Dane (36 page)

Suddenly, Lena broke away from her, her face wild, almost panicked. She looked from Dane to Bastian to Sevin and to Dane again.

“What is it?”Dane asked, thinking something new must be wrong.

Shocking them all, she barreled toward him then and wrapped her small arms around his middle, hugging him with her face buried in his shirt. “Thank you for saving us.”

Dane‟s arms rose in surprise at her unexpected embrace; but then he slowly lowered them to her back and his expression filled with a new warmth Eva hadn‟t seen in him before. That of a parent reassuring his child. Their eyes caught over Lena‟s head and Eva melted inside, hoping.

Never one to be left out, Mimi raced over to join in the hug and was immediately included. And then Dane opened an arm to Eva, and she went to join in with a laughter that was a mix of relief and joy. And something more precious.

“We‟ll bid you good night,” said Bastian. Dane glanced up to see him and Sevin leaving the room and nodded to them in farewell. Satyr blood linked them, and they‟d sensed the depth of his feelings for this woman and were glad for him. Though Bastian still worried, he was reconciled.

“You and your nieces are welcome here,” Dane told her once they‟d gone. “Forever. You‟re part of my family now.”

Eva pulled slightly away and looked up at him, her adoring expression making him feel heroic.

“We‟re not nieces. We‟re orphans,” Mimi informed him.

Dane caught Eva‟s eye. “It‟s true,” she confessed.

“But we can‟t be orphans anymore,” Lena corrected. “Orphans don‟t have homes or families.”

“What, then?” asked Mimi.

“Would you like to be my daughters instead? Our daughters?”

Dane asked, his eyes never leaving Eva‟s. Tears filled her vision. As the girls enthusiastically embraced this proposal, he quirked a brow at her over their heads. “Is there anything else I should know about you?”

Dashing her tears away, she pretended to contemplate. “Hmm.

Let‟s see. I‟m the only female satyr in existence, my girls are not nieces, I wasn‟t afflicted with the Sickness. I believe that‟s the entirety of it.”

Dane stilled. “What was that last one?”

She smiled at him, fully aware that that last bit was news to him.

He shook his head in amazement “Damn, woman. A fertile female satyr?”

“So you see what a prize I would be to the Council,” she said.

His eyes softened. “But an even greater prize to me. Marry me, my love?”

The Tracker Dane had worried would come arrived three weeks later. He came only hours before the full moon was to make its appearance and brought with him an administrator laden with books and papers. Both were sitting unannounced in Dane‟s study, lying in wait when he walked in.

Bastian and Sevin were absent from the city, having escorted Luc to Tuscany and through the interworld gate. A kineticist in ElseWorld professing some experience with Luc‟s sort of preternatural abilities had offered to work with him. But the brothers would take no chances of losing him to ElseWorld‟s asylums as they had Dane, and had insisted on traveling there with him while Dane oversaw matters here until their return.

“Are you here to arrest me?”Dane asked the Tracker, going to sit at the massive desk Eva had purchased for him. The entire house gleamed now under her care, and the smell of lemon polish and beeswax and fresh air and joy mingled here as it had in his boyhood.

The administrator looked taken aback at his nonchalance. But the Tracker swiftly got down to business. “Military prison or rejoining your operative unit. Those are your two options.”

“I choose a third one,” said Dane, his eyes going to the window and Eva beyond it. She was in the yard playing a rowdy game of croquet with Mimi and Lena. Having come to see to the household accounts as he did weekly now as part of his new accounting business, Pinot was enjoying the game as well.

The Tracker‟s gaze followed his to Eva, and Dane scented his immediate appreciation for her many attractions. “Who‟s that?”

“My wife.”

The administrator went on alert. “You wed without permission?”

“The Council wanted a wedding,” said Dane. “Go back through the gate and tell them they got one.”

“Her name?” asked the administrator.

“Evangeline Delacorte.”

“Human?”asked the Tracker.

“A fey-human mix,” Dane lied smoothly.

