Page 41 of Bones and Ashes

"Yes, Legion⁠—"

I push my forehead against hers. Still inside her. Still softenin' slow. My mouth right on her mouth.

"One of these days⁠—"

I stop. Swallow.

Shit. Just say it, Demon.

"One of these days I'm gonna put a baby in that belly."

She goes still under me. Just for a breath.

Then she grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard.

Kisses me like she's tryin' to tell me somethin' her mouth can't say in words.

Her whole body wraps around me, ankles crossin' at my low back, arms lockin' around my neck, and she don't let go when the kiss breaks.

"That," she whispers against my mouth, "sounds like a dream."

CHAPTER 9

A baby.

My heart rate hasn't even settled yet as I play his words back in my mind.

I haven't thought much about babies. Not until little Marigold showed up. And even then, it was more of an abstract kind of way. A relation, but apart from me.

But when Legion Kane tells me that he wants to put a baby in my belly… well, that's not abstract at all. Not in the slightest.

That's… more like a promise.

God, the babies of Legion Kane would be somethin' spectacular indeed. Eleanor would've shit her pants and lost all her manners if she had been here to witness a grandbaby of Legion's.

Of course, she'd have photographed the hell out of it.

Which invokes feelings of resentment and longing at the same time.

When Legion and I were in the photo bunker lookin' at his book, he said his mother never took any pictures of him. She didn't care about him. And so… my mother stepped in to make sure he was seen.

It's a different way of sittin' with Eleanor Ashby, that's for sure. Because the very idea that a mother would not photograph the hell out of her child—angelic looks notwithstanding—is so foreign to me.

Of course, that's because I grew up knowing nothing else.

My mother wasn't just good, she was an artist. Highly respected in the photography world. Hundreds of spreads in glossy magazines, several dozen gallery exhibitions, seventeen coffee table books.

She was a professor of it at one point. Not for long—maybe a year, maybe two. We have an airstrip on this property. Something else I have not thought about in years. I'm not even sure I could find it, that's how little use it gets these days.

But when Eleanor Ashby was a professor of photography at Yale, she'd fly out every Monday and back every Thursday night. That airstrip got more use in those two years than it has in all the time since.

And now… she's gone.

If there is a baby in our future, she will never meet it.

Legion tugs me close to him. Nuzzling my neck. "What are you thinkin' about?"

I smile and find it's not even forced. "I was picturing that baby of ours. And then I thought of Eleanor. And how she would've died to photograph your child."