Fantasyland 04 Broken Dove (41 page)

At his words and all they meant, my heart slammed in my chest, but I burrowed deeper, shoving my face in his throat, unable to say anything. Only able to feel.

“Sleep, Maddie,” he murmured.

“Okay, honey,” I forced out.

I felt his lips leave my hair and he kept one arm around my shoulders, holding tight while the other one moved down my back to smooth over my bottom, cupping me there lightly as if he wished to sooth the warmth that his hand left there. Warmth I didn’t mind in the slightest.

I should have slept. Everything I knew, everything I’d learned, everything that was me told me to keep my mouth shut.

But in his arms, all he’d said, all he’d done, all we gave each other, I didn’t.

My voice so quiet, it was even difficult for me to hear, I told him, “All my life, I’ve never been happy. So I never imagined even being that way. Until now.”

He heard me.

I knew because that got me another powerful squeeze that took my breath away and I felt his lips back at my hair.

“I wish you to share why this was with me, Madeleine.”

“I will, honey,” I wheezed.

He heard the wheeze and loosened his arms.

“Not now. Now we sleep,” he commanded and at his arrogant, bossy command, I smiled against his skin

“Right,” I muttered.

“But I want you to sleep knowing how much it means to me that I’ve made you happy.”

I took in a trembling breath and to let him know I knew how much it meant, and hopefully let him know how much what he said meant to me, I pressed my lips to the skin of his throat for a kiss. Then I turned my head and pressed my cheek at its base.

He continued to hold me close.

I burrowed closer, tightening my arms around him.

And I slept.

Chapter Sixteen

Skulking

“I cannot believe we’re doing this.”

That was Meeta.

“Shh!”

That was Loretta.

We were skulking through the forest toward the main house.

We were doing this because Apollo told me two things the night before.

One, the men he was waiting for had arrived, they’d been set to patrolling and thus all of Ulfr land was now protected. This meant it was safe for us to leave the house and wander around without an escort. Apparently his soldiers had been out on leave (kind of, I had a feeling “leave” meant “leave on missions Apollo didn’t think it necessary for me to know” and I didn’t really want to know so I was okay with that) but now they were back.

Two, he’d given the children my cookies and they’d love them.

“It’s lucky I had one before I gave them to Christophe and Élan,” he’d told me, grinning. “For when I went back for more, they were gone.”

This made me happy. Not only that the kids had liked them but also that he’d gone back for more which meant
he
liked them.

That night, I was to have dinner with them.

Suffice it to say, I was freaking out.

I wanted to ask Apollo for one more day (or seven of them) in which I could make them a variety of things. Snickerdoodles. Chocolate fudge. Lemon meringue pie. And I wanted to do this because I wanted them good and primed to meet me.

But I’d told Apollo I’d have dinner with them that night and I couldn’t go back on that now. He was excited (in his badass other world soldier type of way) for me to do it so I had to do it.

For him.

But in thinking about it (okay, fretting about it), I decided that I couldn’t walk into a room with them and keep my cool.

Unless I saw them again.

Therefore, during dinner one night when Apollo offhandedly told me their schedule—breakfast with him, studies, lunch, outdoor activities then back to studies before he spent time with them in the evenings—I was skulking through the forest with Meeta and Loretta in order to spy on them during their “outdoor activities” (whatever those were).

For moral support, I’d brought Meeta and Loretta along.

For obvious reasons, I had not shared with either woman, or Cristiana, that I was from another world. But knowing I looked so much like the other Ilsa, in other words, their dead mother, Loretta got me and understood my concerns about how the kids would react to me (if not all my concerns about why I was the way I was about them).

Meeta, however, watched me shrewdly in a way that felt weirdly like she’d figured things out, something she couldn’t possibly do as, according to Apollo, only those who needed to know about the two worlds knew (with the warning I was to keep it that way, no matter how close I grew to the women).

That said, Meeta had agreed to go, if reluctantly. Though, mostly this was because, having been born and raised in the sun, heat and sand of the Southlands (this I knew because she’d described it), being out in the cold was not one of her favorite things.

So now we were skulking.

I’d been reduced to skulking.

I felt I should be slightly embarrassed about this but mostly I was anxious about dinner that night and I didn’t have it in me to be both embarrassed
and
anxious. Therefore anxious won out.

“They can hardly hear us from this distance,” Meeta pointed out to Loretta as I kept moving ever closer, using the horse tracks in the snow as my guide to the house.

“You never know,” Loretta returned.

“Do they have unnatural hearing?” Meeta shot back.

“Not that I know of,” Loretta replied.

“Then they will not hear,” Meeta stated with clearly strained patience.

I was no longer listening to their somewhat ridiculous conversation, a conversation that would usually make me laugh, or at least smile.

In the last few days they’d had these a lot. This was mostly because Meeta was highly intelligent, highly logical and not overly emotional (or, at least, she didn’t show it). She was like a Maroovian Spock. Loretta, on the other hand, was not stupid but she was excitable and emotional so she wasn’t exactly Uhura or even Dr. McCoy. More like an honor roll cheerleader who’d been beamed aboard the
Enterprise.

This made me Captain Kirk, for I was leading them on a misguided venture and I hoped, like Kirk seemed able to do, I could get us through it unscathed.

On this thought, I saw it through the trees.

