Author's Notes: In my story "Choices After Evil," Duncan returned from Europe in the aftermath of his Dark Quickening and found Richie involved again with Felicia Martins. Felicia claimed to have turned her life around and, through her actions, persuaded Duncan of her sincerity and love for Richie. The story of Richie and Felicia's tragic romance is continued in my story "Lay Down Your Sword." This is just a little interlude, and it exists obviously in HL world where "Archangel" never took place.

Thank you to Cindy Hudson, Angela Gabriel and Sue Factor, who helped immeasurably! Any remaining mistakes are entirely mine. Thank you also to the helpful ladies on the HWRC list, whose feedback also made this story better and gave me a boost when I needed it!

On Both Knees

Willemstad, Curacao
February 1999

Richie is quiet but awake beside me, his gaze focused on the ceiling that is barely visible in the darkness of our room. Moonlight through the windows sends a faint swath of silver over his firm chest. He has a lot of hair on that chest, short wiry curls that I like to part and twirl between my fingers. Any woman would play with those ringlets for hours. Botticelli would have painted them on canvas; Michelangelo would have teased their delicate, fragile curves from marble but situated them a lot lower. I slide my hand across the few inches between us, my intentions anything but honorable, and he warns with a smile, "Careful, Felicia. I'm ticklish."

"I know," I tell him. Rising out of those beautiful curls are two little hard points of flesh. I rub them gently and his breathing shifts, quickens. His hips rise fractionally. A couple crosses the street below, their low voices ringing off the narrow streets, their footsteps slow and dawdling. While they pass under our window I keep still, and Richie keeps still, and the sounds of music and revelry from Willemstad's main streets carry in the warm tropical air. We did our share of drinking and partying earlier tonight, after the parade. But alcohol metabolizes quickly in Immortals, and now we're both mostly sober. When the interlopers are gone, I look at the clock. It's three o'clock in the morning.

I lean over with my mouth open, ready to do more to that magnificent chest, but Richie thwarts my foreplay by flopping over on his side. He meets me halfway with a kiss that is sweet and gentle, and nothing like the bruising, exhilarating, wildly passionate lovemaking of just a half hour ago.

"I've been thinking," he says.

Not my three favorite words in any language. They sound like the prelude to a break-up or some other news I don't want to hear. I am a three-hundred-forty-nine-year-old woman, and I know what it's like to be dumped. In the past I might have killed a lover who spurned me, but that's the old Felicia Martins. The new and improved one, the one lying in this bed, might *think* about bloody vengeance, but she wouldn't take it. Probably.

Still, something cold and dry flutters in my stomach as I ask, "Thinking about what?"

"Stuff," he says. His hand rests on my bare hip, his fingers warm and damp. "I'm really glad we came here."

He'd been thinking of a Caribbean cruise on some hideous ocean liner as a spring break getaway. I told him that cruise ships made me long to return to my days as a pirate. He thought Jamaica might be nice. I told him the entire island is overrated. As for Curacao, he'd never even heard of it until I told him where to look on the map. What finally swung the decision in my favor is not the fact that I could fund our trip and he couldn't, but that his spring break coincided with the island's Grand Carnival.

"It looks just like Mardi Gras!" he'd said over the phone, and I could hear him clicking on his computer keyboard as he surfed the Internet for more tourist information.

"Besides," he'd added, "Mac says it's a lot of fun."

Duncan MacLeod, Richie's mentor and closest friend, isn't exactly a member of my fan club. He remembers all too clearly how the old Felicia once seduced Richie, threatened Tessa Noel and then tried to kill the Highlander himself. This new one he trusts within limits, and if he isn't always the first to give me a great big hug whenever I'm in town, at least he hasn't taken my head yet.

With MacLeod's recommendation in his ears, Richie agreed to a holiday in Curacao. I didn't tell him I would have endured a cruise for him - the silly little drinks, corny poolside competitions, relentlessly cheerful staff and all. There's a lot I'd endure for Richie. He makes me feel like I'm twenty years old again - no easy feat - and every time I look into his gorgeous blue eyes, I lose all my fears and regrets for just a few seconds.

"Felicia?"

"Hmm?"

"Are you glad we came?" My wandering thoughts have made doubt creep into his voice.

"Yes," I reply. "I'm very glad."

The last fifty years have changed Curacao, not necessarily for the better, not totally for the worse. The wooden Queen Emma bridge still squeaks when it opens twice an hour. The old Victorian houses in the Scharloo neighborhood, once fallen into disrepair, are slowly being renovated. The governor's mansion still stands in Fort Amsterdam, and the bodies I buried by the south wall are probably still there, too. Manhattan has by and large obliterated the city I grew up in, seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, but in Curacao I often find reminders of my youth.

