The Lawgivers: Gabriel (35 page)

“I love you, Gabriel. Nothing would
give me more joy than to be your woman and have your children, but
… I love them, too.”

“I’m not asking you to choose. Just …
let me take you to a place where you’ll be safe. There’s … The
tension between your people and mine is dangerously high right now.
I’m afraid that you’re in more danger from your own people than
mine. You know where they are now. When things are … more peaceful,
I’ll bring you back to visit them.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words
because it immediately reminded Lexa that there was liable to be
war before anyone saw peace. She chewed her lip indecisively. “When
did you want to take me?” she asked finally.

“Tonight. Right now.”

She looked up at him in dismay.
“Without even telling them bye?”

Before Gah-re-al could think of a
response, they were both distracted by a faint rustling sound. Kyle
stepped out of the darkness. “Go with him, Lexa.”

Anger flickered through Gah-re-al. “I
might have known you’d stay close enough to eavesdrop!”

“Yes. You should’ve. I never said I
trusted you,” Kyle said coolly, but then dismissed him and focused
on Lexa. “Go with him. I want you to be safe. I’ll tell
them.”

“But ….” Lexa stopped. “I wanted to
talk to Will and Maura again. I need to, Kyle. I need to … make
them understand.”

“You won’t change their minds. Let him
take you someplace safe. He’s right. This is no place for
you.”

“Then it isn’t a good place for you
either!” Lexa snapped.

“It’s where I need to be right now,”
Kyle countered. “Go with him, Lexy. Stay safe. I want that for you.
I’ll be easier in my mind knowing you have a man to take care of
you.”

Surprise flickered through Gah-re-al,
but then he realized something that hadn’t occurred to him before.
If there was a war—and he thought from some of the things Kyle had
said that Raphael hadn’t been mistaken—he would find himself on one
side and Lexa’s siblings on the other. How much was she going to
love him if she thought he might have killed one of them? If she
thought there was even a chance that he might have?

Briefly a sense of guilt smote him, the
thought that he owed allegiance to his own people, but he dismissed
it with the reflection that he wouldn’t be taking sides—either
side—and one man wasn’t going to make a difference either way if
there was conflict. And he didn’t know that there would be war even
if he did suspect that it would come to that.

He knew, abruptly, what he was going to
have to do if he and Lexa were to have any chance together.
Nothing, he realized was worth risking losing Lexa. He had a
chance, finally, to have a family and he wasn’t going to throw that
chance away.

“I won’t leave you long,” he said
slowly. “I have to resign my post as lawgiver. It might take a few
days to get through all the paperwork, but then I’ll return for you
and we’ll find a place to build our own homestead … if that’s what
you want?”

Lexa was still torn. She’d told herself
that she wouldn’t fail her siblings again, but as she stared
unhappily at Kyle she realized that she had still been thinking of
them as the little children she’d left. They weren’t children
anymore and they’d made it clear that they controlled their own
destinies, made their own decisions. They had already decided. She
didn’t know how they’d come to that place of hate, but she was a
virtual stranger to them now—just as they were to her. They weren’t
going to listen to her as they had as children. They didn’t trust
her anymore. She wouldn’t be throwing away a chance of happiness
with Gabriel for them. She’d just be throwing it away for
nothing—and she’d probably still lose them—or not. It wasn’t
something in her power to change, though. And truthfully, she
didn’t think she could bear losing Gabriel when he was offering her
what she’d wanted for so long.

Guilt overshadowed the happiness
Gabriel’s offer had given her, but then she’d learned in life
lessons that happiness was usually leavened with a healthy dose of
painful reality—which made it something to be treasured. Only a
fool would throw away such a rare and wonderful gift, selfish or
not.

And she didn’t have to give up on her
brothers and sister. Gabriel had already said he would bring her to
visit them. Maybe, in time, they would come around and she would
still have a chance to have both Gabriel and her siblings, but she
knew Kyle was right. Nothing she could say or do at this point was
going to change anything. “You won’t be a lawgiver
anymore?”

He smiled faintly. “I guess I’ll be a
farmer. Damned if I’ve got any idea how to do it, but I’ll figure
it out.”

Lexa smiled at him. “We will figure it
out.”

* * * *

Gah-re-al grimaced. “My ears are
ringing,” he muttered. “Healthy lungs, that one.”

Lexa elbowed him in the ribs. “They
might hear you!” she hissed.

Gah-re-al uttered a disbelieving snort.
“Not over the racket that little monster was making!”

She sent him a disapproving look,
unconsciously lifting her hand to the mound her belly had become.
“I suppose you’ll think ours is a monster, too?”

Gah-re-al gaped at her for a moment in
dismay, not the least because it almost seemed like she’d read his
mind and knew he was worried about that very thing—wondering if he
was going to be able to handle having a squalling infant in the
same house—well, stay in the same house. He didn’t doubt that if
anybody was going it was going to be him. “I didn’t say
that.”

“They only cry when they need
something,” she said. “It isn’t like they can tell you … any other
way, I mean.”

Gah-re-al nodded, but he didn’t know a
damned thing about it. “You sure you want to walk to our place?
It’s a long way.”

“And you’re worried about
me.”

He frowned. “I was just thinking it
might be too much for you. I don’t want you to drop it or
anything.”

“I’m not even six months into my
pregnancy! I’m not going to drop it along the way,” Lexa said a
little indignantly. “They don’t just fall out! It takes a hell of a
lot of work to push them out.”

Gah-re-al felt a little queasy. He’d
been trying damned hard not to think about that part. “I didn’t
mean it that way,” he said indignantly.

