Read Online ThirteenNights by Sabrina Garie - Free Book Online Page B

scotch glass when
Tai approached him.
    “Who are you?” Lines rippled across his forehead as he
leaned back against the bar to steady himself.
    “Your son.”
    Sander pushed his hair back off his face. Still thick and
lush like Tai’s wilder, less-styled tresses, but with elegant streaks of gray
at his temples. “Bloody hell of a way to tell a man.”
    “I’m shocked myself. If I could have done it differently, I
would have, but…” He pulled Annie to his side, desperate for her scent and
warmth. “We need your help or our unborn child will be taken from us at
birth…as I was taken when my mother tried to bring me to you.”
    Sander’s eyebrow flipped up in a perfect Mr. Spock
imitation. “Clio, another Talisker. I’ll meet you at your table. You’ve got
some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.”
    “Your dad has one geeky sense of humor, he may be all
right.” Annie pitched her voice low, knowing Tai’s hearing could pick it up.
“I’ll text Marta and get us a round of drinks. I think your father’s going to
need quite a few. He’s already downed the last one.” It took an enormous
quantity of alcohol to inebriate one of the warrior races and it had no impact
on their fetus. Annie and Tai had not even come close to their limits.
    “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I assume you have a
mother with whom I consorted in my early years.” Sander was already halfway
through the drink Annie brought him.
    “Her name’s Phoebe. You met at an historian’s conference in
London, thirty-one years ago.”
    “I remember the conference. Her name wasn’t Phoebe.”
    “You may know her as P.S. Cassidy.”
    “Cassie? I tried to get back in touch.” He drained the scotch
glass. “She cut me off, said she wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw her
again at another conference. As if she knew which ones I was attending and
avoided them.”
    “You never married?” Annie asked.
    Sander shook his head and waved Clio over with another
drink. A soul-deep sadness softened his eyes. His body hunched over as if in
pain. “There was something different about her, otherworldly.”
    Tai glanced at Annie, who nodded in response. “She’s an
Amazon, a supernatural being.”
    “I think I knew that,” Sander whispered. “My obsession with
mythology, trying to answer the question of whether or not supes existed
accelerated after I met Cassie, uh, Phoebe. Blimey, I can’t get my head around
this.” His accent descended from clipped, proper English to a more cockney
rhythm.
    “Maybe we could meet up tomorrow, talk this through. After a
good night’s sleep,” Annie offered.
    “Flipping good idea.” Sander wiped his brow.
    “Meet us back here tomorrow when it opens at eleven,” Tai
instructed.
    After Sander left, Clio tapped into the pantheon network and
had him followed. The tail would watch over him, make sure he didn’t escape.
They didn’t always wipe knowledge from humans but Sander had not yet proved his
trustworthiness.
    * * * * *
    Annie dragged a wound-up Tai to their new hotel, given the
state of their room this morning. She stripped them both and ushered him to the
bed. Tai pulled her close, locked her in the steel cage of his arms and nuzzled
her head and neck gently. The tenseness of his body told the tale of the emotional
churning the past few days inflicted. Like most male warriors, he did not
verbalize his emotions. Unlike them, he let her know in other ways how deeply
he felt. Right now, as they subtly declared war on the warriors’ way of life,
she needed the words.
    “Why do you want me the way you do?” she asked.
    “For all my rebelliousness, I am a Gargarean warrior
as you are an Amazon.” He gave her a quick kiss on the head and held her
impossibly closer. “How could I not fall for someone as strong as you with the
courage to be gentle, to love, to be different? You’re everything I ever wanted
but never believed I’d find.”
    After a nip to her lips, he let her go and pulled