The Moon, the Madness, and the Magic (13 page)

Then she whispered, “You are for me, Rourke Grayland.”

Chapter 12

Celeste tells Rourke everything

She dropped the glamour, and the light dimmed as she collapsed on top of Rourke’s chest.
What have we done?

“It’s time to spit it out.” Rourke lifted her chin up and watched her response with narrowed eyes. “What are you hiding from me?”

Before he’d taken her blood, she could have prevented him from finding her and touching her mind. She couldn’t hide anything from him now. But after taking his blood, she figured they were even again. She smiled at him. “I could ask the same of you.” And she kissed him on the nose.

“You walked away from me. I can’t walk away from you,” he said. “It goes against my grain to feel this way.”

Her hackles rose at his arrogance. “Grain or pride?” She stood up and walked to the stream.

“Grain, pride, it’s all the same, isn’t it?” He approached her and drew her into his arms.

“Ah, well, there, that’s one of my problems. You think all my responses are about you. Maybe that’s what’s wrong. Your pride.” She dropped her head to his chest and listened to the strong, steady beat of his heart.

“No. It’s not that. You were already aware of that side of me the minute you saw me. It’s more.” He sniffed her. “You smell like… I don’t know. Heaven. Or hell. Sex and sin.”

“Sin?”

“I can’t decide. The sex feels too much like sin to be heaven and too good to be hell.” His embrace on her tightened. “But wanting you like this…this feels like hell. Everything about you is pure sex. Your body is made for sin. I can’t resist you.”

She turned away. “Maybe that’s my problem, too. I’m feeling the same way about you, torn between fighting this strong attraction and succumbing to it.”

He turned her around to face him and studied her. “You do want me as much as I want you.” He pulled her tight inside his embrace. “I thought it was just me. I’m confused, in a constant state of arousal around you, and shit, I’m hard all the time.”

She glanced down. “I was wondering about that.”

“I can smell the honey pouring out of your folds again, even now. It’s almost like I can hear your arousal screaming for me to satisfy you. Why can’t we get enough of each other?”

She wasn’t prepared for his questions or the way his powerful mind probed hers. Despite the barriers she’d erected to keep him out, his mind drove through her defenses and merged with hers, looking for answers, stealing into her memories as well as her thoughts. In the middle of his declaration and in the middle of their passionate embrace, she’d never expected his mind to invade hers, picking out the one memory that could hurt him beyond measure—his past.

No.
But he was there inside her mind taking the information from her. As much as she tried, she couldn’t keep him from delving deeper, touching the knowledge that could destroy his relationship with Dane.

Seeing the confusion hit Rourke’s face as he merged with her mind made her wonder how strong he really was.

“What’s going on? Why do I feel linked to you? It’s stronger than my feelings for Dane. I’d always figured he and I were close because we’ve been together since birth.”

She took a few steps away, not wanting him to see the fear in her eyes. If he had a mental connection to Dane, maybe that’s why she was drawn to both men.

He turned her to face him and held her by her upper arms. His brow furrowed. His eyes shifted, looking around first then piercing into hers, accepting their mental link, and more, too easily.

Maybe he saw the confusion on her face or heard her concern in his mind, but he answered her unspoken question. “Strange things have been happening to me lately. I came here looking for answers, and I plan to get them. So if you know something, tell me.”

“Are you sure you’re ready?” The answers she had for him could obliterate the last shred of his humanity.

“I can’t live with nothing but questions.”

“I guess you’re right.” Celeste worried about the consequences of upsetting him. If he shifted completely before they completed the Beltane ceremony, she didn’t know what would happen to the prophecy. But more than anxiety over the prophecy drove her concern. After making love to him, she didn’t relish the thought of bringing him the kind of pain the shared visions of the past would cause him. They would wound Rourke in a way no mortal injury could, and above all, she didn’t want to be the one to deliver the blow.

The masculine control entered her mind, and he innocently pulled at her memories, not comprehending what he was doing. She fought him, trying to block him from her thoughts, but she was naked to him, body and mind, after the blood exchange.

No matter how hard she tried, Celeste couldn’t stop envisioning the tale of his past as it had been told to her by Zeelane, the old fae Seer.

“Show me.”
Rourke demanded when her reluctance forced his hand. He was a quick study.

A vision of a wolf standing in a clearing appeared in her mind, no matter how hard she tried to hold it back.

The wolf nuzzled a baby wrapped in a blanket. The action quieted him before she took off to chase the hare she’d scented hiding in the nearby brush.

Celeste envisioned the strange birthmark on the babe’s back. It was smaller but the same as Rourke’s, a winged dragon.

Next came a vision of a hunter.

The sound of the crying baby must have drawn the hunter to them, and thinking to protect the human child from danger, the man raised his rifle, took aim, and shot the wolf.

Rourke’s eyes burst open when the wolf dropped to the ground, and he shuddered as if the bullet had hit him.

Celeste closed her eyes, shivered, and ran her hands up her arms. The scent of blood, metallic and warm, sent a knife of ice to her heart.

Nothing could warm her or him. Her thoughts and her emotions flowed from her into Rourke, and she watched his expression change as those visions held him trapped in the horror.

She sent her aura to enfold him, but nothing soothed him.

The shock of that moment filled her as if she’d been there.
More images of that evening in the forest flashed inside her head, and Rourke held her thoughts captive despite the pain the images caused him. He wouldn’t let her stop the kaleidoscope of events flashing through their minds, not now. Not when the truth was about to become clear—ice cold and crystalline.

