The Gift She Gives Ch. 20

A few hours later, he stood on the front steps of the spa as the first of many black sedans pulled to a stop in front of the mansion he had built to house his menagerie of nonhumans. When the back door opened and he saw the succubus step out of the vehicle, Mr. Hughes smiled and stepped forward, his hand outstretched to take the lady's as he turned partially towards his fiancé, who had been standing beside him.

"Vesper, this is Brigitte Bricker, I've spoken to you about her in the past." Mr. Hughes kissed the woman's hand and put his arm around Vesper's waist as she walked over to them.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bricker. I've heard only good things, I assure you." Vesper smiled softly and let the bright eyed woman, who was not overly pretty, wrap her small hand in her slightly larger, very warm one. Mr. Hughes raised a brow at the look of curiosity that Brigitte fixed him with for a slight moment when Vesper wasn't watching.

"You are enchanting, Vesper, please, call me Brigitte."

"You've kept old Arc here on his toes, Miss Lynch, it's easy to see why he's so enamored with you." A deeper, male voice sounded from behind the succubus and Mr. Hughes looked around the woman to see a very handsome, tall, dark haired man had exited the car and was now standing slightly behind the woman whom he'd just introduced to Vesper.

"Vesper, you remember my husband, Ned, right? He spoke of his visit here not long ago. He and Arc have known each other for a long time." Brigitte smiled at the ayperi as Mr. Hughes shook Ned's hand.

"It's nice to see you again." Vesper let the incubus kiss her hand and Mr. Hughes squeezed her waist just a little as they turned towards the mansion.

"I've put you in your usual room, Ned, Brigitte, I am sure everything is in order." Mr. Hughes said as he walked slightly behind the couple with Vesper on his arm.

"I'm sure it's just fine. I'll help Brigitte get settled and then we can have a drink. I'd love to hear more about how everything...came together for the two of you."

"Oh, that's a story that I'd like to hear as well." Brigitte said curiously.

"It wasn't a romance in the beginning." Vesper sighed as she looked sideways at Mr. Hughes, a soft smile playing at her lips as he bent slightly to kiss her forehead.

"It's finishing as one." He smiled back down at her.

A short time later, Vesper sat in the living room of her home with Natasha next to her and Anya sitting on the overstuffed chair at their side. Brigitte and Ned sat to their other side, and Samir, Mr. Hughes, and Shi were standing near the fireplace. Anya's wolves were outside with their many children who had begged to play in the snow that blanketed the ground. She'd just finished telling the Brickers how she and Mr. Hughes had met when Anya and her family had arrived. The light siren's reception had been warm, and she'd been greeted by her various lovers in the spa with open arms, despite the warming growls that had come from the wolves who'd preferred those welcomes to be a little more chaste. Vesper had noticed that when the wolves had greeted her, Mr. Hughes has seemed to be a little tense himself, especially when Grigory had moved forward to give her a gentle, but full hug.

He hadn't said anything, but Vesper had been able to tell by the look in his eyes that he had plenty that he would like to know. Biting her lip, she looked up at the man who was soon to be her husband and took in the view he presented her with. He still hid his wings for the most part, though he was more likely to be shirtless with wings comfortable spread when they were alone together in the house. Right now, they were hidden, though, and she wondered if that had to do with Anya. She'd laughed at his true form once. Looking over at the light siren, she saw Anya talking to Shi about the little girl that she'd had with her elf husband. They hadn't seen each other in a long time, it seemed, and were catching up.

'Grigory is walking in the woods by himself. You should excuse yourself and go walk with him.' Natasha's voice in her head made Vesper frown and look over at her friend.

'I don't want to talk with Grigory, the fact that he is here is more than enough for Arc to deal with right now,' Vesper bit her lower lip as she looked slowly up at her fiancé. She most assuredly did not want to give her lover any reason whatsoever to doubt where her heart lie.

'You must speak with Grigory. He is going to interrupt your wedding if he feels like you are being coerced. You must.' Natasha persisted and Vesper sighed.

'Mr. Hughes needs to speak with Anya. The two of them are just a hot mess right now inside and are having a hard time not showing it. If you want this all to be civil, it would be better to clear some of the air before Domino gets here and stirs things back up again.' Vesper looked at Natasha and frowned, she did not want things to go badly for her wedding, this was supposed to be a happy time for her.

