STAR KISSED
By Nalini Singh

The first time Mac Tanner saw Cass Hamilton, he was six years old and she was ten.

“Mama,” he said, “I’m going to marry that girl.”

“Well, my dear,” was his mother’s startled response. “I know Tanner men make up their minds early, but you’re barely in school. It’s a tad soon to be talking about marriage, don’t you think? Especially with...that girl, even if they are our neighbors.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

His mother didn’t answer him that day, but he was a smart boy. He listened and learned. By the time he was eight years old, he’d figured out that Cass Hamilton was one of the mixed breed. Her father had been touched by the Keepers while he’d been up in space. He’d come back a little more than human. And when Cass was born, she proved to have inherited the Keepers’ gift.

Cass Hamilton had skin like gold, eyes as rich as chocolate, and a voice so pure, it made Mac’s chest tight with the best kind of hurt. Cass Hamilton was also a Dreamer. If she focused very hard on a dream, she could make it come true. People didn’t like that. It was a bit too strange. And so, whenever something bad happened in town, the police would come knock on Cass’s grandparents’ door and ask if she’d been Dreaming.

Like when Jim-Bob vanished and folks found out he’d been teasing Cass for being a freak.

Or when Maisie’s long blonde hair turned into stubble overnight, and she screamed that Cass was jealous because Cass only had that soft black fur on her head.

Mac didn’t understand why the police believed Maisie. She was a liar. Anyone could see that Cass didn’t have fur on her head. She just had really soft hair, like on a baby. It was pretty. In the sun, it shone blue. And, Mac thought, even if she had disappeared that stuck-up Maisie’s hair, it was no worse than a toothpaste prank.

As for Jim-Bob, he was discovered five days later, having decided to run away from home. He’d only gotten as far as the next town before realizing that he had no clean clothes, and he missed his computer games.

After Jim-Bob’s return, Mac waited for the police to come say sorry to Cass, but they didn’t. It bothered him. Tanner men knew what was right and what was wrong. And saying sorry to Cass was the right thing to do. Deciding that he might as well make up for the police’s rudeness, he climbed over the fence and up the trellis to Cass’s window. For, unbeknownst to his parents, not only had he not changed his mind about marrying Cass, he’d spoken to her. Not once. Not twice. Every night since the day he’d first been able to get up the trellis. But as he went to knock on her window that night, he saw something that made his hand freeze.

Cass was asleep and she was Dreaming. Something appeared on her bedside table as she slept. It was a card. Chocolates joined the card a few minutes later. It didn’t take long for Mac to put two and two together. His mother had been humming softly all night because his father had gotten her flowers. And his sister had come home squealing because a boy at school had given her a Valentine—a stupid card that played tinny music over and over and over again. It had made Mac so crazy, he’d wanted to jump up and down on it until it stopped. He hadn’t, of course. Ginny was a pretty good sister, and he liked it when she smiled.

But it wasn’t Ginny on his mind on that moonlit night outside Cass’s window. He wondered why Cass had to Dream her presents. She was the prettiest, most wonderful girl in town. Surely boys had given her things? He made a face. Mac didn’t like the idea of other boys giving her presents, but he knew he was only eight. He couldn’t expect Cass to know that she was going to be his wife soon as he finished growing up. As long as those boys didn’t kiss her, he’d decided it would be okay for them to give her presents.

But they hadn’t.

“You’re a sweet boy to think of her,” his mother said when he asked her about it the next day. “And I have to admit, I might not have been as kind to her as I should’ve been at the start, but I’m not liking how that girl’s being picked on. By the police no less.” There was a thread of anger in his mother’s voice that he knew spelled trouble. “I don’t know what her parents were thinking to leave her in this town where she’s one of a kind. Better to have put her in boarding school in some big city. I have a mind to write them and—”

“Mom.”

“Sorry, m’dear. It just makes me so furious. I think the reason Cass didn’t get any Valentines is that people are scared of her. They can’t see beauty in what they fear.”

Mac thought about that. He wasn’t scared of Cass.

That was the first year Mac Tanner gave Cass Hamilton a Valentine’s Day rose. “I picked it from my mother’s garden,” he whispered from where he sat outside her bedroom window. “It’s only a day late.”

Cass smiled so bright and true, he thought he might burn up in the glow of it. “Oh,  Mac, you make me believe in hope again.”

He couldn’t keep his secret in his heart any longer. “I’m gonna marry you, Cass.”

“I know.” Then she leaned out the window and kissed him on the cheek.

He didn’t wash his face for a week.

The next year, she kissed his other cheek. “If only you were older,” she said with a laugh. But he noticed she hadn’t Dreamed herself a Valentine. She’d waited for his rose.

