Page 3 of Jace

The significance of that hadn’t hit her before. She had been too excited to meet her son.

“I thought the baby I was adopting was Imberian,” she said carefully.

“He is,” Jace replied.

“So why does he have your coloration?” she asked.

“I’d be glad to explain, Susannah,” he said. “But we have a journey ahead of us, and it’s getting late. Why don’t I tell you once we get moving?”

For a moment, she was lost in his serious blue gaze. Then she remembered herself.

“You’re not coming with us,” she said, practically stamping her foot. If he wasn’t going to take a hint, then she just had to be direct about it. Apparently, Invicta men were not so different from the ones back home after all.

“Like hell I’m not,” he retorted. “I don’t know if your agency didn’t tell you, or if you just didn’t pay attention, but I am the personal guard of the baby in your arms.”

“You keep saying that,” she said. “But you did what you were supposed to do, You got him to me. You are… dismissed.”

He paused for a moment before he spoke, his hands balling into fists and then relaxing again.

“Getting him to you is just one of the many responsibilities I owe to that child,” Jace bit out. “I will be watching over him until he reaches maturity.”

“Maturity…” Susannah echoed in horror.

“Twenty standard years,” Jace said firmly, as if that was the end of it. “Do you know how to ride a float-ray?”

Twenty standard years.

She stared at him in open shock.

“Do you know how to ride a float-ray?” he asked again, carefully now, as if she might be a little slow on the uptake.

Maybe he was right. She certainly felt that way at the moment.

“I do not know how to ride a float-ray,” she said.

“Then I can instruct you,” he said. “Wait here.”

“Twenty years,” she murmured to herself, watching him go, and enjoying the view.

Gods, but he had a great ass.

What had come over her? She felt like some kind of silly schoolgirl again. But she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him until he finally disappeared into the trees.

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked baby Zeke.

He blinked up at her as if he was trying to work it out.

“I love you, baby,” she told him. “You don’t have to worry about it. I’ll deal with him and with everything else. You just be you.”

Zeke straightened out his limbs and waved them up and down, as if to show her he was serious about following orders.

She smiled down at him and he reached for her face with a chubby hand.

Jace cleared his throat loudly and she looked up.

He was flanked by two floating creatures that looked like a cross between a flattened dolphin and a deflated hot air balloon. Each had an onyx horn at the center of what looked like its forehead. A long translucent tail trailed behind each.

“They do not care for saddles,” he told her.

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