| Excerpt from Girl on the Run . . .
He froze. Something was wrong here, someone wasn’t the right someone ...
"Oh God! Kaia?"
In all his life never had Eben’s ardor deserted him so abruptly. Never had thought, if such it could be called, rushed from his nether regions to his brain so quickly. Never had the tolling bell of conscience jangled so fiercely as the moment when Eben Dhion raised his head and realized the woman who lay sprawled beneath him in erotic thrall might just as well be his sister.
Rearing back as though a cobra swayed before him ready to strike, Eben flung himself aside and scrambled to his knees. Kaia had not yet fully recovered her senses and gazed up at the trailing feathers of clouds with slumberous, unfocused eyes, as though returning slowly from a sea journey to some exotic clime and unwilling to accept that the ship was coming to anchor.
"Oh God, I am so sorry, Kaia. Forgive me." He snatched at her skirts, tugging them loose from the cord at her waist and draping them over the sweet gate he had only moments before sought to breach.
He sprang to his feet, stormed this way and that. "Mad, I must be mad. That’s it, I’ve lost my mind. Kaia! What ever could I have been thinking?"
Such frenzied reflection and remorse would not be reassuring to any woman, virgin or not, who had just been so pleasured. Kaia climbed to her feet with slow deliberation, adjusted her skirts, and shook the sand from her tousled locks. She fixed Eben with a look that would have any man with a modicum of common sense holding his tongue and backing away to a prudent distance.
She crossed her arms across her chest and cocked her head. "You appear to be distressed, my lord."
Eben was too distraught to apprehend his danger. "Of course I’m distressed. A man of principle does not ... his own sister ... mortal sin..." he babbled to the heavens.
Kaia glared at him. "I am not your sister."
"You might as well be," said Eben waving his arms about. "I’ve known you since, well, since the day you were born. You spent more time in my hall with Morgana than you did in your father’s. I have always looked upon you—"
"Have you?" demanded Kaia.
"Have I what?"
"Looked at me. Really looked at me."
Eben’s eyebrows went up. "Of course I’ve looked at you."
"As a woman?" she challenged, stalking a circle around him.
Eben sensed a trap. "Well, er, you’re but eighteen, not exactly a woman. Almost."
"A child, then?" Kaia inquired, far too politely.
He needed to gain some control here, Eben thought. "Well, yes, if you must know," he said, coming to a standstill and settling his hands on his hips. He wasn’t about to back down in the face of her growing fury.
"Was I a child a few minutes ago?" she shouted. "Did a child incite your passion, harden your body, drive you beyond coherent thought?"
Eben, of course, had no answer. She certainly had been no child but the most exciting woman who had ever lain beneath him. No, definitely not a child in that moment. But he’d cut off his right arm before he’d admit it.
He had no choice but to steer the conversation toward safer ground where he could be sure of himself. He must go on the offensive.
"Only a child would be so rash as to set out on this harebrained scheme of yours. You have half Jibril’s army out in search of you. Traveling into the future!" He gestured contemptuously. "Only a lackwit would believe such nonsense. Some charlatan has drawn you in for some dark reason of his own, and you have not one iota of common sense if you believe him."
"You know nothing about it," Kaia snapped. "Merlin himself has been there and he would have no reason to lie. He knows a spell to send us there. I can learn to read and write, I can—"
"You can do that here," Eben countered, abandoning any attempt at reasoning with her about some mythical sorcerer.
"My father would have me live in ignorance all my life," Kaia yelled into the rising wind. "Yes, just like a child. That is how men wield their power over us. Keep us in ignorance, keep us children, send us from the rule of our father’s house to that of our husband’s."
She threw up her hands in disgust. "And we go like sheep because we don’t know any better. Well, I know better now. It doesn’t have to be like that, it doesn’t—"
"Not all men are like your father, Kaia," Eben interjected hastily before she became hysterical. "Jibril will bring you to the palace, where you can study with the best masters in the kingdom."
The first wavelets of the incoming tide eddied ever closer, but Kaia and Eben would likely not have noticed a thirty-foot tidal wave thundering toward shore.
"And what then?" Kaia yelled. "What good will my learning do when I am married off to some sour old man and find myself in childbed year after year? When I must have the scriptures read to me and interpreted for me by a priest - a man, naturally - and I am beaten when my husband finds me with pen and parchment in hand, as my father did?"
In the way of women, Kaia’s fury exploded into a flood of tears. When Eben made a move toward her to offer comfort, she backed away and threw up her hands to ward him off. "No, don’t touch me," she sobbed.
"Kaia," Eben said gently, "Trust Jibril. Trust us all to see that you do not live this life you fear. You will never return to your father’s hall. We will find you a husband who--" Something in the way Kaia’s head jerked up and her eyes went hard stopped Eben in mid-sentence. With great deliberation she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and straightened up, every bit the imperious noblewoman she had been born to be.
Eben breathed a sigh of relief. The storm appeared to have passed. He held out his hand to her with a winning smile.
"Come, little one. All will be well, you’ll see."
So unexpected was the scream of frustration and rage that rent the air that Eben stumbled and landed flat on his back. A little wave washed over him. Sputtering and spitting sand he clambered to his feet. Before he could properly collect himself, Kaia was off, pelting back down the beach.
"Oh hell," Eben snarled and went after her.
Far ahead Kaia could see what looked at first like a flock of birds flapping toward her. With her waist-length hair streaming behind like her a golden pennant, she ran toward it, and soon saw that the brown and gray, white and black that she had supposed were wings were in fact the habits of a gaggle of perhaps twenty nuns, who had launched a rescue party for a young woman they believed to be an imperiled sister.
The beach was narrowing now as the tide began to pour in and Kaia had no time to veer around them as they raced toward her. At the very last moment, they parted like the Red Sea to allow her through, then closed ranks again when they saw Eben pounding toward them.
He never stood a chance.
Lord Eben Dhion, armiger of the Ninth House, went down beneath an onrushing horde of vengeance-bent Brides of Christ. |
