with its multitude of dark openings. “For all of us.”

Chapter Twenty

Diana closed her eyes and put her hand to her forehead. She’d gone through too many emotional changes over the course of the night. From terrified to turned on to angry and scared to insanely happy – during that impromptu flight over the Goblin Kingdom – and back to scared again.

Damon Chroi was asking her to do
something immense. In the course of a few short hours, he’d entered her world and upended it. He had presented her with a choice of such grand and bizarre proportions, she truthfully wondered whether she were just about to wake up.

So she waited with her eyes closed and let the images of her crazy new world spin through her head. But they didn’t fade
like dreams would. They didn’t blur around the edges or mix up into meaningless nonsense. Nothing changed.

When she opened her eyes again, Damon Chroi the Goblin King was still standing a few feet away, his badass amazingly handsome self exuding power and strength and the scent of freshly fallen rain – just as he had from the beginning. A
nd his vital, ever-changing green eyes watched her with a mixture of worry… and hope.

All
Diana could do was take a deep breath and let it out with decisive finality.

“Okay,”
she said tentatively, but resolutely. “You’re telling me that the goblin I helped in that alley is not the only one of his kind. The rest are in there.” She gestured to the cave entrances. “And they’re all in pain just like he was.”

“Yes.” A breeze brushed th
rough a lock of his black hair, causing it to shimmer like a blackbird’s wing in the dawning light.

“And you want me to heal them.”

Damon smiled a small smile. “I only know that you can.” The sun creeping over the horizon behind Diana reflected in the depths of his gaze, casting it into a brilliant faceted rainbow of tourmaline colors. “You’ll have to decide what to do now for yourself.”

Diana looked from him to the caves and accidentally ran a hand through her hair, once more
dislodging precious strands to pull them out with her fingers. This time, she just let them fall, her mind on other things. Like choices:

Return
to my world and try to heal as many as I can before the bad guys who attacked my house came back to finish the job….

Or stay.
In a place that shouldn’t exist, with a man too good to be real. As his queen.

Before she could give him an answer, Damon turned fully toward the caves and raised his right hand palm-out.