When her eyes had shimmered a bright metallic blue with her desire ... she couldn't feign that. Nor her

body's reaction. Her sex had been wet, the soft lips bare. His claws sank into his palms.

After the last few weeks, this was just fuel on a blaze. There were too many conflicts within him. His mind simply didn't work like this. Usually potential decisions unfurled in precise tree diagrams, with clear choices and predicted outcomes. Normally, he was rational, and liked things straightforward, needed them to be so.

Yet now little was as it seemed, or if it was, it was utterly wrong. He had returned home but as a prisoner. He might have found his fated queen, but she was con­niving, cutthroat, and amoral. Until he could escape, his fate and the fate of his people rested in Cadeon's hands-and that was a tenuous position to be in.

Especially now, when Cadeon had with him the woman he'd once drunkenly called "the highlight of my existence."

Rydstrom had been there the first time Cadeon had seen Holly Ashwin, and he had sensed an energy between them. Yet Cadeon had been unable to attempt her because he'd thought she was a human.

Now Cadeon had learned Holly was actually a Valky­rie. So nothing stood in Cadeon's way of having her.

How could Rydstrom expect his brother to not only deny himself his female but also to turn her over to Groot, a psychotic murderer who only wanted to breed with her?

The last time the kingdom had needed him, Cadeon had turned his back on Rydstrom and their family. Why would this time be any different?

Thinking of Cadeon and Holly made another suspi­cion creep over him. The two of them were complete opposites. Cadeon, a slob and a cold-hearted mercenary, had found his woman in a glasses-wearing, genius math­ematician with a fixation on cleaning.

The obsessive-compulsive scholar and the rolling-stone soldier of fortune. A completely unexpected and absurd pairing.