To her surprise, Ivy opened the door to the bedroom Rose had shown her to that first night, and found the space empty. For the past week, every time she had managed to slip away from her six-and-a-half-foot shadow before bed, she had found him already here, waiting for her, showing no intention of leaving, no matter what she might order him to do. Any time she protested, Baen would just kiss her until she forgot all about maintaining distance and not complicating matters with sex. Or really, her own name. When that giant Guardian touched her, Ivy could not think at all.
She could only feel.
So where was he tonight? And for goodness’ sake, why did she feel such a wave of disappointment at the idea that all her previous attempts at pushing him away might have finally had the (ostensibly) desired effect? She should be whipping out the pompoms and doing her happy dance, not feeling the hot press of tears behind her eyes.
Well, maybe she could at least blame that last part on PMS? Hormones were always a good excuse. Right?
Sniffling and calling herself ten kinds of idiot (idiot with cheese, diet idiot, idiot with chocolate sauce, et cetera, et cetera), Ivy padded into the en suite bathroom and washed up in preparation for bed. She’d had a little time to think since that conversation with Drum and Ash on the terrace before dinner. Even though there were people everywhere in the manor, they had all seemed to be operating according to some shared understanding that Ivy should be left alone. Even after dinner when it had been expected that she join the other Wardens in the blue salon, the conversation had flowed around her, including her without demanding much in the way of responses from her.
Maybe Drum had tipped the others off? She couldn’t see him gossiping or directly reporting what they had talked about to anyone else, but he was such a nice man that she could see him warning the others that she had a lot on her mind, and maybe they should give her some space.
She’d gotten that, and her mind had put it to use almost without asking permission. Or, in other words, she’d spent the remainder of her night brooding about what to do about herself, her Guardian, and all the conflicted feelings currently twisting up inside her.
There hadn’t been all that much else to choose from. In the past week, Ivy had learned that life at the manor moved in time with the traditions of the French countryside. While they might be less than forty miles from Paris in the geographical sense, in all other ways Maison Formidable occupied a world apart from the capital. The Wardens who had sought refuge here had come from all over the world, and yet they seemed to have embraced the slow pace and unhurried lifestyle of the local population. Only, you know, with magic, instead of farming.
That meant that days were spent learning how to cast spells and catching up on the history of the Guild, while the Guardians smashed at each other with sharp and/or heavy objects. Evenings, on the other hand, revolved around conversation and games, rather than television or painting the town. Ivy had heard rumors that the manor did have a satellite dish and several accompanying TVs, but hadn’t spotted one since her arrival. Instead, she’d spent time reading and talking and studying.
And studiously avoiding the very being she had expected to find waiting for her in the bedroom. Now that he had failed to show after she’d spent the entire evening searching her soul to discover how she really felt about him, Ivy couldn’t help but feel a little miffed. How dare he give up on her just as she had maybe, almost, sort of, half decided that she didn’t want him to?
Ivy finished brushing her teeth, rinsed out her mouth, and made a face at herself in the mirror. She at least had enough self-awareness to realize how ridiculous she sounded, even inside her own head. But that didn’t change the feelings behind her thoughts.
Hours of quiet reflection had told her that it was entirely possible she had feelings for Baen that had nothing at all to do with Fate or destiny or anything in the universe other than the fact that he made her heart race and her knees go weak. If she admitted that to herself, then she also had to admit that if he had been any other man on the face of the earth, she’d have been chasing him across the manor grounds, not leaving it the other way around. She didn’t like to think of herself as a bigot, but what was really stopping her from doing exactly that? Other than the fact that he was a Guardian and she was human.
Who cared? Not a single other couple around them had let that put a stop to their relationships, so why should Ivy?
Turning off the bathroom light, she crossed back to the bed, climbed under the downy duvet and clicked off the bedside lamp. As she settled herself in a nest of fluffy pillows, she allowed herself to admit the answer.
Fear.
Fear had held her paralyzed since the first moment she laid eyes on Baen in that dark, narrow alley, and if she didn’t start fighting back, fear might rob her of her greatest chance at happiness. So what if destiny had brought them together? Most people would kill for the sure knowledge that they had met their soul mate. They wouldn’t be pouting and whining over it like she had.
Maybe it was time to embrace the idea that while Fate might have conspired to present Ivy with certain opportunities over the last several days, it was up to her to seize them and make the most of them. That was a choice Ivy could make, and after several hours of introspection, she had.
