Conception

by Sarah McCarty

  She did not need them making a big thing of her injuries. Even though her grandfather’s latest experiments had failed to restore the incredible healing properties he’d initially created, she was still strong enough to do what she had to. She had to be. She didn’t have any choice. “I’ll be fine.”

  As if her assessment was a gnat he could wave away, Bohdan motioned to her abdomen with his hand. “We need to tend to your wounds.”

  She looked at him, and then at Deuce. She couldn’t allow that. If they succeeded they would know too much and never let her leave. If they failed, their attempts could make her too weak to do what needed to be done. “I’ll live.”

  The determination in those two words flicked Deuce on the raw. Willpower may have gotten Edie this far, but she was worn out, her energy weak and fading. She needed to be healed. As her mate, it was his duty to see that she was. He stroked his hand over her shoulder, his finger catching on the fold of her shirt. He pressed in, freeing his finger and the trapped air from within the light fabric. The strong odor of blood welled around him, giving birth to a foreign panic. She would not die. “You will allow Bohdan to examine you.”

  She went stiff in his arms. “No.”

  “I will force this, mate, if I have to.”

  “You won’t. “

  She was badly mistaken in her belief. He would do whatever he had to ensure her survival. He shifted his hands to her abdomen. The waistband of her jeans was wet with blood. They would not slide off easily. He would rather scare her than hurt her. With a thought, he made them vanish.

  She grabbed at air as if she could recover what was gone, her shriek echoing in his ears as he stared at the blood-soaked bandage covering her entire lower abdomen. Blood smears spread down her thigh. There was a crudely gouged hole in her upper thigh. The flesh surrounding the seeping wound was red and swollen, obviously infected.

  Bohdan took a step forward. A whisper of power and then the bandages were gone. Eden cried out, Deuce swore and Bohdan’s breath hissed out between his teeth. He stepped closer. Eden lashed out with her foot. Deuce struggled to mentally contain her panic as it crashed through him. Following the emotion back to its source with the intent to quell it, he ran up against a barrier that should not have been there. He probed it carefully. It was strong. He could not penetrate it.

  More emotion poured out of Eden, demanding his attention, blending into the chaos of his own, catching on the primitive edges, dragging them higher, forcing him to turn his mental efforts to controlling his own response rather than hers as he absorbed the reality of what he was seeing.

  She had experienced surgery. Recently. Her abdomen was laid open, stitches popped. Blood flowed in a sluggish seep. She was a mess. He did not know how she still lived, yet she’d climbed the mountain with his daughter, struggling with the snow and cold, and injuries—that will of hers carrying her when others would have surrendered to defeat.

  “Be easy, mate,” he whispered in her ear, keeping his horror to himself, giving her calm. “You are safe now.”

  His words had no effect. Her panic spilled over into his anger, feeding it. Driving it higher. His fangs pushed through his gums. Red hazed the edges of his vision. His control slipped a notch. And then another.

  In the next instant, he felt Bohdan’s touch in his mind, controlling the spill of energy, siphoning off the excess so he was free to isolate Edie’s emotions and his reaction to them, to bind her anger with his, to pull it back into himself to be sorted through another time. She twisted against him, hands curled into claws, her mind for a brief second unguarded. He pushed into the small opening, and with a thought sent her to sleep. She slumped against him, all that desperation blessedly smothered under a forced veil of unconsciousness.

  Chapter Five

  “I cannot heal her.” Pale and drawn, Bohdan sat back on his heels, and slowly withdrew his hands from Eden’s stomach. Of all the things Deuce had expected his brother to say, that was not it. Bohdan had perfected his skills over centuries of existence for precisely a moment like this. He could not fail now. Not with Eden. He above all others, knew how important Edie was to him, to their people. But one look into his brother’s eyes confirmed the words he would not accept.

  “I do not understand.” The wound on her stomach was closed and the wound on her thigh likewise, but they were not gone like they would be had the healing been complete.

