Goddess (Starcrossed)

stunned.
    “Did I hurt you?” he asked her urgently.
    It amazed Helen that a brutal warrior like Aeneas, who had spent the last ten years of his life shedding rivers of Greek blood, could have such tender emotions. He was more concerned for Cassandra’s well-being than he was for the fact that he had just committed a crime that was punishable by death.
    The Oracle was sacrosanct. Helen couldn’t believe that the Fates had allowed this union at all. From what she understood, fate itself stepped in and kept Oracles from finding intimacy with men. Oracles could try, but the man they wanted would inevitably meet a fatal accident, get shipped off to a faraway land and never return, or there’d be some other devastating misfortune before that love could be consummated. For whatever reason, that obviously was not the case here. The Fates either wouldn’t—or couldn’t—interfere with Aeneas.
    Cassandra smiled and reached up to touch her lover’s pretty mouth with her fingertips. “I hear that’s to be expected the first time. It was worth it a thousand times over,” she said quietly.
    He took her hand in his and turned it so he could kiss the center of her palm. “I’m sorry, anyway,” he whispered, placing her tiny hand over the thick muscles that hid his sensitive heart.
    Cassandra gazed at him hazily, her eyes swimming. Aeneas scooped her up, pulled her onto his lap, and kissed her. Cassandra swooned for a moment in his arms, but then seemed to steel herself. She pulled away from his kiss and shook her head.
    “You must go,” she slurred, drunk on him. “Now, before anyone discovers us.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Aeneas responded with a low laugh. “I won’t dishonor you by running off to save my own skin.”
    Aeneas shifted so that Cassandra could sit comfortably astride him and still see every change of his face as he pledged himself to her.
    “I am free to remarry,” he said, smiling softly. “My wife died in childbirth years ago, and my mourning is long over. Your brother may want my life for what I’ve done to you, but I have every right to ask for your hand before it comes to that.”
    Cassandra edged away from Aeneas, pushing him back so both of them could see more clearly.
    “I am not simply my brother’s sister, and this is not a silly tryst that can be excused with a hasty marriage,” Cassandra said, like he was missing the point entirely. “I am Cassandra of Troy and the vessel of the Fates. You have defiled that vessel, Aeneas. The punishment for you is certain.” Cassandra spoke to him harshly, trying to make him understand the stakes. “You must run. Tonight. Now. Or you will die.”
    “I won’t leave you, Cassandra. I’ll take my chances, throw myself on Paris’ mercy. I’ll beg him to allow you to be my wife if I must. But I won’t run.” A pained look crossed his face as a troubling thought occurred to him. “Don’t you want to be my wife? I thought . . . since you gave yourself to me . . . that you loved me.”
    Cassandra dropped her head into her hands. Aeneas tried to soothe her. He caressed her, held her, and urged her to look up at him. When she finally met his gaze again, her piercing blue eyes sank deep into his bright green ones, and she spoke with all the authority of Fate itself.
    “I couldn’t love you more if you came to me holding the sun in your right hand and all the stars in the sky in your left,” she told him, her voice as final as a funeral dirge. “I could live a hundred lifetimes and never wish for a more perfect man than you. I have loved you since the second I saw you, and unfortunately for me, I know for a fact that I will never love anyone or anything as much as I love you.”
    Helen’s heart jumped into her throat. She ducked behind the column that hid her and stuffed a hand over her mouth to keep her heart, and the choked sound that followed it, from leaping out. Cassandra knew Troy was going to fall that very night. She had seduced Aeneas on purpose in order to force him to run away. It was a desperate attempt to save his life.
    Cassandra had risked angering the Fates to save the man she loved, but instead, her plan had turned back around and devoured itself like a snake eating its own tail. By loving Aeneas, Cassandra hadn’t made him want to flee Troy as she had planned, but rather, she had given him an unshakable desire to stay. For all her foresight, the one thing Cassandra hadn’t accounted for was that Aeneas