Hidden Depths (30 page)

After that, Olivia’s mind checked out. She was aware of people speaking to her, but she couldn’t respond. Like a doll, she let them pull her away from the body. She needed to remember something, or explain something, or maybe just wake up.

Sleeping Beauty
, she thought with a dreamer’s logic.
Someone find a prince to
kiss me
.

Her brain returned to normal working order once the four of them had squeezed into the shiny red sport sub. Ty was at the wheel with Anso beside him.

They were speaking by turns into some sort of hands-free phone, giving and receiving status reports from different voices. Olivia’s hair was floating around her face.

“The earthquake -” she said, batting at it in annoyance.

“Petering off,” James answered, squished in the back seat with her. “It’s looking like we stopped the spell in time.”

“Good.”

The word came out as a heavy sigh. James’s arm gave her shoulders a bracing squeeze. She looked at him, startled afresh by his changed eye color. Possibly she’d never completely get used to it. James smiled, but there were shadows in his humor. Neither Ty nor Anso were turning to check on them. All she saw was the back of their light and dark golden heads. No matter how important their conversation, Olivia had a feeling this wasn’t an accident.

Ty and Anso knew they had tried to run.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE
elephant in the room must have seemed worth avoiding to Anso and Ty.

Neither wereseal mentioned James and Olivia had been escaping before they turned back at the warehouse. The men’s main concern after returning to the palace was Olivia’s well being. Ty claimed her zoning out after he shot Ellice was due to more than shock. According to him, people acted this way when they came out of magical hypnosis, his theory being that the faerie hairdresser had put a whammy on her. This idea gave James a turn, though it might explain his sudden dislike for her hairpins. Ty didn’t seem overly alarmed, treating it like a case of the flu she’d recover from. He and Anso had a brief low-voiced argument over whether someone called the Magus needed to be brought in, Ty being for it and Anso against.

“Can he make sure the spell is all the way out of me?” Olivia asked.

“Yes,” Anso conceded stiffly, which settled it.

The Magus turned out to be a pureblood fae. James gathered he held some sort of religious post. His stiff embroidered robes resembled a pope’s, though James didn’t think he was Catholic.

Of course, he also hadn’t thought Poseidon was a saint.

Olivia sat like a schoolgirl on a settee in the blue salon while the Magus examined her from head to toe through a large magnifying glass. The process was slightly Harry Potterish and surreal. Sensing Olivia’s nervousness, James stood behind her for support. Her shoulders were tense, her hands folded in her lap, as if waiting for a ruler to rap down on her knuckles. The expectation was her own creation. From what James could tell, the Magus was mild-mannered.

Of course, Anso was probably the person his wife feared she’d earned the rap from. That Olivia hadn’t taken off the dragon ring Anso gave her didn’t escape his notice.

At last, the Magus straightened. He turned to the king to give his report. “It is as I thought, sire. Though Lajos was a minor power for a faerie and only three-quarter blood, he combined a number of smaller spells to persuade the queen to do his bidding. In this way, he avoided setting off the palace’s illegal magic alarms. The hairpins were almost certainly used to anchor his enchantment. I’m also sensing vocal hypnosis with a boost from some object he used to store ‘mojo’

- as the young people say.”

“His glasses!” Olivia exclaimed. “Lajos said they were spelled to pre-test hairstyles, but that might have been a lie.”

“Indeed it might, Your Majesty,” the Magus agreed politely. “Especially if the lenses were real crystal.” He hesitated, rubbing long pale fingers over his lower lip. “I do not wish to mislead either of you as to the extent of Lajos’s influence.

He exaggerated Her Majesty’s impulses with his magic, but he didn’t create them.

Assuredly, you
do
wish to return to your native land. On the other hand, I see by my examination that the part-breed’s spells have only recently dissipated. In order to turn back and save Oceana, Your Majesty must have overruled the enchantment with personal force of will. It cannot be denied you’ve earned your sobriquet of heroine. Because Lajos amped up his power with a spell circle, his earthquake would have wreaked considerable damage. Your Majesty and Mr.

Forster faced down a dangerous character!”

He bowed to them both - well, more to Olivia than James, but he was in there somewhere. For her part, Olivia was too unsettled to respond with her usual blush.

