He didn’t know the answer to that but he contented himself by sitting down on the vine-covered sofa with Danielle still in his arms.
“This is crazy,” she breathed, looking into his eyes. “Why do I feel like I haven’t seen you in months and months?”
“Don’t know, but I feel the same way, little girl,” Brav said and kissed her.
Her mouth was soft under his, sweetly yielding when he licked gently at her lips to ask for entrance. Without hesitation, she opened for him. Brav pulled her closer, plundering her mouth, sucking gently on her tongue and then inviting her to suck on his, wanting more of her, always more…
“Wait, what are we doing?” Danielle pulled away from the kiss, her eyes wide and troubled.
“Getting reacquainted, little girl,” Brav growled. “Feel like I haven’t seen you in months. I fucking missed you today!”
“I missed you too,” she admitted. “But why? I mean, why are we acting this way? Is it the Mother Stone’s power affecting us again?”
“Dunno.” Brav frowned. “But it’s not on right now,” he pointed out, nodding to the empty fireplace.
“Yes, but we absorbed a lot of it last night,” Danielle pointed out. “And now we’re acting like the H’rakens. We don’t want to be parted, we can’t keep our hands off each other—and you can apparently heal me, now, too.”
“Oh, uh…” Brav cleared his throat. “I don’t think that had anything to do with absorbing that pink radiation, little girl.”
“It didn’t?” She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Then how—?”
“Essence—Blood Kindred’s fangs secrete it in order to heal their mates,” Brav explained.
Her face cleared.
“Oh, so you’re a Blood Kindred? I wondered about that.”
“Actually, I’m only half Blood Kindred,” Brav admitted. “And half Beast Kindred—I’m a Hybrid.”
“You are? Your kind are rare, aren’t they?” Danielle looked immediately interested.
“They are,” Brav admitted guardedly. He didn’t like talking about his bloodlines much. “But luckily, I have fangs from the Blood Kindred part of my heritage, which secreted essence in order to heal you.”
He didn’t add that his fangs had never sharpened or secreted essence for anyone else—not even the two females he had tried to bond to him at different times of his life. He didn’t know why they were secreting essence now, but it was damn lucky they were, considering what had just happened out in the town square.
“I’m glad you were able to heal me,” Danielle said. “I thought they were going to lynch me just for healing that boy!”
“I wouldn’t have let that happen, little girl,” Brav growled, frowning. “Although why in the Seven Hells did you have a cauterizer in your pocket?”
“I thought…” She looked down at her hands. “Thought you might get hurt doing the butchering—I mean, what if a knife slipped or something? I wanted to have it with me just in case.”
He sighed.
“Well, I guess it’s good for Jerber that you had it, even if it did make the whole village question if we were really Joined.”
“I know. I’m really sorry about that.” She looked up at him appealingly. “It’s just…when someone gets hurt, I go into doctor mode and forget everything else.”
“Understandable,” Brav said, nodding. Actually, he admired her dedication to her craft. She was a true healer at heart and it wasn’t her fault that these people had such strange beliefs about who could heal who and when they could heal them.
“His wounds were really deep,” Danielle said. “Are the Riivers some kind of wild animals then? Something like a tiger?”
Brav thought of the pale, hissing thing with its bulging red eyes and melted features and shook his head.
“No, that’s the strange thing—they seemed to be humanoid. Well, sort of humanoid. They look like some kind of mutants but they can speak.”
“One spoke to you?” Danielle’s eyes widened. “What did it say?”
Brav thought of the hissing, clotted voice, thick with rage. Thought of the pale thing saying, “You will be remembered, tall one. You and yours will pay!”
“Uh…it mostly just said the boy belonged to it. Like Jerber was its prey—fresh meat or something like that.”
“How horrible!” Danielle shivered. “I can’t even imagine! He was so lucky you were right there to save him!”
“He was lucky you were there, too,” Brav pointed out. “If you hadn’t sealed his wounds when you did, I don’t know if he would have survived.”
“I put us in danger, though,” Danielle said, sighing. “At the very least I put our mission at risk. They’re not going to want to open up to us and share more about the Mother Stone if they think I’m some kind of whore who heals every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
Brav snorted laughter.
“Seriously, sweetheart—don’t worry about it. We’ll prove to them that we’re Joined and that you’re not interested in anyone else the next time we go out in public.”
“At the feast tonight you mean?” Danielle asked. She looked up at him from under her long lashes. “You think we should just be all over each other, the way Navii and Kozen and all the rest of the H’raken couples are?”