“Nah. I don’t say that to anyone. They take me as I come. They can’t handle it, it’s their problem.”

Picking up a sterile pack of gauze, Qhuinn tore the thing open and pressed the white weave against the wound between Blay’s shoulder blades. “I’ve absolutely thought about us… but I see myself with a female long-term. I can’t explain it. It’s just the way it’s going to be.”

Blay’s rib cage expanded and compressed. “Maybe because you don’t want another defect?”

Qhuinn frowned. “No.”

“You sure about that.”

“Look, if I cared what people thought, do you think I’d do what I do already?” He went around and blotted the slice on Blay’s chest, then tended to the wound on his shoulder. “Besides, my family’s dead. Who’ve I got to impress anymore?”

“Why were you so cruel?” Blay asked in a dignified voice. “Back in the tunnel at my place.”

Qhuinn picked up a tube of neomycin and went around to his buddy’s back again. “I was pretty sure I wasn’t coming back, and I didn’t want you ruining your life over me. Figured it was better for you to hate me than miss me.”

Blay laughed for real, and the sound was nice. “You are so arrogant.”

“Duh. But it’s true, isn’t it.” Qhuinn smoothed the milky ointment onto the break in Blay’s skin. “You would have.”

As he came back around in front, Blay lifted his head and his eyes. Their stares met, and Qhuinn reached out and put his palm on his friend’s cheek.

Rubbing his thumb gently back and forth, he whispered, “I want you with someone who’s going to be worthy of you.

Treat you right. Be only with you. I’m not that guy. Even if I settled with a female… shit, I tell myself I could be with just her, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t really believe that.”

The yearning in the blue eyes staring up at him broke his heart. It totally did. And he couldn’t imagine what it was that Blay saw in him that made him so special.

“What is wrong with you,” he whispered, “that you care so much about me?”

Blay’s sad smile added about a million years to his age, lining his face with the kind of knowledge that came only after life kicked you in the nuts a number of times. “What is wrong with you that you can’t see why I would?”

“We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that.”

“Promise me something?”

“Anything.”

“Leave me if you want, but don’t do it for my own good. I’m not a child, and I don’t break easily, and what I feel is none of your goddamned business.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“You weren’t. So promise me?”

Qhuinn exhaled hard. “Fine, I promise. As long as you swear you’ll look for someone real, okay?”

“You’re real to me.”

“Swear to it. Or I’m going to do that I-am-an-island bit again. I want you open to meeting someone you can really have.”

Blay’s hand crept up Qhuinn’s forearm and squeezed his wrist, the pact becoming solid on both sides. “Okay… all right. But it’s going to be a guy. I’ve tried females, and it just doesn’t feel right.”

“As long as you’re happy. Whatever makes you happy.”

As the tension eased between them, Qhuinn wrapped his arms around his friend and held him close, trying to absorb the male’s sadness, wishing there were another way for them.

“I suppose this is for the best,” Blay said into his shoulder. “You can’t cook.”

“See? I’m so not Prince Charming.”

Qhuinn could have sworn Blay whispered, “Yes, you are,” but he wasn’t sure.

They pulled apart, looked into each other’s eyes… and something shifted. In the silence of the whole training center, in the vast privacy of the moment, something changed.

“Just once,” Blay said softly. “Do it just once. So I’ll know what it’s like.”

Qhuinn started to shake his head. “No… I don’t think-”

“Yes.”

After a moment, Qhuinn slid both his hands up Blay’s thick neck and captured the male’s sturdy jaw in his palms. “You sure?”

When Blay nodded, Qhuinn tilted his friend’s head back and to the side and held it in place as he slowly closed the distance. Just before their mouths touched, Blay’s eyelashes fluttered down and he trembled and-

Oh, it was sweet. Blay’s lips were incredibly sweet and soft.

The tongue probably wasn’t supposed to be part of it, but there was no helping that. Qhuinn licked inside and then sank deep as his arms slipped around Blay and held him hard. When he finally lifted his head, the look in Blay’s eyes said he would let anything happen between them. Let it all happen.

They could take this spark between them all the way home until they were both naked and Qhuinn was doing what he did best to his buddy.

But things would never be the same after that, and that was what stopped him, in spite of the fact that he suddenly wanted exactly what Blay did. “You’re too important to me,” he said roughly. “You’re too good for the kind of sex I have.”

Blay’s eyes lingered on Qhuinn’s mouth. “At this moment, I would so disagree with that.”

As Qhuinn let go of the guy and stepped back, he realized it was the first and only time he’d ever turned someone down. “No, I’m right. I’m so fucking right about this.”

Blay took a deep breath, then braced his arms against the gurney and seemed to try to collect himself. He laughed a little. “I can’t feel my feet or my hands.”

“I’d offer to rub them, but…”

Blay’s glance under his lashes was damned sexy. “You’d be tempted to rub something else of mine?”

Qhuinn grinned. “Fucker.”

“Fine, fine. Be that way.” Blay reached over for the antiseptic, put some on his chest, then covered the wound with gauze, which he taped in place. “Will you take care of covering up the one in back?”

“Yeah.”

As he hit the raw patch with some gauze, Qhuinn imagined someone touching Blay’s skin… running their hands over him, easing the kind of ache a male got between his thighs.

“One thing, though,” Qhuinn murmured.

“What?”

The voice that came out of his throat was unlike anything he’d ever heard from himself before. “If any guy breaks your heart or treats you like shit, I will bust him apart with my bare hands and leave his broken, bloody body for the sun.”

Blay’s laughter rumbled around the tiled walls. “Of course you will-”

“I’m dead fucking serious.”

Blay’s blue eyes shot over his shoulder.

“If there are any who dare to hurt you,” Qhuinn growled in the Old Language, “I shall see them staked afore me and shall leave their bodies in ruin.”

At his great camp in the Adirondacks, Rehvenge was desperately trying to get warm. Bundled in a thick terry cloth robe, with a mink blanket over his body, he was stretched out on a couch a mere five feet from the flames of a crackling fire.

The room was among his favorites in the huge, barny house, its grumpy Victorian décor of garnet and gold and deep blue often suiting his mood. Funny, he’d always thought a dog would look good by the massive stone fireplace. A retriever of some sort. God, maybe he would get a dog. Bella had always liked dogs. Their mother hadn’t, though, so there had never been one in the family house in Caldwell.

Rehv frowned and thought of his mother, who was staying at another of the family homes about a hundred and fifty miles away. She hadn’t recovered yet from Bella’s abduction. Probably never would. Even all these months later, she didn’t want to leave the country, although given the state of Caldwell, that wasn’t a bad thing.

She was going to die in the house she was in now, he thought. Likely within the next couple years. Old age was upon her, her biological clock starting to race to the finish line, her hair already having gone white.

“Got more wood,” Trez said as he came in with an arm-load of logs. The Moor went over to the fireplace, moved the screen out of the way, and stoked the blaze until it roared even brighter.