He wanted to cry. He wanted to yell. He wanted to beg her to love him, even just the tiniest little bit. He’d be happy with just a tiny little morsel of love.
“That’s a lie,” he said aloud, despair swamping him. “I wouldn’t be happy with a morsel. I want it all. I need it all. If I can’t have it, then . . .” The sentence trailed off, unfinished.
He truly did want to cry.
“I’m sorry, Gregory. I just don’t know what I want—” Gwen’s gaze met his, and in her eyes he saw the only hope he had of happiness. And as her pupils flared with awareness of him, of what he hoped they had between them, she gave a little hiccuping sob and threw herself into his arms, kissing his jaw and chin and nose and finally his mouth, and with that touch, the love within him threatened to burst forth in a blaze of . . . well, love. He couldn’t think of an appropriate metaphor, not with Gwen kissing him like she’d been without his lips for a lifetime, and it would have been rude of him not to give that kiss all his due consideration.
“Of course I want to spend my life with you,” she said a few minutes later when he was forced to stop kissing her so they could breathe. “Even though you are the enemy, I want to be with you. But what are we going to do—”
He laid a finger across her mouth, stopping her from finishing the question. She bit his finger. “We’ll work something out. I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me now how very much you love me? Perhaps a quick statement regarding how you can’t live without me, and how life would be bleak if you were forced to do so?”
She stared at him.
“Too soon?” he asked.
“Yes.” She reached behind him and pinched his ass.
He couldn’t possibly love her more than he did at that exact moment.
“What are you going to do about what?” her mother asked. “Is there a problem with you marrying? He’s not married already, is he?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “There are just a few people that must be taken care of. These two”—he nudged the man nearest him with his shoe—“and another woman who’s hanging around Ethan’s camp trying to find Gwen. Not that I’ll let that happen, but I’ll have to deal with her once and for all.”
“Not the reclaimer!” gasped the second mother. “She’s here?”
Gwen stared at them both, openmouthed with surprise. “You know about her?”
The two women exchanged glances . . . guilty glances. “Er . . . yes. Don’t you remember before we came to Anwyn how we hurried you out of that psychologist’s office? That Death woman had followed you there, and we felt it wiser to have you elsewhere.”
“Yes, I remember that. But what I want to know is why you are both looking so guilty now?” Gwen asked, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You didn’t do anything to her, did you?”
The first mother made a gesture that could only be described as wringing her hands. Their faces expressing their distress, the second mother blurted out, “It’s all our fault that she’s chasing you, Gwen. We weren’t going to tell you because you were safe here in Anwyn, but if you say she’s here now . . .”
“It’s not your fault in the least,” Gregory told them. “If anything, the blame lies with me, since I am the one who made sure that Gwen didn’t stay dead.”
The mothers gawked at him. “You mean she was telling the truth when she said that she died and came back to life?”
Quickly, Gregory explained the pertinent events.
“Honestly!” Gwen slapped her hands on her thighs. “What is the world coming to when your own mothers don’t believe you when you tell them you’ve died and been mysteriously resurrected!”
“The issue of the loss of time is why Death’s minion is after Gwen,” Gregory added when the two women looked doubtful.
“Er . . .” Once again the two mothers exchanged a telling look.
“Er what?” Gwen stopped looking annoyed and switched back to looking suspicious. “What aren’t you telling us? Does it have something to do with the reclamation woman?”
“We might as well tell them,” the second one told the first. “It’s better if they know, Mags.”
“Yes, but . . .” The first mother fretted with the apron she wore, giving Gwen a doubtful look. “Gwenny will be so . . .”
“Angry? Annoyed? Irritated? Because I’m quickly getting to all three,” Gwen told them sternly. “Spill.”
“The woman may say she’s coming after you because of dear Gregory stealing the time to save your life—and really, that was terribly sweet of you, and Alice and I will always be grateful to you for it, because we just couldn’t be without our darling girl—but it’s not exactly the truth.”
“What is the truth?” Gwen asked, taking his hand. He twined his fingers through hers, a sudden sense of contentment stealing over him. Whatever the problem was, he told himself, he and Gwen would handle it together.
“Well . . .”
“No.” Gwen shook a finger on her free hand at them. “No more of those pregnant looks you’re giving each other. Just tell us how bad it is so we can set about fixing the situation.”
He was even more pleased that Gwen now included him in the mop-up duties of whatever mess her mothers had created.
“I love you more now than I did five minutes ago, and that’s saying a lot,” he told her.
She squeezed his hand. “No distractions from the peanut gallery. Mom? Tell us.”
Her mother took a deep breath, and said so quickly that the words tumbled over each other, “Death is annoyed with us because about three hundred years ago we sold him a love charm that . . . er . . . went awry.”
“Instead of attracting the lady he desired, the spell was intercepted by a behemoth. One that had unconventional tastes,” the second mother confided to them.
“He enjoyed unsavory methods of sexual engagement,” the first mother said, waving vaguely toward her derriere. “Very unsavory when you consider just how large behemoths are. And when Death demanded that we fix the situation—you know full well we never offer guarantees when it comes to love charms because they are so unreliable—we tried to reason with the behemoth (his name was Carl), but he escaped us and locked himself in Death’s bedchamber with Death while he was sleeping in order to have his wedding night—did we mention that Carl wanted to marry Death? I thought that was sweet, really, although what Death said happened that night . . . Well, we won’t go into details because that sort of thing is better not mentioned in mixed company, and really, it wasn’t our fault, but Death didn’t see it that way, and he got a bit stroppy and said that he wasn’t going to rest until he made us as miserable as he was the morning after his . . . I suppose you could call it his nuptials, although he had another word for it, and we knew that he would target you once he found out you’d been born to us because you are so very dear to us both, my darling Gwen, and it was all very upsetting and we didn’t want you to know because you make the biggest fusses about things that really aren’t that dire, and you wanted to go back to the States so you could continue your work, so we didn’t tell you.”
Gwen stared at them for the count of seven before turning to look at Gregory. “I’m going to give you the chance right now to retract your offer of marriage. It’s the honorable thing to do, and I just want you to know that I wouldn’t blame you in the least for not wanting to be connected to my family.”
He flicked his thumb over her lower lip to keep from kissing the breath right out of her. “Not even a violated Death would keep me from your side.”
“OK, that’s going to win you some bonus swoon points,” she told him, her eyes warm with admiration. He wanted badly to get her into the nearest bed so he could show her just how much he appreciated that look. “As for you two . . . you are so grounded.”