The main house.

Karsvall.

And
what
a house.

I had taken not one thing in when we’d arrived there days before.

Now, as I cleared the trees but stood behind one, peered around it and stared, I had no choice but to take it in.

This was because it was massive, long and four stories tall.

It was also made of the same lacy-carved, dark woodwork as the dower house but there was a lot more of it.
Tons
more.

The windows on the bottom floor were all arched and each as tall as a man. Along the front of the house there were decorative iron torches planted every three or four feet at a diagonal pointed away from the house. And on the second floor, every few windows, there were French doors that led to balconies with a carved wood balustrade surrounding them.

I noticed, taking it all in as I moved behind a border of trees, that the whole thing cut stark in the white snow. All around it was cleared so the dark pines and leafless trees framed it from a distance making it look like something from a postcard.

I also noticed, as I got to the back, it was about symmetry.

The front had nothing leading up to it but a lane through a proud stand of pines that had clearly been planted in a way they looked like tall green soldiers at attention.

The back had matching gazebos, one on each side. Beyond the gazebos, there were large matching greenhouses with peaked roofs and ironwork shooting into the sky. And there was a line of short evergreen shrubs trimmed in perfect cones between the gazebos and the greenhouses, the shrubs delineating what my guess was the backyard, which was family-related, from what was probably more servant-related, the greenhouses.

And somehow, I had no idea how (they must have been dug by hand), two twin, rushing streams flowed in straight lines from the forest into a fountain that sat between the gazebos. Its waters brimmed forth from the tip of what looked like a carved marble saber. This water ran over frozen ice, the water and ice setting diamond twinkles into the sun. The streams also flooded out from the base of the fountain, going toward the house and disappearing under it.

I took it all in and found it breathtaking in its frozen serene simplicity.

But what stole my breath completely was seeing Christophe wearing a mini-me Apollo outfit including a long cape. He had a bow and arrow and was aiming at a target some distance away.

Not too far from him, Élan was on her knees in the snow, not building a snowman but building what looked like a snow castle.

I noticed two things immediately.

One, they were even more beautiful out in the sun, doing things they enjoyed, not cowering in a bed, terrified out of their minds.

The other was that they both needed to put on hats.

“They should have hats,” I murmured, staring at them, my heart pounding, my eyes beginning to hurt from just looking at all the beauty that was them.

“Try getting a hat on young master Christophe,” Loretta mumbled. “I’ve heard he’s stubborn, that one. His father doesn’t wear a hat, he won’t either.”

At her words, I felt my lips curve even as my eyes kept burning.

“They’re beautiful,” I whispered.

“They are indeed, Maddie,” Meeta agreed from up close, her hand coming out to hold mine.

Christophe let his arrow fly. It hit just outside the bulls-eye and I fought against cheering at the same time I fought against crying.

“They need a mother,” Meeta went on and my heart squeezed just as her hand squeezed mine. “A mother would put hats on them.”

She would. A mother would put hats on them. And tell them to eat their vegetables. And cheer when they made an almost bulls-eye. And help them make snow castles.

My throat started burning at the same time my scalp prickled in a weird warning and it was the latter that caught my attention.

I tore my eyes away from the children to do a scan of the area and I saw two men I’d never seen before in the forest by the furthest gazebo.

And they, too, were skulking, their eyes, I was sure even though I was far away, aimed at the kids.

Shit!

Apollo’s men wouldn’t skulk. They would have no need to skulk. It surprised me to know it, but with the presence of two skulking men, men obviously who weren’t supposed to be there, it was apparent Apollo’s men were falling down on the job at keeping Ulfr land safe.

But I couldn’t think of that.

All I could think was that two rough-looking men were skulking towards the kids. And (except the way Loretta, Meeta and I were doing it), I knew skulking led to no good.

Therefore, quickly, I let Meeta’s hand go and moved away from the tree I was hiding behind, looking this way and that, ordering in a quiet but urgent voice, “Go! Around the front. Head to the house. Find someone and tell them there’s a threat to the children in the back garden.”

“Maddie—” Loretta started as I found what I was looking for, dashed forward and pulled a stout, fallen branch out of the snow.

I whipped around to the girls. “Go!” I snapped, and didn’t wait to see if they did as I told them to do.

I moved.

Darting through the trees on the edge of the clearing, I kept my eyes to the men who were rounding the kids the other way. They weren’t rushing (one couldn’t rush while skulking) and I was, so I got close fast as they moved into the clearing, their eyes on the kids, their bodies bent low in a threatening way, their clothing warm but rough, heavy beards on their faces.

I moved in from behind.

The one coming up the rear heard my boots in the snow, turned and I saw his eyes widen in surprise because I was ready to strike. I had the branch back; I closed in on him quickly, and swung at him with everything I had.

Unfortunately, he had time to lift up a forearm so he caught the force of my blow there when I was aiming at his head.

Fortunately, I had another weapon at my disposal, my big mouth.

“
Kids! Run!
” I shouted just as the big guy with his scruffy beard caught the branch and wrested it from my hands. “
Run!
” I shrieked, launching myself at him, uncertain what I intended to do, just that I intended to do something.

I didn’t make it.

Not because he fended me off.

No, because an iron arm clamped around my waist from behind and I was hauled back into a strong body.