what you did to ease the pain. You were just trying to survive.”
“Look where ‘just trying to survive’ got me, though,” Alli said harshly.
For the next images which came up showed her same younger self holding a pregnancy test and running one hand through her hair anxiously.
“A baby,” she was muttering as she stared at the positive test. “What in the hell am I going to do with a baby?”
“So your womb did quicken once before,” Kane murmured.
Alli felt grief catch her by the throat and her voice came out tight and squeezed.
“Only once. But…I lost it.”
Images of her younger self clutching her abdomen and crying with a terrible mixture of relief and sorrow filled her head. This was the part of the dream that had affected her so, she realized. This image from her past which was so painful she’d pushed it down and away until she had almost forgotten it herself
“After that, I threw myself into law school,” Alli whispered. “I tried not to think of the baby I lost or wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been able to have it. And I stopped my crazy ways and got serious.”
“You put a lid on your desires—repressed them for years,” Kane rumbled, stroking her hair. “No wonder your yearnings called to me across universes. Your needs are so deep they are like a wound inside you, Allisandra. The need to be loved and to love—the need to bring forth new life…”
“You’ve only been making all those needs worse,” Alli accused him, but there was no real heat in her voice. She was too tired to be angry—too tired to resist anymore, she realized.
“I did exacerbate them,” Kane admitted unrepentantly. “But they were festering inside you, baby. If you hadn’t let them out, you would have been miserable all your life.”
“I’ll still be miserable, according to you,” Alli pointed out. “Since I’m going home to marry a man I don’t even love—one who won’t…won’t give me a baby.”
“I’ll give you one,” Kane promised, his harsh voice unexpectedly gentle. “Though I can’t keep you with me, I can give you what you long for, Allisandra. And I can love you in the way you need to be loved—at least in the time we have left.”
Alli bit her lip.
“I shouldn’t let you…shouldn’t want you to,” she whispered, though she did want him to—desperately. “I shouldn’t cheat on Douglas deliberately.”
“Let me worry about that,” Kane murmured. “Come here, baby.”
He drew her to him and kissed her deeply, his big, warm hands roving over her body as he did so.
Alli let herself get lost in the kiss. The practical little voice was shouting in her head that she shouldn’t do this—that it would go too far. But Alli ignored it. All week the big Kindred had been Stinging her and injecting all her most sensitive areas with his lust-honey and all week she’d been fighting the effects. Finally, she could fight no more.
The dream had shown her that what Kane said about her deepest desires was true. She had pushed them away for years in shame and pain, feeling like the miscarriage she’d suffered had been her own fault because she didn’t want the baby enough. She felt that she didn’t deserve to have another.
Now Kane was asking her to put that shame and fear and despair away and embrace what she truly wanted. It might be wrong in some ways, but it felt so right in others. Alli was tired of being ashamed, tired of wanting what she felt she didn’t deserve. Now she intended to take it.
So when the big Kru’ell One bent to suck her nipples, she thrust her breasts up eagerly. When he spread her legs to taste her pussy, she opened for him willingly and arched her back as he thrust his tongue deep inside her, eagerly lapping away the honey she made.
It wasn’t until he asked her to open herself for his shaft that Alli hesitated.
“Douglas,” she whispered, feeling the shame creep back in. “We’re supposed to be married in less than a month. How can I do this to him? How can I cheat on him like this?”
“You know he won’t give you what you so desperately crave,” Kane rumbled in her ear. “You know he won’t give you a child, Allisandra.”
“That still doesn’t make it right to make love with another man,” Alli protested.
Kane was silent for a moment and she could almost hear him thinking. Then he murmured, “I have