The third year, he asked her to kiss him on both cheeks. Eyes sparkling, she did.

The fourth year, she had something wonderful for him.  It was a stamp with a postmark from the space station. “I thought you’d like this more than a rose. My parents sent me a letter.”

“Cass, this is...” He couldn’t finish his sentence, he was so thrilled. But even in his joy, he heard her pain. “You miss your mom and dad, huh?”

She sat on the windowsill and shrugged. “I don’t really know them. I love my grandma and poppa and I know they love me. My parents—I have a feeling they don’t know quite what to make of me.”

He dared to reach out and take her hand. When she let him, he felt as if his heart would burst. “Next year, I’ll be twelve and then I can tell you I love you, too.”

Stars shone in her eyes as she leaned closer. “Why twelve?”

“Because that’s when I’ll start becoming a man.” He didn’t have time to waste. “And when I’m sixteen, we’ll get married.”

A long silence as she watched him with that Dreamer’s gaze. “You’re already more a man than most in this town, Mac. I think being your wife will be a wonderful thing. I’ll be waiting to hear you love me, and next year, I won’t be kissing you on the cheek.”

But the next year, the year Mac turned twelve, Cass was no longer there to receive his rose and kiss him on the lips at last. The Keepers had come five months previously and taken her. She was too much like them, they said. Earth wasn’t ready for the beauty and wonder of Cass’s Dreams. Mac’s mother picked him up from school that day, even though they only lived a few minutes away. She took him to a field full of wildflowers, and then she told him Cass was gone.

His heart broke, but he didn’t cry. “Then I’ll just have to become an astronaut, Mom. So I can find her again.”

“Oh, Mac.” Tears glittered in his mother’s eyes. “I’ve never said you can’t do anything you put your mind to, but my darling boy, you’re too sick.”

The leukemia had been eating him alive for years, making him race with life. But that day, in that field bursting with life and color, Mac knew Cass had left him one last gift. “I’ll be okay, Mom. I promise.”

His mother didn’t believe him, but two years later, he had no trace of cancer in his system. “I bet Cass had to sleep a long time to do that.” He imagined her in a floating bed out in space, or maybe on the Keepers’ mysterious homeworld, sleeping, Dreaming . To give him a healthy body, Cass had slept two long years.

Time passed. Every Valentine’s Day, Mac would pick a rose and throw the petals to the winds. There were winds in space, he thought. Perhaps the petals would reach Cass.

When he was twenty, his mother sat him down for a talk. “My boy, I know Tanner men make up their minds early and never falter, but she’s gone. She’s a Keeper now. They care for humans but they don’t marry us. They’re too powerful, too extraordinary.”

Mac didn’t mind being ordinary. He never had. He didn’t think Cass had minded that about him either—after all, she’d promised to be his wife. “She was all those things when I fell in love with her.”

“You fell in love with a child, not the truth of what she is. Give real women a chance!”

For his mother, Mac agreed to go on a date or two. The women were quite lovely, and one of them even made him laugh. But come Valentine’s Day, he spent it studying for aeronautics exams. He didn’t forget the rose. He kept it beside him as he studied. And just before midnight, he found a good strong wind and sent the petals Cass’s way.

On the base, they called him Mad Mac, the only man to ever fall in love with a Keeper. But when it came time to pick training crews, they always chose Mac first. He was an engineer a pilot could trust, because Mac crossed every t and dotted every i. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes, not if he was going to reach Cass in time.

Because now, he was racing a different kind of clock.

One day, a long time after he first began, the training mission became a real one. Mac was sent up into the vast night that surrounded the Earth, to the space station where it had all begun. The touch of the Keepers was everywhere—in the clean air, in the trees that grew in zero gravity, in the blue skies that mimicked those of Earth—but there were none of the ancient race to be seen.

“They only drop by every few decades,” he was told. “Probably won’t be coming round again for another three at least.”

Mac felt the blow as if it was a physical hit. Too long, it was too long...because Mac was human, with a human lifespan. For the first time since he was six years old, he considered the possibility that perhaps he wouldn’t marry Cass Hamilton after all. Not in this lifetime.

That night, he dreamed. Cass was sitting on the edge of a white marble balcony, her legs crossed at the ankles, her eyes sparkling bright. She was older, even more beautiful. And her pretty soft hair had grown until it curled under her ears. He’d always known it would—she’d just needed a little more time.

“Well, Mac,” she said.

He knew she was a Keeper but he reached forward to cup her cheek in his hand. “I miss you.” She was in his blood, in his every breath. It didn’t matter that he’d loved her as a child. His love had been true, his devotion endless. Tanner men made up their minds early and never faltered.

Her hand closed over his, and her gaze grew troubled. “I can’t Dream you to me. I’m too young.”

