By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Thirty

Adrian and Jake, once the sweep of the main floor of the palace was complete, with the odd brief firefight attended to, decided to stick close to Richard, whether or not Richard was eager for their company. Like Jake, Adrian had begun to suspect that without a bit of careful interference, Richard was likely to get himself killed before the night was out.

It had been a long night already, and there was still the second floor to search, to find any guardsmen who had retreated up there when things went badly down below. After that, they would turn their attention toward the basement ... unless T'beth, on her own, had already attended to that. So far, she hadn't sent any calls for help to Adrian, but she must have found something worth doing down there; he got the occasional strong surge of pleasurable feeling from her, if nothing else. And she wasn't inviting anyone else to join the party.

So Adrian and Jake attached themselves to Richard and followed him up the nearest staircase.

If the main floor of the palace had been a vision straight out of the Arabian Nights, the second floor, as Adrian already knew, was closer to what Cleopatra's palace or that of Sulieman the Magnificent at the height of his empire must have looked like. Zanjani had a definite taste for the extravagant, and the contents of just one of these rooms, sold off at Sotheby's, would probably have made anyone a wealthy man.

There were a lot of rooms.

The section of the palace that had been altered to accommodate Bahram's vampires was situated, conveniently, Adrian thought, immediately above the harem, and it was just about the same size. Windows throughout this area had been blacked out and covered over with incredible tapestries and hanging rugs, things that bore the stamp of years of intensive labor in their intricacy. Beds were hung with velvet curtains or flowing, multi-colored sheers, and floors were set with minutely detailed designs in marble or in mosaics of fantastically ingenious geometric complexity. Where there was a bare area of simple polished marble, more of the richly-colored rugs were spread. Where there was a bare section of wall, paintings (often, Adrian thought, very bad ones) hung, or statues sat in niches. The Prophet's injunction against depicting the human form in art hadn't slowed Zanjani down much; both paintings and statues featured incredibly lush nudes.

Furnishings were of the inlaid and over-decorated kind, chests and tables and armoires that would have, each on its own, been the dominating focal point of any room. Stuffed together, many of them to each of these very large and rather dim rooms, they were overwhelming and a bit suffocating. But nobody ever said that being wealthy ... or being a vampire, gave anyone good taste.

Adrian was busily feeling superior to everyone who had been involved in acquiring and displaying all this extravagance. Jake was busily watching Richard. Richard was busily searching... avidly and so far fruitlessly, for lurking guardsmen. From the far end of the palace, where others of the Sa'idi group were conducting their own room-by-room search of this floor, there was the occasional sharp burst of gunfire. Each time it came, Richard's frown, and his obvious dissatisfaction deepened.

Richard had given orders, before they left the main floor, that all of his people were to search up here in groups and that no one was to enter any room alone, and he had been unable to complain when Adrian and Jake decided to become his own group. But he was clearly annoyed with their presence, and Jake was beginning to get the feeling that, at the first opportunity, Richard was going to try to get lost.

Adrian was scornful of the idea. Silently, he 'sent' to Jake, 'Let him try. I don't have to see him, Jake. I can sense his presence if he manages to get out of our sight.'

Well, that was true enough. Richard couldn't hide from them without a pretty good head start, and they could keep him from getting that.

"I'll be damned!" Adrian said suddenly, and both Jake and Richard spun quickly toward him, their guns coming up. "Look!" Adrian enthused. "That's a Cellini pitcher! I've seen photographs of it!"

"Goddammit, Talbot, I almost shot the damned thing!" Jake was an anthropologist, not an art connoisseur.

"No, Jake ... I mean, some of this stuff is really priceless." Adrian's eyes were glittering. Objets d'art of every imaginable kind were scattered carelessly on every flat surface. Just one of these little goodies, on the collectors' market, could resolve his own credit difficulties for a long time to come. "Zanjani was doing a whole lot better than we realized."

"Adrian," Richard said wearily, "it would be better if you could keep your mind on the business at hand. While you are admiring the bric-a-brac, a concealed guardsman could be preparing to kill us all."

"I know that," Adrian sulked. Was it his fault if he had an eye for the truly magnificent when all the rest of the world seemed to be attuned to the mundane? Bric-a-brac! Where the hell had Richard picked that up? "But there's no one in here, Richard. I would sense them if there were."

