Totally Spellbound (26 page)

“How’re we going to find anything in
there?” he asked. “It’s different from minute to
minute.”

“Well,” Zoe said, “finding the wheel
is actually pretty easy. Getting it out is going to be
hard.”

“Why?” Rob asked.

“Because,” Travers said. “The wheel is
the very heart of Faerie.”

Rob wasn’t sure he’d heard this right.
“What do you mean?”

“It’s in the center of Faerie,” Zoe
said, “and it powers everything.”

“And you want me to go in there and
take it out?”

“I don’t,” Zoe said. “The Fates
do.”

“One man, alone, taking down
Faerie.”

“If anyone can do it, you can,” Zoe
said, and smiled.

Megan slipped her arm through his.
“I’ll come with you.”

“No, you won’t,” he said.

Megan squinched up her face like she
did when she thought he was controlling her. He really wasn’t
controlling her, but he did have centuries more experience dealing
with magic than she did. He knew a lot more about it than almost
everyone in the room.

“She probably has to go with you,” Zoe
said. “That’s how the Fates work. What’s your prophecy?”

He felt a trickle of irritation. “I
have no idea.”

“You don’t know your prophecy?” Zoe
sounded shocked.

“I don’t believe in that nonsense,” he
said.

“Then why are you helping?”

Megan had her arms crossed. Travers
was pointedly not looking at the map and was, instead, watching
Rob. Zoe was the one who was frowning.

“I’m helping,” Rob said, “because I
got talked into it. Let it go at that.”

“He’s helping because you sent him to
the Interim Fates,” Megan snapped, “and he thinks I was stupid. You
all think I was stupid.”

“Misguided, maybe,” Zoe said. “No one
takes on Zeus.”

“At the expense of his
children?”

“Do you know how many children he
has?” Zoe asked.

Megan shook her head. “I gather no one
does.”

“That’s right,” Zoe said. “Hundreds,
maybe thousands, some with magic, some without.”

“Over the centuries, I trust,” Travers
said.

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “I’m sure a lot are
gone now.”

Travers shook his head. “I have
trouble enough raising one. I can’t imagine raising hundreds, maybe
thousands.”

“That’s the point,” Megan said. “He
isn’t raising them. He’s using them.”

“Why is that our problem?” Zoe
asked.

Megan seemed to grow
taller. Rob had never seen anything like it. “You see,
that’s
the problem. All
you people thinking that other people should be allowed to raise
their kids however they want. We pay for that dysfunction in
increased crime rates, suicides, and just general
misery.”

“From Zeus?” Zoe asked.

“From all dysfunctional parents,”
Megan said. “And this society. We abandon our kids. Everyone
figures they survived their rough childhood, so these kids can
too.”

Rob felt his face heat. He’d said
something similar to her earlier.

“Yet, if you really think about it,
imagine how you would’ve felt if someone had stepped in and helped
you when you needed it.”

“You can’t save the world, Meg,”
Travers said softly.

“Oh, really?” she said, putting her
hands on her hips and whirring to face her brother.

Her robe started to pull open. Rob
would have liked that, but he knew it would create another familial
scene, so he reached over and tightened her belt.

She acknowledged him with a small
nod.

“It seems to me,” she said to her
brother, “that this mission is all about saving the world. Because
the world isn’t worth living in without love—”

“My thoughts exactly,” Zoe
said.

“—
and Zeus and everything
he stands for is getting in the way of love. I have no idea why you
people are balking at helping in any way you can.” Megan was
shaking.

Rob wanted to pull her close, but this
time, he realized, he didn’t dare. She was very upset, and part of
that upset was at him.

“We did help,” Travers
said.

“Then you took a break for some
nookie,” Megan said.

“I’m not the only one.”

“No,” Megan said,
“
nookie
takes
two.”

“Oh, really?” Travers
asked. “Is that a technical definition? Because I know you know
that there are some things which can be done alone—”

“You’re mean!” Megan said, obviously
remembering an old slight.

“And your bedroom always had thin
walls.”

“Not as thin as yours—”

“And that,” Zoe said with finality,
“is too much information for me. How about you, Rob?”

Rob was actually enjoying
this exchange. He would ask Megan about it later.
“Well—”

“Saving the world, remember?” Zoe
said. “The prophecy that you don’t believe in. What was
yours?”

He shrugged. “I don’t recall much
about a conversation I had hundreds of years ago.”

“You
forgot
your prophecy?”
Zoe asked.

Megan frowned at both of them. “Is
this important?’

“It could be,” Zoe
said. “The Fates always hand out a prophecy about each person after
they’re born. Sometimes it has death information in it, sometimes
it has other stuff, but it is
always
about how that person will find true
love.”

“Your prophecy told you about
Travers?” Megan asked.

“Yes, it did,” Zoe said.

“Let it go, Zoe,” Rob said. “I
promised I’d help with the wheel. That’s enough.”

“It’s not enough,” Zoe said. “What
happens if your prophecy says you could die in Faerie?”

“Then I’ll have to find a way to
survive. The prophecies don’t always come true.”

“You do remember yours,” Zoe said,
eyeing him suspiciously.

He shook his head. “I never let them
tell me.”

