Free Warrior's Moon by Lucy Monroe Page B

followed you across the waters if need be for us to be together. You wouldn’t even leave with me to another clan.”
    “I could not!” His bellow was louder than hers, but she was not impressed.
    “Then I say again, Caelis, you were a very ineffectual man. And I believed you a warrior at heart.”
    “I am. How dare you doubt my fighting spirit!”
    “How dare
you
claim one when you never fought for the right to be with me!” He surged to his feet, towering above her, his rage a palpable force around them.
    She was not impressed.
    “I thought he wanted only what was best for me. As you said, I was one of his favored ones. He claimed that as my alpha he could tell you were not my true mate. How was I supposed to know he lied?”
    “You wanted to believe him. You wanted to believe that some in the clan were more important, superior to others. You wanted to be one of those
superior
beings.” She put all the derision she felt into that word, letting Caelis know just how
un
superior she considered a man who could abandon her as he had done.
    His face contorted as if holding something of great import back. Finally, he said, “I was.”
    “I would say that I am sorry you lost your place, but I am not. The longer you held favor with that man, the more of your humanity you would have given up to him.”
    “You do not know how true your words are,” Caelis said, his tone subdued, his face cast in shadows so she could not read his expression.
    She had no answer for him. He had chosen, no matter that he claimed there had been none, and he had done so poorly.
    He sat on the edge of her bed, leaving his scent behind, though she would not tell him so. She’d always been sensitive to it, reveling in his nearness even when she could not see him.
    He looked down at the floor, as if it might have the answers he sought. “There are things I did not tell you then. Things you will have to know now.”
    “You sound very mysterious.”
    He nodded, his expression sober. “It is a great mystery, a secret the humans who are privileged to know must keep at the pain of death.”
    “You say
humans
like you think yourself somethinggreater than.” Was this truly the man she had loved so dearly?
    His sense of superiority and excessive vanity might even rival Percival’s.
    “Not better than—I understand that now—but not the same either.” Caelis’s expression pleaded with her for understanding.
    But once again, his words were more confusion than explanation.
    “Will you ever start making sense?” she demanded with asperity. “No matter what your exalted laird would have you believe, you are
not
some superior being.”
    “I am Chrechte,” Caelis blurted out with exasperation, jumping to his feet and turning away as if frustrated with her obdurate behavior.
    Really? If he persisted in trying to unite them as a family, he would soon learn that she was capable of far more obstinacy than this.
    And the whole Chrechte mystique? Not so mysterious after all. Everyone in the clan knew about the band of warriors that considered themselves elite among the soldiers.
    She rolled her eyes. “So I heard on more than one occasion six years ago from you and others. You considered your skills as a warrior something to set you apart.”
    He spun back to face her, his expression growing increasingly astonished as she continued speaking.
    “My skills as a warrior
are
above those of other men, Chrechte as well,” he declared with affront.
    “And I am an English lady with claim to title and little else. Do you know how it has set me apart?” she asked scathingly. “Not one wee bit. I am still a mother, a friend, a woman with less say in my life than the steward who ran my dead husband’s estates.”
    “You ignore everything you do not wish to hear,” he accused, his frustration obviously mounting.
    She glared at him, her own ire rising to match his. “If you want me to
hear
you, may I suggest you try talking sense rather than the ravings of