She wanted Baen.
The question then became, did he still want her?
She didn’t hear him approach, but then she never did. What she did feel was the way the mattress dipped when he settled his heavy weight on the edge beside Ivy’s hip. Her gaze flew through the dark to settle on his face, barely visible in the unlit room. She didn’t need to see him, though. She felt his eyes on her, that reassuring warmth she had come to take for granted over the past week.
He sat in silence for a long time, and it fascinated her to see the way his gaze caught fire as he watched her. She saw the first spark leap in the dark black pools and watched as it ignited a tiny flame that then burned brighter and brighter the longer he looked at her. For the first time it really struck her that she was the reason his eyes burned, and it made her stomach turn slow somersaults in nervous excitement.
“I was starting to think you’d found somewhere more comfortable to sleep,” she whispered after a moment. The words came out so quietly, she could barely hear them herself.
Baen shook his head. “There is nowhere else. Not for me.”
Her heart leaped, but her brain cautioned her not to read too much into the words. Maybe he meant that the house was crowded and he couldn’t find an empty room. Or that he felt too duty-bound as her Guardian to leave her vulnerable to attack while she slept. His words could have any number of explanations, and she was afraid to interpret them in case she drew the wrong conclusion.
When silence stretched between them, she felt her nerves stretch as well until she couldn’t bear the tension. “Baen—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “No. I need to speak with you, to you, and I must tell you before we go any further. Before you distract me once again.”
Ivy wanted to protest that she wasn’t the only one providing a distraction over the past week. He should know by now what happened when he flashed those rippling muscles of his and paraded around the room half naked, with his jeans hanging low off his Adonis belt. Every time she saw those grooves carved into the sides of his hips, she wanted to trace the lines with her teeth and tongue. And he called her a distraction.
His finger slid from her mouth to her cheek, cupping it in a tender caress. “For all of the long years that I have lived in your world, I have believed certain things to be true,” he began. He spoke slowly and quietly, as if he himself needed to understand as much as he wanted her to do so. “I believed that I existed for only one reason—to fight against the Darkness. I believed that being trapped in sleep for centuries upon centuries had purpose and honor, because my brothers and I were told this by those who summoned us. I believed that as a Guardian, the only emotions I could feel were those that swept through me in the heat of battle—rage, fury, hatred for my enemy, triumph and pride when I emerged victorious.”
Ivy listened and felt her heart contract. What an empty existence he described, cold and gray and in the end futile. His battles against the Darkness kept humans like her safe, but his life of eternal sleep punctuated by nothing but brief moments of danger and bloodshed sounded to her as if they’d been designed to create an army of serial killers. With nothing of hope or love to soften their experiences, the endless rounds of conflict and pain should have warped the Guardians into monsters. The fact that they remained stalwart and honorable, dedicated to the service of the Light, only demonstrated their essential goodness. And contrasted it with the frankly evil actions of the generations of Wardens who had kept them imprisoned.
She reached up and laid her hand over Baen’s, squeezing in acknowledgment and silent encouragement.
“All of that I believed, amare, and to me it seemed like graven truth that I should be separate from the world I defended, that I should form no attachments to it, since it would pass by me as I slept. To have developed feelings for humans who would grow old and die while I slumbered would have driven me mad. It seemed wiser and safer to allow things to continue on as I believed they had always done.”
His thumb stroked across her bottom lip and the corner of his mouth lifted in a tiny smile. “And then you appeared, and all of the universe tumbled into its proper alignment.”
Her heart skipped and shuddered into a much faster beat, racing ahead while Ivy stared into those burning eyes and tried to contain the rush of excitement and hope that welled inside her.
“I looked at you,” Baen continued. “I looked, and I saw the true purpose of my existence laid out before me. You were the thing I had been summoned to defend, and to protect the rest of your kind was only a happy accident. You were the Light I could never let fall to the Darkness, the Light that guided me through all the long years of waking and sleeping. You were the reason for the heart that beat within me, the reason I could feel anything other than the bleak, numb emptiness of endless solitude.”
Ivy’s throat tightened until she couldn’t have said anything if her life had depended on it. All she could do was look into his gaze and hope he could see the words reflected in hers.
“Ivy. Amare. My perfect little human.” He leaned down and brushed his lips gently over hers, more of a caress than a kiss, infinitely tender and full of reverence. “I know that your own world has turned upside down in the days since you met me, and I know that you have been overwhelmed with new knowledge and new rules, with magic and legends and talk of Fate and your responsibilities as a Warden. I know all that, but I want you to believe that none of it is as important as what I have to say to you.”
