“Excellent,” Rhyzkahl said. “Without a summoner controlling the portal from the exterior, it is vital that the room be deeply shielded and solidly anchored when the portal opens.”

I didn’t have to ask him what could go wrong if it wasn’t. An unshielded portal could do very bad things. I wanted to get back to Earth in one piece, thank you.

“Are you ready to begin?” he asked.

“I am,” I replied, smiling.

He lowered his head slightly, hair falling forward to frame his face and drop it into shadow as he held his hand out to me. My pulse quickened as I crossed through the diagram to take his hand.

With his other hand he sealed the patterns, then pulled me in closer. He looked down on me, eyes veiled and distant. “You have come to me, dear one,” he said, a smile with a hint of sadness curving his mouth. “To go home.”

After my encounter with Jesral, I didn’t know what Rhyzkahl had gone through to make this ritual happen. Something sure seemed to weigh on him, and I didn’t want to add to it, just go home. I smiled up at him. “Yeah. And thank you,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.

Slowly, he lifted his head to look beyond me as if thinking of something else. Mentally prepping for the ritual, I figured. Excitement wound through me for multiple reasons, and I had to firmly tamp down the desire to jump up and down or laugh or anything else that would no doubt seriously fuck up Rhyzkahl’s focus.

I glanced around at the myriad of sigils, then scanned the arcanely traced glyphs on the floor. There’d only been about a half dozen in Mzatal’s purification ritual. Here, they covered a good portion of the summoning chamber floor. My eyes rested on the center—Rhyzkahl’s mark. I frowned. Something about the glyph next to it looked familiar. I was sure I’d seen it before, but damn, I couldn’t place it.

I looked up as Rhyzkahl drew a deep breath and dropped his gaze back to me. “I do not always get what I want,” he said, which confused me at first until I remembered that I’d asked him that question the other day. But why was he telling me now? Did he want me to stay here in the demon realm?

He released my hand, expression unreadable as he laid a hand against the side of my face. “Soon you will be gone,” he murmured.

I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss me.”

His only response was to look out over my head again, muscle in his jaw twitching. Maybe he really would miss me? He wasn’t one for sharing his deeper feelings, but he certainly didn’t seem to be eager to send me on my way. A whisper of doubt crept in. As much as I enjoyed my time with the lord, I had no desire to stay here any longer.

I put my arms around him and gave him a light squeeze. “Don’t worry,” I told him with a smile. “I’ll summon you soon enough. We still have another two and half years or so on our current deal.”

But to my surprise he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back enough to disengage from my embrace. His face hardened briefly before he turned away from me. “There is much more than summoning.”

My doubt increased. “I know. I’ve seen so much.” Surely he wasn’t reconsidering sending me home? “I’ll definitely have new and interesting questions for you next time I summon you.” My smile slipped as he remained facing away, hands clenched into fists at his sides, shoulders rising and falling with quickened breaths. “Rhyzkahl?” I set a hand gently on his back. “You okay?”

He went still at my touch, so still I wasn’t even certain he breathed. I slid my hand up to his shoulder. “Rhyzkahl, please tell me what’s wrong.” I gave a somewhat shaky laugh. “You’re kinda freaking me out a bit.”

He turned and looked down at me, face alive with emotions I’d never seen in him before. Uncertainty. Worry. Something akin to desperation flickered in his eyes as he caught my face in his hands. What the hell was going on with him? More bullshit with other lords? Something with Jesral? That one sure as hell had his own agenda. Definitely time for me to get my ass back home before I got dragged into any of that lord shit.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said softly. “How about a goodbye kiss?”

Rhyzkahl hesitated only a heartbeat before dropping his mouth to mine in an ardent kiss. I relaxed eagerly into it as I skimmed my hands up his chest and around his neck, slid my fingers through the white-blond silk of his hair. I felt the tension in him ease as he wrapped arms around me, clinging to me. I was going to miss him too, I realized, as odd as our relationship was.

I expected him to break the kiss and begin the ritual, but he continued as if he couldn’t get enough of me. He pulled me close to him, one hand sliding down to cup my ass. A shudder ran through me, and I obligingly rocked my hips against the growing evidence that he was possibly wanting more than a simple goodbye kiss. Some hot sex for the road? Yeah, I was okay with that. I quickly worked the buttons of his shirt loose and slipped it from his shoulders. He shook it free of his arms to let it fall to the floor, then brought his hands to my waist, gathering the dress and breaking the kiss to pull it over my head. His eyes flashed with hunger and the hint of desperation again. But it was gone before I could fully register that it was there at all.

He gently lowered me to the floor in the center of the diagram. I flicked a quick glance at the sigils, for a moment paranoid that this “goodbye fuck” was somehow meant to power the diagram, but they remained quiescent. Good. Because that would’ve been weird.

He slipped his breeches off and returned to cover me, hair falling over me in a curtain of silk as he held my face gently between thumb and fingers of one hand. “In this moment, we are right here, right now,” he said, voice resonating with intensity. “Nothing else is of import.”

Smiling, I wrapped my arms around him. “We are here,” I echoed.

He lowered his head to kiss me again, but this time with a tenderness that damn near brought tears to my eyes. He’d never touched me like this before—sweet and gentle, yet with a passion beneath it that spoke of genuine affection. His hands moved over me as if memorizing every inch of my skin, and I eagerly responded, more fired and moved by this display of true ardor than by any of his prior attentions.

He made love to me. There was no other word for it. Not possessive or fierce but with a fervor that brought us together into a perfect joining. And my climax was just as perfect, fantastic and overwhelming, spiraling together with his as we clung to each other and trembled with the fierce joy of it.

Sighing in deep, contented pleasure, I relaxed against him. He cradled me close, idly stroking sweat-damp hair back from my face. I gave him a languid smile before casting my gaze around at the pattern of sigils that surrounded us. “It’s beautiful,” I murmured.

A shudder passed through him. “Yes, it is. Very beautiful,” he said, an odd catch in his voice that I’d never heard from him before. He pulled away and stood, back to me, focusing his attention on the slowly pulsing diagram. A lift of his hand sent the entire pattern into a slow spin and then he was still, silhouetted against the softly shifting light.

I pushed up on my elbows. As goodbyes went, that had been a doozy, but now it was time to get down to business. “How do we ignite it? What do we need to do?”

His head dropped. It was several seconds before he spoke. “More. Much more.”

The obvious tension in his body and the taut undercurrent in his voice sent a chill racing over my skin. I wondered about the implications of those little words.

“Rhyzkahl. What’s wrong? Please tell me.”

He crouched and picked up his breeches, tugged them on in silence. “Too much is in motion,” he finally said with something akin to regret in his voice. He picked up his shirt, slipped it on and began to button it. “I cannot stop it now. I can only move forward.”