He considered my words, face grave and somehow vulnerable. “And now?”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. “Now I’m done fighting you, my Rogue. You asked me to trust in you, to be your partner forever and I agreed—that’s not something I take lightly. We’re in this together. I don’t believe anymore that you’d willingly hurt me or the child, so we fight the possibly that you could be forced to the same way we’d defend ourselves against any other attack.” As I said the words, I realized they answered my questions too.
“I should have known you’d be as stubborn at my side as you were when I was trying to get you there.”
“Yes, you should have.” I bent over him, kissing the sueded silk softness of the skin just below the temple, then down over his high cheekbone, taking my time getting to his mouth, which waited for me, hot and greedy.
My hair fell around us and he wound his fingers in it, holding me there. Lazy desire unfurled in me, in him, spiraling between us, sweet, hot and heavy. The depth and growth of my feelings for him alarmed me on one level—as if by admitting them I’d somehow provided the catalyst for the chemical reaction between us to rage past all theoretical boundaries. Frighteningly out of control.
To my surprise, he broke the kiss. “Finish your tale and tell me what has you in such turmoil.”
A bit disappointed, I sat back and took up the grimoire again, wondering how I’d messed that up. Not that I’d ever counted seduction in my skill set.
Rogue gazed out the window. “You forget, my lovely Gwynn, how many of your thoughts I hear. I know you worry that I distract you with sex, that I use it as a way of avoiding difficult conversations. Isn’t this true?”
Nothing like being called out on your thoughts. This was worse than going to counseling together. Talk about total honesty.
“It’s true.” I coughed a little, to cover the laugh that wanted to well out at the image of Rogue exploring his feelings on some faux-leather couch. “Though it feels very strange to be having this discussion with you. At least we don’t have to argue about whose family is worse and where we should spend the holidays.”
“And answers such as that are your technique for deflecting me, isn’t it?”
Damn. Caught me out there too. I looked out at the serene vista, our gazes parallel. “Okay, jokes aside. Yes, I worry that we don’t communicate well—a sentence that still sounds absurd to me, given that I’m saying it to an alien being while I’m looking out at a landscape full of impossibilities. But, even without the geas, or whatever it is that keeps you from being able to tell me everything, this whole deal like last night, when I’m not supposed to tell you about something important...it seems fraught to me. I still don’t understand all the rules—I don’t even know if you sleep at night. I’ve promised to marry you someday and we still know so little about each other.”
“Someday will be sooner than you think, perhaps.”
“Because of what Fafnir said?”
“One of the reasons, yes. He has a point. Until we’re married, you are fair game to be ‘protected’ by another. We might have him in custody, but this cabal he spoke of will simply try yet again. You are a valuable prize.”
“I don’t like being a prize.”
“You didn’t like the abduction attempt either.”
Fair enough.
“Tell me why you fretted about the babe.”
He was relentless and I didn’t really want to talk about it. “Let’s stick to the agenda—when you say ‘sooner than I think’ for the wedding, when would that be?”
“The winter solstice would be the most auspicious timing.”
“That’s soon?” And here I’d been braced for “next week” or “tomorrow.” I flipped to my timeline and frowned at it, wishing yet again I’d thought of making one sooner and had kept better track. “The night we rescued you from QB’s castle was All Hallow’s Eve, which would be October 31 in my world. Solstice, depending on the year, would be around December 21, give or take. So that would more than a full moon cycle away.”
Rogue cocked his head, assimilating the various images. “What you call the moon cycle makes no sense. The moon is the moon. It does not change.”
Fascinating, really, and as had recently occurred to me. “It never appears as a crescent or a half? As if part of it is in shadow?”
“No,” he said in a reflective tone, giving it due consideration. “What could cast a shadow on the moon?”
I snorted to myself. Oh, only a planet, which we didn’t seem to be on. “Okay, we’ve got a reasonable rotation of day and night that we agree on—how many nights from now?”
“Ah—three.”
Keeping my lips close together, I blew out a long, steadying breath through the small opening, concentrating on keeping it even and smooth. I’d suspected this about time. It shouldn’t rock me, to know that what should have been seven weeks had passed in something like one for me, even allowing for lost time when I’d battled the cat. If I figured it had been the equivalent of early September when I’d conceived, then I might be four months along. Utterly terrifying to contemplate.
“Tell me, Gwynn.” Rogue spoke softly, tracing my toes with apparent fascination. “I only get pieces of this worry about the babe before you tuck it away again.”
“I don’t know if I can explain it, even to myself.”
“Try.”
I supposed I owed him that. “Let me start with a story. In my world there are these things called movies—images and sound that tell a tale. I watched this one about animals in another part of the world from where I lived, called elephants. Do you have those?”
He shook his head slightly but stayed silent, forcing me to go on.
“Elephants are what biologists call sentient—they’re capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, for example. They’re smart and can form emotional attachments, even paint pictures. I’d seen them in captive situations, but this showed them wild. A group of them, a herd, traveled through desert, seeking water. It took them a very long time and some died along the way. There were baby elephants too.” My voice thickened and I sucked it back, trying to maintain. “Then there was this dust storm and—they couldn’t see where they were going, but they made it out. Except for this one baby elephant that got confused. All turned around. And when the dust storm cleared, it was still walking, but in the wrong direction. Back into the desert.”
