Cherishing Destiny (A Dangerous Destiny) (31 page)

“I love you too,” Aurora said, reaching out to stroke his
face.  She looked down at Sara, lying between them and placed soft kisses on
her wet lashes.  “And, I love you, little dove.” 

Sara’s breath hitched, and the tears slid down her cheeks. 
She couldn’t talk, but she buried her tear streaked face in Aurora’s silky
hair. 

Aurora was still thinking about the lovers in her bed as
she walked steadily in the snow behind Ryan’s huge wolf form, harnessed to the
sled. After a while, the snow started again, and the surface she was walking
on, grew soft, making it more difficult to step with the shoes.  She called a
halt to Ryan, who shifted back and helped her get settled on the sled while
bare-ass naked.  She marveled at his pure, innocent lack of any shame with regard
to his nude body.  She watched him appreciatively, admiring his tight, muscular
backside when he stepped in front of the sled, just before shifting and
slipping back into the harness.  She remembered thinking that he might amuse
her in bed when she first met him, and she wondered that neither of them had
ever tried.  She put it down to her feelings for Sara and his fascination with
her baby.  She watched his manhood stirring when she and Sara bathed each other
or when she bathed him, but he had never tried to do anything about it.  She
still suspected that Ryan was the father of Lily’s babies, but they were so odd
around each other that she was confused about the dynamic involved.  She
resolved to watch them more closely over the next couple of weeks.  These
thoughts occupied her mind on the swift ride to the settlement.  Before she
knew it, they had arrived, and Lily was bundling her into her warm house.

“Rest a while,” she said, “and then I should examine you
again since it’s been a few weeks.”  She sat Aurora in a chair, in the kitchen,
and made herself a cup of tea.  Ryan had pulled on his clothes on the back
porch and entered the kitchen with his pack in his hand.  He set it on the
floor against the wall, and Lily eyed it as he set it down.

“Are you staying with Kate and Elvis as usual?” she asked,
trying to sound casual. 

Ryan shifted from foot to foot and opened his mouth to try
and come up with an answer when Aurora interjected.

“Lily, I know it is terribly rude of me to ask, but without
Alex and Sara, I am wondering if you would allow Ryan to stay here with us?  I
am really feeling that I need him close.”

Lily cleared her throat nervously, but swiftly responded
with, “Certainly, Ryan is welcome to stay.  There is room.”  She didn’t look at
Ryan, but stood and turned her back to busy herself refilling her tea cup. 

“Thank you,” Aurora said quietly to Lily when Ryan slipped
out to check in with Elvis.

Aurora knew that it was not really her business, but she
was determined to get to the bottom of the situation between Ryan and Lily, and
later when Lily was finished examining her, she tried to think of a polite way
to ask Lily about the babies’s father.  She watched as Lily made notes on a
clipboard and realized how much training Lily truly had and how much the settlement
relied on her as a healer and midwife.  She respected the young woman and found
herself liking her independent spirit.

“Lily, is it really okay with you that I invited Ryan to
stay?” she started. “Because, I got to thinking that maybe you might be
expecting other company.” She inclined her chin at Lily’s enormous belly when
Lily looked up from her notes.  “The father, maybe?”

Lily snorted, “Huh.  It’s funny you should say that.” But
she didn’t expound.

Aurora decided to spit it out all at once. “It’s Ryan,
isn’t it? Ryan is the father of your babies.”

Lily put her notes on a desk and leaned back in her chair.
“Yes. Ryan is the father, but Aurora you don’t understand the circumstances.”

“You’re right, I don’t. Ryan is so attentive to my baby, I
don’t know how he can be indifferent to his own.” Aurora shook her head.

Lily took Aurora’s hand and led her out of the exam room
and back into the living room. “Aurora you don’t understand pack life.  Ryan
doesn’t even quite get it. He was raised with Sara, not as a pack member.” 
They sat on an overstuffed sofa, with one knee up, facing each other and
reaching out to brush each other’s fingers as they talked. “Ryan wants to be a
father to the babies, but that is not the pack way and I’ve asked him not to interfere. 
When the babies are weaned, I will give them over to be raised by the pack.  No
one single individual will be their mother or father.”

