“Be happy to.” Linwe took off with a saucy sway of her hips.

Pia rounded her eyes at Bel, but she couldn’t say anything outright, because she didn’t want to speak out of turn. She settled on saying, “It would be so good for those two to see each other more often.”

A knowing smile deepened in Bel’s ageless green eyes. “I couldn’t agree more. Linwe works too hard.”

“Eva does too.” Pia cuddled Giselle. The baby was much smaller than Niall. Every tiny feature was pure perfection. “Can you stay for a visit? Then they can go on down to the beach if they like.”

“I think that sounds perfect.”

When the other two women arrived, Bel and Pia worked together to send them off. Eva’s normal poise deserted her, and she got a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes. Linwe watched Eva sidelong, a tiny smile playing around the edges of her lips. When they finally disappeared, Pia had to wait until she was sure they were out of earshot.

Then she grinned at Bel. “Oh, I feel good about that.”

Bel laughed. “I do too. It will be interesting to see what they do with themselves.”

“I don’t want to give your baby back.” Reluctantly, Pia handed Giselle back to her eager mother. “If you’d like to go out to the deck, I’ll get us some drinks.”

“I’d love to.”

Pia dug through cabinets for glasses and poured some of the fresh cold tea she found in the icebox. Foraging further, she found light coconut cookies. Since she was the one in the household with a sweet tooth, she knew those would be vegan, and she arranged some on a plate. Then she carried the refreshments out to the deck to visit with one of her favorite people in the world.

When she had first met Beluviel, she had felt an immediate accord with the other woman. Bel had been Lady of the Wood in the Elven demesne just outside Charleston, and she was one of the few people who knew Pia’s Wyr nature. Since then, so much had changed. Bel’s husband had been killed, and she and Graydon—another one of Pia’s favorite people—had fallen in love and mated.

“I can’t tell you how good it is to be here, and to know that you’re here too,” Bel told her.

“I feel the same,” Pia confessed, sharing a smile of conspiratorial delight with the other woman. “Tell me everything that’s been going on. According to the time in New York, you and Graydon left yesterday.”

Since time didn’t flow in Other lands the way that it did on Earth, the inhabitants of each Other land experienced time slippage in some form or another. In Rhyacia, time flowed more quickly—sometimes faster and at other times a little less fast, making it impossible to calculate the exact difference.