“Why not?” Travers asked.

“Because,” Rob said. “Marian was
already dead. I knew I had no chance at true love, so why hear a
stupid prophecy about what had already happened?”

Megan made a small squeak. Rob looked
at her. Her face was pale, her eyes dark hollows against her
skin.

“I, um, need to get dressed,” Megan
said, and hurried out of the room.

“You’re a first-class
idiot,” Zoe said, watching her leave.

He knew that. He hadn’t meant to be so
blunt.

“You know that prophecy couldn’t have
been about Marian if they wanted to tell you after she had already
died,” Zoe continued.

The bedroom door slammed shut. It took
Rob a moment to focus on Zoe.

“What do you mean?” he
asked.

“The Fates,” she said.
“They only give out prophecies of the future, not portents of the
past. If they wanted to tell you after Marian died, then they
thought you hadn’t met your true soulmate.”

Two days ago, he would
have yelled at her for that. But after this afternoon, he was
beginning to realize there was a lot in this world he didn’t
understand, either.

“You think Megan is his soulmate?”
Travers asked.

“My people fall in love fast,” Zoe
said. “Rob is hooked. I can tell.”

“Well, you’ve got a way to go with
Megan,” Travers said to Rob. “Because right now, you just fit into
her classic pattern. You seduced her and hurt her. And I don’t care
who you are. Hurt her any worse, and you’ll pay for the rest of
your long and unnatural life.”

Megan leaned against the closed door
and stared at the rumpled bed. The scene of the crime, as it were.
Only it hadn’t been a crime.

As she had so forcefully told her
brother, she had consented. She hadn’t just consented, she had
initiated. She had pulled off Rob’s clothing, brought him into this
room, and jumped him.

They hadn’t even pulled down the
coverlet—something she always did in hotel rooms because who knew
what other people did on top of those things?

She winced.

Other people probably just did what
she and Rob had done.

Her clothes were scattered around the
room, and so were his. Some of his still had to be in the entry,
but she hadn’t really noticed, not as she hurried in here — her
stomach twisting and her eyes so dry that they hurt.

Ironic that her eyes were dry now. The
way her heart was feeling, she would have thought those eyes would
be filled with tears.

Yet, if she looked at
things calmly and rationally, she had no reason to be upset. She
knew about Marian. Hell, she had known about Maid Marian as Robin
Hood’s Truest Love since she had been a little girl, reading books
of legend and lore.

She had known; she had always
known.

So why did it hurt?

Because, for about two
hours, she had felt cocooned in such a deep love that she actually
believed it when a man who had known her for less than twenty-four
hours had said that he had fallen in love with her.

A man with an amazing and unusual
accent and a deep, sexy voice had told her in no uncertain terms
that he could love her, and then he had enumerated the
reasons.

A man who was the most
attractive man she had ever met, a man who had decided that words
weren’t enough and that he needed to use his body to convince
her.

She had been convinced.

And then he had made it a
lie.

Although he had never said she was his
soulmate. He hadn’t said she was his true love.

All he had said was that he loved
her.

Which should have been
enough.

She sighed and grabbed her clothes.
She tossed them on the bed—as far from the rumples as she could
get—and dropped the robe. Time to come back to reality. Time to
figure out what was really going on.

What would she counsel her patients to
do?

Wait, that wasn’t fair. Kids often
didn’t have life experience to make good choices. Both she and Rob
had life experiences—he a few thousand more than she
had.

What would she counsel an
adult?

She would
ask:
What do you want in this
relationship?

And she would
answer:
I’m not sure it is a
relationship.

All
right
, she would say,
do you want it to be a relationship?

And her heart
answered for her:
Yes
.

Do you love
him?
she would ask.

I don’t know.

And she didn’t. That
was the center of it. Because this had happened before. She had
gotten overwhelmed by desire, desire that seemed to radiate from
the man, desire that she would reciprocate—and then that desire
would fade. Friendship or respect or a sense of fun might replace
it. But that
feeling
, that warmth, would be gone for good.

Only she had felt that
strong, overwhelming sense of belonging when Rob had pulled her
close in the middle of the discussion with Zoe and Travers. His
desire had continued, and so had hers.

But did she want more from him than
sex?

The sex was pretty good. (Pretty good?
The sex was the most spectacular of her life. The sex would have
been enough to sustain any relationship, for anyone, for as long as
the sex worked.)

Which was probably her
answer.

She wanted more, but would settle for
the sex.

And if some teenager had told her
that, she would have said it was pretty pathetic.

But she doubted any teenager would
ever, ever experience sex like that.

She smiled to herself and pulled on
her clothes. Then she grabbed her brush from her overnight bag and
straightened her hair.

Rob was a complicated man.
He claimed he wasn’t controlling, but he would make blanket
statements, like when he had said that he didn’t want her to go
with him.

Yet he could be sensitive and
caring.

Was she in love with him?

She didn’t know. She didn’t believe in
love at first sight.

But if she did believe in it, would
she claim she was in love with him?

Her heart warmed. From the moment she
had seen him, she had been attracted to him. She hadn’t been able
to get him out of her mind.

And no other man would ever compare to
him.