Sighing, irritated more and more by the minute, Richard turned back toward the corridor. Adrian was right; if there was anyone in any of these rooms, he would know the moment he entered it. If anyone had asked Richard exactly why that idea was annoying, he probably wouldn't have been able to answer.

Some of these rooms were huge. Jake was astonished at what was probably, believe it or not, a bathroom. This was a room at least a hundred feet long, with delicately carved alabaster pillars marching in evenly spaced rows down the middle ... and several incredibly ornate pools of water lined up between them. The bottoms and sides of the pools were decorated with gold inlays ... designs of stars and moons and comets that glittered against the dark blue tiles as if electrified beneath the water. Jake reached down to test the water of each pool as they passed it and found one cold, one warm, and the last damned hot. There was no question about it. This had been Zanjani's private bathroom; his own suite was adjacent to it. Jake tried to imagine bathing in these pools, with little floating trays of wine and goodies drifting by, with music playing softly in the background and bevies of harem girls to scrub his back...

And then he remembered what Zanjani did to those girls, and the idea lost some of its appeal.

"Look at this!" Adrian was messing around over against the wall, and Jake went that way, to see what he was talking about. Adrian did something with a rheostat there and part of the wall began to slide away. A section at least twenty feet long disappeared into the wall adjacent, opening the bath to the gallery overlooking the garden below. The scent of roses, rising on the night air, was very strong.

Jake stepped out onto the gallery and looked down. So far as he could see, there was no one at all in the garden except the agitated swans, circling nervously around their pond, kept awake long after they would normally have been asleep by the sporadic gunfire. He turned back into the room, glanced around, and said, "Where's Richard?"

Adrian looked blank for a minute. "He was right here..."

"Oh, shit." Jake ran for the door, with Adrian on his heels. They had turned their heads for only the smallest moment. There couldn't be any doubt at all; Richard was trying to lose them.

He hadn't gone into Zanjani's rooms. Adrian knew immediately that they were empty and swung back into the corridor. Richard had to have gone out into the corridor and across it, to the suite of rooms over there. With Jake following, Adrian went that way, and felt the human presence as soon as he stepped across the threshold.

Richard wasn't in the first of the rooms. Adrian, casting about, selected the proper direction and spun that way, running now. Jake had to stretch himself to keep up. In his mind, he heard Adrian's suddenly panicked, 'He's not alone in there!'

They flew through the large den or study or library or whatever the hell it was and into the adjacent room. Richard was straight ahead, clear across the fifty-foot span of the room, approaching an alcove of some kind, with his rifle held ready. And behind him, but even further away from Adrian and Jake, at the very furthest rear of the room and half-concealed by the polished malachite pillars that supported the ceiling here, was a single guardsman, who had not noticed the new arrivals but who had already drawn a bead on Richard himself.

"Richard!" Adrian could only scream at him. He had no power, at this distance, to compel Richard to do anything.

Jake didn't even try. He snapped his rifle up, hardly daring to take time to aim, his eyes locked on the small part of the guard's head that was visible around the edge of one of the polished green and black pillars, and got off the shot of a lifetime. The guard was thrown violently back and down, and his blood...and other things ... sprayed across the wall behind him as he fell.

But he had squeezed off his shot first.

Jake didn't see it hit Richard. Adrian did, and Jake picked up the image, along with Adrian's own helpless horror. Adrian clearly saw blood spray from Richard's head as Richard dropped, as suddenly lifeless as a puppet whose strings have been abruptly cut, to the marble floor.

"Richard..." This time it wasn't a scream and Adrian wasn't even aware that he'd said it. But in it was all the aching grief of a man who has just lost, before his eyes, a friend who had come to mean more to him than he had ever imagined was possible.

Adrian reached Richard first. Jake's longer legs were no advantage when compared with a stricken vampire's speed. The odd bit of furniture that was in the way as Adrian literally flew in no more that three bounding steps across the vast width of the room would never recover. By the time Jake got there, Adrian had dropped to his knees and pulled Richard's limp body into his lap.

"He's alive!" Adrian's words were a fervent, almost silent breath.

He was indeed. He had a gouge cut into the right side of his head that was spilling incredible quantities of blood all over him, and all over the floor beneath him, but it was clear from the angle, from the corner of his forehead and out through the dark hair, that it wasn't a fatal wound. Richard had, quite simply, had his lights knocked out. Very hard.

Jake hadn't even realized that he'd dropped to his knees beside Adrian. He sat back on his heels now, aware that his hands were shaking. It struck him as almost comical. He had gone through the hell down below, with grenades going off on all sides, and his hands had remained as steady as rocks. Now ... after firing one single shot, he was shaking like a leaf.

