As the last of her climax rippled away, he heard what she did. A strong female voice screaming, Run!
Chapter Seventeen
He could not trace the source.
A woman connected with the Coalition had a private path to his mate, a path so strong she could block Eden and his child from his senses while she could communicate at will. He did not like it at all. He held Edie still beneath him and tried to find the connection point, but the woman ducked his efforts, anticipating what he wanted to know and moving on. She was very skilled. And she wanted Edie to run.
As she retreated he built barriers around Edie’s mind. They would not keep her out forever, but they would slow her down.
As if she heard his thoughts, Eden pushed at his shoulders. “Let me up.”
Deuce caught her before she could slip from beneath him. “Remain where you are.”
“I have to go.” She wiggled down and to the side.
He stopped her by simply resting his elbow on the floor. “There is no need to run.”
She froze.
“You heard her?” Surprise pitched her voice to an octave above normal.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“We are mates.” He touched the pleat between her brows, an indication of the worry tensing her muscles.
“That’s your excuse for everything.”
“It is not an excuse.”
“It’s not a reason either for invading my privacy.” She shivered. “Stay out of my head.” The order lacked strength.
“No.” He lifted her away from the coolness of the floor before gliding to his feet. She swayed. He pulled her to him. The taut swell of her stomach against him reminded him of her fragility. He cupped her cheek in his palm. “I have said they will never touch you.”
Shadows haunted her blue eyes. “They know where I am.”
“That is not certain.”
Edie pushed away his arm, rejecting his touch. “She would never tell me to run unless they were close.”
He caught her wrist, drawing her up short. She winced as she took a step, the delicate muscles between her thighs protesting movement.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“They use her to find you?”
“Somehow.” She cast a glance at the door.
“Yet she protects you.”
“I think so.” She took another step and winced again.
“She is connected to you.”
“I don’t know how.”
He would—soon. “But you trust her enough to run on her order?”
“Yes.”
“You will do so no more.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, but shielding her gaze could not hide the turmoil putting the tremble in her hands and mixing the scent of desperation with the scent of satisfaction.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I do.” She flinched on the next step. He slid his arm under her knees and swung her up against his chest. She lay against him, neither cooperating nor fighting.
“I can walk.”
“You are sore.”
“Whose fault is that?”
He lay her on the white comforter, “Mine, which makes the healing my responsibility.”
He brushed her hair off her cheeks. She seemed to glow from within as she lay on the bed, her skin whiter than white and her hair brighter that gold. Her breasts were still swollen, would stay that way as long as his seed sought fruit. He trailed his fingers down her throat, over the mark of his possession, down into the damp center of her cleavage, to her upper abdomen, until he reached the well of her navel. He circled the rim before dipping his hand to cup the evidence of their mating. He knelt, brushed the small mound with his lips, and breathed deeply of her scent. “You are the mother of my child, the keeper of my future.”
Her hands slipped between his mouth and her skin. “Will this go away?”
He glanced up, running his tongue between her fingers, sensing the shivers that ran up her arm, giving her more. “If you do not conceive, yes.”
He knew she heard the hope in his voice, the excitement at the thought of her pregnancy, by the shock in her voice. “You want me to conceive?”
“It would please me.”
“It wouldn’t please me.”
Her unease was strong. He had flashes of the baby and a sense of danger. “Because you see the future as uncertain.”
“Because I’ve just had a baby.”
That was not the reason, though it might be if things had been normal. “You are uncertain.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.” He wanted another child with her more than anything. He wanted to be with her from start to finish, to guard her, ease her through the changes, watch them both bloom. He touched her stomach. The comforter rustled as she shifted uneasily. He leaned in until he could cup her stomach. “Another child would be a gift.”
“He’d be hunted.”
“It will be a girl.”
“How do you know?”
“Chosen and human matings always produce girls.”
She shifted again. “That must piss you off.”
“I do not like your swearing.” He stood and moved to her head. Her confusion and frustration consumed her emotions. He would lessen both if he knew how. “And why would you think any child would be a disappointment?”
“Men always want sons.” There was resentment in her voice that he could not understand.
“Any child gifted to the Chosen is valued by all.”
She shifted up. He caught her under the shoulders, helping her past the last of her weakness. “So pretty much, I’m just a baby machine to everyone these days.”
He accepted the lash of her bitterness without correction. “You are my mate.”
“You didn’t want me until you knew Jalina was yours.”
“I wanted you.”
“I could tell by how fast you came for me.”
Pain overwhelmed the bitterness in the words, the dual emotions lashing out from within the residue of her satisfaction. He had an impression of hope gone dry and a hell beyond endurance. His grip tightened on her shoulder as guilt flowed from his center. “You believed I would come?”