Baen reached out with his other hand to hold her face cradled between his palms. He leaned in until he hovered only inches away, until all she could see was the fire in his dark eyes.
Until all she could see was him.
“Ivy Beckett, of the red hair and the smoky eyes,” he murmured, his lips smiling but his voice deep and serious. “Ivy of the quick tongue and the tender heart, know that whatever you decide, whatever path you choose to tread, guided by Fate or your own bright mind, I am yours. I shall always be yours, to embrace or to cast aside as you wish. For as long as I draw breath in this realm, I shall protect and defend you, walk beside you or behind you and support you in all things.”
Forget not being able to talk. When Ivy heard those words, she forgot how to breathe. Her chest seized up and her heart felt as if a fist had wrapped around it and squeezed. Her vision began to blur, and it took a moment for her to realize that it was from the tears that had welled up in her eyes. Tears of happiness, or gratitude, or too much emotion in too small a body.
Tears of love.
And Baen wasn’t even finished. He had saved the best for last.
“I love you, amare.”
He said it simply and softly and with so much conviction, it might as well have been etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. There was no question of doubting him. His words were Truth, and they were for her alone.
She didn’t know how to contain the emotions welling inside her. She had a feeling they would spill over at any moment.
“I love you. I will love you always, and whether you grow to return my feelings or you send me away from you, I will not cease to love you for as long as there is Light in the universe. Because you are my Light, and everything aside from you fades into insignificance.”
“Baen.”
She breathed his name, blinking away the tears only to find more welling up to take their place. She stroked her hands up his arms to curl her fingers around his broad shoulders. She needed to hang on to something, and she needed to prove to herself that he was real, that she hadn’t imagined this entire scene, hadn’t conjured it up from a wishful heart.
“Baen. You terrify me,” she admitted, hating the look of hurt that crossed his face, but needing to get the words out. “Not because of what you are, but because of what you make me feel. I didn’t think this was possible. I didn’t think that there was any such thing as one perfect partner for everyone. I didn’t believe in true love or soul mates or happily ever after. And I certainly didn’t believe that someone could swoop into my life out of thin air and wind up being the only thing in the world that I couldn’t live without.”
She reached up to brush her knuckles over his raspy jaw and struggled to find the words to admit to both of them what her heart had already assured her was true.
“That’s why I keep running away from you,” she admitted, ashamed of how she’d been treating him, blowing hot and cold, shunning him one moment, and melting into his embrace the next. “That fear. I’ve been so afraid, I haven’t even been able to admit to myself how scared I really was. Until tonight.” She took a deep breath. “Tonight I realized that the only thing that scares me more than what you make me feel, is the idea of losing you because I was too afraid to hold on.”
He started to protest, but she shook her head and hushed him. She needed for him to hear this, and she needed to say it aloud. “No, it’s the truth. You don’t deserve to be treated the way I’ve treated you, and I don’t deserve to live my whole life with the fear that whatever I love is going to be taken away from me. We both deserve better than that.”
Her mouth quirked in a trembling smile. “Besides, I don’t have to grow to love you, Baen. If I didn’t love you already, I wouldn’t be so bloody terrified of losing you.”
“Amare.” His thumbs rubbed the tears from her cheek, his mouth descending to kiss her watery eyes. “You could never lose me, little one. There is no place under the Light where you could go that I would not follow. No, I am afraid you are stuck with me. I will follow you into the heart of Darkness, if I have to.”
Ivy laughed. The sound came out a little gurgly because of those tears she still couldn’t stop, and a little giddy because of all the joy welling up inside her. But hey, those weren’t necessarily bad things, right? Baen didn’t seem to mind.
“You know, if I didn’t totally get where you were coming from, that would sound a little stalkerish,” she teased, pulling him down to kiss him through her wide grin.
“Stalkerish?” He frowned. “What is that?”
She chuckled. “I’ll explain later. Right now, I feel like celebrating. C’mere.”
Baen offered not a word of protest. In fact, he seized control of the kiss she pressed on him, devouring her mouth with unchecked fervor. And here Ivy had thought him passionate before. Apparently, the big Guardian had been holding back on her.
