Entity Mine (26 page)

She placed two fingers over his lips. “Hey, you wanna hear this or not?”

He pinched his thumb and two fingers together and made a zipper motion across his mouth.

Her sherry brown eyes were warm with laughter. She pulled away, shaking her red-gold head. “Now, I don’t know—”

“No. Come back here.” He caught her wrists and placed her hands back where they were. “You were saying?”

“I was saying, lion, dragon, man or something in between, I love you, Ethan Mara,” and then she dragged him down for more than a kiss.

Epilogue

One week later

Ethan spun his beautiful bride out from his arm in a disco move that would have done Travolta proud and gazed into Devon’s laughing face. The rustic barn’s rafters sparkled with tiny lights and cast a glow on her flushed cheeks. The pounding beat from the DJ’s speakers echoed in his chest.

He’d never pictured a wedding in his future, but if he had, the Cassadaga, New York, barn was probably the last thing he would have pictured, and it couldn’t be more perfect. The barn, on the property of a refurbished Victorian Manor called Blush House had just enough room for his and Devon’s friends and growing family.

Jaden bopped with Beth’s young cousin who’d acted as a flower girl. The little girl’s filmy, white dress and crown of roses were a bit wilted now, but she’d looked like a little angel coming down the aisle.

He brought Devon in as close as her lovely white gown would allow. Too soon to see a baby bump, but he wondered whether they’d have a little girl. His mother had only had sons. Was there some kind of Chimera genetic thing that only produced boys? He hoped not.

“Why so serious?” Devon asked, one warm hand on his shoulder and the other tucked in his hand.

“Just wondering if we’ll have a boy or a girl.” He craned his neck toward Beth’s cousin.

“She did look sweet, didn’t she?” Devon smiled. “Beth says she’s a spoiled brat.”

“Ruin my illusions, why don’t you?”

“I live to please.”

As she looked over his shoulder and grimaced, the words ‘I should be so lucky’ died on his lips. Concerned, he tried to swing her around to see what had worried her, but she planted her slippered feet.

He stopped dancing. “What is it?”

She dragged him off the dance floor beside the head table. “Okay, I hope you won’t be mad.”

“That’s a reassuring way to begin.”

The corners of her mouth curled up. “I asked Thalia to do me a favor.”

A favor? What did she need a vampire private detective slash Witches’ Champion for? He raised his eyebrows and waited.

“I sent her to see the Seegers.”

Her words landed like a blow. He tugged away. “They’re not here?” He took her hand and headed for the nearest door.

She tugged him back with both hands. “Ethan, hold on!”

He wheeled to face her. Her gorgeous eyes pleaded up at him. It was impossible to stay mad, but that didn’t mean he would speak to the Seegers.

He folded his arms. “I’m listening.”

“Thalia went to their home. Ethan, they practically have a shrine to you in their living room.”

“A shrine?”

“Yeah, they’ve got a picture of you in your dress uniform, newspaper clippings about your expeditions, copies of your books and magazine articles. So I had her invite them and they came all this way to see you.”

“Baltimore isn’t that far.” His words sounded grudging, but his mind ground through the image she painted.

He was on ‘the wall’ with the other kids. Him, their throwaway. Their only failure. A little huff escaped his chest. Not just on the wall, but in a place of prominence. The place they saved for the graduates they wanted the younger kids to look up to, to strive to be like.

How often had he studied the photos on that wall and known he’d never be among them? His chest warmed a little as pride nibbled at the edges of the tiny bitter scar their rejection had left on his heart.

Fuck.
“All right. I’ll say hello. For you.” He let her steer him through the crowd to the edge of the dance floor where a middle-aged couple waited.

Mr. Seeger’s head was now devoid of hair, either shaved or naturally bald. Mrs. Seeger had let her hair go white, but she was trim and pretty as ever. The evidence of their ageing almost forced him to take a step back. In his mind, they’d remained like objects preserved under glass, perfect, inviolate, but they were just human.

When he got near, Mrs. Seeger’s dark eyes lit up. She launched herself at him and gave him a big hug. Stunned, he just stood there as she embraced him. She’d always been small, but now that he was full-grown, she seemed tiny. Her head reaching only his sternum. He stood rigid in her arms.

“Oh, Ethan, honey. We’re so glad you invited us.” Her words softened his stance. He bent and returned her embrace.

Mr. Seeger threaded his hand over his wife’s shoulder and held out his hand. For a moment, Ethan just stared at it, then slowly he reached out and shook it.

“We heard your next placement was bad, but by the time we got them to listen to us you’d enlisted.”

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Seeger’s face crumpled. “I knew as soon as you’d gone I’d done the wrong thing, but your social worker didn’t think it was fair to yank you back out without giving the new place a chance. She made us wait a year to request you back and then by the time we had everything processed you’d disappeared.” She started to cry.

They’d wanted him back? The dance floor seemed to rock under his feet. All Ethan could do was pat her shoulder as he absorbed her words. It was like his whole history had to be revised. He glanced at Devon.

She peered at him from under her eyebrows, eyes luminous with unshed tears. She’d done this for him even though she knew he might be angry. God, he loved her.

He took her hand and towed her forward. “Have you met my wife?”

