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of adventure and romance, they incite killing ardor.
    I glanced down at myself to see if I still had my clothes on. I was relieved to find I did. Fae royalty exude such intense sexuality that they override every survival instinct we have, clouding a woman’s mind, provoking her erotic senses beyond anything she was meant to experience, turning her into an inhumanly aroused animal, begging for sexual release. The first thing a woman does when one shows up is start stripping.
    In a romance novelist’s hands, that might come off as hot, campy, even sexy. In reality, it’s icy, terrifying, and most often ends in death.
If
the woman is left alive, she’s
Pri-ya,
barely able to function, a Fae sex-addict.
    I glanced back at the Shade and hastily lit another match. If anything, it was watching me even more intently now.
    â€œSo, assist me already,” I snapped.
    â€œDoes that mean you accept my gift?”
    During our first encounter several weeks ago, V’lane had offered me a mystical relic known as the Cuff of Cruce, a gesture of goodwill, he’d claimed, in exchange for my help finding the
Sinsar Dubh
for his ruler, Aoibheal, High Queen of the Seelie Court. According to
him,
the cuff protects the wearer from assorted nasties, including the Shades.
    According to my intractable host and mentor, with a Fae, Light or Dark, there’s always a catch, and they don’t believe in full disclosure. In fact, they don’t believe in disclosure at all. Would we disclose our intentions to a horse before we rode it, or a cow before we ate it?
    Perhaps the cuff would save me. Perhaps it would enslave me.
    Perhaps it would kill me.
    During our last encounter, V’lane tried to rape me in the middle of a public place—not that being raped in a private place would have been any better, just that, adding insult to injury, I’d regained control of myself only to discover I was nearly naked in the middle of a crowd of voyeuristic jerks. It was a hurtful, hateful memory. I’d been racking up a lot of them lately.
    Mom raised me better, I want that noted for posterity’s sake: Rainey Lane is a fine, upstanding woman.
    I told V’lane exuberantly and in vivid detail what I was going to do to him at the earliest opportunity, and exactly where I was going to shove my Fae-killing spear—razor-sharp tip first—when I was done. I sprinkled the expletives with colorful adjectives. I might not be much of a cusser, but a bartender gets an education whether she wants one or not.
    I had fourteen matches left. I struck another.
    Framed in the window beyond the Shade, V’lane rose, skin of shimmering gold, eyes of liquid amber, inhumanly beautiful against the backdrop of velvety night. I think he was floating in the air. He tossed his hair, a gilded waterfall glinting with metallic sparks, cascading over a male body of such sensual perfection, such hedonistic temptation that I had no doubt Satan had laughed on the day of his creation—and sounded pretty much like V’lane did now. When his laughter subsided he murmured, “And you were such a sweet thing when you got here.”
    â€œHow do you know what I was like when I got here?” I demanded. “How long have you been watching me?”
    The Fae prince raised a brow but said nothing.
    I raised a brow back. He was Pan, Bacchus, and Lucifer, painted a thousand shades of to-die-for. Literally. “Why don’t you come in?” I asked sweetly. I had a suspicion I wanted to test.
    V’lane’s mouth tightened and it was my turn to laugh.
    Barrons was amazing. “You can’t get past the wards, can you? Is that why I’m not naked?” I dropped the match just as it began to burn my fingers and lit another one. “Do the wards somehow diminish your pow—”
    I didn’t even get to finish my sentence. A forest fire of debilitating sexual need blasted