Dark Stallion by Raven Willow-Wood Page A

and found myself inside the castle—lying on a bench—with all of those … people staring down at me.
    “I thought at first that it just couldn’t be real—that I’d hit my head or something like that and I was hallucinating. But it was just too horribly real not to be real! And then you two rescued me ….”
    Aydin and Colwin exchanged another look.
    “Ok—kidnapped me, but really I feel much better being with the two of you than I did with those—awful people at the castle, especially after King Bart decided he was going to marry me!” She frowned. “At least I did until Colwin told me what would happen if they caught up with us.”
    She studied their faces a little anxiously. “I’m not a witch, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said uneasily. “I didn’t make it happen. It happened to me.”
    Aydin cleared his throat. “You are saying that you are a human, from Earth.”
    “I know it’s hard to believe …. You said human! You’ve heard of humans from Earth?”
    “Our mother is an other-worlder,” Colwin said after a prolonged moment.
    Emma gaped at him, feeling a dizzying collision of thoughts in her head. “Your mother?”
    Emma discovered that that was too much to absorb.
    A human woman had given birth to a centaur?
    She could get pregnant?
    Why was the woman still here unless it was impossible to go back?
    Or had she stayed because she’d gotten pregnant?
    She narrowed her eyes at Colwin. “You ass!” she growled angrily. “You knew damned well I could get pregnant if your mother’s human!”
    He reddened faintly, but she couldn’t tell whether it was with discomfort or anger at being called an ass. “I did not say I could not get you pregnant,” he pointed out stiffly.
    “You implied it, damn it! You deliberately misled me!”
    “You fucked her?” Aydin growled.
    “ You fucked her,” Colwin shot back at him.
    “I did not try to get her pregnant!” Aydin snapped. “I pulled out before I spilled my seed!”
    Colwin narrowed his eyes at his brother. “If you did, then it was because you were in centaur form and knew what it would mean to get her pregnant in that form! Do not tell me you would have pulled out otherwise, for I will not believe it!”
    Aydin’s face darkened.
    Emma surged to her feet. “Wait a minute! Time out! This is my damned argument! You two can argue later! And, I might add, I do not appreciate you using the word fuck in conjunction with me! Even if that was what it was you could at least make a damned pretense that it was a little more than that!”
    Both men stared up at her in baffled anger for several moments.
    A slow smile curled Colwin’s lips. “I was mating with you.”
    Emma studied him a little suspiciously. “Well, I guess that’s better.”
    “It is better?” Aydin demanded. “Only a moment ago you called him an ass for trying to get you pregnant!”
    “Oh—is that what he meant?” Emma asked in dawning anger.
    Both men rolled their eyes. “What did you think I meant?” Colwin said irritably. “Mates reproduce, gods damn it!”
    “Ok, so I get it, but you should’ve asked first, damn it!”
    Colwin looked uncomfortable. “That is not the way we do it,” he muttered.
    “I don’t care how you do it! Where I come from you’re supposed to ask a woman to marry you and then have babies with her! Not knock her up and then call it a mating! You mean to tell me you were trying to get me pregnant?”
    “We do not marry! We mate!”
    Emma blinked at him. “For how long?”
    “Forever.”
    “Oh … oh! I can’t do that. I’m going home.”
    Colwin’s lips tightened into a thin line of anger. “What did you think we were doing if it was not mating and you do not care to call it fucking?”
    Emma blushed. “Having fun?”
    She could tell he didn’t know how to respond to that. He looked pleased—fleetingly—and then angry all over again. Instead of responding, he hunched his shoulder at her and focused on turning the