The following day after they had taken Ethan’s foster parents to the airport, Devon exited the car piled high with their belongings and surveyed the cemetery. She sighed, wrapping her coat tighter around her throat against the biting wind and cuddled into Ethan’s side, enjoying his warmth as they passed the red brick entrance sign. The early snow crunched under their feet. “Thanks for coming with me.”

He grinned. “What’s a husband for, Mrs. Mara?” He hadn’t bothered to shave that morning and his scruff was almost as long as the hair on his close-cropped head. He looked good enough to eat and she planted a kiss on his prickly chin.

The sound of her married name still sent a happy, little thrill through her, along with a wave of gratitude. Anjali, Jake, and Kyle had moved heaven and earth to whip up the wedding here in Western New York so Beth’s mother and her childhood friends could be there.

Still she couldn’t help teasing him a tad. “Devon Mara doesn’t quite flow like Devon Daughtry, but I guess it’s fair that we both have to change our names.” Turning serious, she squeezed his arm with hers. “Are you sure you want to give up Wade?”

He shrugged. “Hell, Wade was just a made-up name anyway. Now, your name . . .”

They halted in front of a headstone reading, ‘Wayne Daughtry.’

Tears glazed her vision, blurring the letters carved into the gray granite stone. She ran a leather-gloved hand over the surface. “You didn’t even really get to know your father, I suppose you think it’s silly to be angry at a dead man.”

“You were a teenager. You had to be mad at someone.” He cocked his head. “I think it’s a law.”

She poked his ribs with her elbow and laid the roses she had in her other hand on top of the stone like an offering. Here in Jamestown, the trees had already shed the last of their colored leaves and the scarlet petals were the only punch of color under skeletal limbs and leaden sky.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” The white satin ribbon around the roses fluttered in the breeze. She tugged the bouquet a little more to the center of the stone. “It was stupid to feel abandoned. It’s not like he chose to die.”

She stood there for a moment, remembering her father’s laugh. His spicy cologne. The way he could always make her smile. She touched her mother’s monument. She’d lost her in college. Loved her too, missed her, but her mother had never understood Devon the way her father had.

Now she had Ethan and his brothers. The Mara brothers might not have been raised together, but anyone could feel the bond between them, and they’d absorbed her right into the family. She already felt like Jake and Kyle’s sister.

She smiled remembering how wonderful it had been, after the trials she and Ethan had gone through, to gaze into his eyes at the church and say her vows. To look around the reception later and see Jake and Anjali, and Matthew and Beth, laughing and dancing.

Kyle had stepped out between the wedding and the reception to stretch either his legs or his wings, she didn’t know, but thankfully he’d tolerated her friends’ drunken advances at the bar and on the dance floor without any incidents. She couldn’t blame her friends, that body, that aura of danger and that face? She knew how irresistible a package it was, since she had one of her own. She leaned into him.

Her cloth coat wasn’t quite up to speed and she shivered, taking Ethan’s arm once more and sliding her hand into his. “I guess we’d better get going. Honey will be getting cold in the car.”

As they unlocked the SUV, a familiar voice trilled behind her, raising the hair on the back of her neck. “S.D.!”

Devon pasted a fake smile on her face. She was a grown woman, an attorney, she could be civil and still stand up for herself. She wheeled around. “Colleen! I prefer Devon, thanks. What are you doing here?”

“My father owns the funeral home, remember?” She lifted her arms, indicating some red-bowed ivy wreaths in a box. “There’s a funeral tomorrow and Dad wants the cemetery to look festive.”

“Of course.” Devon waved her gloved fingers. “Well, it was nice seeing you again.” She started to turn.

“Hold on now.” Colleen formed her mouth into what she probably thought was a pretty moue and batted her lacquered eyelashes up at Ethan. “You can’t leave without introducing me to this handsome gentleman. Are you a friend, co-worker—?”

“Husband,” Ethan said and the blonde visibly deflated.

She made a dismissive gesture in the air. “Oh, aren’t you lucky, S.D?”

Ethan smiled. The sight made Devon’s heart beat faster. Time to get out of here and start the honeymoon.

Eyes gleaming gold, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “I’m the lucky one. It was nice meeting you, Collie.” Dismissing the blonde, he swung around and they started toward the car.

“Ah, it’s Colleen, actually,” she called after them.

He waved over his shoulder. “Sure. Goodbye, Collie.”

In the SUV, Devon slapped his suit coat lapel with her glove, making Honey yip in her wire crate in the back. “Collie! Is it any wonder I love you?”

He flashed a little fang and shrugged. “She made your life miserable. It was that or dinner time on the Serengeti.”

Devon pretended to open her door. Playing with him made her pulse race. “It’s not too late.”

He reached over for her. “Too bony.”

“Um.” Devon melted into his embrace, inhaling his heady scent. “I’m sure you’re right.”

“I always am.” His gaze was bright with laughter.

“Really?”

A grin slashed across his lean face. “I guess we’ll see.”

She stripped off her other glove and stoked her mate’s rough cheek. They’d both been alone too long. She couldn’t wait to start their new journey together. “Let’s get back to the hotel and I’ll show you how very
wrong
I can be.”

The engine roared to life, and he slid a hungry glance at her as he threw the gear into ‘reverse’. “I can’t wait.”