Claimed by the Elven King: Part Three Read online

  CLAIMED BY THE ELVEN KING

  PART THREE

  CRISTINA RAYNE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2014 Cristina Rayne

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  The three elven women found me sitting stiffly at my dressing table, a brush in hand and staring off into space as though deep in thought when the truth was my performance had already begun. It was only sheer will that was keeping my nausea down to a manageable level at this point. I knew there was no way I would be able to eat breakfast without puking right now, so rather than force myself to try, I needed to show them my very real anxiety of meeting Sethian again after such a long absence.

  The best lies were the half-truths we told.

  One of them placed a hesitant hand on my shoulder, and I purposely jumped a little before slowly turning to face them.

  “Is everything all right, Emily?” Lariel asked, a slight frown already beginning to stretch her lips.

  I nodded and gave her a tiny smile. “It’s nothing. I’m just being silly, really.”

  “About…?” Rinwen prodded, her eyes briefly darting to first my hands, then to my midsection.

  I cringed inside. She always did that whenever the subject of my imminent pregnancy came up. It was like she expected me to inadvertently give my pregnancy status away by cradling my belly or rubbing it or something. I was beginning to suspect that she was even more excited about the prospect of a royal baby than even the baby-obsessed Lariel.

  “About seeing my lord husband again,” I replied with a sheepish shrug. “I haven’t seen him in so long, so…” I looked down with what I hoped was a shy expression and shrugged again.

  “Ah,” Saeria said sagely. “It’s easy to forget that you are still very young, even by human standards. Come. You will feel better after you have eaten something.”

  The mere mention of food made my stomach turn, and I quickly shook my head. “I tried eating some grapes earlier, but I really don’t have an appetite this morning. Let’s just have some tea and chat out on the balcony. I could use some fresh air.”

  “Are you sure you are all right?” Rinwen persisted. Was that suspicion in her eyes? “Your face looks a little pale this morning…”

  My throat tightened briefly in panic. Why was it always the quiet ones who caused all the trouble?

  “If you are not feeling well, just tell us,” Lariel added, a grin suddenly threatening to split her face in two even as her eyes lit up as if the sun had just risen within them. “Don’t feel as though you have to keep quiet until you see His Majesty this evening. I promise we won’t tell him that you told us first. He probably even expects it.”

  For a split-second, I stared back at Lariel in shock before I covered my face in my hands with a groan and exclaimed through my fingers, “It’s not what you think! I’m just—” My mind was suddenly coming up quite empty on excuses, nearly causing me to have a full-blown anxiety attack right then and there until one thankfully popped into my head before my pause could become too awkward. “—just scared to see him again!”

  “Scared?” Lariel echoed, sounding utterly surprised as she gently, but firmly pulled my hands away from my face. She kneeled down before me and squeezed my hands between her own. “Whatever is there to be scared about?”

  “That he’s changed his mind about me,” I blurted out in my panic and wished at once I could take it back. That was one truth I had never wanted anyone to know, least of all the three women before me.

  Lariel sucked in a sharp breath. “Why would he do that?”

  “I’m just an ordinary human,” I answered miserably.

  If I was going to stick my foot in my mouth, might as well swallow the whole leg and be done with it. The way my stomach was churning right now with more than just morning sickness, I would probably just puke it up later, anyway.

  “I can’t for the life of me understand why an elven king chose me out of billions of other human women to have his children. What if the reason why he’s stayed away for so long is that he’s having second thoughts about me?”

  “But he hasn’t been away overly long at all,” Lariel insisted. “Oh, you poor thing! You should have told us you were still having these fears sooner. It’s no wonder you have no appetite; you have worried yourself sick!” The concern in her eyes abruptly melted into sadness. “My earlier misunderstanding must have been terribly troubling, as well. Forgive me. It was never our intention to put so much pressure on you concerning a royal heir.”

  If I wasn’t already feeing so ill, then her words would have definitely made me feel sick to my stomach with guilt. At that moment, I wanted to tell them I thought I was pregnant so badly. It would have been such a relief, but in the end I just couldn’t do it. I trusted that Lariel had meant every word of her promise not to tell Sethian that I had told them about my pregnancy, but what I couldn’t trust was their ability to lie to their king if he flat-out asked them.

  Even though I had only lived within the elven realm for about a month, the information I had absorbed from my many discussions with the three elven women made me understand that the king’s word really was law in the strictest sense of the word. I was already acting selfishly as it was; I wasn’t about to endanger the lives of my only friends for something as petty as easing the guilt I was feeling. The guilt I should be feeling.

  I needed to keep this secret for as long as possible. The performance had to continue…

  “You haven’t,” I assured them. “This is just me being stupid, I guess.”

  “We just haven’t explained things well enough,” Saeria said firmly. She reached down and tugged on my arm. “Come. You need fresh air and sunshine. We cannot let His Majesty see you so pale and distraught.”