'Can you tell Mr. Hughes to go and speak with her, and tell him that I am going to speak with Grigory and that it will all be okay?' She watched as Natasha nodded very briefly and turned her eyes towards the angel, who immediately lifted his gaze from Samir to the half-elf. Vesper waited for him to shift his gray eyes to her, which he did, the depths of them slowly darkening and lightening by degrees as he listened to whatever Natasha was telling him. Eventually, he nodded a little and put the empty snifter he'd been holding on top of the mantle beside him.

"Anya, if it's all right with you, I thought we might take a walk towards the spa. I wanted your opinion on something and I don't think there will be another time during your visit to get it." His husky voice broke through the conversation happening around them and Vesper watched as Anya widened her eyes and looked up at the angel. They'd only spoken a few words since she'd arrived. Vesper should have realized that the light siren's history with her fiancé would necessitate a sort of coming together like this.

"Of course. If you'll excuse us?" Anya sounded nervous, but she shifted to get to her feet as her eyes moved to Vesper.

Vesper nodded and stood up, "Of course. You haven't seen each other in quite some time. I don't mind."

Vesper looked at Mr. Hughes once more before he left, knowing that while he had acquiesced to doing this, he was still concerned about how things would go between her and the werewolf.

After the two disappeared outside, Natasha got to her feet, as well. "I have quite a list of things to do in the kitchen tonight, if anyone would be willing to help me."

"Sure." Samir nodded, walking towards her with Shi on his heels.

"I am passable with a knife." Brigitte smiled and stood up, pulling her husband to his feet as they, too followed Natasha through to the kitchen.

Vesper moved over to the front door and found her coat. Pulling it on, she quietly opened the heavy wooden door and stepped outside. When she'd closed the door behind her, Vesper turned towards the walkway and instantly jerked back at seeing the large looming male form in front of her. She hadn't realized that Natasha would actually summon Grigory to her, yet here he was, his face full of expectation as he stared down at her face.

"You won't be too cold if we walk?"

Vesper shook her head, with the heat radiating off of the nonhuman in front of her, she was actually more scared that she would be burned.

~*~*~*~

"I didn't know if you would talk to me." Mr. Hughes said quietly when they were at the tree line.

"I wasn't too sure if you actually wanted me here, or if it was Vesper that had insisted that I come." Anya looked at him wearily.

"Vesper insisted." He said honestly, watching her nod, her mouth set in a little frown.

"Well."

"I think you being here was the right call. There are things that the two of us should speak about, things that need to be laid to rest."

"You mean how you made me fall in love with you and then dropped me like a sack of potatoes? Or do you mean how one of my mates is in love with your fiancé?" Anya's bitterness was clear, and he knew he deserved it, yet it stung a little. This woman had affected him in ways that she was completely unaware of even now.

"You are mistaken if you think that my heart was unaffected when I forced you to leave Vorhees. This was not the place for you. You are a light siren and you would never have been safe at a location so filled with nonhumans."

"You didn't know that was what I was when I left."

"I knew you were causing nothing but trouble here."

"I'm not some unruly teenager. I didn't mean to cause any problems." Anya sighed heavily and stepped a little closer to him to move around a tree stump.

"I know. But you did." He winked at her, which caught her off guard and she bit her lip again like she'd always had a tendency of doing when she was frustrated.

"I hate how you made me feel when I left, and I hate how you interfered in my life when I moved home, with Marc. That was unfair and unkind. I don't know if I would have ever gotten over you if I hadn't found Grigory and the pack." Anya looked away from him, she was filled with emotions as she thought about what her life had been like after she'd returned home, Marc, the dragons, locating Grigory and seeing him again for the first time in Minnesota. She could feel Sergei in her thoughts, knew he was trying to soothe her through their bond.

"I shouldn't have interfered."

"No, you shouldn't have. You'd made it abundantly clear that you didn't want me. You should have left me alone." Anya's voice had grown raspy and he could see that she was crying.