Well, not anymore. He made that clear when he crawled onto the bed on top of her, caging her in with his huge, muscular body. He made her feel small and vulnerable in the most exciting way, because she knew he was strong enough to overpower her and yet too respectful and tender to try.
Unless she asked him to, very, very nicely.
At the moment, she didn’t have that option. He had captured her mouth and showed no signs of yielding the territory. He nipped at her lips, stroked with his tongue, and basically drove her crazier and crazier with each breathless minute that passed. Hmm, she had a sneaking suspicion that two could play at that game.
She surrendered to the kiss, responding to his demands with eager participation, but as busy as her lips were, her hands hated to miss all the fun. They glided down Baen’s sides to the waistband of his jeans, tracing the path of the denim to the button closure in front. A few quick tugs had it popping free, and a few more brought his zipper hissing down.
His erection spilled into her hands, already full and hard and leaking drops of fluid from the tip. She curled her fingers around the shaft and brushed her thumb across the head, rubbing his own moisture back into his heated skin. He groaned into her mouth, a fierce, guttural sound that only made her more determined to shatter his control.
She tightened her fingers, squeezing his cock, and began pumping his length in slow, firm strokes. His groans turned to a low, rumbling growl that vibrated against her chest and made her press her legs together against the tingling arousal at her core. The fact that she could affect him this way enthralled her. To have all his power at her mercy made her head spin and her sex grow slick and eager. She wanted him inside her, but she was having too much fun teasing him to rush things.
Too bad Baen seemed to be in a bit of a hurry.
He gripped the neck of her tank top in two huge fists and tore it to shreds without even bothering to break their kiss. A second later, her panties suffered the same fate, scraps of lace and cotton fluttering to the floor like confetti. She might have cared if she hadn’t been too busy shuddering at the press of his skin against hers as he settled his body over her and pressed her into the mattress. Trapped between a rock and a soft place, Ivy couldn’t think of a single location she’d rather be.
She used her free hand to push his jeans down over his hips, refusing to release her grip on his cock. The soft skin over the hard length fascinated her, and the way he hissed and grunted every time she stroked him only fueled her arousal. With his trousers loosened, she wrapped her legs around his bare hips and used her feet to push the annoying fabric completely out of the way.
She couldn’t bear to have anything between them any longer, and Baen seemed to share her sentiment. He kicked the garment to the floor and settled heavily between her thighs, rocking against her until she could feel the backs of her own fingers pressing into her wetness.
Enough of that.
Giving up on her teasing, she guided him to her entrance, pressing up against him and begging him to enter her. Lifting his head, Baen broke the kiss and held her gaze and he began to drive himself within her. “Te amo, amica mea.”
Ivy wrapped herself around him, arms and legs clinging, feeling his muscles shift and flex as he joined their bodies together. Her pussy stretched and ached and welcomed him. Having him inside her made her feel complete in a way she hadn’t known was possible before now. She arched beneath him, wanting nothing more than to draw him closer. If she could have pulled him inside her skin, she’d have done it just to feel him even closer against her heart.
Baen dropped his head and took her mouth again. She felt dizzy and breathless and higher than a kite. She felt like her heart could burst and her lungs could seize and it wouldn’t matter, because they shared one heart and one breath and that was all they needed to survive.
Each other.
He began to move inside her, sliding deep only to draw back over and over, every motion a rough caress to her inner nerve endings. She began to tremble as the tension built inside her. She felt it like a knot of fire and pressure behind her pelvis, and the only way to assuage it was to move with him, to take him deep and cling tight against every attempt to withdraw. She fought a losing battle, but it didn’t matter, because they would both be able to claim this victory.
“Baen!” She shouted his name as he shifted his weight, bumping the head of his cock against a bundle of nerves that sent firecrackers exploding behind her closed eyelids. Her body clenched hard around his and he growled something unintelligible before repeating the movement again and again.
She shattered, body bowing off the mattress only to be slammed down again with the force of Baen’s final thrusts. All she could do was cling to him while the world fell away and her consciousness burst into millions of tiny fragments that danced off into the ether like the sparks from a popping bonfire.
Vaguely, she felt Baen go rigid as he surrendered to his own climax. She just held on while he emptied himself with shuddering groans, then collapsed atop her on a long, grunting sigh.
The sound made her smile, at least inside her head. She couldn’t feel a damn thing, so she had no idea whether her lips moved or not. It didn’t matter. That had been worth some paralysis and possible permanent sensory damage. It had been worth everything.
Love was, after all.