Aurora looked saddened. “It’s more than that, isn’t it? You
don’t love him, and he doesn’t love you.  Knowing how he feels about babies,
why would you want to bear his children of all people?”

Lily screamed in her own head,
I don’t want to bear his
children. I want to bear Stephan’s children. I love someone else!
  Aloud
she just said. “It’s complicated, but it wasn’t really our choice. As close as
you all are, I’m a little surprised that he hasn’t talked to you about it.”

Aurora shook her head.  “I think he is worried that we will
think less of him.  But, Lily, he is a beautiful man, inside and out.  You
could do a lot worse.”

Lily smiled a little wistfully. “I know, Aurora, but our
hearts want what our hearts want.”

Aurora was nodding in agreement when Ryan came back in the
house and went straight to Aurora’s belly, laying hands on and asking Lily, “How
was the exam. Is everything good with the baby?” 

Aurora and Lily smiled at each other knowingly. “Everything
looks great,” Lily said.

Lily didn’t comment later when Ryan made it clear that he
planned on sleeping next to Aurora.  She realized, just as Aurora and the
others did, that Ryan only wanted to be near the baby.  Lily wondered if she
should be concerned about his obvious obsession.  He was so loving and protective
that she found it hard to be too alarmed.  On that first evening, she watched
him humming to Aurora’s belly and then heard him murmuring to her in a Cherokee
dialect.  She didn’t speak well enough to know exactly what he said to the
baby, but she saw the baby pushing and moving as if in response to him.  She
knew that some of the pack had Native American blood and not just Cherokee–
even she did – but the only words she knew were the ones used to describe some
of her medicinal plants and the spirits that moved them to heal and protect. 
She believed in the spirits and in the right state, she was able to see the
auras of others and the life force within them as could many of the healers and
herb women.  The witches called it the Life Spark, the Cherokee called it Adanata,
roughly translated as soul.  She tried to concentrate on Ryan, and for a moment,
she was sure she could see the flow of energy passing between him and the
unborn child.  As fast as she thought she had seen it, it was gone, and she
started to doubt what she had seen because she knew of nothing that would explain
it. 

Over the next couple of weeks, two more women in the pack
delivered and a scout broke his leg running in the deep snow and tripping on a
shallowly buried tree branch.  Lily was busy, and she was growing tired as her
body tried to reserve energy for her own twins.  Aurora wanted to help Lily,
but she made some of the pack nervous, until the afternoon that the scout
injured himself.  He hit the buried branch while running full speed in wolf
form.  He tumbled thirty feet, head over heels, before coming to rest with a
bone jutting through his pelt in the upper part of his back leg.  He shifted
back and was brought to Lily, naked and in extreme pain with the bone sticking
out just above his knee.   Aurora helped to hold him down while Lily had to cut
into his leg to return the bone to its proper place.  His healing abilities
were trying to knit the bone, but he continued to bleed profusely from the
original wound.

“It’s too much blood,” Lily said.  He’s not healing fast
enough, and I can’t see the artery that must be bleeding inside.

“Let me help,” Aurora said, already biting into the fleshy
part of her hand and holding the wound open to allow it to bleed. 

Lily watched fascinated as Aurora poured the blood from her
open wound into his.  His bleeding stopped almost immediately, and his wound
began to close slowly.  “That’s amazing,” she said. “How did you even know that
Vampire blood would work on a
Were
?”

“Alex had to heal Ryan once when it looked as if Ryan might
die. Until then we didn’t know if it would work either.  All these years and no
one ever thought to try before, or if they did, they never told anyone about
it.”  Aurora shook her head sadly as she brushed the sweaty hair from the
forehead of the young scout, who was starting to come around again.  “A few months
ago, if I gave him my blood like this, his wounds would have closed, and the
bones knitted almost instantly, but things are different now.”

Lily watched Aurora’s bite mark slowly closing. “You really
aren’t immortal anymore, are you?”

Aurora knew that Alex didn’t want to talk about it, but she
looked at Lily and said, “I don’t think so.”