I wiped an escaping tear away, glad Rogue was facing away from me. He stroked my foot. “And it died?”
“I don’t even know. Maybe the people filming it—recording the pictures—rescued it. But the thing is, the image of that baby elephant trotting off hopefully into the desert, thinking it would find its mother...it gives me an almost physical pain to contemplate it. And that’s an animal, totally unconnected to me, irrelevant to my life, and its death would be part of nature. As a biologist, I know and understand these things. But—” I broke off, not really willing to take the next step.
“But this babe you carry will be relevant and connected and not an animal. You see the child as this baby elephant—torn from you, lost and dying.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see, not trusting my voice. All those women had been right. The pregnancy hormones were a killer. Rogue waited me out.
“So, the other part is that, were I in my own world, I’d have a lot of metrics to track the baby’s development. I’d have pictures and various tests. I would be able to take vitamins and predict when it would be born. Here, I have none of that.”
“The babe will grow on its own, yes? Without you having this knowledge?”
“Yes.” My laugh sounded watery. “But, see, this is who I am. I’m the person who’s always used knowledge to understand and control my world. Maybe I’m the one wandering in the dust storm. How can I save my child when I’m in danger myself? A danger as huge and as far beyond me as a force of nature.”
Rogue pressed a kiss to the top of my foot, then to the instep, sending a warm curr
ent up to my heart. “Because you have me. I will clear the dust storm and bring you water. If you get lost, I will find you. If Fafnir had succeeded, which he didn’t, because your powers are far greater than any of his or his foolish cabal’s, then I would have found you. Haven’t I always found you before, when you tried to hide from me?”
“This is an excellent point.” Ironic, even.
He turned on his hip, kissing my ankle and tracing a line up my calf muscle with his mouth. I had to shift to accommodate the stretch, which opened my legs.
“Trust me in this, my Gwynn, together we can win. Perhaps I frighten you with my cautions, but I would never have gambled all I have if I didn’t believe we could triumph.”
“You don’t know any more about birthing a baby than I do.”
“Lady Healer will assist.”
“She doesn’t know humans.” Besides, I didn’t trust her.
“Then we’ll find someone who does.” His mouth found the sensitive skin on the back of my knee and I hummed at the sweet sensation.
“Mistress Nancy. I want to see if she’ll come help me.”
“Done. Whatever that canny woman decides to charge.” He lifted my knee higher, his desire meeting mine with renewed strength as I melted under his lips and tongue. Pushing my thighs wider apart, he kissed his way up the tender skin there.
“Is this you not distracting me with sex?”
“This is me, drying your tears and rewarding you for telling me what was in your heart. Besides, it seems we’ve discussed everything on your agenda.” He turned fully now, hands sliding up inside my robe to cup my bottom and coax me to the edge of the chair. Giving me a wicked smile, he opened my robe, gazed down at my naked, already wet sex and licked his lips. “Consider me seduced. Let me please you, my Gwynn. Unless you’re saying no.”
Like I could manage to, when he looked at me that way. “Please me then,” I whispered.
His hands flexed hard on my hips, the barest of warnings. I lost my breath when his avid mouth seized me, and I didn’t regain it again for a long time thereafter.
* * *
My body nearly limp with relaxation, but my mind and nerves buzzing with energy, I felt at least more in equilibrium and ready to deal. Purged of both emotional and physical tension, I dressed in the least over-the-top gown I could dig out of my closet, resisting the urge to modify it, and brushed out my hair again.
Rogue remained where I left him, looking out over the countryside with his hands clasped at the small of his back, that sense of shimmering impatience coalescing around him, as if the sexual release lifted it only briefly. He turned to survey me, taking in my mental and emotional state also.
“Back to your agenda, then?” he asked.
“Yes. Dragons to feed, weddings to plan—a woman’s work is never done.”
“Then winter solstice is agreeable to you?”
I ignored the pang of trepidation and shrugged. “Might as well. I already said yes. Delaying won’t change anything.”
“And might make our situation worse.”
“There is that,” I agreed. I wound my fingers together. So odd how I could feel totally at home with Rogue one moment and tentative the next. “So...I’m going to do some planning. Get my act together on several fronts. What are you up to this afternoon?” Catch up on email? Maybe some pickup basketball and a beer with the guys?
“I thought I’d interrogate Fafnir, see what else I can find out about this purported cabal of his, and fetch Mistress Nancy to attend you.”
“You mean, you’ll ask her.”
Rogue frowned at me. “I already promised that you’ll have her assistance. Would you have me leave room to fail you in that?”
I sighed. “It wasn’t a promise. I absolve you of it. Take me with you and I will ask her. I’d rather do that anyway.”
He’d started shaking his head before I finished talking. “It’s not safe for you to leave the castle until we’re married. And don’t get that look on your face like you get when you start talking about how I want to lock you up. You know full well how tempting you are—for Fafnir’s ilk and others like them. It’s only for a few days.”
