“You want my children.”
I cover my eyes with a hand.
He pulls it away and insists, “You want me to get you pregnant.”
I groan.
He laughs, and it sounds crazed. “That’s why you begged me to come inside you, baby. You want me to knock you up.”
“What I really want is to go back in time to before we had this stupid conversation.”
“Oh, no,” he says, still laughing. “That cat’s out of the bag, lass. You might not want to be my wife, but you want to grow my babies in your belly. Five of them.”
“I feel like this is a good time to remind you that I’m perfectly capable of murder.”
He kisses me again, then rolls onto his back, flings his arms out, and laughs at the ceiling. He laughs and laughs, shaking the bed, until I rise, pulling the fuzzy blanket around me.
With as much dignity as I can muster, I say, “I’ll be in the bathroom until room service arrives. Enjoy this moment, funny boy. Laugh it up. Because when you wake up in the morning, your lips will be sewn together.”
I slam the bathroom door to the sound of Quinn’s gloating laughter ringing in my ears.
35
Spider
By the time the food arrives, I’ve calmed down to the point where I feel as if I’ve only snorted half a key of coke, not the entire thing.
She wants to have my babies.
She can deny it all she wants. She can make up any kind of lie. But the expression of longing on her face when we started talking about it will be seared onto my memory forever.
I let the room service lad into the room and sign the bill. I tip him four hundred percent, because holy fucking baby Jesus on a buttery Ritz cracker, Reyna Caruso wants me to get her pregnant.
I’m light-headed. My heart is palpitating. I have to guzzle two entire glasses of water before my mouth starts to feel normal again.
When I knock on the bathroom door, Reyna opens it reluctantly.
“Are you done cackling in glee yet?”
“I’m done,” I say, grinning. “When do you want to start working on getting you knocked up? Because I was thinking right now would be bloody grand.”
A flush of color spreads over her cheeks. She mutters, “I regret every decision in my life that has led me to this moment.”
I grab her and plant a hearty kiss on her mouth. When I pull away, she sighs.
“Ugh. You’re going to be really unbearable now.”
I pick her up. She’s still wrapped in the blanket, and makes a comfy, fuzzy weight in my arms. Setting her carefully onto the edge of the bed, I roll the room service cart over to her and start removing lids from dishes.
“Okay. We’ve got steak. We’ve got chicken. We’ve got veggies.”
She says, “And we’ve got two hundred side dishes. What happened, were they having a sale?”
“I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so I got one of everything.”
“Of course you did. And stop smiling like that. You’re blinding me.”
“Don’t be so grumpy. It’s bad for the baby.”
She flops onto her back on the bed and hollers incoherently at the ceiling.
“So dramatic,” I tease, feeling like an overfilled helium balloon. “Oh—is it too soon to start picking out names? Because I’ve got a bunch of ideas.”
Closing her eyes, she mutters, “Where’s a good asteroid strike when you need one?”
I make my voice firm. “And I want you to eat a lot of this steak. You’ll need the iron. Developing fetuses have high iron requirements.”
“Quinn?”
“Aye, lass?”
“You’re insane.” When I grin at her evil glare, she adds, “Certifiably. There’s a padded cell somewhere out there with your name on the door.”
My grin grows wider. “Casa de Spider. Love it. Now sit up and let me feed you.”
“I’m not an invalid!”
“Be quiet, or I’ll put something else in your mouth to shut you up.”
If a man could be killed with a look, I’d be dead a thousand times over.
I can’t remember ever feeling this happy in my entire life.
36
Rey
We eat. And by that, I mean Quinn feeds me small portions of carefully cut-up food, making sure to include all the veggies he can coax into my mouth as he drones on and on about the nutritional needs of infants.
After supper and the first of what I fear will be many forthcoming lectures about eating for two, he takes us into the shower, washes us down with the enthusiasm of a Labrador on its first outing at the doggie park, then heads right back to bed with me in his arms.
When he’s lying on top of me, searing my retinas with the brightness of his jubilant smile, I decide it’s time to make an adjustment to the situation.
“Pardon me for interrupting your gloat-a-thon, but has it occurred to you that I might need a rest?”
He draws his brows together. “Rest?”
“Let me put it to you this way: if I inserted an object the size of a bowling pin into your behind, do you suppose you could go right back to business as usual afterward? Would you be riding around the moors of Ireland on horseback, leaping over streams and galloping around full-speed while your poor, raw bottom took the brunt of all that jostling in the saddle?”
He looks appalled. “I knew I was hurting you!” Then, after a beat: “A bowling pin?”
When his grin returns, I give up. I close my eyes and sigh heavily.
“All right, lass,” he says, his voice warm, his mouth close to my ear. “We’ll have a rest. We’ll get a good night’s sleep. You’ll need it, because growing babies requires a lot of energy.”
“Will you stop talking before I throw myself out the window, please?”
He rolls over, drags me on top of him, and hides his face in my neck as he laughs.
I must be more exhausted than I realize, because I fall asleep on top of him almost immediately.
The dream begins with fire.
All over me, all around me, even underneath my skin. I’m being burned alive from the inside out, and there’s no escaping it.
Except it’s not really fire. It only feels like fire.
Because that’s exactly what being repeatedly lashed with a leather whip is like.
I’m naked, screaming, crawling away over a cold marble floor on my hands and knees, sobbing and pleading for mercy. My tormentor gives me none. Following closely behind as I scramble for safety, he cracks the whip over and over, separating my flesh. Blood splatters the marble. It’s warm and slippery under the palms of my hands.
A vicious kick to the ribs sends me tumbling sideways. I lie on the cold hard floor on my back with my arms out, panting, desperately begging no no no no as he looms over me, a tall figure with a shadowed face and an arm raised to strike.
As it falls, the whip parts the air with a vicious hiss like a thousand snakes descending with their sharp fangs bared, prepared to bite.
I scream at the top of my lungs, knowing no one will hear me.
“Reyna! Wake up, baby! Wake up!”
Quinn is shouting at me. Holding me in his arms and shouting.
I’m blinded for a moment, seeing nothing but blackness and hearing only my pounding heartbeat and that terrible hiss that always came right before the pain exploded over me.