“I’ve got it.” Blinking away tears of distress and pain, Cela carefully took the damp paper towel by the corner without touching him.
Tyr returned to his side of the table, inwardly cursing their people and the entire situation. “Why would they punish you like this? Nothing about this situation is your fault.”
“I told you, Kav blames me.” She kept her head down, her hair hanging across her face like a silvery curtain. “And he blamed me even more when I refused to give up the babies and try again.”
“Kav is their father?” Tyr hated him already.
“My mate.” The words came from her in a shuddering sigh.
“Notyour mate.” He spoke through clenched teeth.
This actually got a small smile. “Designated bondmate, then. I was selected from the entire covert for the honor of bearing his children.”
Tyr hadn’t actually known that some of the coverts still practiced arranged mating. It had been done that way in the old days. But these days, it was much less common, and he had only heard of a few isolated cases dating back to his parents’ time. However, Covert Silvershell were said to be traditional and set in their ways.
“We don’t do that out here,” Tyr said. It was all he could say; the sheer unfairness of what had happened to her staggered him.
Cela looked down at her hands. “No, just a fated mating to a man I can’t touch. Much better.”
He had nothing to say to that, and Cela looked up fromher hands, which had closed into fists. “I’m sorry. That was unfair.”
“There’s got to be a way to fix it. Maybe this is temporary and it’ll wear off.”
“Maybe,” she murmured, and stabbed her fork into her spaghetti. But she didn’t sound like she believed it.
CELA
Cela woke slowly,drifting out of jumbled, confused dreams of buses, strangers, and a pair of kind, gold-tinted eyes. She rolled over and blinked at the unfamiliar ceiling of the bedroom as yesterday’s events came flooding back. Her entire journey seemed to run together into one long nightmare of a day. The exiling, the seemingly endless bus journey—meeting Tyr?—
Her hand went by instinct to the tattoo, running lightly over her skin until her fingertips found the healing, injured flesh of the exile mark. Then she pulled her hand away.
Among the things borrowed from Tyr’s ex, she had found a nightgown. Like all Paula’s clothes, it didn’t quite fit her, but it was loose and comfortable. She had burrowed into the bed last night with such tremendous relief that she almost cried again, just to be comfortable and fed and have somewhere to sleep that wasn’t moving. She had awakened in the night to feed the twins and then immediately fell asleep again.
She had tried bedding down the twins on a makeshift pallet on the floor made with extra bedding she found in acloset, but at some point in the night they had shifted and crawled into bed with her. Now she had a lion cub on one side and a large, fluffy owlet on the other.
The twins stirred and woke. Ayra squeaked, and Aven gave a little growl and pawed at the front of her nightgown.
“Shift first, then breakfast,” she told them.
Once she had coaxed them both to human form, she nursed them, reminding her again that she needed to get bottles and some kind of supplemental food for them. On Griffin Island, she’d had the help of another woman in the covert who had recently had a baby, as well as some of the island’s limited supply of baby formula. She had just begun starting the babies on soft food when they had their first shift and everything was blown apart. After that, nursing them was easiest, but they were hungry all the time and her poor breasts could hardly keep up.
She left the babies in their shift forms, playing on the bed. After tucking away her well-used breasts, she went over to the window.
It was a gorgeous, brisk day, with clouds skidding across a blue spring sky. This window looked out on the back pasture of Tyr’s house, and it was even more full of flowering trees than the front. Or would this be called an orchard? A lawn? She didn’t know the proper names for all the parts of a human habitation, only an eclectic grab bag of things she had learned from books.
Whatever it was called, she loved it. She pushed up the window and leaned out so she could inhale the fresh spring air. For the first time in her life, the air didn’t smell like the sea, and she felt a slight pang of homesickness that was eased by the lovely floral perfume—and also the sight that met her eyes.
Tyr was out in the yard, wandering among the trees. With only a tight T-shirt covering his muscular torso, he reachedup and pulled down on a long, overhanging branch. Cela’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“What are you doing?” she asked, hanging out the window.
Tyr made a startled sound and lowered his arms, to her dismay. “You’re awake!”
“You don’t have to stop on my account,” Cela pointed out. Her griffin was purring.
But instead he came closer to the window. “My daughter wants a tire swing. I was looking for a good tree.”
The reminder of his other family stung her heart, but she was feeling a bit less depressed about that after last night. She believed him when he said that he was no longer involved with this Paula woman, even if the idea of him with any woman made her griffin pace and lash its tail. And she found that she was eager to meet his children.
