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“You’d have another woman carry . . .” I stopped.
Hischild?Ourchild? What was the term?
“Not quite.” He took my hand. “We have a choice you are not considering.”
I paused. I thought Ihadconsidered everything. Elineededto have a child. That child had to be carried by his wife, or his line of the fae would wither. He—literally—carried his ancestral memory in his blood. A child of the blood was required to pass on the living memory of his family.
I could not imagine passing on the aberration of my genetic soup.
“Your child has to be carried by your wife,” I pointed out. For infertile, gay, or lesbian couples, there were Temple Partners to enable the exceptional cases to pass on their genes.
“You would be my wife,” he said still carefully. “So . . . the child would be my genetic child, and the ovum would be from a fae surrogate. All you would need to do wascarrythe child and deliver him or her.”
I nodded. It was a solution—one that kept his genes forward and mine ended. I’d had no idea that was possible. Unfortunately, it required my body to also carry life.
“I could agree to that,” I said quietly. “If my body . . . if I . . .”
He waited.
“I’m not whollyliving,Eli.” I swallowed the embarrassment of the topic. “I don’t know if this body . . . if I could carry a live baby.”
“I know that, Geneviève.” He was out of the car and at my door in the next moments. He opened the door and pulled me to my feet. “Will you make another faery bargain with me, Genevieve Crowe?”
I couldn’t help the shiver his words brought. On one hand those bargains were how I ended up engaged, but on the other, Ilovedhim. I held his gaze. “What terms?”
“Be my brideifI can guarantee an answer that gives me an heir but that you do not have to pass on your condition,” Eli asked.
“If I agree to that, how long until we . . .?”
“Marry?”
“No,” I said. “Have to have a child.”
“Within the next century or when I ascend the throne, whichever comes first,” he offered.
“Two centuries,” I countered.
“Accepted.” Eli knelt in front of me. “Will you be my wife, Geneviève? Not just an engagement, but wife in truth.”
I stared at him, trying to stop the swell of emotions that threatened to overpower me. No person had ever understood me as he did. No person had ever accepted me so fully. From making me feel vulnerable to saving my life to accepting my friends and dangerous avocation, Eli had trampled every barrier I’d built. He was everything I could dream of.
“The reason we are so compelled to”—he grinned—“‘boink’as you put it is because the bond we have is embraced and accepted by the magic of my people. We are, as you already must know, compatible ineveryway.”
“Damn it.” I heard the emphasis on the wordevery. I heard it and the way his voice darkened with magic that called to mine. “Every way?”
He laughed and took my hand. “Yes. Every way, every position, every—”
“Duck dongles,” I muttered.
“Emphatic and thorough yes,” he teased. Then he paused, grew serious and said, “I fight at your side as if we are one. You understand me as no one ever has. My heart and yours are as two pieces that had been torn apart and found their way back together. It is not only my loins that—”
“Yes. Damn it.Yes.I want to marry you.” I felt like something crashed over me. “I want you, and only you, for eternity.”
“Good.”
As he came to his feet, my hands in his, I braced myself for the panic, the worry, the sheer terror that the hint of commitments evoked. There was none. I opened my eyes. “You deserve better, but if you’re fool enough to love me—”
“Geneviève.”