A gunshot. Blood.

The wolf collapsed, and as she did, the hunter staggered as she shifted back into her human form.

The woman lay dying and was all the evidence the hunter needed to finally believe that the old mountain tales were indeed true
.
Shifters existed.

Celeste mentally noted, almost to appease Rourke, that the hunter tried to help the dying woman.
His thoughts were confused, frustrated, frightened.

Dying? The shot was off. The wound wasn’t a killing shot.

No, it shouldn’t have been deadly, yet the woman was mortally wounded, and her life force was fading fast.

Rourke dropped his forehead to Celeste’s as the events continued in slow motion, and the ache inside her heart grew along with his pain.
“Why is she dying?”

Images of the man preparing the bullets formed in their minds.

He sat at a table and used silver in his casing mixture for these bullets, because silver was more plentiful in the mountain near his home than any other metal.

Silver. Deadly to the shifter.

The hunter tried to aid the wounded woman. She exhaled, reached out one last time to the crying babe, collapsed, and with her last breath uttered,
“Hide him from the dragon.”

The man looked at the woman’s body and then back at the baby, a horrified expression on his face.
Fear filled his eyes, and Celeste could only imagine his regrets.

Appalled, devastated.
Whose feelings were these?

Celeste realized the hunter had been shocked when the truth about the mountains myths slammed home. Secondly, he’d been saddened. He’d killed a young mother, leaving her child helpless.

Tears spilled down the man’s face as he dug the shallow grave. Then he buried the woman and crept back to his home, bringing the baby to his recently delivered wife. Without question or explanation, she took the newborn in her arms and nursed him beside her own infant.

There was no doubt the other baby was Dane when he turned to examine Rourke, exposing his dimpled smile.

Celeste didn’t have to read Rourke’s mind to understand how he felt. His emotions were linked to hers. Confusion and anger escalated inside him. Furious. Rourke held her head in place, and he shuddered with the knowledge. Heartache, pain, and resolution clearly tore at his emotions.

The one thing she didn’t find was denial
.
Why was that?

“Tell me what’s really going on,” he demanded.

“How’d you get inside my head?” Celeste countered.

He ignored her question. “What are you?” Rourke asked.

“Fae, wolf-shifter, succubus,” Celeste whispered. “Maybe the question we should be asking is what are
you
?”

“Explain.”

“You know what I am, and I am for you.”

“Then it is your responsibility to tell me the truth.”

He insisted she be the one to hurt him. Hadn’t the pain she had already caused him been enough?

“First, tell me what it is about you that has you taking all this in stride. Most humans couldn’t accept the Lore this easily.”

“Things have never been normal for me. So tell me what you know and fill in the blank spaces in my life.”

“Shortly after the incident, the Graylands ran, losing themselves in the crowded city. Your very existence was masked from us—you among so many humans. He hid you in the concrete high-rise mountains. He did as your mother wished.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with her husband, Rafe, or with your biological father. If anyone knows the truth, no one is telling me.”

Celeste’s final visions were of Grayland taking his family and fleeing the forest. All these years later, she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame him for what fate had done to him. Grayland’s fear of the repercussions of stealing Rourke, not to mention his newly acquired knowledge of the forest’s secret, must have been alarming, especially with the responsibility of the female shifter’s death resting so heavily on his shoulders.

“Who would know?”

“Maybe the Council or my aunt Celia, but then, I don’t know if anyone knows about the details of your past. Maybe the forest fae, but I’ve never heard them speculate.” She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“I should go ask them.”

“No, Rourke, you shouldn’t. You won’t be welcomed into the Otherworld until after Beltane, until after you commit to this world. Despite how everything started, you and Dane are soul brothers. You became friends and business partners. You’ve influenced the world of enterprise without the knowledge of your past, without an inkling that magic exists or of the fate that awaits you.”

“Nothing awaits me.”

Celeste shook her head and turned away from him with a shrug. “Destiny is destiny. Believe what you want.”

“I know what Dane and I are and aren’t to each other. What we’ve accomplished. And fate?” He spun her around and shook her gently by her shoulders. “Well, fate can go fuck itself. I do what I want. I’m not going to be guided by some Council’s idea of my destiny. I owe nothing to my world or your Otherworld from what I can tell so far.”

A heart could crack open and bleed. The statement she’d been waiting for hurt more than she’d expected.

Rourke dropped his hands and stood, stone-faced, giving away nothing, blocking her from his feelings.

She nodded. Yes, that’s the way she’d expected him to react. “Not all this came as a surprise to you. Why? You’re taking too much of this in stride.” Something about his response made her wonder. “Did you already know you weren’t biological brothers?”

The two men owned and headed up a genetic research company. Rourke was
CEO,
and Dane managed the research department. Genetic research. She figured they’d expect proof, not speculations. Unless they already had it.

“Yeah, we knew. Old paternity test.” Rourke cocked his head to one side and almost managed to look sheepish. “Like I said, until you, I always used condoms. So does Dane. We did the same girl, together. After extensive testing, the sperm that produced that baby didn’t hail from either of us. Hell, we already knew that, and thankfully, the tests proved it, but they also revealed one other bit of interesting info.” He paused, looked straight into her eyes, and said, “Something was weird with our
DNA
, and we weren’t even brothers, let alone twins.”

She gasped. “
Both
of your
DNA
was
weird
?”