“What troubles you?” Adyin asked gruffly.
Emma glanced at him in surprise and swallowed back her misery with an effort. “I was just thinking my parents must be terribly upset.”
He looked like he wished he hadn’t asked. “It is not something to dwell upon.”
“I know it’s pointless when I can’t do anything about it. I just wish ….”
“You have remembered where it is that you come from?” Colwin asked.
Emma studied him for a long moment and finally focused on the campfire. “I never really forgot. I just didn’t think you would believe me.”
Aydin felt his belly tighten. “Tell us and then we can decide to believe or not.”
Emma nodded. “It’s hard to explain, especially since it was true and I just … woke up here. But … I’m not from this place. I almost thought when I woke up that I’d traveled through time, but this place is nothing like Earth ever was.”
Chapter Seven
Adyin and Colwin exchanged a look Emma found hard to decipher.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me. I don’t understand it myself. I’d taken my class on a little field trip into the forest to study nature.”
“Class?” Colwin interrupted.
Emma nodded. “I’m a teacher—at least I was. I taught kindergarten—preschoolers—children not quite old enough to go to regular school.”
Colwin finally nodded understanding.
“Anyway, we’d taken a picnic lunch and ate in this little clearing we discovered and started back. The children had thoroughly enjoyed the walk in the woods. They should’ve been tired, but they were actually pretty rowdy. They kept darting off chasing each other. Finally, when we reached the edge of the woods and they began to complain about going back into the classroom, I decided I’d let them play just a few minutes longer. I’d hoped that they’d run off some of their excess energy and it didn’t seem dangerous when we were in sight of the school.
“They wanted me to play hide and seek with them and finally I gave in. I’d walked just a little way back into the woods and I saw this huge old oak tree with a hollow—almost like someone had tried to carve a fairy house inside it. Not that it was that big, but it was big enough for me to hide … and that’s last thing I remember. I stepped inside the tree and everything went dark. The next thing I knew I opened my eyes and found myself inside the castle—lying on a bench—with all of those … people staring down at me.
“I thought at first that it just couldn’t be real—that I’d hit my head or something like that and I was hallucinating. But it was just too horribly real not to be real! And then you two rescued me ….”
Aydin and Colwin exchanged another look.
“Ok—kidnapped me, but really I feel much better being with the two of you than I did with those—awful people at the castle, especially after King Bart decided he was going to marry me!” She frowned. “At least I did until Colwin told me what would happen if they caught up with us.”
She studied their faces a little anxiously. “I’m not a witch, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said uneasily. “I didn’t make it happen. It happened to me.”
Aydin cleared his throat. “You are saying that you are a human, from Earth.”
“I know it’s hard to believe …. You said human! You’ve heard of humans from Earth?”
“Our mother is an other-worlder,” Colwin said after a prolonged moment.
Emma gaped at him, feeling a dizzying collision of thoughts in her head. “Your mother?”
Emma discovered that that was too much to absorb.
A human woman had
given birth
to a centaur?
She could get pregnant?
Why was the woman still here unless it was impossible to go back?
Or had she stayed because she’d gotten pregnant?
She narrowed her eyes at Colwin. “You ass!” she growled angrily. “You knew damned well I could get pregnant if your mother’s human!”
He reddened faintly, but she couldn’t tell whether it was with discomfort or anger at being called an ass. “I did not say I could not get you pregnant,” he pointed out stiffly.
“You implied it, damn it! You deliberately misled me!”
“You fucked her?” Aydin growled.
“
You
fucked her,” Colwin shot back at him.
“I did not try to get her pregnant!” Aydin snapped. “I pulled out before I spilled my seed!”
Colwin narrowed his eyes at his brother. “If you did, then it was because you were in centaur form and knew what it would mean to get her pregnant in that form! Do not tell me you would have pulled out otherwise, for I will not believe it!”
Aydin’s face darkened.
Emma surged to her feet. “Wait a minute! Time out! This is my damned argument! You two can argue later! And, I might add, I do
not
appreciate you using the word fuck in conjunction with me! Even if that was what it was you could at least make a damned pretense that it was a little more than that!”
Both men stared up at her in baffled anger for several moments.
A slow smile curled Colwin’s lips. “I was mating with you.”
Emma studied him a little suspiciously. “Well, I guess that’s better.”
“It is better?” Aydin demanded. “Only a moment ago you called him an ass for trying to get you pregnant!”
“Oh—is that what he meant?” Emma asked in dawning anger.
Both men rolled their eyes. “What did you think I meant?” Colwin said irritably. “Mates reproduce, gods damn it!”
“Ok, so I get it, but you should’ve asked first, damn it!”
Colwin looked uncomfortable. “That is not the way we do it,” he muttered.
“I don’t care how
you
do it! Where I come from you’re supposed to ask a woman to marry you and
then
have babies with her! Not knock her up and then call it a mating! You mean to tell me you were
trying
to get me pregnant?”
“We do not marry! We mate!”
Emma blinked at him. “For how long?”
“Forever.”
“Oh … oh! I can’t do that. I’m going home.”
Colwin’s lips tightened into a thin line of anger. “What did you think we were doing if it was not mating and you do not care to call it fucking?”
Emma blushed. “Having fun?”
She could tell he didn’t know how to respond to that. He looked pleased—fleetingly—and then angry all over again. Instead of responding, he hunched his shoulder at her and focused on turning the rabbits on the spit they’d made over the fire.
Aydin seemed more interested in staring at the fire than continuing the discussion for that matter.