Adrian was pointlessly trying to staunch the blood from Richard's head with the edge of his burnoose. Scalp wounds notoriously bleed a lot, and all Adrian was accomplishing was to get himself a bloody burnoose.

With that thought in mind, Jake looked blankly around the room for a moment, saw the satin pillows piled high at the head of the huge curtained bed, and pushed himself up to go get one. He brought it back and held it out to Adrian. "Use this," he said. "Apply pressure."

"Dammit, Jake, I know how to do it!" But he took the pillow.

Jake got up and walked away. He was aware of his breathing, of each intake of air, of each slow exhalation. He had seen god knew how many guardsmen shot down or destroyed in other ways. He had seen Nasrin blown to shredded pieces. It wasn't the same. He knew Richard.

He almost knew Richard. He knew Richard as well as Richard would allow any of them know him. He had gone from disliking Richard intensely, from resenting damned near every word out of the man's mouth, to obeying him without question, to finding himself pleased and proud that Richard seemed to like and approve of him, and to feeling quietly, intensely proud that Richard trusted him. He didn't even know when or how it had happened.

And like Adrian, he had been utterly convinced, for a long, terrible moment, that he had seen Richard die. It was different.

He walked down the length of the long room, along the line of malachite pillars, to where the guard's body lay, sprawled inelegantly across the floor. The high-powered bullet had done terrible damage to the man's head. Jake felt absolutely nothing. This wasn't a human being. This wasn't someone he'd liked or disliked, argued with, resented, admired, been furious with or almost idiotically pleased with. This was an enemy. If he felt anything at all, it was a strange distaste that this enemy was cluttering the room where his friends ... Adrian and Richard, were each suffering in their own ways from what this man had done.

He bent down, grabbed the man's boots, and began to back toward the door to the study. It had become important that this man should not be allowed to stay in the same room with Adrian and Richard right now. It was probably a good thing that there was no one there to ask Jake why, but it was important anyway.

It wasn't enough, somehow, to leave the body in the study. Jake continued backing up, across the study to the corridor door. There was a sudden burst of gunfire a short way down the corridor as he pulled the guard out through the study door and dropped his feet. A moment later, Shapour and Ed Perry came out of a doorway down there, saw him, and came trotting toward him. "Is that it?" Ed said, briskly efficient. "What about the rest of the rooms down there?" He indicated the corridor behind Jake.

"Empty. Empty up until a minute ago, anyway. Ed ... Richard's hurt."

"How bad?"

"I don't know. He's unconscious."

"Where's Pretty Boy?"

"With Richard." Jake gestured toward the doorway.

"Stay here, then, and see what you can do. All these rooms are interconnected, and we're having a hell of a time cleaning them out, Jake. Close the door here behind you and stay inside. I'll be back when I can." Without another word, he headed on down the corridor, and Shapour followed.

Jake turned back into the room behind him and pulled the door closed. There was a bolt, and he threw it. It wouldn't stand against much of an assault, but there probably wouldn't be anyone wasting time trying to break open doors.

Inside his head, suddenly, he felt T'beth's presence. She was trying to say something to Adrian ... and Adrian wasn't answering. Jake concentrated. 'Richard's hurt, T'beth,' he sent. 'Adrian's really upset.'

There was no hesitation. Her whispering thought, directed at him this time, was short and sharp. 'I'm on my way.'

Jake crossed the study, ignoring the bloody streak the guard had left across the floor, and walked back into the huge bedroom. Adrian hadn't moved. He was still holding Richard across his knees, and the look on his face was agonized. Very slowly, Jake walked over to him. "Adrian, we should move him up off the floor."

Adrian looked up at him as if he didn't understand the language. His eyes were red and swimming. "It was my fault, Jake."

"No it wasn't. It was his own damned fault."

"I should have been watching him."

"Christ, Adrian, he's a grown man. If he wants to get himself killed, he's gonna do it sooner or later, no matter who watches him."

Adrian's head was shaking back and forth. "He doesn't want to die, Jake. He just doesn't know what the hell to do with himself."

"Well, he's a big boy. Let him work it out."

