SUMMARY: Details of Wink's visit to Lorelei in Chapter 41: Silver and Gold, of "Once Upon A Time," by LA Knight. After Wink has delivered Nuada's presents to Dylan at dawn (flowers and silly socks! whoo!), he takes his own sweet time making Nuada wait, and comes back to the lair at sunset with a smear of Lorelei's lip-rouge on his shoulder. Hmm, how'd he get that there?

PART 3 Continued: Tying off the cliffhanger from Silver And Gold Part 3: Look of Love. After some sweet kissing, Wink has just discovered Lorelei's bullet-graze scar and been told the story behind it. Not very long but at least it ties off the scene. *whew!*

Special note to girlmundy: THANK YOU! Thank you so much! You are the first person besides LA Knight to give me any real feedback AT ALL on this fic, and I TOTALLY appreciate it! Vielen Dank! Muchos gracias! Köszönöm szépen! Thank you! :D A fellow fan of unconventional fae romance, eh? Glad to meet you. I just can't help loving Beauty and the Beast types.

Lorelei sighed heavily, like a wave breaking on a great lakeshore. Then the river siren turned her head, and began softly tracing over the lines of a few of the scars on Wink's chest with smooth, sliding strokes of her satin lips, as red as mortal blood; scars that had been gotten in the ancient wars between the human and fae kingdoms. Heat writhed like snakes through the troll's veins at the contact. Electric sparks sang up and down his spine, and he wasn't entirely sure, but he was fairly certain that his bristles were starting to stand on end. It was a welcome change from the smoldering rage that he had felt a moment ago.

"Did you ever wonder?" Lorelei's voice came through to his hazing mind like a gold coin tossed into a fountain, making the still surface of the water ripple. He knew that she was talking about the humans that he had fought against in those long-ago battles; if he ever wondered the same thing as she about his enemies.

"I might have," he rumbled, when he found breath enough to answer (which she was making rather difficult with that achingly sensuous mouth of hers). "Not while they were trying to kill me. I was preoccupied with thinking of other things just then." This made her pretty face break into a smile, her sharp teeth shining like pearls in contrast with the red of her mouth. "But I might have," he repeated, with a soft smile of his own and a twinkle in his eye. "Although, such thoughts are generally wasted on humanity."

"Warum?" Lorelei inquired, curious to hear his reasoning behind that statement.

"They are worse than sheep," he told her. "Most humans seek to be ruled. They fear being without someone to take responsibility for them, to lead them and direct their lives, to give them assurances that they feel they cannot guarantee for themselves. Their loyalty is all too easily bought and traded for such favors by those who seek not to be ruled, but to rule and dominate others." Wink's face took on a mirthless, pitying smirk, and his one eye held a distant look for a minute. "Wolves leading sheep..." he rumbled softly, half-absently. His eye refocused back to the comely Rhine daughter occupying his lap. "So you see, such wondering serves no point, for whether he believes it to be right or not, a human and a soldier will do whatever his leader commands."

"And for that, deepest guilt and innocence rest upon his soul, both at once, in equal measure," murmured Lorelei solemnly. "If you cannot command, then you must obey." Wink nodded, seriously.

The river faery sighed with a hmm, as she once again leaned into the solid form of the great silver warrior. His thumbs traced lazily over the places where they rested - his left at her back, his right at the outside of her thigh - as her fingertips went in slow, languid patterns over his chest and shoulder like the flow of water, following line of scar and muscle, leaving soft trails of sensation over his hide. Her swan-soft cheek brushed in smallest strokes against the planes of his chest again, which Wink found was something that never failed to light a warm spark inside of him or make the rhythm of his heart beat just a little more strongly. Lorelei's expression was unreadable, as her fingers trailed from his chest, down over the buckles and stitching of his torso armor, to trace over and over again the elegant lines of hammered metal, the crest of Bethmoora, shining from its place on the wide leather belt at the cave troll's waist. Wink's one eye watched the fine features of his companion's niveous face carefully, but whatever was there could have been interpreted in any of a million ways, shifting and curling on itself into an indecipherable mystery. Then a half-smile that only barely reached her far-away eyes bloomed on her dark rose lips and she murmured absently, and so softly that it could have been almost a whisper, "Nothing is ever as cut as crystal."

Wink lifted her chin with one wide metal fingertip, gently tilting her face up to regard him. His eye held hers with a look of absolute certainty and sincerity, and his voice rumbled with low, serious tones, as he told her, "Some things are."

Lorelei's ultra-gold eyes widened, her ruby lips parted slightly in only the barest resemblance to being slack-jawed, as the true weight and depth of what he meant rendered her speechless and lifted her heart into the sky. A slight, tender smile played over the troll's mouth, and he cupped the side of her face with his flesh-and-blood hand, bringing his mouth to hers and kissing her deeply.

Lorelei's long, slender arms snaked up to Wink's brawny shoulders. A hum of pleasure and heart-pounding joy escaped the rhinemaiden as she melted into the silver warrior's kiss, and the sub-audible magic of that sound glided up and down his spine, through his chest, and left his head swimming. The sensation of it was more electric and ethereal than physical, but every nerve that it touched sang with it. His left hand slid from the side of her face, down the elegant line of her swan-like neck where he felt her pulse beating like the flutter of butterfly wings underneath the delicate gold chains of her jewelry, down over her slender shoulder to her back, all in one smooth caress that drank her in and left her wishing that he would do it again. After a minute his hands traveled from her back to her sides again, his thumbs once more going back and forth in firm strokes over her ribs. Back and forth, back and forth. Lorelei's already naturally acute sense of touch was almost immediately on edge, heightened and aware of every inch of every piece of him that was touching her.

While his kisses and his tender attentions were rendering her at a bit of a loss for breath, another pass of Wink's thumb over her bullet-graze scar triggered a thought in Lorelei's brain. "I still have the gun from the incident," she told him, after they had broken apart for air. Wink blinked once with curiosity, and grunted a noise that roughly translated as something akin to "oh yeah?" Lorelei looked thoughtful for the span of half a second; then, smiling, she lifted herself from the troll warrior's lap and said, "Komm, I would like to show you."

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N - "If you cannot command, then you must obey" is a quote from the Hellboy II movie. Right before Hellboy kills the forest god, Nuada is trying to persuade the demon BPRD agent over to his cause, and Prince Nuada says this line to him (and I absolutely agree with him). What I get the most from that slice of the scene, every time I see it, is that if you don't take charge of your own actions and think for yourself, other people will direct your actions and make decisions for you, whether you believe in them or not, and you will go along with it... for which the consequences can be terrible.

- "Nothing is ever as cut as crystal" really is a favorite saying of mine. It means that nothing is as sharply or clearly defined, or black and white, as people would like to believe. There are too often multiple facets (like crystal) to an issue to definitely call it one thing or another, because it's often both (or more) all at once, depending on how you look at it. The character of the "movie villain" Prince Nuada is a prime example of this, I think all would agree.

TRANSLATIONS

Warum? = Why?