He was dressed in cutoffs and stretched out on top of the covers, reading files, pillows piled at his back. He set them aside and gave her a steady look. “I’m not going anywhere, Pia. Not anywhere. And neither are you.”

His much-loved face was as immovable as a mountain. She nodded and relaxed. He did not pick up his reading again until she was sound asleep.

Almost dying can sure take it out of a body. The brief healing flare of Power from the peanut had taken care of essentials, but she had to do the rest on her own.

She had been unconscious for two days. Dragos had a present for her, an anti-nausea charm set in a two-carat diamond pendant necklace. The day after she woke up, when they were sure she could keep liquids and solid food down, the doctor had the IV drip removed.

She couldn’t concentrate on anything more substantive than magazines and TV shows, and she napped often. When she was awake, Dragos coaxed out of her every detail of what happened.

Then he shared the story of their pursuit, down to the final part when all the sentinels had taken to the air to search for the meadow she had described. With his keen raptor’s gaze, Bayne had caught the movement as Urien and his men had plunged down the incline toward her. They had still been a couple miles away and had hurtled forward with every ounce of speed they possessed.

Every ounce of Dragos’s formidable energy had been focused on taking Urien out before the Fae King had a chance to draw on his considerable Power and fight back. He hadn’t seen Pia get shot, but he had seen her bolt hit Urien high in the shoulder. It hadn’t been a killing shot, but it was enough to distract the Fae King for those few final seconds as Dragos and the sentinels dove down to the attack.

They had all seen her give Urien the finger. The sentinels made much of it as they sprawled on the couches with their feet up on the furniture, ate pizza, drank beer after beer and watched SOAPnet.

“I like that evil twin,” said Graydon, pointing his bottle at the flat-screen. “The other one’s too sickly sweet. Nobody’s that nice.”

“Fuck, no,” said Constantine comfortably. “But you gotta admit, that actress is smoking hot. You think they’re real?”

“Doubt it,” said Graydon. “They’re too globular.”

Constantine nodded. “I can handle globular.”

“Pun,” said Graydon. “Groan.”

Pia looked at them over the top of the Cosmopolitan she was thumbing through but refrained from comment. She supposed it could have been worse. At least they were more or less housebroken.

She was curled on one end of the couch, tucked under a light silk throw. After she had started to feel steadier, she had been able to convince Dragos to go take care of a backlog of things, but that only meant she had a steady, rotating stream of sentinels as visitors. She hadn’t had a moment to herself since the kidnapping.

When she complained to Graydon, he told her, “It’s just a precaution, cupcake. A few of Urien’s Fae are still being hunted down, and that Elven connection we were hunting for has disappeared. Damnedy damn it.” He snickered.

“I can’t believe he told you guys that,” she said. “I’d just twisted my ankle and was having a bad day. I wasn’t responsible for what came out of my mouth—or head.”

“You handled yourself like a pro,” he soothed.

“Yes, I did. I kicked ass,” she grumbled. “And anyway, I’m in the Tower penthouse. This place is locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Nobody’s hunting me anymore. I’m sure not going anywhere right now.”

“Yeah, but you gotta remember,” said the gryphon as he tapped her nose. “You scared the shit out of the boss. He’s not used to fear. If you don’t let him fuss, I think he might blow up. You scared the shit out of us too, by the way. Besides, you’re family now and we’re having fun. It’s like a vacation.” He winked.

Family. Wow.

“Okay,” she muttered. She tried not to wiggle for joy and pretended to still be grumpy, but she gave him an affectionate smile.

A depressed Tricks came to thank her for her part in killing Urien and to say good-bye. The faerie was leaving to be crowned Queen at the Dark Fae Court. She had had the lavender dye stripped from her hair and no longer wore it with a perky flip on the ends. It was its natural raven black. Pia was surprised to see how much it changed the faerie’s appearance and made her look more serious.