All doubt disappeared. “I’m going to marry you, Cass.”

“I know.” Her smile grew until it eclipsed the sun. “Mac, you’ve got silver in your hair!”

He laughed as she stood and ran her fingers through it. “Finally, I’m older than you. Getting older every day.” While she remained ageless, a Keeper. “Will you still marry me now that I’m so decrepit?”

“I’d marry you if you were the oldest man on Earth.” This time, the kiss was a melding of mouths. She was so soft, so beautifully female under his hands. He’d waited a lifetime to hold her but the dream flickered and whispered and then was gone.

He got up, stared at his scarred engineer’s hands, and knew that one day soon, those hands would be too wrinkled for the agency to send them back up into space. But if he stole a shuttle and headed out into the unknown, Cass might gray herself trying to bring him home to her. Even a Keeper could hurt and graying was the worst kind of pain. He couldn’t bear to think of Cass graying. Not his vibrant, laughing Cass.

Before he left the space station that time, he threw petals into space, blown by the whisper of his kiss. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Cass.”

There were five more missions. And still the Keepers didn’t come. On the fifth, Mac watched the rose petals float out into space, and knew this was his last trip. Even Mad Mac, the perfect engineer, couldn’t go on forever. His hands were getting tired, his eyes less acute. But when he closed those eyes and dreamed, he saw in perfect clarity.

Cass, so beautiful, still a woman of barely twenty. She could only Dream to him when he was in space. Surrounded by the endless starlight of the cosmos, the kiss became a touch, the touch so much more. She was getting stronger, learning to hold on longer to the dreams. But she was only a baby Keeper. Thousands of years would have to pass before she gained the strength to Dream him home.

Thousands of years after his mortal body turned to dust.

For the last time, he considered stealing a ship and heading out into space. But no, he couldn’t do that to Cass. If she grayed, her pain would last eons. Better that he turn to dust and become a memory. As she grew ever more beautiful, his Keeper would remember Mac Tanner, the human who had loved her a long time ago on a blue-green world called Earth. “Ah, but who will give you roses, my darling?” It was a bittersweet whisper, borne on the icy winds of space to a world so far from Earth, it was beyond the edges of the universe.

“Sometimes,” a stranger’s voice said, “even a Keeper must surrender to human stubbornness.”

Mac turned, looked into ageless eyes set in a face with skin the color of beaten gold. “About time you got here.” Exhilaration raced through his bloodstream like liquid fire.

The Keeper laughed. “Do you know, when Cass was determined to sleep long enough to heal your childish body, we thought it a waste. She was a fledgling Keeper, born for greater things. You were a mortal, would forget her in a heartbeat.” Those dark, dark eyes grew sun-bright. “But you never forgot. So, mortal, are you ready to be touched by a Keeper? You’ll be immortal, but you will be no Dreamer.”

“The only Dream I ever wanted was Cass.” He held up a hand when the Keeper approached. “Wait. I have to get something.”

The Keeper was curious enough to give him the time. When he saw what it was, he laughed. “You will be a strange child.”

Mac couldn’t imagine being a boy once more. “Am I going to be younger than Cass again?” Damn it, he was ready to stroke her with the kiss of a man, not a boy.

“Yes.” The Keeper laughed and touched Mac.

It was an indescribable sensation. Death and rebirth, everything in flux. But when Mac opened his eyes, he found that he was following the Keeper home through the darkness of space. He was only a fledgling himself, so the older one was doing the work, feeding him the strength to continue. All Mac had to do was keep his gift safe.

Who knows how long it took? Keepers live eons, years are their seconds. The length of the journey mattered little—when they reached the Keepers’ homeland of mountain and sunshine, forest and water, Mac asked only one question. “Which way to her?”

She was standing on her white marble balcony when he found her, a beautiful woman with a waist-length mane of curling black hair.

“Hello, Cass.”

Her back stiffened and she turned. There were tears in her eyes, but when her gaze fell to what he held, she smiled. “Your delivery is about six decades late this time.” Taking the rose, she slid the thornless stem behind her ear. “Did you pick it from your mother’s garden?”

“This one’s from my own garden.” From the wild roses he’d planted for her. “I’ve come to collect what’s owed me.” He walked closer, put his finger under her chin and kissed her. Lush velvet and moonlight, eternity and forever, that was Cass. “Damn Keeper told me I’d be younger than you again.” Who knew immortal beings had a sense of humor?

“You are,” she whispered against his lips and reached up to touch his soft, so soft hair, “but you’re also a man. Will you marry me now, Mac?”

“Are you sure we’re not too young?”  Laughter against his mouth, Cass under his hands.

And a whisper against his ear. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mac.”