  I grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t want him getting mad at any of you because of something that’s totally my fault.” I considered the state of my stomach, what standing would do to it, and then added tentatively, “You might need to help me up. My stomach’s so tied in knots right now that I’m not sure I can do it without making it worse. The last thing I want to do is puke all over the floor.”

  Even with both Lariel and Saeria’s help, the moment I stood, my stomach cramped badly, and I very nearly started to retch again. Only the fact that both women were supporting the majority of my weight saved me from that indignity as it allowed me to completely concentrate on controlling the urge to gag. The smart thing would have been to just have them rush me to the bathroom and just be done with it now that I had given them a very good reason for being nauseous, but once my stubbornness kicked in, it was like all my good sense took a vacation.

  “You need to practice” my mind kept telling me, and like an idiot, I listened.

  “I’m—okay,” I said after a long pause, opening my eyes to three nearly identical skeptical expressions. What they must think of the weak human now…

  “Perhaps it would be better for you to just return to bed,” Saeria said. “I know so little about the intricacies of human illness. It has been centuries since a human was
last brought to the realm, thus the study of them by our healers has only just resumed in response to His Majesty’s decree that human women may once again be invited here after an heir is born.”

  Curling up in a warm bed sounded heavenly at the moment, but I knew I would just fall back asleep. Lariel would probably let me sleep until this evening, and the last thing I needed to be was groggy and sick when I was with Sethian.

  I managed a tiny smile. “Talking with all of you over a cup of tea never fails to calm my nerves. If I go back to bed, I’ll just worry myself sick again with a bunch of ‘what ifs.’ Besides, I really want to be able to greet my lord properly in Elvish when I see him tonight, and we all know that my accent is still awful!”

  Lariel laughed. “I don’t think he will mind it as much as you seem to think.”

  “Even so, I don’t want to embarrass myself,” I insisted as we moved as three slowly towards the door, Rinwen a silent shadow at our backs.

  I felt the tension in my shoulders start to relax as I listened to my friends chat about a mishap involving spilled water on the floor and a ladle Rinwen had just witnessed in the kitchen that had even me giggling half-hardily after a while. One minefield evaded, but with a sense of bone-deep weariness, I knew better than to think the next one would have such a good outcome.

  After all, my life had always been filled with half-empty glasses.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By the time the sky started to darken, I was once again a ball of nerves despite my friends’ best efforts to keep me relaxed and laughing all day. Although my nausea had thankfully subsided to a much more manageable level, it was still very much present, a bomb with a tripwire nestled in the pit of my stomach just waiting for me to make the wrong move. As such, I was glad to hand over hair duty to Lariel and Rinwen for once, not even protesting when they wanted to pin my hair back in an elaborate style they said was currently popular within the court in preparation for my evening with Sethian.

  I was holding my hand mirror up, staring at my reflection in a bit of fascination as the two women twisted and folded sections of my hair elegantly around several silver hairpins, when Sethian abruptly appeared in the mirror behind us like some kind of ghost. I was so startled that I dropped the mirror, the sound of it hitting the floor preternaturally loud even over the girls’ chatter.

  My stomach heaved unpleasantly as I turned sharply to look over Lariel’s shoulder, half-expecting to see nothing but air, but there the elven king stood in what was probably his full royal regalia of a delicate, almost insubstantial silver crown that seemed composed of little more than light and layered, silver and navy-blue robes that made him look twice as wide. He met my gaze with a slight smile of amusement, the bastard—like he hadn’t even been gone for a whole freaking month!

  “Visitors usually come through the front door,” I found myself saying almost sternly as I tried to calm my suddenly racing heart without letting any of my distress show on my face. I was dangerously close to tripping the wire, and damned if I was going to lose the game now after everything I had already been through that day.

  No, not a game, I thought in something like despair as I was struck once again by his too-unbelievable-to-be-real beauty just as powerfully as I had been on that first night.

  This was the rest of my life.

  If anything, Sethian’s smile widened at my words. “It seems I caught everyone unawares,” he said, nodding to both Lariel and Rinwen, who in turn, bowed deeply and stepped away from me in order to fade into the background. “I thought perhaps we could take a short walk through the garden before dinner.”

  My heart clenched. Not for the first time, I wondered if Sethian could really read my mind. It was either that, or I was so hopelessly transparent that I might as well have been shouting out my deepest thoughts to him every time I looked at him. Either way, it didn’t bode well for me making it through the rest of the day with my humongous secret intact. In fact, it could very well be the reason why he had suggested the walk in the first place—giving me the chance to tell him away from gossiping ears.

  My thoughts briefly turned to the conspicuously absent Saeria in sudden suspicion. She had left a bit earlier to, in her words, “oversee” the dinner preparations. At the time, I hadn’t thought much of it, figuring she was just trying to help me and my nerves out by making sure at least the dinner part of the evening would go off without a hitch. One less thing for the nervous Royal Wife to worry about. What if she had gone to Sethian, instead, and told him, if not everyone’s suspicions about the real reason I was nauseous, then at least their concerns about the cause of my sudden illness?

