“The ban will lift,” Grytel confirms.
Daxon looks at him. “Then I’ll bring Darcy and the boy for a visit. And my brothers you can hold their nephew.”
“That’s a promise.”
And Roxy,who has been quiet for most of an hour, looks across the room at Mara and says, “How long does it take to build?”
“The fault?” Mara doesn’t look up from the tablet she’s borrowed. “Properly? Six weeks. Eight, to make it perfect, and it has to be perfect, because Andrew audited beside me for two moon cycles and he’ll know the difference between a real load anomaly and…”
“Mara,” Roxy says gently. “You’re due next week.”
Mara puts the tablet down in her lap. “I know.”
“So when this actually happens — when whoever they send actually comes — “
“I’ll have a newborn.” She says it evenly. “Yes. I’ve done the arithmetic. I did it the diurnal I thought of the plan.”
“We’ll manage it,” I tell them. “I will be by her side every moment.”
We have not managed worse.
Chapter Nineteen
Mara
Lucas wakes at oh-three-hundred, the way he does, and by the time I’ve got my eyes open Cayzor is already out of the bed.
I don’t even hear him move anymore. Seven feet of Margol Xylan gets up off a mattress in total silence and crosses a dark room, and the first I know of it is the sound of my son stopping mid-complaint because somebody enormous has picked him up.
“He’s wet,” Cayzor says.
I lie there in the warm dark listening to my miner change my son’s diaper and narrate the process to him in a low rumble —now the other side, hold still, no, that is my thumb.
Darling.
He brings Lucas over and puts him in my arms for feeding and sits down on the edge of the bed with his back to me.
That’s what he does. Every night. He never goes back to sleep until we’re both settled.
I am so in love with Cayzor of Eighteen that it hurts. I love him when he’s putting my boots on and I love him at oh-three-hundred with my son on his shoulder.
He’s my husband. That’s what he is because I don’t have another word that fits. He lives in my apartment and sleeps in my bed and gets up with my baby. And he looks at me, every day, all day, without once trying to hide it, like I am the only thing on this planet worth looking at.
He loves me as much as I love him.
And we have never touched.
Not once. Not skin to skin, not ever. Nine months in the same apartment and six of them in the same bed and I have never felt that male’s bare hand on me anywhere.
I’ve never kissed him. I have thought about it so much that it’s become its own small madness — what his mouth would do, whether he’d know how. I’ve never had his hands on my body. I’ve never had him inside me. I lie six inches from him every night and I am thirty-three years old and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want that, and it doesn’t happen, and it might never happen.
Because he scented me in this kitchen, in that doorway, on the first night he ever came here.
We are not compatible.
He told me plainly, the way he tells me everything, and I have had close to a year to make my peace with it and I have not managed it for a single diurnal.
That maleadoresmy son.