  Bohdan frowned. With an elegant gesture he indicated Edie’s wound. “Whatever was done to her was done without regard to harmony.”

  “And?”

  There was infinite sadness in Bohdan’s eyes. “It is killing her, and I cannot stop it.”

  Deuce rejected the comforting brush of his mind with a hard shove. He lifted Edie up against his chest so her breath brushed his skin in a rhythmic proof of life. He kept his emotions as contained as his tone. “That is unacceptable.”

  “I know.” Bohdan leaned back and shook his head. “I have never seen anything like it. Her chemistry is unbalanced. Her organs mutated into something I do not recognize and are badly damaged. Attempting to fix anything only causes greater problems elsewhere. “

  A sick, unfamiliar knot gathered low in Deuce’s stomach. “She cannot die.”

  Bohdan cut him a glance. “I know her importance.”

  “Then she will live.” He could accept nothing less.

  “She cannot live as she is.”

  Deuce scooped Edie fully into his arms draping her across his knee, baring her throat to his bite. “Then I will bind her.”

  Bohdan’s hand on his arm stopped him with his teeth a hairsbreadth from her jugular. “Binding will kill her.”

  Logic battled with instinct. “I will not lose her.” The knot grew, spreading its cold through his stomach and chest. Whatever it took, she would live.

  “I bought us time.” Bohdan ran his hand through his hair, letting it drop to his hip as he looked at the sleeping baby and then at Eden. “For now, I have slowed the breakdown of her organs, but how long that will last, I do not know. “

  “How much time?”

  Bohdan did not answer, just folded his arms across his chest and shook his head.

  “How long, brother?”

  “Do not force me to say what you will not hear.”

  “Then do not tell me you have done all you can.”

  Bohdan stood slowly. “I have done all I know how to do with the information I have.”

  Against Deuce’s chest, Edie rested, her breathing too shallow for comfort. In front of him, Bohdan stood, his face expressionless. The knot in Deuce’s stomach exploded outward in an emotion so unfamiliar it took him a minute to recognize it. He tightened his grip on Eden and looked at his daughter lying so helpless on the bed.

  Fear. He feared for his family. He did not know such a depth of feeling was possible, but with everything logical and elemental in him, he feared. He brushed his lips over Eden’s forehead. He was Chosen. She was his mate. He had not found her again just to let her go. “Then I will get more information.”

  * * * * *

  Eden came awake slowly, hovering above realty and pain on a soft cloud of comfort. The awful burning agony in her body drifted just below her beneath an invisible shield, unable to reach her. She savored the moment of peace. She’d almost forgotten how it felt to wake without biting back a scream.

  “It is time to wake up now, Edie mine.” Deuce’s voice floated over her sweet dream, strong and confident, with those varied timbres that resonated in the core of her being. She snuggled deeper into the dream, into the memory.

  “Come, my Eden. Awake.”

  She groaned and rolled to her side. Even in her dreams, the man was bossy. She tucked her hand under her cheek. Fingertips met hers. Knuckle bumped against knuckle before locking together. The scent of wilderness and man surrounded her. The fingers entwined with hers squeezed. There was comfort and demand in the gesture. This wasn’t a dream.

  Eden remembered the argument, the command from
the “Voice” to fight. Her hysteria. The pain. And then nothing. For sure, Deuce had touched her while she was unconscious, which meant there was no going back. They were all living on borrowed time. She cautiously opened her eyes. Deuce leaned over her, his expression neutral, his gaze meeting hers without guilt.

  “The baby?”

  “Our daughter is fed, happy and sleeping in the next room.” His hand stroked lightly over her head, snagging in the hair at her nape.

  Her hair?

  She put her hand over his as he worked his finger free of a snarl. Thick silky strands twisted against her fingertips. This time shock had her blinking. “You made my hair grow back?”

  Something dangerous flared in his eyes before disappearing behind a wall of neutrality. “I would not leave you so shamed.”

