Ivy wondered why that tidbit hadn't made it into the journal.
“Is that where my brother and I were conceived?”
“No.”
Ivy waited for her father to say more, but the smirk he gave her was a blatant clue to confirm he wasn't going to give her anything except exactly what she asked for. She rolled her eyes and elaborated.
“Where in the wide world did you and my mother meet on Beltane the night my brother and I were conceived, and how did you get there?”
“It was a young forest somewhere on this Godforsaken spit of land you call, America. She summoned me using a token I'd given her.”
“And were you aware when you left her, that she was so hurt and battered by what you'd done to her, it took her an entire day before she was able to crawl to the nearest source of water to clean up?”
Ivy slipped the nasty question in as casually as possible, and it seemed from the way Donnatar opened his mouth to immediately respond, then closed it, that he was indeed surprised and thrown off. He struggled not to look at Ilex, who had shifted in his chair to better see his father's expression and seemed quite eager to hear his answer.
Donnatar simply said, “Yes.”
“Did you care?” Ivy pressed, hoping her voice sounded as blank and emotionless as her father's.
“No.”
Uriah squeezed her hand hard enough to make her bones rub together, but it was good. It felt good to know he shared her anger.
Rowena gave an indelicate sniff and an icy smile. “What a gentleman.”
Ivy sucked down a mouthful of tea, rolling an ice cube around her mouth in hopes of cooling the stream of vicious things she had to say. She was suddenly very glad she didn't have Juliet's explosive temper because her father would have had no misconceptions as to what Ivy thought about him if she did.
“So, you sought out my mother and offered to impregnate her?”
Donnatar lifted his shoulder in a lazy shrug. “I'd like to think I was a bit more eloquent than that, but yes.”
“What exactly were the terms of the deal my mother made with you?”
Donnatar’s deer-shaped ears twitched when a fly buzzed to close to his face. “She stated she was willing to do anything for a child. Anything.” He scoffed, “Only the most desperate of fools say such things to the Fae. I could have told her to lie with a rutting boar and she would have if it meant getting with child. But, I was kind.
“I offered her a night of unparalleled pleasure, and in return for carrying my child, she would get to keep hers. She was to summon me on the eve of your birth and give up one of my offspring.”
“That's it?” Ivy asked skeptically.
“That's it,” Donnatar echoed, his lips twisting into a cold, calculating smirk. “She should have bargained to keep the child she bore for the rest of her days, but those are the errors made by desperate women.”
Uriah lifted her hand to his mouth, momentarily distracting her with the stroke of his tongue across her knuckles, followed by a kiss to the back of her hand. It was tender, unexpected, and just what she needed not to blow up.
“If you're a forest god, how much of a forest goddess does that make me?”
Donnatar clearly found that to be a hilarious question, as he threw his head back and roared with laughter. Ilex even gave a chuckle, but his was kind, where their father's was brutally mocking.
“None at all. You have far more magic than the average Green Man, but not nearly enough to be called a goddess.”
“We'll have to disagree on that one,” Uriah cut in, smiling at her in a way that no normal father would appreciate.
Ivy forced herself to smile back, still a little uncomfortable with how out of control she felt when she used sex magic to work up enough power to claim the land.
Both times, she went into it intending to follow the rituals she'd learned in school, and both times, the part of her that was Fae completely took over. Uriah obviously enjoyed it—he suggestively said he wouldn’t mind doing it more often—and accepted it as just another part of her. The level of power she felt and the dissatisfaction she hadn't confessed to Uriah worried her more than a little bit.
The pleasure was off the charts, but there was a moment after she and Uriah had their unbelievably explosive orgasm together, where she