“What the fuck? He is not going to take me anything, much less carnally—”
“Sam!” Randall barked. “There are other things that are a little more important than your sexual deviancy at this very moment!”
“I take it back!” I shouted up at Kevin. “I am so not even happy to see you right now!”
“You’re such a liar—oh look! There’s the castle. We can talk about this later.”
He was right. No, not about us talking about it later, because we would never talk about this again, but the fact that Castle Freesias was now in sight.
I craned my neck so I could look behind us. The feathered dragons were still there, hurtling toward us.
“Do you have plan?” I shouted up at Kevin.
“Do I have a plan?” Kevin scoffed. “Do I have a plan!”
“What! It was a fair question!”
“You’re right. My apologies. But you should know that no, I have no plan whatsoever.”
“We’re all gonna die,” I moaned. “I am in pain and we’re all going to die. Worst adventure ever.”
Kevin’s wings billowed open, catching an updraft, slowing our descent. The drop in speed was rough, Kevin’s grip on us tightening briefly. I cried out as he squeezed my shoulder, and he looked down in fear as he lowered us toward the ground. “What happened?” he asked, sounding horrified.
“Not you,” I ground out. “Happened before. Shoulder hurts.”
“I think it’s dislocated,” Randall said. “We’ll have to deal with it later.”
And that’s when I heard it. Voices shouting below us. It took a moment for me to recognize them. No, it hadn’t been that long, but I’d been through a ton of shit over the past few weeks, so I thought I could be forgiven for not understanding what I was hearing at first.
But when I did?
Oh, when I did, it was possible I’d never felt relief more palpable than I did at that moment.
I heard Tiggy first, of course. My dear, sweet, lovely giant. His voice was the loudest of all, and he was saying, “Look! Sam! Hi, Sam! Hi! Hi!”
And Gary was screeching right along with him, “—and if you ever leave me behind like that again, Kevin, I swear to the gods we will find out exactly what roasted dragon balls taste like! Nobody puts Gary in the corner!”
“So you’ve been shouting,” Prince Justin said irritably. “For the last ten minutes.”
But it was the last person standing there that I focused on immediately.
And how my magic sang at the sight of him.
My breath caught in my throat at the worried look on his face.
“Hey,” I managed to say as Kevin set us gently on the ground. The pieces of the ruined sand sailboard collapsed around us, falling onto the snow. I was on my knees, Randall behind me, hand on my shoulder, but I barely felt him there.
Because a knight was rushing toward me, sliding onto his knees and crashing into me. His sword fell to the ground as his arms went around me, his face into my neck. He held me tightly, and I ignored the flash of pain in my shoulder, not caring how bad I probably smelled, how tired I was, or even how I could hear two pissed-off dragons snarling somewhere above us. All that mattered in that moment was the fact that I was with my cornerstone again.
“Sam,” Ryan Foxheart breathed, his lips against my neck.
“Hey,” I said, blinking away the burn in my eyes. “You’re here. How are—”
He pulled away, cupping my face in his big hands. “Later,” he said, leaning forward and kissing me sweetly, his beard scraping against my—
Hold up. I pulled away, staring at him. “You have a beard.” And he really did, a dirty-blond thing that was full on his face. I went from zero to let’s fuck in the space of a heartbeat.
He rolled his eyes, but he still smiled. “That’s what you’re focusing on right now. Really.”