Chapter Twenty-Four

“Alec?” Melody stopped short when the big, beautiful man came through the door behind her mother. Christ, he looked just the same as she remembered him the last time she’d seen him. The scent and texture of the markers was still fresh in her memory from the day he’d given her the tattoo when she was five. The phone call that had taken him away from her came moments later, and she’d been dazed by the abruptness with which he’d left.

She remembered it all too vividly now, and she especially remembered how devastated her mother had been in the weeks that followed. Her own five-year-old emotions had been inconsolable.

She couldn’t believe her eyes.

She glanced at her mother, whose face was pinched with chagrin. “I should have told you, honey. I …” Her mother glanced up into Alec’s tanned face, then back to her. “I was afraid you’d cut your trip short if I did, though.”

“My ~trip?~” Melody gaped at her mother. “Mom! It’s been almost four years since I was here last! It wasn’t a trip, it was an escape! But you’re right. I would have come for him.” Nothing could have kept her away, for that matter.

Alec’s deep voice carried through the evening toward her. “Glad to know you haven’t forgotten me, Melonhead.”

Tears sprang to her eyes at his old term of endearment for her, and she rushed toward him. “God, like I could ever,” she said, crashing against his chest and letting him wrap her in a tight embrace.

“Come inside and let’s catch up, okay, honey?” her mother said, smiling and accepting Melody’s hug when she finally tore herself away from the only man in her life she’d ever considered a father, even though she knew now that he wasn’t. He wasn’t even human.

* * *

“Does she know?” Melody asked sometime later when she and Alec sat on the back deck in the glow of the windows, watching fireflies flicker in the air over the back yard. Her mom puttered around inside, cleaning and organizing in her already spotless kitchen. Melody smiled at the thought of how little everything had changed. Her mom could never really sit still for long. They’d had a good talk over supper already, so her mom had urged the pair of them to sit out back and relax, seeming to sense that they needed time for some catching up of their own.

Alec remained silent for several seconds, took a long swig of his beer, and shook his head. “I broke enough laws just to stay alive,” he said. “I didn’t want to risk her life by telling her too soon. I was going to tonight, but then you showed up.”

“But you did something to me, didn’t you? Those old stories you used to tell me, they were always true.”

“Mostly, yes. There was one part that wasn’t, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate to tell you, as young as you were.”

“I know,” she said, watching him stare down at his bottle and start picking at the label. It was such a ~human~ thing for him to do—so normal, compared to how Garen and Skye tended to behave.

He turned to look at her, his irises shifting to the glow she always remembered seeing, but that had new meaning now. “You found a male like me, didn’t you? I can sense the bond,” he said. “But you aren’t marked yet. Do the two threads of energy wrapped around your aura have something to do with that, sweetheart? Or the fact that you’ve shown up here alone and filled with as much sadness as the day I left?”

He blanched when she only stared at him, wide-eyed at his open sharing of details she had only managed to guess at so far. The understanding that he could actually see the evidence of her time with Skye and Garen was even more shocking, though.

“How much ~do~ you know about us?” he asked.

“Some … It’s only been a week since all this started for me. How can I feel this way after only a week?” She gave him a beseeching look, hoping he could shed some light on the overwhelming feelings she’d been having for the last few days.

“That’s my fault. And I’m sorry, but I had to make sure you were protected, and short of waiting until you were old enough to mark you myself, it was the only way.”

“What was?” she asked, her voice coming out a little frantic. “What did you do to me? I don’t remember ever ~not~ being able to tell you were different, but it never seemed so odd until I met another man who was like you. Three of them, in fact.”

Alec sighed and rested his head on the back of the deck chair he sat in. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure her mother wasn’t within earshot. “When I met your mother, she was already pregnant with you. I don’t think she even knew she was pregnant yet, but suspected. She was honest with me about it when she found out—she’d been with your biological dad not long before she met me—so she wanted a paternity test. I told her I knew you couldn’t be mine because I couldn’t have kids. It was a lie, but I didn’t want her believing, or letting you believe, that you really were mine. I owed that much honesty to her since I had to lie about what I was. She was alone and desperate and so, so beautiful. I couldn’t imagine life without her, even though by our laws I had very little time left. I hadn’t yet decided I wouldn’t go through with it, though …” He finished off his beer and reached for another from the six-pack between them.

“Are there a lot of these laws? I had to sign a contract, but I never would have told anyone what I knew.”