"When you said this place looked like Holland, I didn't believe you," he admitted when he first saw the narrow buildings of Handelskade. The Handelskade runs along one side of the harbor - tall houses in pastel colors, topped by ornate gables and red tile roofs. The Dutch settled here a long time ago, and the West India Company built most of the town.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Amsterdam?" he asked that day. "Do you know what they put in the brownies there?"

Yes, he has, and yes, I know about his misadventures with hash brownies, but over fried fish and goat stew in the Old Market he told me the tale all over again. Part of Richie's charm is his youthful exuberance over just about everything. He's a natural- born storyteller, prone to just a little exaggeration at time, not above throwing in a few colorful embellishments when the occasion demands it. When he's really enthusiastic his hands wave and his eyes brighten and he becomes even more adorable than he is normally.

Don't I sound like the lovesick old fool?

"Felicia," he says again, this time a little worried, and he cups my face to bring me back from reverie.

"I'm here, Richie. I'm just thinking about how cute you are."

"Cute?" he teases. "Just cute?"

"Yeah. Just cute. What else were you expecting?"

"Devastatingly charming," he says, holding up one finger. Number two and three follow in rapid succession. "A great conversationalist. And let's not forget 'sexual dynamo.'"

"Let's not forget that," I agree, my hand slipping down his flat belly to the warmth between his legs. "Why, Mr. Ryan, I do believe Richie Junior is ready to play again."

Does this really sound as dorky as I think it does? Did I tell you how old I am? Just checking. I don't know why, in love, I revert to the conversational maturity of a twelve-year-old. Or why I have pet names for his most intimate parts. I don't know why he likes it when I leave my shoes on, and I don't know why I like it when he's so sated he falls asleep in my arms. The mysteries of love, I suppose.

He scoots closer, urged no doubt by my firm grip, but then he says, "No, wait, I wanted to tell you about Sister Elizabeth. She was a nun at St. Mary's of the Immaculate Heart."

A nun? He wants to talk about a nun? Okay, so the Grand Carnival is a pre-Lenten festival, and the streets are full of pious debauchery. I've reformed and repented so much I could host my own Sunday morning television show. But is this really the time to stroll down a religious memory lane?

"Sister Elizabeth? Was she your first?" I ask.

"No!" He looks shocked at the idea. "I was nine years old when I met her."

"But I bet you were a great conversationalist," I say, stroking Richie Junior.

"Quit that," he squirms, which leads to a few interesting minutes before he pulls me to that wonderful chest and wraps a strong arm around my shoulders. We compromise. I will listen to his tales of Catholic school woe and he will let me play with his chest hair. Mine is the better half of the bargain.

He tells me that St. Mary's is an orphanage and school on Seacouver's West Side. During the years he lived there, it was a tightly run institution of Catholic charity. Richie was one of forty little boys without parents. Father Brennan ran the place, with Sister Elizabeth as his first lieutenant in the war against unruliness and disorder. It would come as no surprise to those who know Richie to learn he often ran into trouble with Sister Elizabeth.

"She was the tallest nun I'd ever seen," he says. "And wide as a house. But I think she was half-Indian or something, the way she could sneak right up on you without making a sound."

"Why would she want to sneak up on you?"

"Well, you know. When we were doing stuff we weren't supposed to do."

I learn that such "stuff" included hanging out in a secret hideaway Richie and his friends built under the cellar stairs, the illicit magazines they'd found and kept on a field trip to a downtown museum and the time Richie "borrowed" a bottle of sacramental wine to go along with the cookies he'd appropriated from the kitchen. Only in his later, more rebellious years did Richie fall in with car thieves and burglars, but that's another tale.

"She used to spank us with a ruler if we were *really* bad," Richie recalls, leading my admittedly kinky mind to areas best left unmentioned. "But mostly she would sit down and lecture you until you fell out of the chair in exhaustion. You know how when Mac thinks you're doing something wrong he won't shut up about it? Well, she makes Mac look *mute* by comparison.

"Every night before the lights went out in the boy's dormitory, she would make us get down on both knees by our beds and pray to God out loud. Thank him for all we had, ask for his help in being better, all that kind of crap. For five whole minutes! Do you know how long five minutes is to a little kid? I used to get really mad about it, too, because I thought God was mean. Other kids had parents and houses and bicycles, and I had to live in an orphanage. I didn't have anything to thank Him for."

My first teacher, Rebecca Horne, told me all Immortals are foundlings. I guess that's true, although growing up I never heard my parents say anything about my being adopted. My father sexually abused me from the time I turned seven. My mother was incapable of defending herself or her children. Psychologists today would call my family dysfunctional. I would have been better off growing up in an orphanage of the twentieth century, but I don't tell Richie that.

"I know, I know," he says, as if reading my mind. "Looking back, it's not so bad. But I was just a kid then. So when I turned eleven I put my foot down. No more prayers. I told Sister Elizabeth I had nothing to thank God for.