  If everything I had endured up until now turned out to be for nothing, then maybe I should have just gone back to bed and refused to come out of my room at all, never mind what the king wanted.

  Even so… “A walk sounds great,” I said with as much of a genuine smile as I could muster.

  If the king of the elves wanted to fulfill one of my more cheesy fantasies of a “romantic walk,” then I wasn’t about to say no. Maybe this time we would actually get to really talk about things. By now, my list of questions for him had grown into the thousands. At the very least, talking would help to keep my mind off my queasy stomach, and who knows? Maybe I would actually get a better feel for his true feelings about me, and I would be able confess that I thought I was pregnant.

  Sethian offered me his hand, and I rose with some trepidation, relieved beyond measure that my stomach took pity on me and decided to behave. Also, Sethian’s touch always seemed to have a calming effect on me, and thankfully, this time was no different. A rush of warmth washed through my body the moment he clasped my hand tightly, easing my upset stomach until I could barely feel any discomfort at all, and I knew then that he was indeed using his elven magic or whatever it was on me.

  However, that fact only served to make me even more suspicious of how much he actually knew about everything. Memories of that strange incident that Sethian had been reluctant to talk about when we had seemed to physically share each other’s emotions once again flashed through my head, and I wondered if we were still connected in that way and if Sethian could still sense what I was feeling.

  Giving my hand a squeeze, he turned to Lariel and Rinwen and said, “You both may take your leave for the rest of the day. I will call for you in the morning.”

  And damned if I didn’t blush and my pulse start to race when he said that. He may not have meant anything by that, but my attention-starved body suddenly tightened in anticipation.

  My friends bowed to him again, then a second time to me to my dismay, and swiftly left the room. I now found myself alone with my husband for the first time in a month. Suddenly feeling painfully shy, I started to lower my head, but Sethian would have none of that. He pulled me into a tight embrace and planted a soft, though lingering, kiss onto my slightly-parted lips.

  He pulled back and raised a hand to my cheek, gently rubbing his thumb back and forth across my skin.

  “You have a little color in your face now,” he said with satisfaction. “You were as pale as a silvery moon when I first arrived.”

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I admitted. The best lies were half-truths…

  He tilted my head up and looked at me with a critical eye. “You are unwell,” he said after a long pause. It wasn’t a question.

  It really was a miracle that I didn’t flinch. Here it was. The moment of truth. He clearly knew something was up with me. Should I continue this farce, or just admit defeat and let the chips fall where they may?

  “I’m okay,” I heard myself say as if I were listening to our conversation from another room.

  No—I couldn’t lose my resolve here, not when I didn’t know anything for sure.

  When Sethian continued to stare down at me, his expression unchanged, I hastily added, “I was anxious to see you. We haven’t really had much chance to talk since our wedding night, and I guess—I—got overly worked up about it since yesterd
ay when Rinwen told me you would be coming. There’s so much I want to talk with you about—”

  The crush of his lips abruptly cut me off, and just like that, every one of my thoughts and worries disintegrated as my head suddenly began to spin as though I were extremely buzzed. His tongue slid almost lazily against mine, coaxing it into a sensuous dance, and my mind fuzzed out even further. I moaned and pressed myself harder against his body, clutching a fistful of his elaborate robes tightly as a feeling very much like relief washed through my entire being.

  I was finally where I belonged.

  I don’t even remember shutting my eyes, just that the darkness I now found myself within had become a little less dark and the air surrounding us slightly cooler. Sethian pulled away with another soft caress of my cheek with his fingers, and I opened my eyes to the exquisite sight of the elven king against a backdrop of several flowering trees of lavender, pink, and cream-colored blossoms and the setting sun.

  I knew this scene well; I had imagined it hundreds of times over the past month. He had magicked us to my garden and inadvertently fulfilled another of my cheesy wishes. My chest tightened with emotions I rarely allowed myself to feel at the beauty of the moment, then Sethian spoke, and his words made my heart skip a beat with something other than admiration.

  “No one will overhear us here,” he said. “Speak as freely as you wish.”

  Blunt and to the point. Unfortunately, I was still feeling the dizzying aftereffects of his hello kiss, and that frankness only served to completely fluster me. His earlier touch may have eased my nausea, but my nerves were certainly doing a good job of resurrecting that hateful churning in my stomach.

  Suddenly unable to face the intensity of his gaze, I buried my face into his chest before I mumbled the Elvish “welcome back” phrase I had been practicing with the girls, stalling for time. It sounded as atrocious as I had feared. No matter how hard I practiced, I just simply could not duplicate the smooth cadence of a language that seemed to be composed of mostly vowels and sighs of breath.