Read Online The Immortal Highlander by Karen Marie Moning - Free Book Online Page B

had, the only one who could see him. He
needed
her.
    That realization went a long way toward calming her nerves. She wasn’t dealing with impending death, she was dealing with impending battle, and those were two very different things.
    Wait a minute, she thought suddenly, frowning as her mind latched on to an inconsistency: He claimed to be powerless, but was still able to move in the blink of an eye like a fairy. How could that be? She needed to know precisely what she was up against. “I thought you said Aoibheal stripped your powers. Why can you still move like a fairy?”
    He shrugged. “It’s the only power she left me—the ability to sift short distances.”
    “Why would she leave you anything at all?” she pressed, wondering if he was telling her the truth.
    “I suspect,” he replied dryly, “so buses wouldn’t run me over while I was trying to adjust to my new form. She wishes me to suffer, not die.”
    “But she left you nothing else?”
    He shook his head and gave her a chiding glance. “Don’t think to escape me, Gabrielle. I won’t permit it. It would be unwise to think me”—he paused a moment, as if choosing his next words with care, and smiled faintly—“impotent . . . in any way.”
    “And why do you want me to talk to this Circenn Brodie person?” she forged on, refusing to acknowledge his thinly veiled threat.
Think him impotent?
With all that testosterone and virility dripping from his pores? Ha. She’d as easily mistake the Sahara Desert for the North Pole.
    “Because he has the power to return me to the Fae realm.”
    “Is he a fairy too?” She stiffened instantly. No more fairies. There was no way she was going to reveal herself to another one, especially not one that possessed all its powers.
    “Half-Fae. But he chooses to reside in the mortal world.”
    Still too dangerous, even if only a half-blood. “And after I act as your intermediary and he takes you back to Faery, then what?”
    “Then all will be made right, and I’ll be invincible again.”
    She rolled her eyes. “I meant, what happens to me? While you may be the most important thing to your egotistical little self in your narcissistic little world, guess what—so am I in mine.”
    His eyes glittered and he laughed. Tossed back his dark head, white teeth flashing, muscles in his corded neck flexing, and she bit back a soft, appreciative moan. His body might be human, but it was dusted with Fae exoticness, from his incredible gold-velvet skin, to those eyes that flashed with shimmering gold sparks no human had, to his flat-out intimidating sexual presence. Potent, larger-than-life Fae essence bottled—and not quite capped—in a mortal body. And a perfect mortal body at that.
    Simply deadly. A pure fairy could not have tempted her so. She would have kept telling herself it was a “thing.” But now that she knew he was all human male beneath that black T-shirt and those snug, faded jeans, he seemed like an entirely different—
Eew!
    Her spine went rigid as the back of her chair. She snapped up straight so violently that she nearly toppled herself over.
    How long had she been thinking of it as “he” and “him” in her mind?
    Oh! She wanted to spit, to scrape the foul taste of her own betrayal off her tongue! Had her grandmother taught her nothing? She closed her eyes, shutting it out, painstakingly rebuilding its it-ness in her mind.
    After a few moments she opened them again.
It
had not yet answered her. “I said,” she repeated, “what about me?”
    “Anything you want,
ka-lyrra,
” it purred. “You have but to name it.” Its gaze raked over her body appreciatively, hungrily, those dark eyes promising the fulfillment of any fantasy she might harbor in her deepest heart. It wet its lower lip with its tongue, caught it with its teeth, then gave her the slowest, sexiest smile she’d ever seen. “Whisper in my ear, Gah-bry-yil, your deepest desires, and I shall make them yours.”
    Yeah, right,
she