The persnickety administrator began fussing. “I know her. She‟s a Marital Broker. Prepared her visa myself to send her through the gate.”

He frowned. “She‟s had the Sickness.”

“Not so, as it turns out,” Dane informed them, truthfully this time.

“But she was tested,” the administrator insisted.

Dane leaned forward, interrupting. “Tests are fallible. She‟s not infertile, I tell you. Tonight is to be Moonful. I‟ll make sure my seed takes in her. In another month I‟ll have the children you require of me.”

“But what sort of children? Not human as we requested,” tutted the administrator.

Dane‟s eyes narrowed. “No.”

The Tracker eyed him, weighing the truth of his words. “Children at least. That‟s something.”A shared camaraderie flashed between them, that of men bound by service and training. A moment later, the Tracker stood and waved his companion toward the door.

“But—“the administrator protested, sputtering.

“We‟re done here,” the Tracker stated unequivocally. “Lord Satyr is to be congratulated for securing this ancient grove again for our world.

And he has wed. It‟s plain to see he‟s besotted with his new wife. If they don‟t conceive, we can find him again easily enough to reopen the matter with him.”

He ushered the administrator out the door. As he followed, he turned back to Dane with a sardonic half smile. “These children you‟re planning to make with her. If they cannot be human, make them satyr, will you?”

Dane grinned slowly. “I‟ll do my best.”

With Eva as his mate, the man had no idea how easy that request would likely prove.

20

Mere hours later, Eva flew through the olive grove on Aventine Hill, her gown fluttering in the breeze. Her slippers were wet from the dewy grass, betony, and rosemary that grew low on the forest floor. Dane followed in her wake, not attempting to catch her but still enjoying the chase. It was Moonful, and his hunting instincts were keen, his blood running high.

A gentle misty rain was falling, the sky overhead a pendulous gray.

Although the moon was in hiding, its pull on them was strong. It wouldn‟t be long now.

Dane slowed when he saw where his delectable quarry was headed.

The temple. The mosaic was gone from it now, replaced with one removed from another ancient site and brought here. This one depicted harvest scenes showing grape and olive pickers with their baskets and nets, the vats and the urns, and the wild celebrations in which consumption of wine and olives featured prominently. The tunnel beyond the mosaic had been blasted to rubble, twenty yards deep so no door would ever open here again to steal their joy. Still, back at the house tonight, he‟d posted ten night servants to watch over Mimi and Lena, all with strict orders to keep them safe. Some fears died harder than others.

His beloved Eva awaited him on the temple steps now, her dress damp and clinging, her long hair in rivulets on her shoulders and crowned by a wreath of olive, like a beautiful pagan goddess.

“Nice gown,” he told her, drawing near.

She held the skirt of the long, simple linen shift wide on each side of her, and his eyes dropped to the way its sodden fabric molded her thighs and the shadowy vee where they joined. “Do you like it? It‟s from a design I found in one of Bastian‟s books. The traditional dress of a virgin on her wedding night in ancient Rome. Note the embroidery.”Her fingertips skimmed the decorative stitching over her breasts. Her nipples were dark circles, poking at the rain-soaked linen that covered them. They would be cool in his palms, his mouth.

His brows lowered. She‟d drawn his gaze there on purpose, offering enticements in hopes of luring him into ignoring the fact that she‟d brought him to this vile place. He moved closer and she kicked off her slippers, excitement lighting her eyes.

“We‟ve been married over a week now,” he informed her. “It‟s not our wedding night. I distinctly remember our wedding night.”He reached overhead for a gnarled branch, plucking an olive from it, juicy and plump.

She glanced at the small green oval he rolled between his forefinger and thumb and blushed, remembering exactly what he‟d done with a very similar olive on their wedding night. Rouging it over her slippery folds, separating her petals, and tucking it delicately inside her core and.. She sighed with remembered bliss. Although he didn‟t know it, she had saved that small olive, carefully placing it in a velvet box within a treasure trove that also contained the portrait of him Lena had made that day in her study and the neatly folded wrapping paper from the box of olives he‟d sent her afterward.

