Under the Moon (8 page)

“Damn right, you don’t.” He accelerated again, his speed and abrupt movements telegraphing his impatience.

As soon as they were inside the hotel room, Nick cornered her.

“What makes you think we’re related?”

Quinn didn’t intend to stall, exactly, but his reaction gave her the excuse. She circled him and backed toward the sitting area. “Why does it bother you so much that we might be?”

He hesitated. Then his shoulders relaxed. He tossed the keys into a thick glass dish on the spindly table behind the couch. “It doesn’t.”

“Nick.”

“C’mon, Quinn, tell me what’s going on.”

Quinn removed her jacket and dropped it onto a narrow stuffed chair, then dropped herself onto the hard cushions of the ultra-modern couch. Muscles all over her body protested, then eased out their knots and tension. “Alana said something about family ties. That seems to be the reason the board is keeping me out of the loop on the leech. Since there’s the whole thing about you going rogue…” God, what if he was her brother? She pressed a hand to her stomach as nausea churned.

“It’s logical they wouldn’t trust the goddess related to the rogue protector.” Nick pulled two beers from the minibar next to the particleboard dresser, popped the tops, and sat on the couch with her, handing her one. “But I guarantee you, we aren’t related.”

Quinn took a pull of the ice-cold beer. “How do you know?”

Pink flared across his cheekbones, subtle but there. “I checked.”

“You checked?” she repeated, incredulous. “What, you hired a PI to make sure we weren’t secretly brother and sister?”

“Not exactly.” The flush faded and he grinned with his usual cockiness. “I had an aunt into genealogy. She made this big book that goes back, like, twelve generations. I looked for your name.”

That didn’t ease her mind, the reason for her shock rolling over her again. “I’m adopted, Nick. Caldwell is my adoptive name.”

His expression didn’t change. “I know.”

“You know my original name?”

“I do.”

She stared at him, caught in that numb state when something so surprises you, your emotional center can’t react. He didn’t seem to notice.

“And I looked for both. By the time we met I had nephews in the book. Aunt Phyllis was thorough. There’s no one in there who could have been you or your blood family.” He drank, and Quinn watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. After he wiped the sleeve of his flannel shirt across his mouth, he continued. “I memorized six pages of the damned book, okay?”

“How did you know who my birth family was?”

Nick leaned forward and set his bottle onto the glass coffee table. “It was part of my training.”

She raised one eyebrow. “To investigate me?”

“Of course not. It was investigation in general. You were one of my study assignments.”

Now that Nick had put to rest the horrifying possibility that they were related, she needed to accept that Alana had to have meant her birth family. But Quinn had decided, long before her adoptive parents died, that she wouldn’t dishonor them by seeking her birth parents. After they died, being alone was less painful than being rejected. She lived her life as if they didn’t exist, but now she was being forced to acknowledge them, and maybe more.

It was far easier to talk about Nick.

“What did you learn?” Almost out of habit, she swallowed some more beer before setting her bottle down, too. She didn’t need a fuzzy head, and she was already tired after being up all night and getting less than two hours of sleep on the plane.

“Surface stuff. The names of your birth parents, adoptive parents,
their
parents, where you grew up, went to school, worked. You know.” He twisted to lean against the arm of the couch. Quinn kicked off her shoes, pulled her legs up onto the couch, and faced him from the opposite end.

“Did you get assigned to me later because I’d been a training assignment already?” Her heart thumped a little harder as she waited for his answer. It came in a curl of his lips, a tenderness she’d rarely detected in his eyes.

“Something like that,” he said, the curl lifting into a smile. “We get info for every goddess we’re assigned to. When your mother called for a protector, I was available and they knew I already had the background on you.”

Quinn watched her knee rock back and forth, a little lost in the past. He’d been so confident and strong, even as new as he was to the Protectorate, and that had allowed her to turn away from her fear and be strong, herself. Maybe he’d been that confident because he already knew her. Maybe he’d even cared about her.

Dangerous territory
. Nick watched her steadily, as if he knew what she was thinking and wanted her to think it. But why? She already knew she meant more to him than a standard assignment. He didn’t talk about his other goddesses much. She knew he traveled all over the country to be wherever he was needed, and he protected other goddesses not even half as often as he protected her. But she also knew he wouldn’t take his relationship with her any deeper because his duty to those goddesses was just as strong as his personal feelings. No, stronger.

Quinn had settled for what they had because it was so much better than not having him at all. She’d always believed that was also Nick’s motivation. But now that she recognized the same pattern with Sam, she had to see her relationship with Nick differently, too.

The familiar ache of longing sharpened enough to make her turn away from that line of thought and face the other. Family ties. Alana could have meant only one thing.

“What—” She swallowed, but the rest of the question still came out raspy. “What did you learn about my birth parents?”

Nick’s tone was gentle when he asked, “What do you know about them?”

She folded her arms and lifted her shoulders. “Not much. I met them once, when I was about eight. They were still together, but they were only twenty-three. They told me they’d given me up for adoption because they were too young to take care of me.”

“Did your birth mother tell you what you were?”

“Not really, but she didn’t have to. I was too young to understand the whole genetic thing, but I believed I was a goddess because my real mother—my adoptive mother, I mean—was a goddess. But they had different sources and skills.” She remembered the small tricks her birth mother had done and how awed Quinn had been. “My birth mother snapped her fingers and made a hair ribbon appear. I thought it was out of thin air, but it was probably from her pocket. My hair was frizzy beyond belief, and I hated it, but she smoothed her hand down it and tied it with the ribbon, and it was perfect after that.”

