Beguiled Read Free

looking for an escape. She didn’t find one. Though for the first time, she wondered where everyone had gone. She didn’t even hear the low rumble of skateboard wheels on cement anymore. Weird.
    “You just made my point about all of this, Culhane. I don’t know Otherworld. Don’t have a clue about the Fae.” And that was the bottom line, Maggie told herself.Why she couldn’t bring herself to be a queen. How could she be?
    “I am willing to teach you,” he ground out in a tight, low tone.
    “And that will take how long?” Maggie looked down into the red paint and stirred it so that it wouldn’t develop a dried-out skin across its surface. “You want me to sit on a throne and make decisions that affect not only your world, but mine, too. I can’t do it.”
    “Maggie . . .”
    She lifted her gaze to his, and staring into those pale green eyes, she finally managed to say, “What if I screw it up? What if what I do causes a war?” Hearing the words spoken aloud made her shake her head. “No way. I can’t risk it. And you shouldn’t want me to.”
    Culhane moved closer and Maggie breathed in the clean, almost foresty scent of him. Did he have to smell so damn good? Wasn’t it enough that just looking at him could make the most stalwart feminist throw all of her ideals out the window and beg him to take her? Culhane was a walking, talking orgasm-in-waiting and being this close to him made Maggie’s hormones jangle so loud, her brain practically shut down.
    “You are the destined Queen, Maggie,” he reminded her for the twelve thousandth time. “Your reign was foretold.”
    She choked out a half laugh. She knew what he said was true. She felt drawn to Otherworld now. But that didn’t mean she was comfortable with her role. How could she be? Maggie hadn’t been raised to believe in the Fae. She’d always assumed her grandmother’s stories were just that. Stories. And even if she had believed, knowing about the Fae would not have prepared her to be their Queen.
    Despite the gleam of confidence in Culhane’s eyes when he looked at her, Maggie was afraid she just wasn’t up to the challenge of what he expected her to be. Yes, she was a strong, independent woman. A woman of the twenty-first century, master of her fate, captain of her soul, owner of her own business. But that didn’t make her queen material, now, did it?
    “I don’t suppose that prophecy of yours said how my ‘reign’ would turn out,” she said.
    “No. Only that you would be Queen. The rest of your fate is up to you. You must write your future, as we all must.”
    “Fabulous.”
    He smiled, apparently guessing where her muddled thoughts were taking her. “We make our futures what we will, Maggie. Fate twists our paths and some things are immutable.” Culhane shrugged his wide shoulders. “Your destiny was to become Queen. It is up to you what you make of it.”
    “But no pressure.”
    “You will be a great queen, Maggie. You’ve the heart for it. The strength for it.” He lifted one hand to tuck a strand of dark auburn hair behind her slightly pointy ear. “We make our own destinies. We forge the future, one decision at a time.”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she admitted.
    “I am here with you, Maggie. We will work together.”
    Yes, she thought, but he’d spent two hundred years at Queen Mab’s side, too. And what had that gotten the former queen? Deposed and thrown out a window into the void between dimensions, that’s what.
    “Together? For how long?”
    One corner of his amazing mouth tipped up and something inside her fisted. “For as long as we will it. The Fae are immortal, Maggie. And you are quickly becoming completely Fae. Soon your mortality will drop away.”
    “Along with my humanity, huh?” She wrapped her arms around herself and scraped her paint-spattered hands up and down her arms to battle a sudden chill. “What if I don’t want to stop being human?”
    “In that, you’ve no choice at