Rocked by Love (Gargoyles, #4)(55)
“Oh, hell no!” Wynn scoffed. “I’m much more an advocate of sitting up and riding him like a cowgirl. I just mean that maybe if you just stopped fighting quite so hard and stopped trying to make everything make sense, things might fall into place without your help. You have to remember, Koyote girl, that life is not a program you can debug, or a line of code you can tweak until it all does what you want it to. It’s a little bit more complicated than that.”
Oh, how she hated it when other people made all the sense. She lifted her head and narrowed her eyes at her friend. “I still might stab you.”
“Ha! I’d like to see you try. You’d have to get through my fiancé first, and he can’t stand the sight of my blood.”
And that reminded Kylie of all the things Wynn had gone through since she had been dragged into this mess well before Kylie had gotten involved. Wynn hadn’t just been hurt, attacked, shot at, and nearly killed, she had lost a brother.
It all came back to Bran, and his loss was what had motivated Kylie to start digging around in the first place. She didn’t want anyone else to lose their own family the same way, stolen from them by a group of people too greedy for power to see the lives of others as anything other than fuel for their evil fires.
Stopping the Order was the most important thing Kylie could ever do. Could she do that without the giant Guardian by her side?
Did she want to?
Chapter Twelve
Az dos harts iz ful, geyen di oygen iber.
When the heart is full, the eyes overflow.
Dag entered the room warily, nearly tiptoeing over the cool floorboards, entirely unsure of his welcome. A smart warrior, a cautious warrior, would have executed a strategic disengagement and given his mate the time she had told him she needed to sort through her feelings and the crucible of events she had already been through.
He wasn’t that smart. Or maybe he simply wasn’t thinking with his brain at that moment. Either explanation could be true. Possibly both.
He hadn’t come upstairs for sex, though. At least, that hadn’t been his primary motivation. He simply needed to see Kylie again, to be near her without the distraction of their temporary guests or the plans of the nocturnis. She had burrowed her way under his skin, and the only way to soothe the constant itch was to be near her, to smell her, to touch her, to feel the warmth of her small energetic body that somehow appeared restless even while lying still.
“I guess not growing up with a strict bubbeh, or you know, at all, means I shouldn’t give you too much grief for not knocking.”
Her voice floated out of the dark, quiet and relaxed, more amused than annoyed. Dag let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I did not wish to wake you if you slept.”
“Yeah, not sleeping.” She shifted, her skin shushing across the smooth sheets. He could see well in the dark, but she remained curled on her side, the puffy height of her covering obscuring her face from his angle near the door. “You might as well come in.”
He crossed immediately to the bed and reached for the blankets.
“Whoa! Hold up there, Quick Draw,” she said, holding out a hand to stop him. “I meant come into the room, not climb into my bed. I’m pretty sure we still have a few things to talk about.”
Dag swallowed his disappointed sigh and sat on the edge of the bed, on top of the covers. He noticed the smaller size of this mattress compared to the one downstairs and couldn’t help but picture how close they would have to curl together to both fit. His mate wished to talk, so he would talk with her. He just wished he possessed more skill at the activity.
“You have questions,” he guessed.
She frowned. Now that he sat beside her, he could see her expressions clearly, and this one looked confused but not angry. He felt a stirring of hope.
“Actually, I’m not even sure I do,” she murmured. Both of them instinctively kept their voices low, unwilling to disturb the intimacy of the quiet, darkened room. “I mean, I think I understand everything everyone has told me, so I don’t need to ask how this all works, or what the legend says, or what my role is in all of this. My mind gets all those things. At least, it gets that they’re things you all think are true, and I have no concrete evidence to disprove any of it.”
Dag struggled to sit still and listen, to not lean toward her and try to make her see things the way he did. He might not have known this female for a long time, but he already knew that trying to rush her or pressure her would only result in frustration for him and more stubbornness for her.
“The only question that keeps popping into my head is why,” she continued, tucking one arm under her cheek to raise her head on the pillow. “And it’s not even clear to me which why I mean. Why me? Why you? Why would Fate care about the love lives of ordinary women and a bunch of stone statues? Why do men have nipples? Honestly, at this point they all seem equally relevant. So no, I don’t have any questions, because I don’t even really know what it is I want to know.”
He tried hard to wrap his head around her words, which as usual she had strung together and knotted into sentences that took him time and effort to untangle. Finally, he said, “I cannot think any of those questions has an answer. Even if they did, I am unsure the answer would satisfy you.”
She pulled a wry face and stuck her tongue out at him. “That big a balagan, am I? A big, crazy mess?”