“Still is.”

He said it so low Quinn wasn’t sure she’d heard him. She hesitated before going on. “She left a box for me, some things her mother had handed down to her, things to help me focus my power and learn how to use it. But my mom was the one who actually taught me.”

“Did you ever look for your birth parents once you were an adult?”

She shook her head. “Of course I thought about it, all adopted kids do, but I decided not to. At first, I didn’t want to hurt my parents.” They’d been a close-knit family, especially after her father quit the corporate world to open the bar. Her mother was a traditional housewife who didn’t use her power for commercial use. Seeking her other parents had seemed insulting, and then Quinn’s father had his first heart attack when she was nineteen. He stayed fragile until he died seven years later, leaving her the bar she’d renamed Under the Moon. Her mother suffered so much with his death that Quinn hadn’t even considered adding to it.

“After Mom died, I was so lonely it was easy to spin fantasies about reconnecting with my birth family. But I decided there were more reasons I’d be sorry than glad if I tried.”

Nick shifted closer on the cushions and lifted her feet into his lap, stretching out her legs. He rubbed her arch, like he often did after she’d worked a long shift at the bar—with care and skill and no awareness he was doing it. Warmth blossomed where he touched her and seeped up through her muscles. The banked hunger glowed a little, but she was so tired and so distracted by their conversation it remained low, present but ignorable.

“What kind of reasons?” he asked.

“The usual. However young they’d been, they were still together eight years later. What if it hadn’t worked out after that and they were both miserable and blamed me? Or it could have been the opposite, and they had a great life together I wasn’t a part of.”

“But you had a good life without them, too.” He pressed his thumb deep into her arch, stroking upward, and she shivered.

“Yes, and being sorry I wasn’t part of their life would have been disloyal to Mom and Dad.” She’d still had to work hard to fight the disappointment when they never tried to contact her again. “Mom wasn’t a very powerful goddess. She derived her power from plant energy but couldn’t draw enough to do spectacular things. I was afraid if my birth mother was as powerful as I can be, especially if she had a constant source, that would make Mom feel bad, too.”

“Not after she was gone,” Nick pointed out.

Quinn shook her head. “No, the only real risk after they’d both died was that I’d be rejected. Whatever I found couldn’t hurt Mom and Dad, then. But my birth parents didn’t want me when I was born, and they didn’t want me when I was eight, so why would they want me at twenty-six?” Her throat tightened, the vulnerability of being left behind returning. “Or what if they welcomed me at first but decided they didn’t like me? I was already in too much pain to face that.”

Nick nodded and slid his hand from the top of her foot to her ankle, resting it there. His heat seeped through her sock, relaxing her even more. But god, it was easy to remember that pain. Only the bar and Nick’s visits had given her anything to be happy about at first. Slowly, she’d built her own independent life. And then Sam came along, and the pain had faded.

“I don’t know much more than that,” Nick told her. “Just that they’re from New England and were still here fifteen years ago.”

His gaze went distant and Quinn wondered if he was thinking of his own family. His parents had both been protectors, two strong legacies who went back to the origin of the Protectorate. Nick had wanted to be a protector since he was a little boy, but then his parents had been injured in a mundane car accident and forced to retire. His two older brothers had nothing to do with goddesses, so it was up to Nick to carry on the family legacy. It drove every choice he made.

“How often do you see your family?” she asked, stifling a yawn. Her eyelids had gained a few pounds.

“The usual. Holidays and stuff. We get together in the summer sometimes. You know, family vacations.”

“I can’t picture you with them.”

His smile was sad. “I don’t exactly fit. Six or eight families, all with spouses and kids. Even the divorced ones get along. Stepparents and real parents in one big, chaotic, mostly happy group.” He framed a space with his hands. “And then there’s me.” He stuck his fist out to the side. “The kids climb all over me, their parents braced to snatch them to safety. At night, once the kids are asleep, they want me to tell exciting stories, because I’m the freedom and adventure they want but will never risk.” His tone had gone bitter at the end, an edge of resentment at the burden he’d taken on but no one else would share.

Quinn hesitated over whether or not to pry open that crack. “Wow.” She eyed his beer. “I thought you only had one of those.”

He chuckled. “It’s not some big secret. I like my life. I love my family. It’s balanced.”

Her yawn caught up to her, and she tilted her head sideways against the back of the couch. “You don’t feel like something’s missing?” Like she did. It was harder and harder to keep it buried.

“Sometimes.” He shifted again, tugging her down so her head rested on the pillow behind her, her neck more comfortable. She lost the battle against her heavy eyelids.

“Do you?” he countered.

Quinn shook her head and tried to make her tongue work. “Rarely.” She didn’t have the energy to correct the lie, and somewhere in the very small part of her brain that was still awake, she knew she wasn’t ready to go down that road, with or without Nick. She let herself continue to drift until she fell asleep.

Only to wake a short time later with the world exploding around them.

Chapter Four

Each goddess has a specific source that serves as a conduit between her and the energy. She also has a unique combination of abilities that we like to compare to talents. Just as one child in a family might have an affinity for playing music while another can fix any mechanical item or perform complex mathematical equations in his or her head, so can each goddess have a unique combination of talents.