“I’m sorry.” His voice was edged with frustration. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” His head raised, his eyes dark with concern and bemusement. As though he too were treading in waters so unfamiliar the threat of drowning was imminent.
“Kane will come for me,” she whispered. “You have to let me go, Callan.” His lips twisted bitterly. “I know,” he agreed, his hand lifting, his thumb wiping her tears from beneath one eye. “But to take you, Merinus, he’ll have to kill me.” The finality in his voice terrified her. The resounding echo in her heart shattered her last hope that she would ever be free of him.
“You said you could walk away,” she sobbed. “That even if it hurt you could walk away.”
“And an hour later I found you gone and lost my sanity,” he told her bleakly.
She shook her head. This couldn’t be happening. Not like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
“Kane won’t let you keep me,” she said, desperate for him to understand, to let her go. Desperate to make herself believe, despite the agony throbbing inside her. She didn’t want to be free of him, and that frightened her more than anything.
“As I would refuse to let any man hold Sherra or Dawn against their will,” he answered her, his expression drawn into lines of acceptance. “This will be up to you to solve, Merinus. One of us will die if you try to leave with him. I won’t let him take you.”
“You said the doctor would find a cure.” Her fists clenched as she rejected his brutal statement. “You said he would make it better.”
“And while you were running, I learned he cannot.” Callan reached up, pulling her hair back from her face as he watched her. “It will have to ease on its own, and he believes it will. But he believes it will never go away completely. This need, Merinus, whatever it is, could be something neither of us will be free of. Something I’m not certain I want to be free of.” She heard the curious note of vulnerability in his voice. A bemusement that he felt that way.
“I have to call my brothers. They have to know I’m safe.” She knew Kane was going crazy with worry.
He wasn’t safe to be around when he did that.
Callan sighed wearily, rising to his feet.
“Come on. Let’s go back to the cabin. We’ll discuss it there.” He held his hand out to her.
Merinus stared up at him, anger and pain shattering her.
“You won’t let me call them, will you? You won’t let them help me.”
“I won’t let them take you,” he corrected her. “And if they can find you, they will try to take you, Merinus. They will convince themselves you can be cured. That the need can be taken away. I don’t believe it can. I believe nature is having its last laugh on those crazy bastards who crea
ted me.”
“What do you mean?” She shook her head, even more confused than before.
“The hormone releasing from my body to yours counteracts the contraception injection the doctor’s been giving you,” he told her softly. “We were created to be unable to breed, our semen incompatible with normal humans. But that hormone is changing that, slowly. Reversing the DNA coded into us. We’re mated. Nature will allow us no other choice.”
Merinus felt her world tilt. Her hands pressed to her stomach, she had to fight for air.
“Am I—?” She swallowed tightly.
“Not yet,” he assured her. “But eventually you will be. There’s nothing we can do but see how this anomaly intends to work itself out.”
“No.” Desperate, pleading, she came to her feet, her hands gripping his arms. “No, Callan, you have to do something to stop this. Wear a condom. That would protect me.” Mockery slashed across his face. “What, Merinus, unwilling to breed with an animal after all?” Shock held her immobile for only a moment.
“Damn you,” she lashed out at him. “I’m unwilling to be an experiment for you. You don’t love me, Callan. I’m nothing to you but a bodily function. I refuse to have a child under those circumstances.”
“A condom will not work anyway,” he told her bitterly. “That part of me that gives you such pleasure, that swells and throbs within your flesh would not allow it.”
“What are you saying?” She shook his arm, her nails biting into his flesh. “A condom would work, Callan.”
“A condom would split when the barb swells from my cock, Merinus. At full erection, it fills the back of your tight little cunt, locking it into your flesh. It doesn’t hurt you, because it’s blunt-tipped, but it’s too large for a condom to sustain.”
Merinus felt the blood drain from her face. Her knees weakened, her heart beating sluggishly within her breast.
“Barb?” Her voice was strangled now as she fought the rising nausea erupting in her stomach.
“I told you I was an animal, Merinus,” he bit out. “Do you not remember me warning you, that day at the station?” His gaze was hard, cold as he watched her now. Merinus felt the chill of it running over her body. “You should have believed me.”