Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
It was impossible to disbelieve the blunt sincerity of her.
Exhaling quietly, Elena allowed her worry to whisper away and focused on the moment. On her gorgeous, happy, healthy baby, and on her sister, as happy and healthy. Eve was—unusually for her—wearing an elegant ankle-length sundress of deep blue linen that had a fitted bodice and a flared skirt, her hair in a fancy braid rather than her go-to ponytail.
Her face, too, Elena realized, showed signs of cosmetics.
“Do you have a date?” A gasp of a question—not because of the date, but because Eve had dressed up for it. Elena’s sister wasn’t one to soften herself for anyone; in fact, she took fierce independence to the extreme, partly due to personality and partly due to the fuckwit who’d been her first relationship in immortality.
It had turned Eve off relationships for a good, long time.
“He’ll always be around,” she’d muttered to Elena during a wine-fueled night after the breakup. “Hundreds of years I’ll have to suffer him.” She’d shuddered. “No thanks. I’d rather stay single than risk another immortal ex.”
Today, Eve’s cheeks colored. “It’s just a drink.”
“Oh puh-leeze.” Elena shook a rattle at Nixie to amuse him. He immediately grabbed the item that Dmitri had carved by hand, a gift from one father to another.
Talking a mile a minute, even if only one word in twenty was comprehensible, her son shook the rattle with gusto.
“That’s my boy,” Elena said with a huge smile, her hand on his plump little leg. “Soon it’ll be a sword.”
“Or a kukri,” Eve said of the weapon she’d come to love.
Abandoning the rattle with another burst of chatter, the baby turned himself over and took off on a race-crawl over soft green grass colored purple by the jacaranda’s floral bounty. Nix’s wings were still small enough not to bother him, and they remained folded in against his spine. However, they’d become less translucent and were now covered by white feathers that were tinier than tiny.
As with baby teeth, he’d molt those feathers at a certain point and start to grow in his adult coloring and feathers.
Sitting up so she could keep an eye on Nixie while allowing him to explore, Elena said, “Who’s the lucky date?”
“Ugh.” Making a face, Eve flopped over onto her back. “I feel like I’m cradle robbing. It’s embarrassing.”
“I’m truly intrigued now.” She admired a bug Nix was pointing toward, his face solemn as he told her all about it. “That’s a very nice bug, sweetheart.”
Happy, her son left the bug to its business and crawled on.
“He kept asking and he’s adorable and…” Groaning, Eve covered her face with her hands. “It’s Izzy.”
Elena’s mouth dropped open. “You are robbing the cradle!” she joked after that first shock, then poked her sister in the arm. “He’s only a thousand one hundred years old, you cougar!”
“Oh, shut up.” Eve sat up, grumpy as anything. “I knew him when he was barely even an adult.”
“Evie, I wasn’t so much as a twinkle in anyone’s eye when Raphael was born,” Elena said with a laugh, delighted for both her sister and for Izzy, who remained one of her favorite people in the Tower.
Eve did not look any less mortified. “I just remember when I saw him after my transition into vampirism, and he was so shy and blushed a lot. I was a full-grown adult at the time.”
“He hasn’t been that youth for a long time.” Elena got up to help Nix into the viper-green play car that sat on the lawn. A gift from Venom and Holly—complete with a personalized number plate—it was a bit too big for him, but he absolutely loved the thing and would grow into it soon enough.
He hit the buttons and laughed when the car made old-fashioned engine sounds. “Mama! Zoom!” he said, speaking two of the few words over which he’d gained full mastery, even if his pronunciation remained iffy.
His first word had been Papa, and Elena hadn’t even been able to be mad about it, not when she’d seen Raphael’s face melt in a way that she’d have believed impossible for an archangel.
He’d been undone, her lover.
“Mama! Zoom! Zoom!”
Yep, she had a future speed demon on her hands. “Ready or not, here we go! Let’s zoom!”
As Nix “drove” the car she was pushing, she said, “Izzy is the senior wing commander in charge of an entire sector of units, in case you hadn’t noticed. He also doesn’t blush anymore—though that grin of his has caused more than one broken heart.”
“I know, I know.” Sitting up, Eve clapped her hands at her nephew. “Woohoo! Go, Nixie, the speed master!”
“Zoom! Anny Ebi!”
Eve sucked in a breath, held it. “You heard that, right? He said Aunty Evie?”
Delighted with himself, Nix threw up his arms. “Anny Ebi!”
“Yep.” Elena grinned. “Illium is going to be mad you beat him to it.”