“A contract?” he asked, sounding concerned. “I suppose that’s not surprising. You were working for Kol Magnus, I knew that much. He’s a very cautious man. And there have always been a lot of laws, but they’re changing now, which is why I came back.”

She felt her cheeks flush at her obfuscation of the truth about her relationship to Kol. He turned his golden-eyed gaze on her and furrowed his brows.

“What aren’t you telling me, Melody?”

“The contract wasn’t exactly for non-disclosure, though that was a clause in it. It was for …” She cleared her throat and quirked her mouth as she glanced at him, still too modest to say the words but remembering an alternative he’d understand. “It was for laughter. All of mine, just for one man.”

He frowned. “For Kol? He shouldn’t have needed …”

Her face heated further but she found the will to cut him off. “Not him! Though he was my first experience … and after him, things got really complicated.”

“Melody,” he said softly, “I’m not a stranger to the way we work. You can be honest with me.”

“You first,” she said.

He nodded. “Fair enough. Your mother never knew what kinds of resources I had, and I didn’t tell her because I was afraid I’d be forced to go through with the Renunciation and leave her behind. One of our laws is that we have to mark our partner when they learn our true nature—preferably before. The mark can be a gift, but at the ends of our lives it means our mates go with us. If I’d done that, and then went through with my own Renunciation—giving up my life’s essence to the next generation—you would have been an orphan.

“You weren’t my child, so you weren’t like me and wouldn’t have had the care of my kind if that had happened. The alternative wasn’t much better. If I didn’t go through with it, I would have to hide—there are other races like us, who harbor members of our race sometimes, and allow us to live in hiding. I could join one of these groups—and hope that the new Court were as open minded as they turned out to be. But I knew I couldn’t leave you entirely without protection. Even before you were born I loved you, Melody, as much as if you had truly been my own. I gave you the blessing you carry the second I knew I’d never love another woman but your mother.”

“What is it?” she asked softly. “Because it’s kinda tortured me my whole life.” She gave him a shaky laugh. “I mean … I never liked many boys growing up. I did like laughing, though,” she gave him a sly grin that provoked a chuckle from him. She grew serious again. “But I never fell in love like all the girls I knew kept doing.”

“You weren’t meant to love anyone but one of us. Perhaps it was unfair of me to control your life that way, but it was the only way I knew you’d be safe and healthy and cared for, once your blessing was recognized by the right male and he managed to supersede it with his own bond and his mark.”

“Nobody would have measured up to my memory of you, anyway,” she said. “But I don’t think it worked the way you meant for it to. I pretty much threw myself at Kol after an incredibly ~funny~ encounter with him and his wife, because I couldn’t imagine life without him. The man’s a regular comedian.”

She meant the last part to be a joke, but Alec didn’t laugh. His jaw clenched and he set down his beer. “I didn’t expect it to be a Court dragon you found first,” he said softly. “They’re far too powerful for the magic of my blessing to stand up to. I created it to ensure you always had a choice in the matter, but if his magic got to you first, it would have affected the blessing—taken that choice away from you depending on how he channeled his energy the first time.”

“He was pretty damn intense,” Melody said, her pulse increasing at the mere memory of that afternoon with Kol and Hallie. “And he’s definitely the boss for a reason.”

“He’s more than just the boss to the rest of us, but if he didn’t mate you, I have to assume he had a good reason.” He paused and glanced at her. “I wish you would tell me why you’re here … alone … when I can sense very clearly that you’ve left something behind, and that it wasn’t Kol Magnus. Your aura’s all wrong for it to be him.”

“Did your blessing account for there being two men?” she said, unable to suppress the bitterness in her tone.

Alec went very still for a second. She wished she were like him and could see things the way he did. But his shift in demeanor told her just enough to know he hadn’t been prepared for that statement. After a second, he relaxed again and looked at her.

“The two of them, they were kind to you?” he asked.

“Mostly, yes.” Her stomach knotted at the memory of the last day when they’d both chosen to desert her, one after the other, after making love to her in the best possible way either of them could. Then retreating as though being ~too~ amazing was against some law of theirs.

“How were they not?” he asked, his voice gruff and commanding, his jaw muscles twitching. In that moment, he looked a lot like Kol at his most imperious.

“They were perfect gentlemen, until they couldn’t be. Dad, it all happened very fast.”

Her mouth snapped shut the second the word came out. She hadn’t called him “Dad” to his face in over twenty years. She’d been told not to by both him and her mother—because he wasn’t her father, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love him like one. She’d somehow understood why without asking, yet in her head she’d always thought of him that way.

