CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Finally, he was able to close the bedroom door (an innovation, on Gramarye) and shuck off his doublet. “What’s the matter with the kids?”

“Why, naught, I should think,” Gwen answered from the pillow. “They have been perfectly behaved, all afternoon!”

“That’s what I mean. What’s wrong with them?”

“Oh.” She rolled over on her side with a cat-smile. “They do fear thou’lt hear their thoughts.”

“Oh.” Rod grinned. “So they can’t even think about being naughty, huh? Well, I do sort of hear them—but so far, it’s only a mutter in the background. Of course, I haven’t been trying.” He stripped off his hose and slipped into bed.

“Thou’st forgot thy nightshirt,” Gwen murmured.

“I haven’t forgotten anything.” Rod reached out, caressing; she gasped. “Hmmmm, yes, just as I remembered. Sure that’s all that was bothering them?”

“That, and the memory of thine aspect as thou slew the Duke.” She shuddered. “’Twould shake a grown man, let alone a child.”

“Hmm, yes.” Rod frowned. “I’d like to say I’d never even try to do that again, dear—but you know occasions are bound to arise.”

“They are indeed.” Her voice was hushed; she cuddled close. “I doubt not thou’lt be enforced to draw on such powers again.”

“If I can,” he agreed. “And if I do, dear—well, I hate to say it, but, as wife, you sort of have signed on for the job of keeping me sane while I do it, of being my link with who I really am.”

She only smiled, but her words murmured inside his mind: Have I not always done so?

He grinned, and agreed, his words wrapping themselves in her mind, while his arms wrapped her in a much closer, much warmer embrace than she’d ever known.

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