Totally Spellbound (27 page)

Was that love?

She didn’t know.

Unlike Rob, she had never experienced
it. She had no idea what it felt like.

Was it this confusing?

Her patients always said it was, and
she believed them.

Hell, she had experienced the
confusion part herself.

But never the all-enveloping warmth.
Never the complete and total merging with another person. Never the
certain knowledge that no other person would ever measure up to
this one.

She sighed.

Her training had made her analytical.
This was a question for her heart.

And her heart was hiding, terrified of
being hurt.

Megan wasn’t coming back.

He had hurt her and he hadn’t meant
to.

“Excuse me,” Rob said, and
headed toward the bedroom. Neither Zoe nor Travers tried to stop
him, which told him that they agreed: He had screwed up.

He stopped outside the bedroom door,
half expecting sobs. The women from his past, with the exception of
Marian, would have been wailing by now.

But it was silent in there, except for
a quiet rustling. What was she doing?

He knocked.

“Come on in, Rob,” she
said.

He opened the door. “You knew it was
me?”

She was fully dressed. Her lips still
looked swollen from being kissed, but her hair was combed and her
clothing was straightened.

“Who else would it have been?” she
asked. “Travers hates strong emotion, and I don’t know Zoe all that
well.”

“She’s a good person,” Rob
said.

“I’m beginning to figure that out,”
Megan said. “Did she send you here?”

It was a trick
question, and fortunately, he’d had enough experience with
women
not
to admit
that Zoe had told him he was an idiot.

“Coming after you was my idea.” He
held out his hands in a what-was-I-thinking gesture. “I’m
sorry.”

Megan shrugged. “I’m the one who’s
sorry. I overreacted. You’ve lived for centuries without me. To
think that I’m the most important person you’ve ever met is
arrogant, particularly since the whole world knows about
Marian.”

He sighed. She sounded so reasonable,
and yet he worried that she wasn’t. “You are important.”

“You told me that,” she
said.

Which wasn’t the answer he
expected.

“But do you believe it?” he
asked.

She nodded. “Oddly enough, I do. And
if you’d asked me at noon yesterday would I have believed that
people could come to mean so much to each other that they were as
involved as longtime lovers, I’d say not outside a wartime
situation.”

“A wartime situation?”

“You know, like being hostages
together or being the only two survivors on a
battlefield.”

“Wow,” Rob said sarcastically, “you
have a romantic view of love.”

She smiled. “I was raised to be
practical.”

“But you’re not practical, Megan,” he
said, “or you wouldn’t have spent time with me this
afternoon.”

She met his gaze. Her green eyes
seemed clearer than they had before. “Oh, yes, I am. What I felt
today is something I’ve never felt before—and I liked it. So I
asked myself: Did I want to experience that again or ruin it by
having the wrong expectations?”

He frowned. He had never heard
anything like this.

“And I realized that I’d rather be
with you as long as I can, and experience whatever it is that we
have until we’re both tired of it, rather than letting John’s
rather blanket statement about me being the best for you and all
this talk of Fate and soulmates make me overreach the
relationship.”

“Overreach the relationship?” he
repeated. He’d never heard anything like that.

“This relationship is going to be what
it’s going to be,” she said. “No amount of wishing can make it
anything else.”

There was a certain amount
of logic to her statements, but there was no logic in how he felt.
And there had been no logic in how he’d felt about Marian, either.
At some point, a man had to realize that sometimes he lived through
his heart and not his mind. And that living through the heart was
just as valid—if not more valid.

“Did they train you to think like this
in your profession?” he asked.

Her smile widened. But it looked
cooler than he’d ever seen it.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s my job to see
what’s beyond the emotion, to understand it, and to help the
patient understand it as well.”

“And in this case, you’re the patient
and the therapist?” he asked.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“And they call economics the dismal
science,” he muttered.

“What?” Megan frowned at
him.

He shook his head. “Nothing. It just
seems like a sad way to look at the world, analyzing each emotion
good and bad, and figuring out the logical approach to that
emotion. Sometimes, it’s better to follow your
feelings.”

“Says the man who once defied the
Fates,” Megan said.

“I don’t regret that, even now,” Rob
said. “I followed my heart.”

“And they could have imprisoned you
for it.”

He smiled. “I’m beginning to
understand why they didn’t. They knew how I felt about
Marian.”

Megan nodded. “We all
know.”

He felt his cheeks heat. He wasn’t
going to get past this. “Megan, I have been honest with you from
the beginning.”

“I know that,” she said. “And I think
that we have tremendous potential.”

The word stung him, and he wasn’t sure
why. It was a dismissive word, one that undercut what he already
felt. He grabbed his pants, which were in a pile on the floor,
found his shirt, and tossed them on the messed-up bed.

Then he took off the robe.

Megan’s cheeks heated. She wasn’t as
dispassionate as she pretended to be.

He grabbed his pants and slid them on,
then put his shirt over them, buttoning it quickly. He preferred
not to feel naked any more.

“For the record,” he said as soon as
he finished dressing. “What I feel—and have felt—for you since I
met you is the most quick and intense emotion of my life. Is it
true love? I don’t know. But I do know that two weeks ago, I would
have told you I had already experienced true love.”