But Jake was feeling every bit as guilty as Adrian. They had both known Richard was taking stupid chances, and they had both become distracted. It had been a long night, but it wasn't really a good enough excuse. Richard had helped them ... he had made this whole rescue of T'beth possible for them. He had pushed them and prodded them, driven them damned near crazy and trusted them absolutely, and he had driven them to do things they never thought they could do. They should have been able to help him, whether he wanted them to or not.

"Let's get him up off the damned floor," Jake said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

Richard made a noise, deep in his throat. Expression moved, briefly, across his pale face. He looked annoyed as all hell.

"He's waking up," Adrian said, pointlessly. He couldn't think of anything else to say either. Adrian's hands weren't shaking, but only because he didn't suffer from excess adrenaline, as Jake did.

For once, Jake didn't bitch about Adrian stating the obvious. He watched Richard's face as avidly as Adrian did, and in a moment, there was another noise, a groan this time, and another, stronger expression.

No question. Richard was pissed off.

Richard's hand came up to his head, as if to hold it in place. His eyes were still closed. But he said, in a surprisingly clear voice, "Let me go."

Adrian did, immediately, and Richard slid off his knees. His head hit the floor rather hard, and he groaned again. Both hands came up to hold his head. He said, annoyed, "I didn't say you should drop me, Adrian."

His eyes opened, squinting, and he used the back of one hand to brush the blood away enough to see clearly. He looked at Adrian for a moment, aware of the reddened eyes, and then up to Jake. "One of you," he said distinctly, "might make the effort to help me to get up."

They just stared at him. And then, idiotically, Jake began to laugh. It really wasn't funny. But he was going to laugh or cry, and he was damned if he was going to let either one of these men see him cry. He bent down, taking Richard's hand in his, and saw that Richard, too, had begun to laugh, and to wince painfully as he lost control of his facial muscles.

He used Jake's hand to pull himself half-way up, wriggling around to his knees, and put a hand on Adrian's shoulder to lever himself upright ... and stopped, staring for a moment at Adrian's white face, until suddenly Adrian, too, was laughing. Adrian looked up at Jake, shaking his head, trying to say something he couldn't force out, and the look on his face set Jake off again. He pointed a helpless finger at Adrian, and Richard nodded, wincing, and laughed even harder...

There was a sudden whoosh of displaced air, and from out of nowhere, a small, golden-haired woman was beside them, her face absolutely horrified, her hands reaching out to Richard...

Abrupt silence. Richard's face had frozen. Adrian looked as if someone had kicked him in the stomach. Jake took a stumbling step backward.

The woman's eyes never moved from Richard's face, but her own had gone suddenly slack, all the horror gone and something very different stirring there. Her hand had barely touched Richard, but she drew it away covered with his blood.

Jake didn't need Adrian's sudden mental push to back away. He was aware of Adrian backing up, too, on his feet now, watching, as Jake was, the frozen tableau before them. Richard and the small blonde woman were staring at each other with no expression at all on either of their faces ... and one or both of them was about to explode.

Jake had no idea where she'd come from ... but he would have known her anywhere. This impossibly beautiful little woman ... so small, so perfectly formed, was the woman Richard had held in his arms through so many dreams ... dreams wildly erotic or heart-breakingly loving. The tumble of curling hair, in so many different shades of gold, the great brown eyes, too large for her small face and yet perfect for her anyway, the delicacy of the slender nose, the high cheekbones, the eyebrows a bit too luxuriant for current fashion but unbelievably perfect for setting off those glorious eyes ... this was the woman who filled Richard's mind to the exclusion of everything else whenever sleep took his rigid self-control from him.

He wasn't asleep now.

With blood all over his face and his clothing ... the freely flowing blood any scalp wound releases, he scrambled to his feet and stared down at her as if her touch had scalded him. More slowly, Liliana straightened, looking up at him with those beautiful eyes, her whole body trembling now, with sudden tears spilling, unnoticed, down her white face.

And she punched him. Jake couldn't believe his eyes. It wasn't any little feminine slap across his cheek. It was a full-bore, from the heels, intended-to-do-serious-damage, roundhouse right to the jaw that snapped his head around as if she'd clubbed him with a baseball bat. Jake clearly saw blood droplets, splattering from his face, hit the floor fifteen feet away. She didn't knock him down, but as soon as he began to recover from the first punch, she smacked him open-handed from the other direction with a left that sounded as loud as a pistol shot.

Adrian's fingers sunk into Jake's arm. 'Let's go,' his voice whispered, urgently, into Jake's head, but Jake was transfixed, watching Richard and the woman he loved face each other like furious tigers.