"It was never that I didn't want you. It was that I couldn't have you. You are a light siren, and you're a terrible sub. You weren't what I needed." He knew what he said came out harsh, especially by the way she tensed and rubbed her eyes with her hands.

"God, you are such an asshole, Mr. Hughes." She moaned as she let Sergei reassure her that this would be okay.

"I'm not saying any of this right," Mr. Hughes sighed and looked at the clearing to the lawn ahead of them, "Perhaps it would be better if you listed all of the things that you are angry with me about and then we can address them one by one."

"That could take a lifetime." Anya snorted a little and he looked over at her and frowned, he needed this anger between himself and the light siren to end. Today. He wanted to spend his life with Vesper without worrying about Anya, or her bloody wolf pack.

"Anya, I am serious. I see things much differently than you, I am old, I don't get as affected when I don't get my way." He sighed, leading her slowly to the patio that they were walking towards.

"Well, that certainly makes me feel like a petulant child." Anya huffed a little under her breath. Looking at her, he saw her shake her head a little and frown and figured that Sergei was inserting himself into their conversation.

"Anya, and I mean no offense by this, you are very young in this world. I'm saying that I see things differently, I did not say that I see them perfectly." He waved her to walk onto the patio first and she did so, moving towards the back door that was already being opened for them.

"So you're willing to admit that you were wrong?" She asked quietly as she passed into the dining room.

"Wrong in letting you leave?" He asked, guiding her through the dining room towards his office, their conversation needed to be private, well, as private as it could be with a jumpy werewolf in her ear.

"Sure."

"Have a seat, Anya." He waved to one of the chairs in the office and walked around to the one behind the desk after shutting the door behind them.

"So you would like a list?" Anya let out a slow breath and let her green eyes settle on his stubble covered jaw and those full, wide lips of his that were constantly set in a position of disapproval.

"A list." He nodded.

"You drugged me without my knowledge to abort Sergei's pups." It wasn't the first item that he expected to be on the list, but Mr. Hughes nodded anyway and licked his lower lip before answering.

"That wasn't personal. Sergei knew that you would be given shakes that would keep you from getting pregnant. We have to protect the nonhumans that live here as well as the humans. It was not my intention, nor Ned's, for you to come here and become pregnant with a nonhuman child and then leave. I suppose I should speak to the women about that, but honestly, Anya, it has never come up in the past with other guests. The women come here to dominate or be dominated, they don't come here to find a family. You are the first who did that. I am sorry if that caused you pain."

Anya was frowning at him, but he could tell by her eyes that his explanation was calming her down, and hopefully her beast of a husband was reminding her of the same in her head.

"You said I would always be able to say no, and then I was repeatedly put in positions where I didn't really have a choice but to let the men have their way with me."

He closed his eyes, she was correct about this. He had told her that she would always be able to say no. He had lied to her about a very basic right to her own body. But he hadn't done it intentionally.

"That was not the way it should have happened, nor would it have had you been anything but what you are. You make nonhumans...passionate." He explained, "If you had paid to come here, I would have refunded you. If you had allowed me to, I would have done what the dragons did, buy you a home, help you start over. But when you left you wanted nothing to do with me. The...way...in which you had sex here at the spa never went as it was planned. Your influence over both light and dark nonhumans...it made things difficult. I am sorry that I didn't realize what you were sooner and get you out of here."

"I shouldn't really complain about that. Getting bonded to Sergei even for that short amount of time let me know what I truly wanted. But the gargoyles-" He watched as she closed her eyes and shivered for a moment, "and then Alexandru almost killed me."

"And at the same time, he was ensuring that you would live by communicating with me about your needs. If you need an apology from the vampire, I doubt that he is going to give one. He is not going to see this any way but his own." Mr. Hughes stood up and went to the mini fridge in the corner of his room and got out two water bottles and then handed her one before sitting back down.

"I doubt he's ever apologized to anyone in his life." Anya smirked as she opened the bottle.

"I don't know, I've seen him sorry a time or two." Mr. Hughes thought back to when Alexandru was healing at the spa from his incarceration in Belarus, and how the vampire had been beside himself that Domino had become a vampire.