“Sir,” she said, “why didn’t Lady Ellice kill the Meimeyo? James and I assumed she was reluctant to use violence, but clearly that wasn’t the case.”

“I can only speculate,” said the Magus, “but I expect she feared bringing a curse upon herself if she harmed them. Those mini-dragons are potent little beings.

“And now, if you would excuse me, might I suggest you call Pinni to see to your various wounds and bruises? The spirit isn’t the only part of a person that needs healing. Lord Otari in particular has been trickling blood from his leg on your nice carpet.”

This gentle reminder had all of them turning to face Ty. James wasn’t sorry to see Anso put his hand on his lover’s arm.

“Old friend,” he said, “forgive me for not thinking.” Ty shrugged and turned brick red. “I’m all right. The bullet would have pushed itself out soon enough.”

“Eesh,” Olivia said, then covered her mouth for fear of having sounded rude.

Because
eesh
was pretty much what James was thinking, he patted her shoulder.

Once they’d been prodded and patched up by Pinni the elf physician, Olivia didn’t seem to know what to do with herself. Though they’d averted the worst of the earthquake, downtown Oceana had suffered some damage. Anso and Ty had plenty of relief efforts to take reports from and allocate resources to.

In their absence, the contrast between the emotional wringer they’d been through and its unexpected finish was dramatic. James understood - maybe better than Olivia did - why she wandered the guest room like a lost child, her fingers trailing over the surfaces she passed.

Readier to accept his feelings than she was, James leaned against the doorway and watched her.

“Olivia,” he said.

She stopped walking and looked at him. “I’m fine. I’m just wondering what happens next.”

“You know what you want to happen.”

“I -” She screwed her face into an expression that pleaded for him not to push.

“You know,” he repeated, then walked to her and chafed her shoulders. “You knew what you wanted the moment you agreed we ought to turn back. I don’t think you’re wrong for wanting it, mind you. I want to stay with them too.” Olivia’s chin quivered. “They think we were running away from them!”

“Well, we were.”

She laughed and buried her face in his chest. James wrapped his arms around her and immediately felt better. She would always be his touchstone.

“They’ll forgive us,” he said, rubbing her back gently.

Olivia hugged him tighter. “Will
you
forgive me?”

“Oh sweetheart, that never was an issue.”

She tipped her head back to look into his eyes. “Go find him,” she said. “He needs to hear from you that we want to stay.”

James knew she meant go find Ty. The surface of his cheeks heated. Seeing this, Olivia touched his face and smiled. “How you feel about him doesn’t hurt me. I thought it might, but I like the idea of you making him happy.” He could have said so many things. That he loved her. That Ty wasn’t immune to her appeal either - erotic or otherwise. He didn’t say them because she knew already, and besides she was right. Ty deserved to hear how James felt from James. He’d been treated too often as an afterthought to Anso.

Of course, James was only guessing Ty would be happy about the news. This conversation might be more awkward than he was prepared for.

Laughing softly, Olivia petted his jaw from either side. “Silly man. You’re exactly the extra blessing Ty needs, whether he knows it yet or not.

* * *

Didn’t he have a right to stay? Weren’t James and Olivia as much his bloodmates as Anso’s? Then again, perhaps the Forsters didn’t belong to either of them. They
had
been trying to run away. If Oceana hadn’t been in such grave danger, would they have turned around?

He’d drifted to the dining room to grapple - albeit unwillingly - with these questions. A stretch of rare rectangular picture windows gave a pretty view of the coral garden. The upper reaches of the water sparkled with rippling light.

Oceana’s fake sun was rising. Did James and Olivia miss their real one?

Without warning, a soft and pleasant vibration thrummed through his tired body.

“Ty,” said James’s voice from the door.

You see
, he thought as he turned.
There
is
a bond between them and you
.

“You okay?” James asked.

God, the man was gorgeous. From his night-black hair to the way his shoulders filled out his shirt to the exotic Outsider accent in his deep voice. Ty wanted to rip off his clothes and ravish him on the table, then maybe lick him all over for dessert. He tried to tighten his groin muscles, to keep his cock from emerging, but the effort was futile.