Megan watched him, her eyes
glittering.

“I don’t know how you feel, but I do
know you don’t value yourself much,” Rob said. “You’re willing to
settle for whatever I have to give, where me, I want this to be the
best relationship of our lives. And since I’ve already had a
fantastic, deep, and mutual love with a marvelous woman, I know I’m
asking a lot.”

He opened the door, finally
identifying what he felt. Anger. He didn’t like the way she had
somehow dismissed him.

“But I’m asking a lot,” he said,
“because I don’t settle. I never have.”

He stepped out of the
room, grabbed his suit coat, and headed back into the dining
room.

Megan wasn’t following him, and he
pretended he didn’t care. He had made a promise to get that silly
wheel.

And he would.

Megan stood inside the bedroom and
watched Rob walk across the suite. He was barefoot, which made him
seem oddly vulnerable despite the expensive suit he
wore.

He was right: she was settling—and she
had thought that good news.

But he was also right about something
else: he didn’t settle. She had known that about Robin Hood as long
as she had known about Maid Marian.

If he’d been the kind of man to
settle, he never would have gone into the woods and assembled his
now-famous band of Merry Men. He never would have taken on the
Sheriff of Nottingham, and the Pretender, King John.

He would never have taken on the
Fates.

Megan sighed. Rob was talking to her
brother and Zoe as if nothing had happened. But he was slightly
turned so that he could see her.

She felt a connection to him, even
now.

How strange was that? Feeling
connected to a man she hadn’t even known two days ago?

Maybe it wasn’t strange at all.
Considering all she’d learned in the past several hours, perhaps it
was normal. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t hooked up with
anyone—not really—because Rob had been out there, waiting to meet
her.

What had he said?
She had slipped into his magic—driven into it, she had said—and no
one,
no one
, not
Marian, not the Fates— had done that before.

Megan could accept the idea that
someone like him could love her. But she had a lot of trouble
accepting that he would make her the most important person in his
life.

She hadn’t been the most important
person in anyone’s life before. She’d always been an afterthought:
the third child, the younger sister, the second aunt, the trusted
friend.

She squared her shoulders. The one
thing Rob hadn’t said, the one thing no one had said, was something
she would tell her patients sometimes.

Love took courage. To love
someone—anyone, even a parent or a family member—was a risk. You
gave your heart, your very being, to that person, and you risked
rejection, or worse.

You risked complete destruction of
every warm emotion you’d ever felt.

All she had done from her earliest
memories was protect herself from emotion. And even though her own
therapist had mined her background, searching for a single
traumatic event that caused Megan to shut down like that, she had
never found it.

Her therapist had even interviewed her
parents to see if the event was pre-verbal.

The only thing anyone could come up
with was that Megan had been abandoned as an infant. Had that been
the traumatic event? That someone—the person who had birthed
her—hadn’t loved her enough to keep her?

Or had Megan, as an older child,
responded emotionally to the news of her abandonment?

But that had never felt
right. Megan wasn’t sure she believed in pre-verbal memory, and she
didn’t remember a time when she had ever felt unloved.

Her family—the
Kinneallys—had loved her as much or more than her biological family
could have.

She sighed. She was just reserved,
that was all, and risk-averse, and afraid.

Very afraid.

And there was Robin,
gesturing over a map of a place so dangerous, the danger spilled
into the map itself. Her own brother, whom she loved dearly but
never thought of as mighty courageous, had rescued his fiancée from
that place. (Even though Megan still wasn’t sure how. Had he added
and subtracted the Faeries to death?)

Her nephew had taken care of three of
the zaniest women Megan had ever met, had heard adult thoughts
since childhood, and still had the sweetest personality of anyone
she had ever met.

And Rob. Rob had lost the person most
dear to him centuries ago, and yet he kept living. Not only kept
living, but was willing to try again.

There was something wrong with her if
she didn’t give this her all.

Not many people got a chance like
this.

She slipped on her shoes and crossed
the suite’s floor. The conversation was about embedded spinning
wheels and transforming lights. She felt behind already.

“All right,” Rob was saying as she
approached. “So the Faerie Kings stole the wheel from the Fates,
and they were able to continue on, even though the wheel was their
source of power.”

“Someone told me,” Zoe said, “and I
can’t remember who because this has been a strange few days, that
the Faerie Kings became a lot more powerful after that. In fact,
the expansion of Faerie happened after that.”

“So they’re not going to want to let
the wheel go,” Rob said.

“The way the Fates made it sound,”
Travers said, “they won’t have any choice.”

Rob frowned. “Why is that?”

“Because,” Zoe said, “even Fates have
prophecies, apparently, and the wheel and the Faerie Kings and
someone named Great-Aunt Eugenia are all involved in
theirs.”

“Only my great-aunt died,” Travers
said.

“This Eugenia is related to you?” Rob
asked.

“And me.” Megan entered
the conversation as if she had never left. “She was the one who
found all three of us, and helped with the adoptions.”

Travers looked at her in surprise. “I
never knew that.”

“I checked the records. Great-Aunt
Eugenia put Mom and Dad in touch with the agencies where we all
were, and actually pointed Mom to each one of us.”