"I don't need apologies from the staff here, I understand how I make them...behave. The ones that I would want a word with...well...they're no longer here." Vesper shivered a little again as she thought of the creatures that had encased her in rock after a very violent fuck.

"Back to the list?"

Anya nodded, thinking a moment before she looked at him again. "You humiliated me in front of my pack."

Now it was Mr. Hughes' turn to smile, "They were not your pack at the time, despite the fact that Sergei had claimed you, he wasn't allowed to do that under my employ."

"You know damn well that claiming a mate to a werewolf has nothing to do with a job."

"I do. But he still wasn't allowed to claim you."

"Fine, Sergei..." Anya muttered aloud and bit her lip again as she looked over at him.

"I loved you." She said simply.

That made Mr. Hughes' gut tighten. It had been her reaction to him that had frustrated the entire situation the most. He had not been ready for a relationship, he had not wanted one. It was as if internally he knew that she was the one woman he could never truly have, and he had been right. He could have never gotten over what she was. He could never have been with a light siren, not when he had been involved with wiping out her entire species. He had had no rights to her at all.

"I'm sorry."

"That isn't enough. I loved you, I REALLY loved you. I would have stayed here with you, regardless of Sergei and Yakov and Yegor and Grigory. I LOVED you." Anya was crying now, and he could tell he was getting to the real reason behind her anger, as he knew he would.

"We could never have been together, Anya. Not in the way you are with your wolves. Not in the way I am with Vesper." He shook his head a little lazily as he looked down at the blotter on his desk, one corner of the plastic was torn to shreds by one of Vesper's cats, probably the orange one, he frowned at it.

"Not now. But back then..." Anya started but he shook his head more firmly.

"Never. We could never have been together. I don't know how much Zheng told you about Vesper, but she is an ayperi. And not just an ayperi, my ayperi. Even if I had asked you to stay, the moment that Vesper came into my life, I would have left you. I would have left you despite how much you loved me, or I loved you at the time, and I would have been drawn to her." He explained slowly, his deep voice reverberating around the room as she listened with her green eyes wide with hurt.

"Like a moth to a flame?"

"Exactly that. You probably look at Vesper and think that I feel that she belongs to me, and it's actually quite the opposite. I am bound to her, completely." Mr. Hughes said more gently, he didn't want her hurt more.

"So you're going to use her as an excuse as to why you made me leave? You didn't even know her then." Anya frowned.

"You're right, that's not fair. I owe you an explanation."

"You certainly do."

"I didn't know you were a light siren when you left Vorhees, Anya. If I had known what you were, I would have forced you to leave so much sooner in your stay. You caused a great deal of trouble here. But I knew that you were nonhuman in some way, and I knew that whatever it was would affect me, and the rest of those here at the spa for as long as you remained. It's cruel, but it's simple. It was more important for me to keep the spa the way it was than to allow you to stay."

"A sex spa was more important to you."

"This is more than a sex spa, Anya, it is a safe place for nonhumans who have nowhere else to go. Your presence here threatened that."

"But YOU left ME." Anya put her hands on the front of the desk, her eyes angry with him as she glared in his direction.

"I had to, Anya. You were making me-, you were making me question everything, and I couldn't handle it." He barked out at her and stood up, turned to stare at the back wall of his room for a moment as he worked to control his breathing.

"You cared about me and that scared you?" She gasped from behind him and he turned to look at her, his eyes dark with anger.

"The issue was never whether or not I loved you, Anya. The issue was whether or not I wanted you." He growled, stepping closer to the desk, causing her to sit a little upright in her chair.

"Nope, no, Sergei stay there." Anya sighed out in a breath as she apparently tried to convince her lover to leave them alone.

"Oh let him come in, I'm so tired of your goddamned werewolf pack, if they want to fight they can bloody well have at it." Mr. Hughes growled, his voice booming to ensure that he was well heard by the wolves.

"Mr. Hughes, sit down. Sergei, don't, DO NOT. Listen to Yakov. We came here for Vesper, to support her. Fighting with her fiancé is not going to make any of this better." Anya had her eyes closed as she concentrated on speaking with her pack.

"It's hard to believe you were pregnant not all that long ago." Mr. Hughes changed the subject and she looked up at him.

"Vesper told you I had a second litter?"