“Fine.” I tried to make it sound calm and not irritated.
“Is it fine?” Rogue’s thoughts brushed mine. “Or will you be frustrated by it and brood with your mind hidden?”
“Welcome to marriage with a human woman. How about if we agree I get to stew about it a little bit, but I’ll make an effort to be gracious overall and look forward to increased freedom in the future—will that suffice?”
He smiled, very slightly. “I would also ‘stew’ in your position. We are not so different in that way.”
“And in others?” I had to ask.
“I do not sleep, no, not unless injured.”
I nodded, letting myself assimilate that, though I’d suspected as much. “How about food? You’ve eaten with me, but do you need to?”
“No.” Rogue looked somber. “Does that bother you?”
“Some.” I rolled my shoulders, loosening them. “So you just pretended to, for my sake?”
“Not to deceive you, no. I enjoy it, but as with many fae, my true sustenance comes from magic. Eating, however, is a ritual of trust. So is sharing a bed. In many ways, I’d say it means more to me to do those things with you because I choose to, rather than it being necessary.”
“An interesting point.”
He cocked his head slightly, listening, thoughts touching mine like a kiss. “And the part you’re not saying?”
Gah. I stretched my fingers, enjoying the freedom of movement, my restored humanity. “So, there’s this thing. In my culture, people tell stories of human women impregnated with alien babies. Monster babies.” Changelings.
“As I’ve done to you.”
“Well, we did it to each other, but yes—it feels strange, not knowing who—” or what, “—the child will be.”
“Something we cannot know until it is born.”
“I know. You asked.”
“I did. And you have another question.”
Fine. “Do you ever think about it, Rogue? We are different species. Have you thought through that I’m human and mortal? That I’ll become an old woman and eventually die.”
He came to me and, lacing our fingers together so we stood palm to palm, looked into my eyes. The connection between us throbbed like a heartbeat, a commingling of my one-two rhythm with his waltz beat, each a counterpoint to the other.
“None of that matters. A moment with you or an eternity—neither is more valuable than the other. Should everything end now, I would call myself blessed.”
My heart rolled over. “You do know how to say the right things.”
“Besides,” he added, glancing at my belly with a wicked glint in his eye, “the way you think this word ‘species’ means being able to interbreed. And we’ve certainly done that.”
And wasn’t that just the cherry-topper?
It puzzled me still, the ways our physiologies intersected and how they diverged. It shouldn’t be possible for us to interbreed. Nor for a fae woman like Blackbird, who was not mammalian-born, to give birth to a half-human child in a fully mammalian style. For a while I’d joked to myself that the fae all fruited on the vine, except even fruit had navels. In a rational world, higher organisms could not reproduce in a way other than the way in which they themselves were conceived. Lower organisms, however, could “choose” to reproduce either by recombining genes with another individual or by essentially cloning themselves. Parthenogenesis. Though theoretically possible in humans, it had never been documented—beyond those seeking to rationalize virgin birth stories.
Still, there seemed to be enough similarities among particularly the lower-tier fae to suggest parthenogenesis. That could be just my foreigner’s eye, leading me to believe they all looked the same. Funny that I’d been ruminating on the development of the embryo or fetus within me. One aspect of fetal development I did understand was th
at ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny. In other words, a human child went from a single cell and developed into an increasingly complex organism by following the same path as evolution, from amoeba to fish to monkey to human, in essence.
Could it be that this shift in reproduction among the immortal noble fae represented a sort of evolutionary leap? It would be working at an extraordinarily accelerated rate, a saltational evolution producing the very essence of the “hopeful monsters” the thesis predicted. I pressed my palm to the round ball of my belly. A changeling child as the hopeful monster.
Rogue’s eyes, shades darker than the brilliant sky framing him, but no less bright, glittered as he listened in on my thoughts without commenting.
“I want to ask you a question you maybe can’t answer,” I said, stepping away and opening my grimoire to the new section in Rules of Magic: Changelings.
“No, I did not grow on a tree like an apple.”
“I’m totally writing that down.”
“Of course you are.”
I laughed. This was better. “Can you tell me how you did grow? I’ve seen images of you as a juvenile—not your adult self—were you an infant? Do you have a mother?” A daunting thought, a fae noble mother-in-law who would no doubt deeply disapprove of me as a match. All I needed.
Rogue didn’t reply. An answer right there. How else could I ask the question?
He strolled idly over to the basket of apples he’d brought me and selected one, holding it up for inspection. “After the wedding, I’ll take you on an excursion. A celebration of your freedom. Would you like that?”
Wiser to his ways at last, I nodded. He planned to show me then. Fascinating. Too bad we couldn’t go right away. Rogue chuckled, set the apple on my workbench and picked up my left hand, stroking the diamond, intent gaze full of warning. “First things first, however.”
“I know. I know.” Though it didn’t feel like the correct order of priority to me. Still, to please him, I turned to my notes page and wrote:
Discuss wedding with Starling.
Though he couldn’t read it, I pointed to it and raised my eyebrows significantly. “There. Wedding is first. Happy?”
Rogue's Paradise Page 18