  “I wasn’t ashamed.”

  His thumb stroked over her cheekbone as light as a feather, as tender as a kiss, sliding under her defenses. He always could say more with a touch than most people could with an hour of speech. “No. You would not be.”

  He said that as if it were a given. Like she was some sort of wonder woman, taking on all comers with a brave front. Her “Yes” was a partial truth. She remembered the helplessness of being strapped down while the two attendants approached with the razor, their laughter as they’d done their job, feeling like they’d stripped the last of her humanity from her as they’d shaved her head, the horror of knowing she truly had become nothing more than a vehicle for an ongoing experiment sinking in as the last of her hair had fallen to the lab floor.

  Deuce’s grip tightened as his breath hissed between his teeth and something like satisfaction flared in his black eyes. “I will enjoy making them pay.”

  He was reading her mind! “Stop it!”

  She pulled back into the pillow as far as she could, pushing his hand away before just as quickly letting go. She caught her breath and reined in her panic. “You have to stay out of my head.” However slight the chance was, if the Coalition had not found her yet, she didn’t need to create a beacon for them to follow.

  His gaze searched her face. “That is not possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Mates do not—cannot—withhold secrets from each other.”

  She pulled herself up higher on the bed and leaned back against the carved headboard, weariness dragging at her. For all that she’d slept, she felt drained to the point of exhaustion. “Maybe we should just drop the subject of mates.”

  For a second he looked like he was going to argue, but then he shrugged and handed her a pillow. “If that will make you happy, it will be done.”

  She could get used to that attitude. She tucked the pillow behind her back. She reached up and touched her hair. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find, but it felt the same as always—thick, with curls springing all over the place. She squashed one flat. “You couldn’t have seen to making it straight while you were at it?”

  He glanced at her hand in her hair and what could have been a smile tugged the corner of his mouth. “No.”

  “You could at least sound regretful.”

  Strange lights flickered in his eyes as he touched a curl. “I like your hair.”

  So it would seem from the length he’d given her. It was halfway down her back. She dropped her hand to the comforter. The intricate quilting drew her fingertips. “You said you fed the baby?”

  “It had to be done.”

  She rolled her eyes. As if she didn’t know that. “What did you feed her?”

  “Bohdan examined her. While there are differences in her physiology, her feeding needs seem to be human at this time.”

  “Which means?”

  “Baby formula works fine.”

  Thank God. “I didn’t know how to care for a vampire child.”

  Deuce didn’t respond, just stared. He stared long past comfortable and just when she couldn’t suppress the urge to fidget, he said, “You call our daughter ‘the baby’ or ‘the child’.”

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “You have not given her one?”

  “No.”

  It hadn’t seemed right when she hadn’t known if she could save her, if Deuce would accept her, if she was even theirs.

  Deuce frowned, pushing her hair off her face, his expression as harsh as his touch was gentle. “Did you fear loving her?”

  She counted the stitches in the quilt. They were very small. Twelve to an inch. “Yes.”

  “Because she is mine?”

  She looked up to find him staring impassively at her, as if her not loving a child because it was his would suit him just fine. “No.”

  “Why, Edie?”

  The way he called her Edie, in that deep voice that danced like soft notes over her desire, immediately poked holes in her defenses. She held his gaze and bit her tongue on the shameful truth that wanted to spill out.

  “Why did you not name her?” he pressed. His hand slid around her head to cradle her skull in his broad palm. With one gesture, he made her feel small, pampered vulnerable. And valued. Incredibly valued. She didn’t deserve his respect. “I didn’t want to think of her as real.”

  “So you did not name her.” His fingers stirred the curls over her ears.

  Anger shimmered in the air, mingling with her guilt, leaving her feeling completely exposed. “Pretty much.”

  “And for this you feel guilty.”

  It wasn’t a question. She jerked her face away from his touch.