“Please God, come visit soon,” said Tricks. “Don’t abandon me to the Dark Fae Court. We’ll do lunch again.”

She groaned. “Okay, but next time let’s do without the Piesporter and cognac.”

Tricks gave her a sly one-sided smile. “We’ll see.”

Pia told her, “I’m going to miss you.”

The faerie threw her arms around her. “I’ll miss you too.”

Lunch sometime with the Dark Fae Queen. Invitations to visit with the Elven High Lord and Lady. How strange her life had become.

On impulse she asked, “Did you find somebody to take over your PR job?”

“No,” said Tricks. “There hasn’t been time. Why, do you want it?”

She lifted a shoulder, feeling self-conscious. “Maybe I’ll talk to Dragos about it. You know, when I’m up for it.”

“Whatever you decide, you keep that dragon twisted around your little finger,” the faerie advised with a giggle. “It’s his karma after so many centuries of being the center of everybody’s universe around here. It’ll do him a world of good.”

Another visitor came one afternoon. Pia looked up as Aryal threw her six-foot body onto a couch beside her. The harpy’s black hair was tangled again, which seemed to be its usual state. She wore low-rider jeans, a sleeveless leather vest and the requisite sentinel weapons.

Pia studied her as Aryal fidgeted. The harpy’s odd gaunt beauty had nothing to do with dieting, and while lanky, her body was sure cut. Pia looked at her arm muscles and rippling stomach, thinking of all the hard work it took to look like that. Not in this lifetime.

Aryal glared at General Hospital playing on the flat-screen and jiggled a foot. She picked up a Harper’s Bazaar, thumbed through a few pages and tossed it aside. Pia thought she heard the harpy mutter, “I’m no good at any of this girlfriend shit.”

She raised her eyebrows and wondered if she was supposed to say something.

Aryal looked at the TV. She said, “Can you believe it—first, the witch Adela sold you a binding oath, the next day she put a tracking spell on you for Dragos and this week she contracted with the Dark Fae to find you. You turned out to be quite the cash cow for her.”

She shook her head. “That’s pretty wrong. I never did feel quite right about her.”

The harpy continued, “We found her body in the Hudson River. Her throat had been slit. Apparently she contracted her services out one too many times. The forensic report is inconclusive, but we’re guessing the Dark Fae killed her. The estimated time of death is shortly after you were kidnapped. It looks like the Dark Fae were trying to cover their tracks after taking you.”

“I see,” she said, her tone neutral. Maybe she should care that the witch had been murdered. Whatever Adela had done, Pia wasn’t sure that she had deserved to die for it. At the moment she couldn’t seem to muster much of a reaction.

Silence fell between them. Then Aryal’s strange stormy gray eyes met hers. “Bayne and I feel like shit about the kidnapping. But I’m not sorry about the rest of it.”

“I didn’t ask you to be. You’re entitled to your own opinion, and you were trying to protect Dragos in your own way. I respect that and there’s nothing more to be said.” Pia took the end of her cheerleader ponytail and flicked it at the harpy.

A feral grin spread across Aryal’s face. “Uh, listen, sometime when you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to have a round or two with you on the mat. For a while the gryphons couldn’t talk about anything else.”

“Sure, why not,” she told the sentinel. “The way things have been going, I had better keep up on my training.”

“Okay.” Aryal put her hands on her knees and started to push to her feet.

“Just one thing,” Pia said. The harpy paused and looked at her. Pia regarded her with a cold, steady gaze. “Try shoving me into a wall again and I’ll smack you down.”

Aryal’s grin turned into a scowl. She looked like she had just swallowed something sour, but after a moment she nodded.

Pia returned the nod and looked down at her magazine. It was a dismissal. The harpy took it as such, launched off the couch and disappeared.

Pia also had time to give Quentin a call. She went out onto the balcony on a sunny afternoon and closed the door for some privacy. Then she leaned against the new wall and looked out over the city as they talked.

