Unanswered Prayers-Book 6 Of The Mad Mad World Series

Chapter 2

Being in love does funny things to you. Everything---at least for a time---is sunshine and roses, the one you love is the most wonderful person ever and all is right in the world.

At the moment, I was trying to figure out how to extract myself from the heated argument I was having with my beloved Lilly and lock myself in a road case before I lost my temper with her and started yelling back. At least we were able to confine ourselves to using our "grown-up argument" voices, the ones where you clench your back teeth until they want to crack and hiss politely at one another. I wasn't about to try and talk to her through our link, she probably would have read me my pedigree up one wall and down another and given me a migraine on top of that.

"Richard, you're being unreasonable about this! I told you, once I'm settled in Berlin I'm going to go job hunting! I don't want to spend an entire year unemployed, it'll screw up my employment history to the point that nobody will want to hire me!" Lilly growled, shooting me a glance full of daggers in my direction from her seat on a table in my dressing room. Her bright blue eyes were full of fire, her mane of red hair coming loose from its braid and fairly crackling with anger.

Any other time I'd be half out of my pants and running over to pounce on her for a wild roll in the sheets(or in this case, a wild roll on the couch), but at the moment I was staying on my side of the room and trying to stay as still as possible. I valued my life and didn't want to walk around for the rest of the day with an ice pack in my underwear. Lilly had lost her temper with Till one afternoon and by the time she was done verbally peeling the skin off of him, she nailed him in the balls with a well-placed kick that knocked the wind out of him and put him on the floor. Poor Till had been sore and bruised for several days and avoided her for a week, scared to death that he'd accidentally say or do something and end up a castrati. In fact, we all walked on eggshells around her for a couple weeks after that.

"Sweetheart, I didn't say anything about not going job hunting, I just think you need to take some time to get used to living in a foreign country before you throw yourself into anything," I said as gently as I could. "You said that you've never lived anywhere than in the US and I can tell you from experience that just knowing the language and some of the customs of where you're going to be living isn't enough. You don't have to come out on the tour as our tour doctor. We'd love to have you along just to show you all the places you've wanted to see. Didn't you say that you wanted to see Japan in the spring? And what about going to Australia on that dolphin watching tour that Ollie told us about?" Lilly rolled her eyes and hissed, "I'll have time for that after I've been working a year or so."

I didn't say what I was thinking and I made absolutely sure Lilly couldn't hear it in my head, knowing if she did I'd be digging myself out of the wall. She didn't look strong but she had one hell of a punch to begin with and now that we were Changelings, she could probably punch a raging bull completely out. She'd been working with Ollie and Schneider lately on dealing with her temper; they were teaching her how to handle a quarterstaff and she'd broken more than a few heavy, thick dowels before she'd learned how to pull her blows. Ollie had collected a couple of broken fingers from being in the wrong place at the wrong time while sparring with her and Schneider was still nursing a bruise across his behind from the same mistake. On top of that, she had begun doing T'ai Chi not only as exercise but something else to help her manage her anger. Some mornings I'd wake up early enough to watch her moving gracefully through the forms, filling my eyes with her serene face, the way her muscles moved under her skin and her red hair, tied up in a braid, moving with her, almost as if it was alive and sentient.

The problem with my dear girl was she was, as I'd heard an American from the Southern part of the States say, as 'independent as a duck on ice.' She wouldn't accept a helping hand until she'd admit that she did (and often grudgingly at that), she was uneasy with compliments and loving words, and insisted on holding up her own end of anything. Sex, who picked up the check when we went out to dinner, the whole nine yards. While the latter didn't bother me a bit, the former did. I was the same way but not as obsessive about it as she was. It had taken me years to learn how to react to compliments without worrying that there would be a serious consequence to them and love...well, that's a tale and a half all by itself.