My eyes drank in the absolute panty-dropping goodness before me. Giant height, golden skin, chiseled features, not to mention those icy-blue eyes that were so intense I often found myself staring mesmerized into them. Yep. It was official. Lucy was whipped. Not only was I whipped, but I was also referring to myself in the third person, and I was totally okay with it.
For reals, Colton and I were going to have beautiful blond pixie-faerie-wolf-Walker babies. Just as long as they didn’t come out in pup form, I was okay with mini Colton’s running around.
Colton dropped a second plate next to mine, and joined me at the breakfast bench. His long legs allowed him to rest his feet flat on the ground, while mine dangled below the tall stool.
“So yesterday went well, right?” Colton spoke as he began using his knife and fork to maneuver his breakfast around into the order he liked to eat.
The wolf-Walker was a tad OCD in some ways. He had to eat each section of food fully before moving on to the next, and he always left the meat until last. Just one of the weird Colton things that I found adorable and annoying.
“It was awesome. The look on Abbs’ face when she walked through that door. I thought she was gonna pee herself or something.”
Colton snorted over his eggs. “You have such a way with words.”
“Word.” I agreed with him wholeheartedly. I was practically a wordsmith.
We continued to chat as we ate. It was so strange for me. Such a domesticated scene we painted. Pretty much as far removed from the majority of my life as a scene could be. There was no fighting. No worry about the Seventine. Just me and my man eating some food. I needed to take a freaking picture or something, because this was way too peaceful. Something for sure was going to come along and smack me in the ass. Disturbing the serenity.
And when that happened, I was going to more than return the favor.
I shoveled in a mouthful of the fried gems or, as I liked to call them, weird-white-tube-things-that-were-a-lot-like-potatoes.
“Are Abbs and Brace back yet?” I said as soon as my mouth was not filled to the brim.
Some of the words were garbled around my food, but Colton would get the gist.
“No, the mantle of princeps is still upon me.”
It sort of irked me that when Brace wasn’t on Abernath, Colton had to do all the craptastic running around and cleaning up after the Walkers here. Some sort of weird magic energy thing descended over him and he could feel their people. When Brace was here, he didn’t have the same energy layering his mind.
Colton had never wanted to be Brace’s second, but he trusted no one else to protect his best friend. And I completely understood that. I would go all ninja bat-shit-crazy pixie on anyone who screwed with Abby. Gods, I missed her. I hoped she would get back soon and we could figure out what the heck we were going to do with the rest of eternity.
Okay, mostly I needed to figure it out. Everyone else had lots of important things to do. Damn, Abby was supposed to be the ruler of two worlds and peoples, although Ria might be helping out with one of those. All in the name of love, of course, or possibly just trying to get into Emperor-boy’s pants.
Colton chuckled again. My inner thoughts amused him a lot. I tried to get mad about it, but I was a little bipolar, so it was no surprise he found my jumpy thought pattern funny.
“You have two worlds pulling you in different directions also, pretty girl.”
He was finished eating now, his plate clean with no spilled food around it. Meanwhile I had almost as much egg on the bench as was on my plate. Yeah, I was focusing on something stupid to hide from the very realness of his words.
I sighed. “My father wants to unlock my faerie side. Malisna is all pissety about that and keeps smashing things. Pretty things that I would love to have rather than them end up in a zillion pieces on her nice wooden floors.”
My mother’s pixie castle was out of the weird portal it had been in.
All of pixie now resided in the forest-of-no-entrance-and-a-zillion-spiky-things. I had a bedroom in the castle, across the hall from Refis, my brother. I hadn’t spent much time with them lately, what with the battle to save the worlds, almost losing Abby, and then our impromptu Christmas. It was probably time to make the trek back to First World and calm my parentals.
Not that Latinti, the faerie prince needed calming. Dude was zenned out a lot. Faeries had to have some good drugs, because they were whacked five ways from Sunday. I sometimes wondered if I was possibly adopted. Both of my parents were just crazy.
Colton snorted into his plate again.
My head whipped around, but by the time I skewered him with my eyes, there was no humor in his face. Except maybe that extra twinkle in the blue of his wolf peepers.
“Have I told you today that I love you, my little pixie?”
He leaned in with the kiss and, as distractions went, it was pretty epic. My body was boneless as I sank into him. He smelt of bonfire nights and that crisp air at the beginning of fall. Everything about Colton was so alive, and he made me feel like I would burst out of my skin every time he touched me.
“I felt you last night,” I murmured against his lips. “You had another nightmare.”