He flipped to the next drawing and what he saw made his lips quirk in realization.
“Here are your goblins,” he murmured. “At last.”
She gave him a shy grin that made his heart speed in his chest. He realized that she was unlike any female he’d ever been with because she made him feel things he’d never felt before. Strange things that both frightened him and humbled him.
She can destroy me if she wishes to, he thought.
Crystal held that much power over him.
“Yes,” she said. “Krane and Jron.”
She pointed them out and once again she surprised him. Her passion for her drawings was written on her face as she looked at them, pride in her creations evident.
Next to her numerous sketches were what he assumed were English words.
“This is your written language?” he asked, touching the thin screen, tracing the lines.
“Yes,” she said.
“What does it say?” he asked, slightly frustrated that he could not read it, though that was a limitation of his language implant. Perhaps, in time, he would learn to read her language, just as he’d come to speak it.
Would she still be on Luxiria by then?
The thought sobered her but he focused as he listened to her voice.
“They’re just notes for book ideas, things I want to include,” she told him.
“Will you start on it soon? Your book?” he questioned, looking through more of her sketches of them, studying the words he didn’t understand closely.
“Maybe,” she said, still a little shy about it all. “Beks wants me to.”
“Why?” he asked, looking up at her.
“On Earth, um…” she looked down at the tablet then raised her shoulder in a shrug. “Well, my mother used to read to us. Stories and fairytales. They were our bedtime stories. It’s…just one of our customs, I guess. And Beks reminded me that there will be children again soon. On Luxiria.”
Cruxan felt his stomach jolt at that reminder. Vaxa’an’s mate, Kat, was due to give birth any span now.
“And well, Luxiria doesn’t exactly have a library full of fairytales,” she explained.
Realization hit him. “She wishes you to write those books. For her children, for the others that will come soon.”
“Yes,” she whispered, looking into his eyes. “To bring at least one of our customs here…reading to our children.”
Our children.
Longing like he’d never known squeezed his chest. He knew it was just a slip in her words, but they conjured images in his mind that hewanted. Images of hisluxiva, heavy with his offspring.Images of their children, of little males and females, sporting their mother’s likeness, with golden hair and shy eyes, but they would be mischievous like he’d been as a youth and they would have his horns.
Cruxan’s breathing came fast, the image so real in his mind that it was like a premonition sent to him by the Fates.
“Cruxan?” Crystal whispered, reaching out to touch his forearm.
“And you,luxiva?” he rasped, his voice guttural and thick. “Would you wish to read to your offspring?”
She blinked, her lips parting. It took her a moment to reply, but eventually she said, quietly, “If I had them, yes.”
“And do you want them?” he couldn’t help but ask.
He heard her heartbeat increase, heard itthud, thud, thudin her chest.
