Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(73)

He tore his gaze from hers and looked up at the ceiling. “Thanks.”

She released a soft snort. “Thanks? Tighe, for heaven’s sake, you’re an amazing creation. Rare, powerful. Beautiful. In all your forms.”

He heard her words, but the fist inside his chest only pinched harder. “You don’t understand.”

“Obviously not.”

Her soft palm slid across his chest. “Tell me. Help me understand. If you give me just one last gift, make it this.”

He groaned. “You don’t fight fair.”

“You can’t always win with fair.” Her soft mouth brushed his arm in a sweet kiss. “I want to understand you.”

“Let me finish my shower, first.” He needed space. Because she was getting too close. She was digging too deep.

Delaney sighed, her eyes frustrated and sad. “Okay.” She moved to the other shower and picked up a bottle of flowery shampoo Kara must have left down there.

He washed thoroughly, scraping his skin raw, lost in feelings and thoughts he didn’t know how to explain. Things he didn’t want to explain even if he knew how. But Delaney’s presence, the solidity of her acceptance, grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let him go.

He’d give her the sun and the moon if he could. He supposed he could try to explain what he didn’t entirely understand himself. And if he was going to do it, it had to be tonight.

With a sigh, he turned off the water, wrapped a towel around his waist, and sat on one of the benches, tipping his head against the wall behind him as she finished her shower. His gaze fastened on the rocklike tile of the wall across from him as his mind looked inward.

“I love living here, D, fighting beside these men. And when I shift into my tiger, it’s a rush unlike anything you can imagine. But I swear, I swear not a day goes by that I don’t think about how I’d give it up…” He shook his head. “I’d give it up…”

The words burned in his throat.

Delaney joined him, wrapping a towel around her dripping body as she sat down beside him. Her fingers stroked his damp arm. “For what, Tighe?”

Pulling her against him, he struggled to find the words for a longing he’d never given voice to.

His voice shook. “To hold my daughter again.”

Delaney started. He tasted her surprise. But all she did was press her head against his shoulder. “Tell me about her.”

Where to begin? But as he clung to her, the words poured out.

“She was precious. Perfect. Her name was Amalie, and the last time I saw her she was five, with dimples like mine and a cloud of golden curls that she’d flick back from her face as she ran from one discovery to the next. She had a quick mind and an insatiable curiosity, and from the moment she learned to speak, all she did was ask questions. Why do the clouds move? Why don’t all butterflies wear the same colored wings? Why did her cuts take days to heal and mine only seconds?”

“She was mortal.”

“Yes. My wife, Gretchen, was human. The children of such unions can be either, but Amalie was mortal.”

His eyes fogged, a lump forming in his throat. Goddess, but he missed her.

“Tell me about Gretchen.”

Swallowing back the emotion, he forced himself to push past the anger that thoughts of her always brought and think about the girl she’d been. For the first time in centuries, he thought of the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

“I met her when I was fifteen. She was a year younger, but I knew I was going to marry her. From the first day I saw her, I loved her.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“We both wound up with the same foster father. I grew up in a Therian village in Denmark. When I was nine, my mother had a premonition of a Mage attack. The Mage in that area, at that time, were trying to wipe out the Therians.”

“Why?”

“A superiority thing we’ve suffered from the dawn of time. One of the women in our village had married a human a few years before, so my mother took me to her and asked her to let me stay there for a while. She promised she’d come back for me as soon as it was safe.”

Delaney’s soft hand stroked his chest. “She didn’t come back, did she?”

“No. A few months later, the woman I was living with died of a mysterious illness. She was Therian, so of course it was no illness. It had to have been Mage magic of some kind. I was too young to understand fully what was going on, but I had a feeling…I knew my mother would never come back for me. So I lived with the human, Anders, and his young son, helping with the farm.”

“Did he know what you were? That you were immortal?”

“I was never really sure. In hindsight, no. He couldn’t have known. When I was fifteen, his fourteen-year-old niece came to live with us. Gretchen. She was…incorrigible. Full of mischief and laughter, and I fell head over heels in love with her. Three years later, we married. Amalie was born a year after that.”

A soft kiss brushed his shoulder. “What happened?”

He looked down at her dark head and lifted his hand to touch the cool sleekness of her hair. “Why are you so sure something happened?”

She lifted her head to meet his gaze, her heart in her eyes, and he knew she felt the pain in his chest. So he told her.