Noah. Jacquelyn Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ face turning closer to the woman’s, the sound of his breath loud in the room full of people holding theirs.

      “Very well.”

      Jacob and Isabella both cautiously exhaled. Corrine was less able to control her emotions, bursting into tears and falling against her sister in relief. Bella had no choice but to push her away. Her husband’s command was ringing in her head and she rose straightaway to obey. She approached Noah carefully, swiping damp palms down the thighs of her jeans.

      “Let me have her, Noah,” she beckoned with a half smile and all the feminine coaxing she could muster. If Jacob had reached for Noah’s possession, there was no telling what volatile reaction it could spark. To this day, Jacob himself had difficulties with other men touching or intending to touch Isabella. Therefore, he was highly sensitive to who should make the necessary move of retrieving the King’s would-be mate.

      The unconscious woman was nearly six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than the petite Enforcer, but Bella was far stronger than she looked. Jacob watched her work her soft, soothing magic on the Demon King, her hand reaching to cover his warmly where it gripped his captive’s shoulder.

      “She…she is drained,” he warned her, clearly reluctant to release her to anyone.

      “I know. I see that. She will come around soon enough,” she assured him.

      “Only I can reverse it. I can feed her energy in general, but she is to be my one true mate. It is my energy she will crave as she becomes Druid. She must stay close to me.”

      Bella glanced at Corrine when she caught her nod of agreement out of the corner of her eye.

      “Then she will stay close to you. Only, let me carry her. You…” Bella hesitated for a long, painful second that reflected a fear only her husband was fully aware of. She spoke before he could stop her. “You have frightened Leah. Go and comfort her. You know she always stops crying for you.”

      Isabella knew her husband was flushed with mistrust and barely repressed outrage at the idea of Noah touching their child after he had behaved so badly and with so little regard for her safety, especially because neither of them was at all certain Noah’s episode was past him. However, Isabella knew that Noah would never relinquish the woman without redirection.

      He finally acquiesced after a long moment, hoisting his burden into Bella’s arms with a tenderness that belied all of his actions of the past minutes.

      “Don’t worry,” Bella whispered to him. Noah nodded, drawing away slowly. He paused for several beats before turning toward Leah. What he ended up facing was the expressions of fright that neither of the females huddled together could have repressed even if they’d had all the time in the world to prepare for it.

      It was this evidence of the cruelty of his actions that finally and truly hit home. Noah exhaled sharply with shock and breathless pain as true awareness battered him from all sides. He was surrounded by a roomful of loved ones he had betrayed. He had been running on borrowed strength and power for several hours, burning it off as fast as he could replenish it in his maddened momentum. When the insanity abandoned him, so, too, did his strength, and just as suddenly. Noah stumbled forward onto his knees, only the brace of his hand preventing him from falling facedown onto the debris-scattered floor.

      With a child’s fickleness of memory and emotion, Leah scrambled out of her aunt’s arms and hurried to help her uncle. Her little hands cupped his face for a moment, and then she hugged his head and made the soft, soothing sounds her mother and aunt used to comfort her when she was hurt or upset.

      It completely undid the Demon King. He blindly gathered the little girl in his arms, sobbing once with incredible pain into her neck before completely giving in to his emotions in front of them all.

      Chapter 6

      The Miserable Princess

      A Demon Fairy Tale

      Cont’d…

      Sarah could hear the collective whisper that shifted like a wave throughout the viewing stands as the Enforcer came to stand before her. She looked up, feeling small and vulnerable in the wake of his tall, imposing figure. He was crafted out of muscle and sinew as a sculpture was shaped from marble. The calluses on his hands were visible, as was the scar that ran down the side of his left temple. Sarah’s father had told her that he had been stabbed there once, with an iron blade. When she thought of how that must have felt, the metal that was so deadly to Demons burning like acid through skin and bone, she wondered how his sight in his left eye had been preserved. He was lucky that all he had suffered was a scar.

      “Good evening, Sarah,” he greeted her, his deep voice surprisingly soft.

      “Enforcer,” she said in return, nodding in her very best royal manner.

      “Ariel,” he corrected, an amused grin playing over his lips and sparkling in his eyes.

      Sarah shrugged, telling him it did not matter to her one way or another.

      “So be it,” Ariel said softly. “I thought you should know that I intend to win this competition, and I will demand you for my prize.”

      Sarah gasped in shock and flushed with outrage.

      “How dare you speak to me this way!”

      “Adjust, Kikilia,” he said with determined ease, “for soon you will be in my house, tending my hearth, and you will no longer be a Princess.”

      “I would rather be dipped in boiling oil than become mate to the Enforcer,” she retorted, the acid in her voice meant to burn viciously. She thought he had incredible nerve to even think such a thing. No self-respecting Princess would give up her father’s house and her title to live with the stigma of being the wife of the man who humiliated and punished his own kind. Granted, somebody had to do it, and her father respected him very much, but she was not about to become the wife of one such as he, no matter what he said to the contrary.

      Ariel chuckled at her reply, but she did not understand what was so funny.

      “Do you wish to give me a favor, my lady? Then all will know of your regard for me as I wear it onto the battlefield,” he said.

      She gasped, horrified at his sheer gall.

      “Never!”

      “Very well. It will not matter one way or another. Before dawn, you will belong to me.”

      Ariel reached out to her quickly, taking the liberty of stroking her fair hair and purposely running a finger down the length of neck hidden beneath it. She huffed, but not entirely in outrage. His touch burst like fire over her skin, soon moving to burn through her entire body. As he turned and walked away, Sarah was left numb and speechless with the riot of sensation and reaction that rushed through her body. Skin and breath, heart and blood, all of it. All of it. It was as if a brilliant candle had been lit inside her and, given another moment, would send yellow bursts of light out of every pore of her skin.

      Sarah suddenly understood what raw panic and terror truly were. As a Princess, she had never needed to be afraid of anything. She had lived a very protected life and had always been safe from even the most rudimentary of fears.

      Now, however, she was learning a rapid lesson in all those frightening emotions. The Enforcer СКАЧАТЬ