“We may not have long,” he said into her hair.
Cela heard the words, but the only answer she could muster was a faint sigh. The overwhelming release of tensionhad left her nearly dizzy with relief and so relaxed she couldn’t even imagine moving. She was drifting as she lay, and with Tyr’s arms around her, she fell asleep curled against him in the moonlight.
TYR
Pain woke him.Tyr flinched violently, rolled into the grass and was already sitting up by the time his conscious mind caught up.
Beside him, Cela sat up, gorgeously tousled and naked. It was early morning, the sky graying toward dawn. The moon had set.
And that was why they were awake.
Tyr knew without even looking that the tattoo, the hated tattoo, was back. He could see Cela’s version of it on her arm and shoulder, her skin pale in the gray dawnlight. His nerves jangled from the jolt of too-familiar pain.
Cela raised a hand, still half asleep and blinking, reaching toward him.
“Don’t.” It came out harsher than he’d intended, and she jerked her hand back as if she’d been slapped. The harshness was because he wanted so desperately to let her continue, to feel the soft brush of the fingers he had enjoyed so intimately last night. Pushing himself to modulate his tone to gentleness, he went on, “Don’t. It’ll hurt.”
That woke her up all the way. “The tattoos.” She lookeddown at her arm, and Tyr saw the moment when she became utterly crestfallen, her face crumpling with a misery he ached to wipe away. “Oh, Tyr, I thought?—”
“So did I.” Tyr felt his mind coming back online slowly, despite the distraction as he kept slipping back into memories of last night. The kisses, the touching—it felt as if everything they had been struggling to hold back had exploded, a pent-up flood bursting through a dam.
Tiny rustles from Cela’s direction didn’t help; it only reminded him that she was still naked, and he yearned to hold her in his arms with a physical ache. For a teeth-gritting moment, hewouldhave taken her into his embrace, no matter the cost, if he hadn’t known that it would hurt her too.
“But we know, now, one thing that we can do about it,” he went on after the intensity of the urge had passed. “Moonlight.”
“Is it any moonlight, do you think? Or just the full moon?”
“I don’t know.” He finally risked a look at her, drinking her in. Her lips were slightly parted, and now it was even worse than before—because heknewhow those soft pink lips would taste and feel; he had felt the strength of her arms around him, the silken glide as their two bodies became one?—
“Tyr.” Her voice came out on a sigh. She cleared her throat and seemed to rally a little. “So—tonight. We’ll find out tonight.”
“Right.” He glanced up at the lightening sky. “We’d better get dressed. Your coworker from the bakery will be here to pick you up soon, and I guess finding us naked in a scatter of our clothing will tip our hand a bit.”
Cela managed a smile. “A bit.”
She got up, and they dressed quietly. Tyr occasionallycaught her sneaking glances at him from under her mussed hair. He couldn’t blame her; the only reason he caught her was because he was doing the same, as those glorious soft-skinned limbs vanished, to an extent, beneath the nightgown she had been wearing.
He started, by instinct, to reach out to take her hand. Her fingers twitched toward him, and they both realized at the same moment. Her hand fell back to her side. Tyr lowered his hand, swallowing misery and disappointment that competed oddly with the lingering afterglow from the night before.
“Tyr—what are we going to tell people?” she asked as they walked back to the house, close but not close enough.
“We don’t have to tell them anything. It’s none of their business.”
“Yes, but—your kids? And your friends, they’re trying to find a cure for us, knowing about the moonlight could help.”
Tyr sighed. “You’re right. Let’s just think about it and not rush into anything. First let’s find out if moonlight always does it, or if it has to be the full moon to work.”
But they didn’t find out that night. A storm blew in, blanketing the sky in thick clouds. Cela sat on a window seat with a cup of tea in her hands and gazed out at the rain lashing the window glass, while Tyr took his turn bathing the twins and putting them down for the night.
He came back eventually, leaving them sleepily babbling to themselves in the crib with their toys (after six board books, three diaper changes, and a hundred belly raspberries and lullabies). Cela moved over a little so he could join her.
“Even the rain here is different,” she said in a musing tone.
Her gaze was fixed out the window. She had showered before work, but not when she came home, and Tyr could smell her—a soft scent of femaleness, coffee, cinnamon, and lingering shampoo. He wished he could smell himself on her, but for that he would have had to lean too close, his nose mere inches from her neck, risking disaster?—
“How so?” he asked, wrenching himself out of his thoughts before they drove him to either despair or unwise choices.
Cela glanced at him, her seaglass eyes nearly gray in the rain-filtered light. “Oh, softer somehow, I think. Nothing was ever easy on the island. You remember that, don’t you?”