After staring at their backs for several moments, Emma finally turned and stalked over to the pallet she’d helped Colwin make from the brush they’d gathered and plunked down on it. It was actually fairly cushiony, but not so much that flopping down on it wasn’t painful. Gritting her teeth, she focused on ignoring the pain until it subsided and then turned her mind to the discussion—such as it was.
She was too angry at first to think about anything except her possible exposure to pregnancy. As her anger began to subside, however, it occurred to her that Colwin wanting to mate with her was quite possibly the sweetest thing any man had ever said to her—that and the fact that he clearly wanted to have a baby with her—wanted
her
to have his baby!
It was insane, of course. They hardly knew each other and she couldn’t imagine he’d fallen hopelessly in love with her in such a short space of time—any more than she thought King Fart had!
Still, it was sweet.
And it was, sort of, a proposal, she supposed and nobody had ever proposed to her before. Well, Murry had, but that hardly counted when he’d proposed they pool their income and sell her house so they could get a nicer one!
She discovered she was a lot more intrigued by his offer than she should have been. It was absurd! She couldn’t stay here! She
had
to go home ….
To her empty house and her empty life.
Didn’t it just figure that she would finally find a man that actually wanted her to have his baby in a place like this? When she was almost too damned old to even consider having a baby?
He was just young and naïve, she told herself. He seemed very manly and he looked very manly, but she could tell he was young and he had to be naïve to consider forming a life partnership with a woman he hardly knew. Who was older than him. And not even the same species.
Or course, he was half human if she could believe him.
Guilt began to swamp her. He’d bared his soul! He’d told her he wanted to mate with her and have a baby and she’d cussed him out!
She was
such
a bitch!
“The food is done if you are hungry,” Aydin said to her after a little while.
If
she was hungry? She wasn’t that pissed off!
She got up and settled across from the two of them. Resolutely closing her mind to the fact that it had been a cute furry thing not long ago, she took the stick Aydin handed her and blew on the steaming meat, feeling her mouth water with anticipation. Using another stick, Aydin speared one of the tubers from the fire and handed that to her.
It was the most divine meal she’d ever eaten in her life! She would
never
have believed wild bunny and completely unfamiliar roots could taste so wonderful! She was never going to be able to look at a rabbit the same way again, she thought a little sadly, especially if she was hungry.
“This is good!” she said after she’d eaten enough to appease the gnawing hunger a little.
Aydin nodded politely.
She studied both men uncomfortably. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t mean to be so hateful. I just …. I’m so lost here. I really don’t belong here.”
Adyin and Colwin both looked at her in surprise.
Adyin frowned thoughtfully. “Mother felt the same when my father and uncle stole her away from her world and brought her here.”
Emma felt her belly clench. “They went there and took her?”
Colwin glared at him.
Aydin shook his head slightly. “She is right, Colwin. It must be her choice—to go or to stay with us.”
Colwin’s lips tightened, but he didn’t say anything.
“I was dying,” Aydin said after a moment. “The hoonans had captured me and worked me in the mines until I was nigh dead when my father finally managed to get me away from them. The men of the village could do nothing for me and neither my father or my uncle could accept that nothing could be done. They knew of her, knew that she was a doctor. They captured her and brought her back to help me get well.”
Emma thought for several moments that she would cry. “And she fell love with you and your father and decided to stay?”
Aydin shrugged. “She loves me. She loves my father and his father. She decided to stay.”
Emma blinked at him in confusion, glancing at Colwin. “She’s … uh … I’m confused.”
“They are mates,” Colwin said. “Our mother and our fathers.”
That was pretty hard to misunderstand and almost as hard to accept.
Her first thought was,
no wonder she decided to stay! Two absolutely gorgeous men of her own!
They had to be, she was sure. Aydin and Colwin were quite possibly the handsomest men she’d ever met. They must take after their fathers!
It was still hard to believe a woman from earth would give up civilization to live as she must here. She’d had a horrible time coping with the discomfort and inconvenience and she’d never thought of herself as being soft. “Where are they now?” she asked after a moment.
“Summer camp, I am sure … unless the hoonans attacked.”
Dismay filled her. “Because of me?”
Aydin’s expression tightened. “Because that is what they do! I knew that when I freed the others. We cannot simply allow them to enslave our people.”
“No. I see that.” She swallowed a little convulsively. “I’m not sure the king would be willing to trade the babies for me. If he does that sort of thing all the time, then I’m guessing he isn’t going to stop … and he didn’t really care anything about me, you know? He just … I guess he thought I was some sort of prize because of my hair.”
She couldn’t tell what either man was thinking.
Trying to close her mind to the probable outcome, at least for her, she took the plunge. “I’m willing to try it, though, if you think it’ll work.”
“I am not,” Aydin said grimly. “If you want to try to return to your world, I am willing to take you to my father. He can show you the way—though I cannot promise that the gateway he knows of is still open. No one has tried it in many years. My mother’s sister was the last who came through and that was before Colwin was born.”
Emma studied him. “She mated with men from your tribe, too?”
“Yes.”
It was oddly comforting to know that there were at least two women in this strange world who’d come from hers.
She finished her meal in thoughtful silence, realizing that, now that it had occurred to her to offer herself as a trade for their babies, as scary as it was, she wanted to do it even if they no longer wanted her to. It wasn’t as if it would be huge sacrifice for her. It would put her closer to the portal where she’d come through.
Of course, Aydin’s father supposedly knew of one, but if no one had passed through it in more than twenty years she doubted it was still open.