  He shook his head, causing his hair to swing and catch the light from the lamps, and caught her chin on his fingertips. The same lights gathered in his eyes, flashing— red?—in the black depths. He looked at once totally familiar and completely alien.

  “I am grateful you were there to care for her when I could not.”

  His thumb brushed her cheek. She flinched back. “I didn’t care for her. I threw her in a sack and ran.”

  “To me.”

  “That doesn’t make everything okay.”

  “It does.”

  She squared her shoulders and blurted out the horrible reality. “When she cried, I covered her mouth until she shut up.”

  He nodded as if she’d just told him she’d bought the baby a new blanket.

  “And in doing so you preserved both your lives. I am grateful for your quick thinking.”

  Eden closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around her churning stomach. She’d never forget the baby’s expression as she’d smothered her cries. The tiny forehead wrinkled above big blue eyes wide with terror. The way she’d fought and struggled. Her baby, and her first memories were of the terror her mother had given her. There was no taking that back.

  Light vanished beneath shadow. Deuce’s scent surrounded her. When she opened her eyes, his face dominated her field of vision. The sympathy in his gaze told the story. He’d read her thoughts. The warmth of his hand settled over her stomach. The nausea left, but not the guilt.

  “When our daughter is old enough to understand,” he began in his deep voice, “I will tell her the story of how her mother loved her enough to do what it took to get her to safety. She will know what true courage is, and she will know it was her mother’s gift to her. There is no need for your guilt.”

  A fairy tale. He wanted to spin her daughter a fairy tale. “It doesn’t change the fact that at a day old, I taught her fear.”

  The bed dipped as he pulled her against his side, under his shoulder, in an age-old gesture that screamed protection and comfort. She turned her cheek into the cocoon of his strength because she needed, for one moment, to let go of that pain. As if he understood, Deuce murmured, “It will not matter when weighed against a lifetime of love and security.”

  She hoped so. She really did. She relaxed totally into his embrace, too tired to fight the lure of his touch. “You have this thing for invading my space.”

  “If you are stating that I feel free to touch you, this is true. It is my right.”

  “Are we back to th
at mate thing?”

  His lips twitched. The mattress protested as he turned to lean over her. “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose it will do any good to reiterate that I am not your mate?”

  “No.” His head cocked to the side and his smile spread. “I have no doubt you are mine, my Eden.”

  There was a distinctly possessive edge to his voice. She pushed up higher, expecting him to move back. Instead he leaned in, letting his lips brush down her neck as she rose off the pillow, his hand on her back supporting her as she scooted back. Heat raced over her skin as his cool lips skated her flesh. His laughter puffed over her collarbone as his tongue tested the hollow. Pleasure shot to her core, followed hotly by need. Her pussy flowered as her body instinctively arched into his. His fingers opened on her back in an invitation.

  God, he was dangerous.

  “Let me go.”

  “You will fall.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He pulled back, his dark eyes studying her face so intently that she threw up additional mind blocks. “Stop it.”

  “What do you fear?”

  She feared becoming weak again, of surrendering control, of losing the impetus to do what needed to be done. Of having another person running around in her mind, controlling her emotions, reducing her to a puppet whenever he got the urge. “Just because I don’t want to become ‘playmate of the minute’ does not mean I’m afraid.”

  “I can smell your panic.”

  Panic was what she’d felt when she’d stolen the baby out of the lab. Panic was what had driven her up the mountain looking for a vampire who might be dead or might want her dead. This was just a healthy dose of fear. This she could handle. “You need to get your sniffer adjusted.”

  He blinked, and then the slightest of smiles curved his lips. “I like your sense of humor.” He grazed the back of his fingers over her cheek. Sparkling, effervescent bubbles of delight danced through her bloodstream. “But you are still afraid.”

  She tried to contain those seductive sparkles. “I’m nervous.”

  His fingers traced along her jaw until they reached her chin. With a nudge, he forced her gaze to his. “You will tell me why.”