“I’m fine,” he said. “How are you and Olivia?”

James appeared to find this question amusing. He walked in shaking his head, only stopping when he’d reached Ty’s side of the long table, where he leaned his hips on its edge. His closeness thickened the air in Ty’s lungs. What could Ty say to him? What would convince him and Olivia not to run again?

“You killed a woman today,” James said. “One you’d known all your life.

And you did it to save my wife.”

James’s arms were folded across his chest, the cuffs of his plain white shirt rolled up. With an effort, Ty wrenched his gaze from the dark hair on James’s strong forearms. “Am I supposed to be sorry about that? Ellice was a shit to me for as long as I can remember.”

“That isn’t why you killed her.”

“No.” Ty rubbed his sweaty palms on his casual buckskin pants. He liked that James seemed very sure of this. “It isn’t why I killed her, but I won’t feign remorse. I wasn’t going to let her hurt Olivia and Anso. Or Oceana. I don’t care whose family blood she has. Rulers shouldn’t act like that.” James dropped his head, his lashes amazingly thick, his mouth slightly curved.

Did he think nations with kings and queens were humorous? He watched James uncross his ankles and then look up. Whatever he’d been thinking, it wasn’t a judgment. His deep blue eyes sparkled.

“Olivia and I want to stay.”

Ty’s internal organs were knocked off kilter, heat and chills trying to rush through him at the same time. “You want to stay. Both of you.”

“I think we knew we did before we tried to leave. We simply weren’t ready to admit it.”

“The Magus said Lajos merely exaggerated Olivia’s wish to go home.”

“I know. And we’ll have to work that out. Olivia and I can’t be kept here like prisoners. We have to be free to communicate with and see our family as we think best. You and Anso will have to trust us to show good judgment - and to come back.”

“The blood bond would call you back,” Ty warned. “You’d be uncomfortable without us.”

This wasn’t the best thought-out response he’d ever made. It sounded too much like a threat. James’s faint smile deepened.

“Maybe,” he said, “but Olivia and I are fairly stubborn. I think we’d manage to stay away if we wanted to. Of course, you and Anso could join us on dry land, at least for short periods. I know it’s not your preference, but Olivia and I might be able to make your stay tolerable. The best marriages rely on compromise.”
The best marriages
... Ty wagged his head in wonder at him using those words. “You’re serious about this. You really think we could all live committed to each other.”

This was what Ty had come to believe he wanted, but found so frightening to let himself hope for. James took Ty’s hand from where it had been nervously rubbing his thigh again. “Olivia always calls me a romantic.” She’d called Ty that too. He wouldn’t have thought he was, but he couldn’t deny he found James’s hold on his hand very sweet. Sex wasn’t the only thing Ty desired from him.

“Look,” James said quietly. “When people fall for each other, it isn’t always even. Maybe you’ll always love Anso more than you will me. Maybe Anso will always be most attached to Olivia. That doesn’t mean his feelings for you don’t matter. This is early days for all of us, but I think it’s worth finding out if this foursome can work.”

“How can you be so brave?” Ty burst out. “What if Anso or I never fall as deeply as you want?”

He knew these were his own fears talking, but James treated the question seriously. “Maybe I’m naturally optimistic. Or maybe I’m arrogant. I’m accustomed to thinking of myself as lovable. I’d be happy and honored if you fell for me, but I wouldn’t be shocked.”

And there was the difference between them.

“It shocks me,” Ty confessed. “It always shocks me - in either direction.” James straightened from his lean on the table, his arms pulling Ty gently against him. Ty’s resistance simply gave. He held James back with his cheek resting on his temple. He wasn’t sure he’d ever held anyone like this. Not lovers, not Anso, not anyone. Though the full frontal contact aroused him, he didn’t want to move. He was too quiet inside for that. It wasn’t even hard to ask his next question.

“Do you believe I could love you?”

“Maybe not
only
me,” James said. “But
also
me? Absolutely. Don’t you think you could manage that?”

Ty thought about how easy it was to hold him, how welcome his kindness was, and how - when Anso inevitably made James his third - he didn’t think he’d sicken with envy. James was a good man, maybe as natural a leader as Anso.