Chapter Nineteen
Connor stood outside the bower uncertainly for some moments, feeling his rage evaporate.
Annabelle remembered what had been done to her, he realized, feeling anxiety supplant the anger that had driven him to find out where Ryne had gotten off to with Belle.
He was insane about Belle, he thought.
It was all he could do to behave himself like a rational, thinking, human being at any time he felt threatened with the possibility of losing her.
Which was a self-fulfilling prophesy, he realized, disgusted.
Could be if he didn’t get a grip.
She had experienced violence that nearly destroyed her when she’d still been a child. He knew that.
It had broken something that had never mended.
Or he had broken it because he’d lost his mind with the need for revenge on the bastards that had hurt her. Instead of being there for her--with her--to soothe her, he’d been sitting in jail like a caged beast.
Heading back to his quarters, he opened his computer and searched records until he found what he was looking for.
The AI had never changed her memories. It hadn’t tampered with her mind at all in any attempt to cover the worst of it.
It had determined that doing so could damage or reduce her IQ and that was an undesirable risk when it would be healthier, in any case, to deal with her emotional issues stemming from the attack.
Annabelle had researched everything, knew everything.
He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him that she would. She had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. She would certainly have wanted to find out about any blind-spots that had occurred stemming from the attack.
She already knew he’d gone to jail for assaulting the guys that had assaulted her because she’d checked on him when she was able to. But she had believed her parents had told the truth when he didn’t come back to her.
And that was his fault--theirs, too, but just as much his own.
It he’d gone to her then she would’ve welcomed him just like she did after that psycho, Marcy, attacked her.
Not that he didn’t still feel like kicking that bastard, Ryne’s, ass and, to a slightly lesser degree, Torr’s, but she loved him, too.
He didn’t actually like being ‘too’, but it beat the shit out of not and he realized she’d proven faithful. She hadn’t wavered in her love. She’d just tried to shield herself from pain because he was too … wounded and too arrogant to want to try to patch things up.
He was going to have a really hard time sharing, but the together forever he’d envisioned when he was a child himself just wasn’t going to happen the way he’d thought it would then.
What they had to do, now, was figure out how to make things work.
* * * *
They built a cave--a dome home half buried below ground level and ‘hidden’ beneath a living roof-top and outer walls.
In a world filled with sentient beings that could fly, the tree house just didn’t work--especially not for land dwellers like Connor and Belle--and potential off-spring.
And Annabelle was absolutely pregnant.
The palisade wall had also proven virtually useless for anything but keeping flightless wild beasts out.
Belle designed and mostly built a ‘net’-a small version that covered their compact homestead and kept everything out that didn’t belong--and everything protected that did belong. The colony engineers expanded her design to protect the main village.
Annabelle presented Connor with a whopping baby boy as her first born and then Ryne with a baby girl and Torr with his own boy. And then all of the ‘fathers’ fought over the only girl.
It wasn’t all sunshine and buttercups, but Belle managed to be very happy.
The colonists still hated her--especially the women. But she had Connor and the two of them had almost literally been made for one another.
And she had Ryne and Torr and her babies.
And she was completely content with the company she had. She didn’t need the colonists to justify her existence.
The End.