She still did, even knowing what he was finally and having her fantasy shattered that there might be a possibility that he really was her dad.

She started to rise and take their empties inside, but his hand lashed out and grabbed her by the wrist.

“Do you love them? Both of them?”

The need to confess it made her want to cry. “God, yes. But they have their own issues. I couldn’t sit there and wait for them to work things out.”

She wrested her arm from his grip when he didn’t say anything else. He retrieved the last beer in time for her to slot the empties back into the cardboard holder. As she headed back through the French doors into her mother’s dining room he called to her.

“They’ll be here. If they’re worth their horns, they’ll come find you.”

“They know where I am. I wasn’t exactly secretive about it. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath, Dad.”

She loved saying that word and not having him object. With the odd glow he got afterward, she suspected he liked it, too.

* * *

Holding her breath would have been a disaster, as it turned out. Some part of her kept hoping over the next few days that one or the other of them would show up on her mother’s doorstep and confess his love, begging her to marry him. ~Mate him, that’s what they call it,~ she reminded herself, and the thought gave her a little quiver of excitement.

Except she hadn’t lied in her letter to them, beseeching them to work things out between them. The last thing she wanted was to be a wedge in the middle of their love for each other. Garen’s misery had grown ever more apparent the last day, and Skye had left her with a hunted look, giving her the impression that he believed he’d committed some sin by daring to have true feelings for her.

~“I can’t love you,”~ Garen had said. She supposed the words implied that he almost did. That was what had hurt the most—believing he’d been on the edge of actually feeling that way and rejected it. Both of them had fled from her with the exact same look in their eyes. And so she had fled from them.

“It’s better this way,” she said to herself, immersed in the sweaty task of pulling weeds in her mother’s garden.

“What did you say, honey?” her mom asked, tilting her head up and peering at her from beneath the wide brim of her straw hat. A geometric smattering of sunlight freckled her face, reminding her with a pang of sadness of the way Garen’s skin had displayed its odd pattern to her in the sun that first day they’d met.

Melody sighed. “Better that I’m home. I missed you and Alec. You seem so happy now.”

Her mother beamed at her. “Somehow, I knew he’d be back. I’ve spent the last twenty years feeling like I was in some kind of holding pattern. Like a chrysalis. I wish I could have been more present for you growing up.”

“You did fine, Mom. I’m just happy you’re not alone anymore.”

Her mother nodded and shifted down the row of pepper plants, frowning into her work and carefully avoiding crushing a ladybug before she went to work again. Her posture remained tense, however, making it clear to Melody that she was working on some kind of lecture that she wasn’t looking forward to saying.

“Spit it out, whatever it is. I can tell you’ve got something on your mind.”

Her mother’s lips tightened into a thin line. “You don’t seem happy, sweetie, and it breaks my heart to see you this way. You never were very forthcoming about your love life with me, but I wish you would talk to me now.”

“My love life?” Melody asked, laughing. “I never really had one to speak of before. I guess it just seemed weird to start talking about it now that I do, especially because the love life I had, I managed to prematurely abort in a matter of days. Why bother you with the gory details? Can’t I just be vicariously happy for your love life?”

Her mother grimaced at her macabre metaphor but didn’t reprimand her for it like she might have done when she was younger.

“But you talked to Alec about it, didn’t you?” she asked softly. Her tone wasn’t accusatory or hurt, simply curious, concerned.

“I guess I just needed his perspective—as a man, you know. He’s more hopeful than I am. Or he was when I first talked about it.”

“I waited for twenty years,” she said. “And I would have waited forever for him.”

Melody sat back on her heels and looked at her mother, who glanced up at her with a direct blue gaze. She shifted her shoulder slightly and gave Melody a soft smile. “Sometimes you just know he’ll be worth it. Is he worth it for you—the man you left behind?”

Melody tried to come up with an answer that wasn’t an outright lie. She wasn’t sure if her mother would understand the crazy situation she’d gotten herself into.

“I didn’t leave because I was afraid of commitment, or anything. I did it because I was a complication for him.” In her head she amended “him” to “them”—no sense confusing her mom with the convoluted details.

“You didn’t answer my question, honey.”

Melody’s chest tightened. Her true feelings were far too volatile a thing to admit out loud, but she did owe her mother an answer. Getting the actual words past the strangling sensation in her throat was another issue entirely, however.

The tears preceded the words by about a mile and her mother surged over the row and pulled Melody into her arms, oblivious of the plants she crushed between them.

“Oh, God, Mama. I would. I would wait forever, too.”