“Ah.” He touched my cheek lightly, then ran his fingers down to my lips. My body quivered under his touch, desire spreading like wildfire. “I see.”
“Do you?” I asked, my gaze searching his intently. “This will create life between us, and that child will bind us more than any words ever could. Is the thief ready for that sort of responsibility? Ready for me to be a permanent part of your life?”
“The thief was a goner the minute the woman with wild-looking hair decided to play chicken in the middle of an Oregon highway.”
He smiled, and there in his eyes was all the emotion I could ever want. Love, desire, need. It was right there, a fierceness shining in the brightness of his eyes. And the ache in my heart eased a little, because while I might have lost my parents, I’d gained something else. A lover, a companion, a friend. A man who would be with me, stand by me, no matter what happened, for the rest of my life.
“You couldn’t escape me now, even if you wanted to,” he added, then leaned forward and kissed me. “You complete me, Destiny. There’s no other place I want to be, and nothing else I’d rather do than walk into that water with you and celebrate your mother’s life. I just wish it wasn’t so fucking cold.”
I laughed, gloriously, deliriously happy for the first time in years and years, and threw my hands around his neck. “God, I’m so glad you said that, because I’ve been in love with you for what seems like forever. I was just too chicken to say anything.”
He kissed me, soft and slow and oh-so gloriously, and then I helped him strip. When he was finally naked, we walked into the deeper water. It was cold, but I didn’t care, and he didn’t seem to, either.
He pulled me close. I melted against him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and kissed him again, hard and fierce, until my head was spinning and I wasn’t sure whether it was lack of air or sheer happiness.
After that, his touch and his lips seemed to be everywhere, fueled by urgency and yet filled with passion. I let my fingers roam, giving them the freedom of his glorious body, touching and tasting and teasing, even as he touched and teased. The deep-down ache blossomed and grew, becoming such a sweet agony that I groaned, arching my back, pressing into his touch, wanting him as fiercely as I’d wanted anything in my life.
Finally, he slid deep inside and it felt so good, so right, I could only groan. I wrapped my legs around him, holding him tight against me, wanting every bit of him. He wrapped his arms around me and leaned forward, kissing my nose gently.
“This is how I’ll always remember you,” he said softly, his eyes the blue of the rising day, bright with the wildness and need. “With the dark waters at your back, the heat of passion in your face, and the power of the dawn shining in your eyes.”
“Not dawn,” I whispered, “the loch. And she is getting frustrated that you won’t get down to business.”
“Sweetheart, she’s not the only one. But teasing is good for the soul.”
“Not my soul.”
He laughed, a sound that curled joyously around us, filling the air with sheer happiness.
He began to move—not urgently, not desperately, but slowly, passionately. And I answered in kind, kissing him deeply, my arms tightening against his neck, as if I never, ever meant to let him go.
“Look at me,” he ordered, after a while.
I opened my eyes, looked into his. And again I felt like I was falling deep into those wild pools of blue, slipping deep under the surface, captured and secured, never to be free from his grip again. And I couldn’t have been happier.
He began to move, sliding in and out, and the feel of him penetrated every fiber, enveloping me in a heat that was so basic, and yet so very pure. His hands were on my hips, supporting my butt, holding me steady as he rocked deep, his touch seeming to brand my skin as his thrusts gradually became more and more urgent, until passion and desire and need became a wildfire that burned through every part of me.
“Come with me, sweetheart.”
His words were hoarse, urgent, his breath hot as it whispered past my cheek. His powerful body stroked fast and deep, driving me insane with need. I tightened my legs around him, urging him deeper still, wanting, needing, every inch of him. He groaned, and thrust harder, and it felt so good I cried out in pleasure. Then the sweet pressure broke, and I was drowning, shuddering, under the force of a glorious release.
“Oh God, yes!”
He came with me, his roar echoing across the silence, making the dark waters shimmer and dance at the glory of it all as his body slammed mine so hard waves rolled away from our bodies and went racing across the loch.
For several seconds, we remained locked in each other’s embrace. Our breathing was ragged and despite the chill of the water, sweat pooled where our flesh still met. Then he sighed, and kissed my neck.
“So do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?” he asked, amusement crinkling the corners of his bright eyes. “And will they take after their mother or their father?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
He kissed my nose, and gave me a smile that was happiness itself. “Well, there’s one thing I do care about. I’m just about to have my nuts frozen off, so if we want to have more than one child, we had better be getting out of this water.”
I sighed softly. “I’d love to move right into bed, but we have kids to look after first.”
His smile faded. “It’s not going to be easy to find all their parents. Especially little Carli’s.”
“It’s not even going to be easy to get them out of Scotland. Not with the remaining scientists still sniffing around.”
He kissed my nose, then splashed out of the water with me still in his arms. “Let me worry about all that. Right now, we need to get dressed, then get back and see if the vultures have left us any pizza.”
Epilogue
In the end, getting the kids out of Scotland wasn’t the problem I thought it would be. I’d forgotten that Trae was a thief by trade, and any thief who could get a will-o’-the-wisp to steal a ring wasn’t going to find it all that troublesome to get help transporting stolen kids back to their country of birth.
Nor was it hard to find most of their parents. Jace and Cooper had both been snatched when they were older, and knew their home addresses. Their reunion with their parents had been a joyful thing, and just as many tears had flowed down my cheeks as theirs—especially when it came time to say good-bye.
Tate and Marco were both several years younger, but they’d also been captured more recently. Armed with their surnames and the descriptions of their cliques and the surrounding lands, Trae and his friends had tracked down their families pretty quickly.
Sanat was tougher. The littlest of the boys, he’d come into the cells only six months after Carli, and he really couldn’t remember all that much about his family. We had their names, of course, but that wasn’t a whole lot of help when it was a common surname. And all he could recall about where he lived was a bell. A shiny silver bell that had rung out every dusk.
It took us a month to find his home—a tiny cliff-top village. His clique was not connected to any of the thirteen major ones. He’d been the only son in a family of fourteen, and the party had gone on for days.
Which left us with little Carli, who couldn’t remember anything except her mom’s pretty smile and long brown hair, and her dad’s blue eyes and bad singing voice.
Then one of Trae’s friends came through with a list of missing air dragons—how, I have no idea, when all the cliques seemed determined not to help out more than necessary—and there she was. Carli Symmonds, whose small clique owned a two-thousand-acre ranch over near Wolf Creek in Montana.
We stayed there for a week, and leaving her was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. In so many ways, that little girl had kept me sane in a place of madness, just as she and all the kids had kept me going once I was out. If Egan had been my rock and my strength, then the kids had been my sanity.