Her gaze dropped from his, as if there was shame in a woman believing her mate would do anything less. “It was stupid.”
“It was not stupid.” He did not know if he would ever learn to live with the ways he had failed her, the marks her body bore because he had grown complacent. Marks he would not heal as they served a warning to him of how dangerous complacency could be. “I did not come because I thought you dead, but never again will I accept less than proof from my own eyes.”
She shrugged, her breasts rising and falling on the lie. “It was just one of those things.”
He tipped her chin up. Her eyes did not follow, remaining instead locked on her clenched hands. “You will not hide behind polite words. Your faith in me was broken.”
“I didn’t know you well enough to have faith.”
He touched her too thin cheek, drawing her gaze. “You hoped.”
“I was desperate.”
“You still are.” Her start betrayed everything she sought to hide. “Do you think I do not feel your turmoil?”
Her big blue eyes widened further. He brushed his thumb over her parted lips.
“It is the way it is. In this life and the next, I am bound to you. We cannot be parted without death.” He slowed her heartbeat and breathing. Her mental panic evaded his efforts. “You will tell me what upsets you.”
She grabbed his wrist. Her nails dug deep as she gasped, “They’ll come for me.”
“I am anticipating it.”
“You don’t know them.” Her grip tightened and her breath caught. “They won’t give up.”
“It does not matter.”
She was shaking her head before he finished the statement. “They’ll keep coming until they get me.”
He cupped he
r throat in his hand. His thumb rested against the mark from his bite. “They will never take you from me.”
“But if I leave, they will follow.”
The thought of her out there alone trying to stay ahead of the men who hunted her made his blood run cold. “You will not leave.”
She tugged at his arm. Her strength barely registered against his. She was so weak. So human. She took a breath. Her fear of being captured again was so strong it flavored the air. She grabbed his wrist with both hands, her arms shaking with the need to make him understand. “You and Jalina have a chance to escape if I can lead them away.” Hope lifted her voice. “You can take her so far away they’ll never find her.”
On the edges of her consciousness he felt the subtle probe. Was the stranger responding to Edie’s distress or taking advantage of it? “Your plan is unacceptable.”
She shook his arm. “It’s good if you stop thinking in terms of keeping me.”
“Since the day I found you, there has never been another thought.”
Her lips pulled back from her teeth. If she were Chosen, her fangs would be flashing in the lamplight. “Goddamn you!” She yanked away from him. “Why can’t you understand?”
She shoved her hair off her face, holding it against her head, pressing in with her palms as memories fed into the stream of her panic. “They can’t take Jalina. You can’t know what they’ll do to her, what they’ll put her through trying to become immortal.”
“They will not touch her.” Instead of soothing her, his calm unleashed her fury.
“Damn you!” She took a swing at him. He caught her hand before it could connect with his face. Her “You have to protect her” was a feral snarl flying in the wake of her blow. She swung at him again. He caught that one too, gentling his grip when she winced. He pulled her close as a subtle stirring began in her mind. The probe strengthened, giving him a path to follow. Deuce lashed out at the next foray, blocking the stranger before she could connect. Satisfaction at the faint echo of shock from the intruder filtered through his guilt and rage. Good. Let her run and tell the Coalition his mate was no longer unprotected. Let them fear the retribution of the Chosen.
He stroked Edie’s hair off her face, following the waves down her back, into the hollow of her spine where he lingered, pressing her into him, wanting to give her his strength, knowing he didn’t deserve her trust but needing it anyway. “Be calm, Edie.” She pressed her forehead into his chest as he said, “Jalina is safe and so are you.”
She shook her head, her forehead rocking on his breastbone as her hands opened on either side of her face, the fingertips stretching away, as if through sheer force of will she could undo all that was. Her tears left damp patches on his chest. “She’ll never be safe as long as I live.”
He could not bear her torment. It tore at his calm, bringing forth emotions as primitive as hers were strong. Dangerous emotions he could not control. He pulled her closer, her stomach pressing into his thighs, a small reminder that they had a future. “Your death would not stop anything.”
“If they can’t find her, they can’t hurt her.”
She clutched that plan with an unreasonable fervor. “You have thought on this for a long time.”
“I had nothing but time to think.” Her hands relaxed into his chest, one knuckle at a time as if she were forcing herself to calm. He wished he had her ability to manage the emotions that raged from her to him.
“That plan was made when you were alone, but you would do well to remember you have a mate now.”
“You can’t fight them all.”
“Dak is right.” He tipped her chin up and wiped the tear from the corner of her mouth. “You are hard on a mate’s ego.”
He did not get the smile he’d been looking for with his joke. Her chin trembled a second before the muscles in her jaw bunched. The faint grind of her teeth proceeded her, “Chosen or not, you’re just one man. They are hundreds.”