Richard, one hand raised to what must have been a very sore jaw, wasn't even breathing, and Liliana was breathing so hard her whole body shook with it. After a very long moment, Richard said softly, without taking his eyes from hers, "Leave us ... please." The "please," very much an afterthought, was hardly a whisper.

Adrian pulled Jake with him. 'Move,' he thought at Jake. 'This is between the two of them.'

Jake stumbled, almost falling. 'Talbot, damn you ... he's gonna hurt her!'

'No, he's not.' There was amusement in Adrian's thought. 'And what he will do is none of our damned business.'

He was perfectly willing to use his unnatural strength if he had to, so Jake gave up and went quietly. But at the door, he turned to look back, and he could see that Richard was drawing a long, carefully-controlled breath. Dammit ... he was going to slap her back...

Adrian shoved him through the door and pulled it shut behind him. "Don't be an idiot, Jake," he said aloud. "We're not going to see either one of them for hours ... and it won't be because either of them is suffering.'

The Sa'idians, mortal and vampire, were darting in and out of every room along the corridor now ... with the occasional sharp exchange of gunfire marking the discovery of one more hiding guardsman. Adrian flagged one of them down, the first one he saw who spoke elementary English, and stationed him in front of the door he'd just closed. "No one is to disturb the Vaje Richard," he said firmly, and the man, his chest swelling with the importance of his responsibility, nodded and assumed an almost comically rigid stance before the door.

Adrian clapped Jake on the shoulder, smiling up into his uncertainly frowning face. "Come on, Jake," he said sympathetically. "I'll find you a beer."

He was laughing. There were two other men with him, and all three of them were laughing like idiots, leaning on each other, blood splattering on the floor between them, their shoulders shaking and their faces streaked with smoke and sweat and ... in Richard's case, an astonishing amount of blood. And he was laughing as if it was the funniest thing in the world ... until he saw her.

The abrupt silence was deafening. The other men ... Lily had no eyes for them at all, backed away slightly as Richard stood up and his face got that closed, strained, incredibly tight look on it. The smile, the laughter, drained from him and those incredible dark, dark eyes rested on hers with an expression as unreadable as stone.

Lily couldn't stand it. Rising, she balled up her right fist and, swinging from as far back as she could, brought it around with all the force in her small body and punched the love of her life in the jaw hard enough to snap his head half off his shoulders.

She wasn't using her Awakened power; without it, she wasn't strong enough to knock him down. Richard straightened, looking down at her with absolutely no change of expression, doing nothing to defend himself. Lily, tears streaking her face, her whole body quivering with the adrenaline rush and sick relief at finding him still alive, brought her other hand, open, across his face almost as hard.

"God damn you!" she shrieked into his still face, hardly able to see him for the streaming tears. "How dare you try to get yourself killed? Don't you know I couldn't live for a single second if I lost you? Don't you know I can't sleep and I can't eat and I'm killing myself and I'm killing our baby because I can't bear to be away from you and I want you so much that every minute of every day is nothing but agony and I thought that I had to ... because you were Anne’s, and not mine, and I didn't have any right to try to take you away, even though I never knew anything in the world could hurt like you hurt me, like I hurt every minute when I thought I'd never be with you again, that you'd never make love to me again or hold me again or look at me with that look in your eyes..."

She was running out of words, but not out of steam, and when he opened his mouth and said, stiffly, "Liliana," she hauled off and belted him again with everything that was in her.

Across the room, the two men who had been laughing with him eased quietly out the door and closed it behind them. Lily didn't notice their absence anymore than she'd noticed their presence. Every muscle in her body rigid, her hands clenched so tightly that they felt as if she would never be able to loose them, she glared up at Richard with rage that seemed to get hotter by the second. "Don't you dare!" She spat at him. "Don't you dare tell me it was my fault! You never told me! You never even asked me! You never tell me anything at all! How am I supposed to know what's the right thing to do, what's right for you and for Anne, and for her baby and for mine, when all I get from you is..."

"I love you," he said.

"I know you do! And I love you! But you never told me it was any different from the way you love Anne! You never told me that you couldn't be happy without me! You never said that you couldn't live with Anne again if I left you! You let me walk away ... you let me leave you when every cell in my body ached for you, when every breath I took was a prayer for you to come after me, to make me come back. God damn you, Richard! You let me leave!"

"Yes, I did."

