Waking Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

And yet, his wound healed itself before her eyes. This was just too strange.
    Instead of calling the local psych ward, she just went with it. What was one more crazy thing in a day of insanity? “I see times haven’t changed much.”
    A smile crossed his face, making his cobalt eyes sparkle. “I’m afraid women are my biggest weakness. Which leads me to my current situation.”
    “Are you saying a woman is responsible for you healing from a near fatal injury?”
    “Not just any woman, a goddess. Morrigan.” He said it with such bitter anger a shiver chased down her spine. “I won’t give you all the gory details, but you get the idea. I seduced a priestess of Anann, goddess of fertility. When she came to me on the eve of a battle telling me she carried my babe and begging me to marry her, I pushed her off. I couldn’t think about marriage when I was going into war.”
    “Would you have married her if there was no battle?” she asked, suspecting the truth.
    “Probably not. I wanted nothing to do with staying by the hearth when there was glory to be had. And Fiona, the priestess, wasn’t right in the head. I think today she would have been labeled schizophrenic, but at the time she was just gods touched.”
    “So you kicked her to the curb and went on to battle and glory?”
    “Not quite. She may have been crazy, but she was able to commune with the gods. Annan was only one aspect of the three goddesses. One of the other aspects was Morrigan, goddess of battle and death.”
    Oh boy, she could see where this was going. Foreboding made her stomach sink.
    “What happened to the woman who carried your child?”
    “After I left, she took her own life, killing herself and the child she’d sacrificed so much to conceive.”
    Ciara let out a gasp of dismay. She couldn’t imagine ever destroying a child, no matter what she thought of its father.
    “I didn’t find that out until after Morrigan visited her curse upon me. There was a battle and my whole clan was wiped out. Everyone was dead. Except me.”
    “Because of Morrigan?”
    “Yes. Her curse is that I may not find the solace of death until I not only fall in love, but the woman has to return that love and we must conceive a child.”
    “To replace the child who was lost.” Her head spun. This made no sense. None whatsoever. Goddesses did not come down to earth and visit curses on men so they lived for hundreds of years.
    Yet here he sat, the Celtic eternity knot stood out clearly on his pec. The three goddesses in one.
    Holy shit.
    “How old are you?”
    “A thousand years old, give or take a decade. We didn’t really have calendars in those days, nor anyone who could read them. And the years tend to blur together after a while.”
    “I’ll bet.” Ciara pushed her plate away. There was no way she could eat anything else with her stomach tied in knots. “So what does this have to do with me? Are you telling me you’re madly in love with me?” She’d meant to sound flippant, but her heart stumbled in her chest at the thought.
    “I haven’t changed so much in a thousand years that I’m ready to go jumping into a declaration of love. But there’s no denying you are a key player in this mad drama.”
    “How do you figure?”
    “We never went to a tattoo parlor. You didn’t have that mark when you were in my bed. So unless you got it done on your way from my hotel to yours, Morrigan has marked you too.”
    Ciara stared at the tattoo with dawning horror. She’d woken up with this mark and had assumed she’d gotten it on the way to his hotel room. With shaking fingers, she ran her hand over it and jumped when Declan let out a groan.
    “What?”
    “Every time you touch that mark, I get hard enough to pound nails.” His eyes were pools of blue flame, scorching her from across the table.
    Ciara thought back to all the times she’d traced the lines and realized it had gotten to be a habit every time she thought of him to touch it. And she’d