The scout sang Aurora’s praises to anyone who would listen
for the next few days, and
Weres
came and went, wanting to meet the
Vampire and see if it was true that she was pregnant.  The already exhausted
Lily was dragging after entertaining nearly the entire settlement, one after
the other.  By the time Aurora’s due date was only two days away, Lily had to
stay in bed for an entire day.  She was having mild contractions that she said
were just practice, but she needed rest to try and carry the babies as close to
term as she could.  

Aurora made tea for Lily and tried to make soup for her. 
She didn’t really know how to cook, though, and Ryan had to take over and save
her.  He was actually pretty adept at it, or at least he looked competent,
chopping vegetables, meat and herbs and adding a pinch of this or that.  Since,
Aurora didn’t eat, she had to rely on Lily’s word that the soup was good. 

On the day before Aurora was due, her contractions
started.  Lily got up out of bed and made preparations, even though she said it
would probably take a quite a while.  Ryan sent Tyler to the lodge for Alex and
Sara.  It was his turn to laugh as Tyler tried out the sled in case Sara needed
help getting back. 

He hovered around Aurora until she finally asked him to
give her just a little space. It wasn’t until the early morning hours, when the
baby still hadn’t come that Lily began to worry.

Thirty
-three

Sara and Alex watched as Ryan and Aurora made their way
into the snowy woods around the Lodge.  It didn’t take long to lose sight of
them and Alex’s mood plummeted when that happened. 

Sara couldn’t get him to talk, and she decided to reread a
paperback mystery that she found in the apartment when they first arrived. 
This would be the fourth time reading it, but there was little else to do.  
For several days, she entertained herself while Alex sulked.  On the eighth
day, when Alex was looking almost haggard, which was hard to do for a Vampire,
she went to him and stood in front of him until he finally paid attention to
her.

“You need to feed.  You don’t look so good,” she said. 

“I’m not hungry,” he shot back. “Please, Sara, leave me
be.”

Aurora once told Sara about older Vampires and their
tendency toward depression and sadness.  She called it melancholia and said
that Vampires were known to kill themselves when they were overwhelmed by it. 

Sara was getting scared for Alex.  Finally, she appealed to
his love for Aurora. “What happens if Tyler or Ryan comes today, and Aurora
needs us and you are too weak to make the trip?”

Alex scowled at her. He knew what she was doing but, it
didn’t make what she said any less true.  He took her arm and bit her wrist,
drinking the blood in the way that they did when they didn’t have enough time
for something more pleasant.  He could feel her disappointment, but his mood
was dark and he was punishing her for being right about his need for blood. 

As he fed, he felt the heat rising in him. He knew his eyes
were glowing red, and his disposition turned from sulky to lustful in a matter
of moments.  He watched Sara with her eyes closed, feeling the mild euphoria,
and he immediately felt guilty for his rude behavior.  She was so sweet, but
she was also a little vixen in bed.  He hadn’t really been able to play Vampire
games with her since they first left the estate months ago.  Now they were
alone with nothing to do, but wait for a summons to attend Aurora.  As he
watched Sara, now, he felt himself hardening and he released her arm.  She
opened her eyes in confusion as he had only begun to feed, and she saw the way
he was looking at her.  She smiled, and he lunged for her, grabbing her around
the waist with one arm and ripping her shirt and bra down the front in one vicious
tear.  Her breasts bounced free, and she gasped as he dipped his head to one
and sank his fangs into the curved swell of her breast above the rosy tip. 
Electricity raced through her core, puckering her nipples and heating her
loins.   He squeezed the breast he was feeding on, hard enough to leave finger
marks in her flesh.  She cried out, but the pain still made her wet and she
wasn’t even thinking about asking him to stop.  He could feel her erect nipple
against his hand as he squeezed, and he let go of her breast and grabbed the
little pebble, pinching it hard and rolling it between his thumb and finger. 
She hissed through her teeth and moistened her panties at the same time.  He
retracted his fangs from her breast, plenty of time to finish feeding later. 
He had extensive plans for her in mind.  He dropped to his knees in front of
her petite frame and took her other nipple in his mouth.  He bit her without the
fangs and sucked her hard.  He had both hard little bullets now, one in his teeth
and one pinched in his vice-like fingers.