“You are not alone and neither am I. You are one of the Chosen, and we will guard what is ours.”
“Jalina?”
“In six hundred years, no Chosen union has been blessed. And only one Other family has conceived. Jalina is more precious than you can understand. She is our hope for the future. She will not be taken while a Chosen draws breath.”
“I want to believe you.”
“You have no choice. If the Coalition knows anything about the Chosen, they know that all they need to do to get me is to capture you.”
She gasped. “You can’t let them take you!”
“Then you cannot allow me to think they have you.”
“But you would know…”
He shook his head, his hair brushing her cheeks before settling amidst the blonde strands of hers on the top of her chest. “As the woman you hear in your head can block me, I would not know. And I would not chance thinking a truth a lie.”
“But Jalina—”
“Is only safe if you are with me. And you cannot leave me.”
Eden leaned back, her instinctive trust that he would not let her fall settling some of the anger surging at her insistence on leaving. “You keep saying that.”
“You need to feed regularly or you will die.”
Beneath his hand, her spine pulled taut. “How regularly?”
“Daily.”
“Good God! I can’t be away from you for more than a day?” Her shock at this announcement left her totally dependent upon his strength.
“Your discomfort would become unbearable after two.”
She shoved at his hold. “You mean I’m a junkie, and you’re my drug?”
He held her easily, not trusting her apart from him as she absorbed this. “It is as it should be.”
“You never told me that.”
“I told you it was forever.”
“But not that I would be addicted.”
“Bonding is not an addiction.”
“So says the man who can walk away.”
“I can no more walk away than you can.”
“Right.”
Dak was right. Her ignorance was dangerous. “My life force is bonded to yours. If you die, I die. It is that simple.”
She slumped against him. “Oh God, you totally messed things up.”
If ever a plan needed “messing up”, it was hers. “I set things right.”
She had nothing to say, just lay against him, her despair prodding his beast to roar in frustration. There was nothing he could say to ease this for her. A Chosen woman would rejoice at coming under a mate’s care. His independent human viewed it as a fate worse than death.
He changed the subject. “This woman who speaks to you, can you block her?”
It took her a minute to switch subjects. A small shake of her head preceded her “No”.
“But you can block me.” He made it a statement of fact.
She looked up and bit her lip, the natural red color receding under a wash of white from the pressure of her teeth. “She can. I can’t do much on my own.”
“Unless I touch you?” The woman had to be a very strong telepath, her connection to Edie just as great to accomplish so much from afar.
She nodded and shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I don’t know why.”
Neither did he, but he would. “The reason will be discovered. In the meantime, it will be my pleasure to touch you often.”
Touching her was his greatest pleasure and biggest distraction. He needed to talk to Dak and Nick. Security needed to be updated on the new threat. He needed to feed again before dawn so he would not awaken weakened. He needed to do many things, but instead he stood there, his discipline subdued as if it were nothing as he savored the texture of her skin, the scent of her pleasure, the gentle beat of her heart. His hand drifted to her belly again.
She sighed and stepped back. “You are obsessed with my stomach.”
He followed her, cupping his hand over the curve. “You are beautiful like this. Has your discomfort eased?”
> “It’s no worse than my time of the month.”
Excitement surged through his body like a streak of lightning. “I had forgotten that humans bleed.”
She rolled her eyes. “The proper term is menstruate.”
Menstruate, bleed, he would not quibble over a term. “When is your next time?”
“Far enough away that we don’t need to worry about it.”
“I was not worried.”
Her blush heated her chest and face to a fiery red that made her hair glow like spun gold in contrast. “We are so not going there.”
He was definitely going there, but he did not need to argue about it now. “I need to advise the Others on the security issues and to feed.”
She stepped back. “Go ahead. I’m fine.”
She was far from fine. Too much had happened, too fast for that, but she was as good as could be expected. “I will have food and Jalina brought to you.”
Her initial response was joy, quickly buried under a flood of desperation that dissolved under a wash of love so intense that he didn’t know why she thought she could ever stay distant from her daughter.
“So much for our one night.”
“There will be others. Many others.”
Her doubt swept over him in disturbing ripples. Deuce paused before opening the door. A glance over his shoulder showed her slipping back into another too big T-shirt and shorts. He needed to get her more clothes. Clothes that defined her beauty. Clothes that left no doubt to all Chosen that she was mated. Maybe then he could get the wildness she inspired in him under control. He would ask Marlika to shop for her.
He drew himself up to his full height, sending his senses out, scanning the area for threat, blinking as he absorbed the information flowing back. The enemy gathered. “You are not alone, Edie. Those who have harmed you will be punished. Those who think to harm you will not succeed.”
Conception Page 25