Lord of the Wolfyn - By Jessica Andersen Page 0,75
other parts of her were staying silent—because in the end this wasn’t the human realm, wasn’t even the wolfyn realm. They were in the kingdoms where magic—and emotion—trumped.
She had heard it all before: love is messy, it hurts, it’s not logical, it defies prediction. But now she got why those were clichés, got why some people nodded knowingly over them while others looked blank.
Her parents hadn’t made any sense together. On the surface, a fey dreamer, possibly even a realm traveler, shouldn’t have had anything in common with the stalwart, conservative, linear-thinking major. Yet they had chosen each other, had made four children together. More, when she died, a piece of him had died with her—the piece that had known how to laugh, how to live, how to remember without letting the past take over the present.
Reda had long known that she was a product of her mother’s death and the way her father changed. What she hadn’t really grasped, though, was that she had also come from a love that had been so strong that it had drawn her parents together despite their differences, and whose absence had made her father a different, lesser man.
Which brought to mind another of those sayings: throw your heart over first and the rest will follow. He had done that and gotten burned. Had she on some level realized it and held herself at a distance rather than leading with her heart, not wanting the pain he’d lived through, not wanting to cause the pain he had experienced because of it?
When had she ever thrown herself into a relationship? More, when had she put her heart into it first? Maybe she had started to in the wolfyn realm, only to have Dayn’s secrets rear up between them. But even there she hadn’t given herself fully.
His test might have been proving that he could think of others before himself, but maybe hers had been to do the opposite and learn how to please herself and stop worrying about what other people—including the ones she channeled in her head—thought about her decisions.
“Got it figured out yet?”
Starting, she looked over and found Dayn watching her through heavy-lidded eyes. A flush touched her cheeks, warmed her skin and made her suddenly conscious of her own pulse. “Have I got what figured out? The way onto the island?”
“Whatever was making you look so fierce just now, like you were ready to take on the whole world by yourself. The thought of which, by the way, terrifies me.”
Hearing him sounding more like himself, she took a closer look. “You’re healed!”
He nodded, shifting and testing a muscle here, a move there. “I can’t explain it, but that little bit of your blood helped far more than I would have expected it to. Maybe it’s got something to do with whoever your ancestors were, or maybe it’s connected to the part of the spell that ties my life force to the island. Who knows? But believe it or not, I’m good to go.” He parted his ragged shirt to reveal his chest and flat stomach, made whole once more, save for reddish marks stamping the places where he had been torn to the bone an hour earlier.
If they had been in the outlaws’ cave, separated by fences and space, it might not have happened. But she was sitting so near him in the small hollow that it was too easy to stretch her hand across and press her palm to his chest to soak up the feel of the warm, yielding muscle the steady lub-dub of his heartbeat.
“I thought you were going to die.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, hadn’t meant for her eyes to well up.
He covered her hand with his own, holding her against his heart. “You’ve seen for yourself that I’m not easy to kill.”
“But you could have died back there. You still might.”
Reaching up with an arm that had been broken an hour before, he touched the single tear that had broken free, then cupped her cheek in his palm. “Ah, Reda. My sweet, sweet Reda. I wish I could freeze time right now. No more looking back or moving forward, just the two of us together.”
She closed her eyes and felt another tear track down her cheek as he leaned in and touched his lips to hers. And although nothing was different between them, there was something new inside her as she opened her mouth beneath his.