Her hand had already started swinging again, but he stopped her cold. Breathless, and finally speechless, Lily stared at him ... at the sudden, glorious warming in those dark eyes, the sudden small lift at the corner of his wonderful mouth...

"I will never let you leave again," he said softly.

She couldn't say anything. She couldn't seem to catch her breath. He was looking at her exactly the way he had when he told her she was pregnant ... when he thanked her so joyously for conceiving his child. He was looking at her as if she was his entire world.

"You will never leave me again," he said, more firmly. He moved closer, shrinking the small distance between them to nothing. There was blood all over him ... all over one side of his face, on his idiotic burnoose. He was filthy and sweaty and he smelled like a charnel house. "You belong to me," he said, in a flat, implacable voice. "Like my arms or my eyes or the blood in my veins ... you belong to me, and I will kill any man who tries to take you from me."

"Richard..."

"Liliana," he said, and his voice had softened, had become that incredible, caressing, warm silk sound that made every bone in her body melt, "shut up."

Richard was not a big man, and yet he engulfed her. His arms closed around her and pulled her into their circle, in against his chest. Blood from his wounded arm immediately soaked through her clothing and onto her skin, but she didn't feel it. Her head settled in on his shoulder, against the rough fabric of his borrowed clothing. Her face was buried against the warm, sweating flesh of his throat. His arms tightened, fitting every line of her body to his, and his mouth, moving against her forehead, whispered, "Tell me, Liliana. I can't read your mind. You have to tell me."

He was the entire world. Buried in him, surrounded by him, by the hard muscle of his chest and arms, the rank smell of sweat and gunpowder and blood, the tangled strands of his hair brushing against her face as his mouth moved at her hairline, Lily said helplessly, "I love you."

"You'll never leave me," he insisted.

"Never."

"Tell me."

"I'll never leave you."

"There is no other man. There will never be another man while I live."

"Richard ... there will never be another man while I live..."

She felt his cheek move against her hair as he smiled. He moved one arm, brought his hand around to raise her chin until he could look down into her eyes. "I love you," he said. She couldn't even see the streaking blood and sweat, the black smears of gunpowder and something burning. All there was in the entire world was the face she loved, the dark eyes that glowed with the simple honesty of what he was finally, finally saying to her. "There was nothing in me but desolation and failure and self-loathing for 500 endless years until you looked at me, and knew me, and loved me ... until you wanted nothing more of me than exactly what I am and taught me to value everything in me because you loved it all. Liliana, you are all in the world that I want. Without you, life is not bearable."

"Richard..."

He shook his head. "Sweetheart, shut up." But his incredible, warm smile, the smile that was hers alone, softened the words. "I love Nan, Liliana. She is the lodestar I have followed for all of my life, and whatever I have ever done that was of value grew out of her love and expectation of me. But I am not ... I never was ... the man she loved. He exists in her mind ... not in me. Trying to be him made a better man of me than I could otherwise have been ... but all the desperate trying, for all of my life, couldn't make me into what she sees when she looks at me. I will always love her. Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"But I have never loved another woman as I love you. I didn’t know that love like this existed. If a benevolent god had felt pity for me and created a woman so perfectly designed to fill my heart and my life, to fill all the emptiness and bring joy into the desolation, he could not have devised a woman half so perfect as you. I will love you ... I will want you ... for all the days of my life. Sweetheart, you are all of real love that I have ever known."

Every word seeped into all the broken, aching places inside of Lily. Every word warmed and healed. His head lowered slowly, until his lips touched hers ... gently, almost reverently. His kiss was like no kiss he had ever given her. Probably for the first time in his entire life, Richard Plantagenet was truly humbled.

Against her mouth, smiling softly, he whispered, "Sweetheart, I want you. Forgive me, Liliana ... I cannot hold you without wanting you..."

"Thank God."

"I am so dirty..."

"That," Lily said fiercely, "is no damned excuse ..."

There was a bed, somewhere behind him. If there hadn't been, she would have created one. Lying on it, with the weight of his beloved body pressing her down into the softness beneath her, with his pelvis grinding against her, trying to find a way to reach one more millimeter into the deepest, sweetest core of her, Liliana opened her mind to him totally. He didn't understand the bond between them, but he would, in time. Now, all he understood was that making love to her, for all the intensity of its pleasure, was a homecoming as well. For her, this was no dreaming, half-aware Richard; this was a Richard exerting every power of his mind and body to give to her all that was in him, to take from her all that she was. And Liliana soared on it ... and took him with her.