Hating all humans, with their holier-than-thou souls, lumping all mortals together as one unilaterally vile species. And finally remembering that he was, after all, a demigod—so fuck them!—he had walked through the Highlands for a time as Death himself.

Jaw clenched, he shoved the whispers of times-gone-by back into that dark corner of his mind he never willingly visited. His oubliette, his place of forgetting. Layers upon layers of memories dropped into the pit and left there, stretching back thousands of years. To immerse in it would be to invite madness. Yet another lie he’d told Circenn was that learning too much too quickly caused madness among their kind, when the truth had been a subtle variation of that: It was not knowing when to forget that did.

“You don’t know Darroc, ka-lyrra,” he said. “He likes to play with his prey before he kills it. He wouldn’t take the risk while I was touching you because, if he didn’t knock me out or kill me instantly, I could sift us to safety. He didn’t bother to conceal himself and the Hunters this time with the féth fiada, because he wanted me to see him and hear him. He was trying to antagonize me, to get me to turn on him, to separate us. After what he saw, I’d wager he now wants you as much as he wants me.”

“Why?”

He glanced at her. She’d twisted her long hair up in one of those clips that she was so fond of, and there was a little spiky tail sticking straight up, poking the roof of the car, bobbing perkily as they bounced and careened over the rough road. She had on her soft suede jacket with the fleecy lining, the collar turned up, framing her slender neck. The early-evening sun was a fiery ball sliding down behind Ben Killan, gilding her dainty profile as she nibbled her lower lip.

And she was the bonniest damn thing in all the Highlands, far more than the blooming bens and sparkling burns.

She was funny and stubborn and sexy and smart and packed with human passion, and she did something to him he couldn’t explain. Kissing Gabrielle, he’d decided back in the suite, with his arms full of her lush softness, was as close to tasting heaven as a man without a soul could hope to get. She’d responded to him with all the explosive passion he’d sensed in her the moment he’d laid eyes on her, rising swiftly to the edge of climax. He could so easily have brought her to it after they’d been interrupted, could have been merciful and relieved the tension in her body while they’d sifted, or even later on the train or plane.

But he’d not been about to let her off so lightly. He liked the thought of her stirred to painful awareness of him. Hurting with it, just like he was, constantly, painfully aware of her. They would suffer together. When he finally gave her that first orgasm, it would be followed by a dozen more. By his cock in her, deep to the hilt. Branding her his own.

His human body, it seemed, had pulled a MacKeltar trick; it had looked at her and growled: mine. And there was no going back. For either of them. If she hadn’t figured that out yet, she would soon.

“To get to me. He’s a twisted bastard. He likes to take from me. Especially mortal women. I had to play a deep game to keep him from finding out about Morganna. But he knows about you now, and he’s not going to stop coming.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then opened it, “Would it get to you, if he took me?”

He glanced at her, but she wouldn’t look his way. There’d been a strained note in her voice. For a novel change, her gaze was fixed firmly on the road ahead. The question was important to her. And to him. “Yes, Gabrielle,” he said with quiet intensity. “It would.”

“Oh.” She was silent a long moment. Then, “Are you sure we’ll really be safe at this place we’re going to?”

He smiled faintly. She was as bad as he was when it came to skirting issues and changing subjects. No matter. There was time. He would see to it that there was more than enough time.

“We already are; we’ve passed the wards. The queen is alerted the moment a Tuatha Dé crosses her wards and comes within a thousand leagues of Keltar land, and those wards identify the trespasser. This is the one place Darroc can’t come without revealing himself to Aoibheal. If he did, the game would be over, and he’s not about to let that happen. Besides, he has little familiarity with the human realm, and if I know Darroc, he’ll focus on what must have brought him to Cincinnati. He’ll keep trying to find Circenn.”

“Will the queen know that you’ve crossed her wards?”

“The wards were designed for a Tuatha Dé, which I am no longer, so I don’t think so.”