It was quite an exchange. She had to fill Quentin in on all that had happened since her brief stay at his beach house. It was a lot to tell, including that she was now apparently Dragos’s mate and carrying his child.

When she finished, there was a long, long silence on the other end. She toed one of the flagstones and watched traffic below as she waited. “That’s going to take me a while to process,” Quentin said in a scrupulously neutral tone of voice.

“Tell me about it.”

“How . . . is he?”

“You know Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady?”

“The professory, growly son of a bitch?”

“Yeah, well”—she closed one eye, squinted at the skyline and grinned—“Dragos is a lot worse.”

That caused another rant that went pretty much along the lines of he’d-better-treat-you-right-or-I-don’t-care-who-thebastard-is-I’ll-kill-him-myself kind of thing. She bent over, put her forehead on the wall railing and endured it with as much patience as she could muster, making noises every once in a while to pretend she was actually listening.

Finally he said, “I want to see you in person. I want to make sure that bastard hasn’t addled you with some kind of beguilement.”

“He hasn’t,” she said. “But I’ll come to Elfie’s soon for a real visit.”

“You’d better.” Quentin sounded grim. “Or as allergic to the Tower as I am, I’ll come break you out.”

“Tell everybody I miss them.”

“I will. See you soon.” He stressed the last.

“Yes, you will, I promise.” At last she was able to extricate herself from the conversation and hang up.

She was wrung out. This starting a new life was a hell of a lot of hard work.

She and Dragos didn’t talk much after they had shared stories, and she didn’t see much of him after she had convinced him to go back to work. He was soon immersed in stabilizing some businesses in Illinois before he sold them, and he mentioned something about initiating a hostile takeover of an investor-owned utility company.

She wondered if the distance between them would be the definition of her life now. He slipped into bed with her every night and wrapped her up in his arms, and she derived a lot of comfort from his nearness. But they didn’t make love, or have sex, or . . . mate.

Changing and becoming full Wyr enhanced her healing capability. After three days of convalescence, she was climbing the walls. Finally Dr. Medina, who had been making daily house calls, cleared her for treadmill walking and other light exercise.

“Yes!” She’d been hoping for the go-ahead.

“No running until I say so, no matter how good you feel. And I’m not going to say so till at least next week,” the doctor warned. “That crossbow wound gave your respiratory system quite a knock.”

“No running. Gotcha.” She grabbed her clothes, black Lycra exercise tights and sports tank top, and put them on. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.” The doctor smiled. “I’ll let myself out.”

She sat on the edge of the bed to put on her running shoes—another new pair—as the doctor left the suite. After her last shoes were ruined in her flight through the rain-drenched forest, Dragos had bought her six new pairs.

The door opened. She looked up, ready to tell the guys they could hit the gym. Dragos strode in. As usual, he took total command of the air space in the room.

He gave her a long look, then shut the door. He had dressed that day in black jeans and a black silk shirt that emphasized the strong athletic lines of his massive body and the bronze of his skin—and did nothing to lighten the severity of his face.

Even in his human form he looked capable of ripping the Fae King apart with his bare hands. Should she find that as sexy as she did? She scratched her head. She wondered about herself, she really did.

“Hi,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Apparently you don’t expect much from me,” he said.

“Excuse me?” she said, taken aback.

He began a slow stroll around the large suite. It was his prowling stroll, his long muscular limbs moving like liquid under the silk and denim. She twisted to watch him with equal parts pleasure and uncertainty.

“The doctor has cleared you for exercise,” he said. “So I figure that means you’re strong enough to face other things now as well.”

“Oh-kay.”

“Go ahead and call me obsessive, but I have a bone to pick with you,” he said. He was frowning.

It made her forehead crinkle in response. “What’s wrong? What else did I do?” Hadn’t she done more than enough for a week? At this rate she was going to have to turn catatonic to make sure nothing else happened.