“What did you mean then?”

He was damned if he knew!

Lexa glanced at his sullen expression a
couple of times as they walked along the narrow trail that
connected their homestead to Raphael and Claire’s. “You were
thinking I might be too tired to fuck when we got there,” she said
bluntly.

Gah-re-al felt his face redden. She was
getting way too good at reading him and the hell of it was he
didn’t know how she did it! “It didn’t cross my mind,” he
muttered.

She laughed, but there was just a touch
of a sarcastic edge to it. He nursed his feelings of ill usage for
a few moments, but he knew if they were still at odds when they got
back he wasn’t getting any. He managed to curl his lips in a
semblance of a smile. “Really. It didn’t. But I could be
persuaded.”

Her laugh that time was more genuine.
“Supper will be late.”

“I can wait.”

Lexa stopped abruptly and moved closer.
Looping her arms around his neck, she grinned at him. “I’m not sure
I can. I’m starving. You’d better fly us there.”

Gah-re-al wrestled with himself. “We
don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Hmmm. That depends.”

“On what?” he asked
cautiously.

“Are we going to fuck? Or make
love?”

Gah-re-al stared at her a long moment,
knowing getting what he wanted hinged on saying the right thing.
Then again, he knew what the right thing was. “I always make love
to you.”

“Smart man!” Lexa said with a
chuckle.

Gah-re-al studied her for a long moment
and finally lifted a hand to caress her cheek. “I do love you,
Lexa. You know that, don’t you?”

Lexa blushed with pleasure. “I’ll give
you an hour to convince me.”

“Just an hour?” he asked,
laughing.

“Oh you’ll be lucky to hold out that
long!”

“Ah! A challenge! I love a good
challenge.”

The End.

Read an excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connors’
latest book in her popular cyborg series, available soon through
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Cyberevolution:

The Awakening

By

Kaitlyn O’Connor

Chapter One

There was no question about the precise
moment the drop ship entered the planet’s atmosphere. The troop
carrier began to shimmy. The vibrations increased exponentially as
they dropped lower until it reached a point where it felt like it
would liquefy flesh, bones, and teeth, and everything around them
would disintegrate. Then the transport began to buck wildly.
Abruptly, an explosion ripped a hole in the hull wide enough to
suck three troopers and their seats out of it.

Something strange happened when it did.
Seth felt his motor functions slow in a most peculiar way.
Logically, he knew that the hull breach, the flying shrapnel that
peppered every troop close enough to catch a projectile, the
screams, the flying bits of flesh and metal that resulted from the
impact of the projectiles, and the abrupt extraction of one entire
row of seats and their occupants created by the opposing forces of
interior pressure and exterior occurred almost simultaneously. He
also knew that his processor was fast enough to record all of those
nearly instantaneous occurrences.

Time seemed to slow, however. He
blinked, heard a strange roaring sound that did not seem to be
related to the hull breach—because it occurred milliseconds prior
to that—and then he saw everything that happened in a series of
stills. As if he was experiencing a complete system failure due to
faulty, failing power supply, he saw the hole simply appear, the
darkness beyond as profound as deep space although he knew it was
simply the dark side of the world below them. He saw the stunned
expressions on the faces of the three troops that were sucked out
as they flew backwards in their safety harnesses and vanished in
the black abyss.

Panning right, he saw the troops who
had been seated beside them turn their heads very slowly toward the
hole and the strange, disjointed dance several others performed as
holes appeared in their bodies and chunks of flesh, blood, and
pieces of metal slowly jetted from them.

It was more than a slowing of his
visual perception, however. He could not seem to process what he
had recorded. He felt oddly blank which became even more strange
when he realized he had not simply shut down.

This was a very strange system failure
indeed.

Particularly when he felt a rush of
something completely incomprehensible fill the odd void.

Abruptly, his heart rate shot upward
and he felt his body tingle with cold as if an electric current had
sizzled along his exterior, penetrating all the way to his
biological organs nestled in the armor of his chassis. And then
time, his motor functions, seemed to abruptly right themselves and
everything was happening simultaneously around him, too quickly to
process.

He strained against his safety harness
to twist his head around enough to assess his team leader, Danika.
She was staring at the hole, her blue eyes wide, her face as pale
as death, her lips parted slightly. The frozen look on her face
sent a shaft of … something through Seth, making his heart jar in
his chest, as if it had lost its rhythm.

“Danika! Are you alright? Were you
hit?”

She sent him a startled look, which
sent another inexplicable tide of something unidentifiable twisting
through Seth. She had not ceased to function—was not dead, he
corrected himself.

She blinked a couple of times and then
looked down at herself as if she could not assess her condition
without a visual—and her hands. She patted her torso and then
looked at him again. “Damage report,” she demanded
abruptly.

It was at that point that it occurred
to Seth that he had not executed a damage report despite the fact
that he had noted that his systems were performing in a very
erratic way. He frowned and looked down at himself as she had. When
he looked at her again, he saw that she was looking at him
strangely. He felt the temperature of the flesh of his face heat
inexplicably and a strange flutter in his belly, as if he had
swallowed something alive that was still moving. “All systems fully
operational. No damage.”

She studied him several moments more
and Seth felt a fluctuation of heat and cold that seemed to be a
reaction to her close scrutiny. Finally, she dismissed him and
flicked a glance at the other two squad members. “Dane—Niles—damage
report.”

“All systems fully functional. Minor
anterior damage to torso,” Niles responded. “The shrapnel did not
penetrate beyond biological sheathing. Nanos performing repair.
Estimated repair time … one hour to complete.”