throbbed like someone was scooping out her brains …
No, wait, that was a pair of fingers patting her face. Hot breaths, smelling strongly of milk and peppermint, breezed across her cheek and neck, too. All she could think of was being attacked in the past week, and she jerked back. A stabbing pain shot through her temples as she met two pairs of munchkin eyes in cherub faces. Very human eyes, children’s eyes staring back at her.
She let out the breath she’d been holding and felt her heart slow to a normal rhythm. She realized her left side ached while holding herself up on an elbow, so she carefully lowered her head to the pillow, feeling twinges in places she didn’t know existed. She noticed she was in a strange four-poster bed. Yellow paint covered the bedroom walls and matched the bed’s comforter.
Hannah’s gaze shifted back to the children still standing by the bed. The little girl was beautiful, with large exotic dark eyes and hair and burnt-umber skin. She looked to be about two and wore a red smocked dress. A little boy stood next to her with the same dark features. His hair was clipped close to his head and the hair on his widow’s peak poked straight up. He appeared older, maybe four. He chewed nervously on the sleeve of his green polo shirt, while one of his hands stayed in the pocket of his grass-stained jeans.
When he realized Hannah was staring at him, his eyes grew to the size of half-dollars. He turned in a flurry and ran out of the room, yelling, “D-daddy, Daddy, sh-she w-waked u-u …” He paused in his stuttering, gulped, then forced out, “Up!”
Who was daddy? Thoughts of finding out caused Hannah to fidget, a nervous habit she’d never conquered. The more she fidgeted, the more aware she grew of her body aches and the swimming sensation in her head. She balled her hands into fists to still them and stared into the little girl’s eyes.
The girl hadn’t caught the boy’s fear. She continued to stand by the bed, tracing Hannah’s chin with her fingers, gazing into Hannah’s eyes with such spellbound wonder and trust and sheer delight that Hannah’s heart melted. Her normal reaction would have been to flinch and move away—she had always feared the reaction of others. But this innocent child had a sweet magnetism that drew Hannah in. The girl cocked her head and blinked at Hannah from beneath her thick sooty lashes. A fairy twinkle lit her intelligent onyx eyes, a look that no doubt charmed wide smiles from all those she graced with her curiosity.
Hannah felt a smile catching hold of her and she, too, grinned back at the fey child. In fact, Hannah found herself enjoying the feathery light touch as the little imp learned the contours of Hannah’s nose and lips.
“Hello,” Hannah said, touching the child’s hand, feeling the baby-soft skin.
“Ha-woa.” The little charmer continued to stare deeply into Hannah’s eyes, then she grinned, exposing a few white teeth between her plump lips.
Hannah wasn’t certain she understood fairy vernacular, but she took a stab at a translation. “Hello, back at you,” she said.
“You fizzzzzz,” the little girl said. “Fizzzzzzz.” The child stamped her feet with excitement and her eyes widened as she threw her hands up in the air, then grabbed Hannah’s bare forearm. “Ecktrick.” She gazed down at Hannah’s skin again, absorbed in the intrigue of touching it.
“Better than sticking your finger in a light socket, huh?”
The girl pursed her lips as if trying to decipher some cryptic adult code in Hannah’s words.
“Never mind. You’ll learn what to fear soon enough.”
“Mayhala.”
The male voice hardly rose above a whisper, but it held the acute intensity of a reprimand.
Delight melted from the startled child’s face. She pulled away from Hannah and whirled around, looking confused, as if she’d done something wrong but didn’t understand what. So this was Daddy.
Chapter 4
Hannah wanted to reproach him for startling Mayhala, but the expression in his cold narrowed eyes stopped her. He looked like a black bear who’d just been awakened early from hibernation, irritated, threatening, and ready to end his hunger.
He was tall and lean, she noticed, with the same exotic sun-bronzed skin tone as his children. There was a penetrating gleam in his eyes, as if he could see right into a person’s most private places. His harsh expression tugged at the sharp planes of his ruggedly handsome face, softened only by a pair of wide sensual lips. A thick ponytail of jet-black hair fell past his sinewy shoulders and stopped at the middle of his back. If he’d been wearing buckskins, moccasins and a muzzle loader, he would have looked like a character right out of The Last of the Mohicans.
Something about him looked familiar, too. A memory flashed and she was seeing him in the headlights … the one who’d been stabbing that weird creature. It had all seemed so unreal and so far away. But this guy was definitely real. His authority and predatory air filled the room like a thundercloud, and the walls suddenly closed in around her.
To her dismay she realized she wasn’t wearing anything but an oversize T-shirt that barely covered her thighs. His? He’d undressed her. Oh, God! He had to have seen she glowed like white Christmas lights. The thought made blood rush to her cheeks, but she couldn’t feel the sting of it for the wired sensation chasing beneath her skin.
An overwhelming feeling of embarrassment gripped her and she wanted to throw back the covers and run. But all she could do was lie in this bed, avoiding his gaze, her fingers twisting the covers, her feet and toes twitching as she said, “She’s okay. We were just getting acquainted.”
“You have a concussion. She shouldn’t be in here.” He reached down and scooped up Mayhala.
The girl immediately went into a tantrum. “Noooooo! Daddeee. Stay! Feel ecktrick! Ecktrick!”
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