“But this will be our first Moonful here on your land,” she coaxed softly. “I made this gown to celebrate it.”

“Eva.” Her name was a primitive growl in Dane‟s throat. He took the steps to stand just below her.

“Dane.” A stairstep above him, she put her hands on his shoulders, her reply light and teasing. Then more earnestly, she said, “Let it happen here. Our first Moonful together. Let it happen where your ancestors mated, where they made love and babies under the full moon long before we were born. Let us heal here together, join our bodies in the ancient way for the first time.”

Tension crackled between them, electric and waiting, and then Dane peeled off his shirt, trousers, and boots in a flurry, leaving them lying on the stairs. He came to her and tossed something on the raised altar beyond them. Something he‟d been carrying. A coil of rope. She shivered, anticipation coloring her eyes darker. His hands went to her waist. “This will be a first for us both, for I‟ve never had a Moonful of my own, one without Dante.”

“And I have had far too many on my own.” She inhaled his warm scent and moaned softly. The longer she was in his company, the more easily she could discern it as distinct and precious among others. “I brought something as well, earlier today.”

“Another surprise.” He sounded wary.

She turned away, going to the altar. “The wedding ritual entails wine, but I thought for tonight”—she held up a bottle and tilted it, filling her palm with viscous amber—“olive oil.”Setting the bottle aside, she returned to him and cupped her palms around him, massaging his cock and balls until they glistened. And all the while he watched her with stormy silver eyes, enjoying the sight of her doing this service for him.

The backs of her fingers stroked his abdomen, making it quiver and ripple.

His skin was smooth there. But the muscles beneath were extraordinarily taut. With the coming of the moon, his second prick would emerge. “It excites me to know how you‟ll Change here,” she whispered.

He grabbed her wrists, his voice tight with emotion. “I want to be in you when it happens. I want you to feel it.”

She drew a harsh breath and sunk her teeth into her lower lip, nodding. “Yes. Yes.”

She took his arm and they hurried to the altar. It was slick and puddled with rain, but she readily knelt on the marble ledges that jutted from the base of it.

He picked up the rope he‟d brought, and her eyes watched him uncoil it. With experienced fingers, he looped and knotted it securely around her wrists, binding them together. He nodded toward the altar that stretched before her. “Will you be cold?”

She shook her head, smiling slightly. “Not for long.”Still on her knees, she half-lay facedown on its surface so breast and cheek met cool, rainslicked stone. Her breasts settled into the slight depressions where the slab had been worn smooth by the breasts of other women who‟d prostrated themselves here in earlier centuries. He drew her arms up and tethered her to the mooring that protruded at the head of the altar, then came to stand in the hollow of the jutting ledge, between her splayed thighs. And she awaited his pleasure then as generations of females before her had awaited the pleasure of his male ancestors.

Her damp, ceremonial gown clung, delineating the cleft of her buttocks. He lifted the back of the linen length high, unveiling her.

“Gods, I wish you could see how beautiful you look, bound here, half naked, and so open for me,” he said.

He tilted her hips up, noting the telltale signs of the moon‟s effect on her—the deep crimson flushing of her folds, their unusually plump petaling around her feminine core. Pouring oil in his palm, he cupped it to her there and she moaned, rubbing against his hand, massaging herself until she was dripping with it. Another symptom—hypersensitivity.

Then he dribbled more viscous amber along the crevice of her bottom, anointing her with oil from olives planted here by the ancients from his world. He spread her cheeks, massaging it into her pruney ring, hearing her whimper as he slipped a finger inside. The signs were here as well, a general puffiness, a responsiveness to the merest touch. “I can‟t wait to come inside you here,” he said, his voice low and dark.

“Dane.” It was a moan, a plea. “Why is it so. . intense?”

“The Calling,” he told her. “Without your powders to inhibit it, the moon has affected you physically in this way, made you incredibly sensitive and responsive. And so fucking beautiful.”