"She almost had a stroke then and there. I can still see her eyes bulging out of her head, this big throbbing vein on her left temple. After a billion hours of lectures she still hadn't changed my mind, though, so she sent me to Father Brennan. He made me so mad I told him I didn't even *believe* in God. He told me I would burn in Hell when I died. I told him I didn't care."

He falls quiet.

I wait.

He's drifting somewhere in Catholic orphanage memories. I tweak a nipple to bring him back to the present.

"And what, exactly, is the point of this story?" I ask him. I'm afraid he's going to tell me that his refusal to pray did in fact drive Sister Elizabeth into some horrible medical condition, that she died an untimely death, and that he's been carrying the guilt of that around ever since. What this has to do with Curacao is beyond me, but Richie's mind doesn't always work like the rest of ours.

"The point?" Richie looks blank for a moment. "Oh. I remember. Well, it's just that I don't think I told Father Brennan the truth. I said I didn't believe in God, but now I'm not so sure. I haven't always been the most grateful of guys, either. So maybe I should give thanks once in awhile."

"Richie, are you telling me you want to pray?"

A long moment of silence. Then he admits, "Yeah. I think so."

Okay, fine. When, in the middle of the night in the Western Caribbean, the man you love decides he wants to pray, there's really no reason to argue with him.

"You want to pray, too?" he asks.

"No. But I'll watch you."

So he climbs out of bed and gets down on both knees. His bare butt gleams in the moonlight. As he folds his hands together I can see the well-defined muscles in his arms. Those arms can lift a sword and swing it hard enough to chop off an enemy's head. He closes his eyes and tilts his head down, and then he starts to giggle.

"I can't do this if you're watching," he protests. "Close your eyes."

I close my eyes.

"You're peeking," he says.

"I am not," I tell him. "Cross my heart."

But I am peeking. That's just the way I am. His lips move soundlessly for a moment. I resist the urge to play with his hair, to run my hands down his skin, to do all sorts of things the image of a nude Richie Ryan inspires.

"This is dumb," he says abruptly, and starts to climb back into bed. Although I admit that I would rather have him cuddled up here beside me than kneeling on the floor, I put my hand on his arm.

"Finish what you started," I say softly. "It's not dumb."

He looks at me, uncertainty in his eyes, but after a few seconds he gets back on his knees and starts again. I wonder what exactly he's saying in his silent communique, and a moment later I find out.

"And I wasn't too pleased with you about Tessa, either," he says abruptly, startling me. Tessa Noel died the night Richie lost his mortal life. He keeps a picture of her and Mac on a shelf in his apartment. "If she's there now, say hi to her, and tell her I miss her."

I roll on my back and look up at the ceiling. I don't want to hear him in pain. He is twenty-five years old. He has killed and been killed. We're both part of a secret group of men and women who hunt each other across the world and through the corridors of time. There's nothing either of us can do to change that essential fact. Every time he walks away from me in an airport I'm convinced I will never see him again.

"I just wanted to thank you for all that I have now. Being Immortal isn't always fun, but it beats the alternative. Mac taught me everything he could and the rest is just luck, I guess. I'm in college, which is something I never thought would happen, and maybe I'll even get my degree one day. I've been to Europe and South America and lots of other places, thanks for that, too.

"Thanks the most, though, for sending Felicia back into my life. The first time didn't work out so well, but this time I'm in love with her."

I look at him. He is utterly serious. I am tempted, very severely tempted, to get down there on the floor beside him. The old Felicia would have laughed at the idea. The new Felicia just isn't quite there yet. My own relationship with God has had its ups and downs over the years, mostly downs. Sometimes I think it's a He, sometimes I think it's a She, sometimes I think God's a sadistic bastard out to ruin my life, and once I swear I saw an angel.

It was 1805, somewhere along the eastern coast of England. I'd killed another Immortal in front of her children during the night. By dawn I was riding northward on the cliffs, drunk from the bottle of wine in my jacket, none the better for taking a Quickening. On the path in front of me appeared a woman in white, her face the saddest I've ever seen, her arms spread wide in supplication. She was made of mist and light and when my horse rode through her, it felt like a tiny Quickening.

There are some things you don't forget even after a lifetime of misdeeds, you know?

"Don't listen to him, God," I say now, reaching over and cupping Richie's face. "He's the one who let me back into his life. He's the one who had faith when I didn't."

Richie takes my hand and kisses it. He finishes his prayers silently, benedictions I can't hear. The last of the island revelers have gone to bed and all is quiet. Richie is still on his knees, and when he opens his eyes there's a look there that I've seen before and hope to see again.

"So," he says with a leer, "while I'm down here, is there anything Little Felicia wants me to do?"

"Why yes, there is," I say, and spread my legs.

We make love again. Sometimes he's too eager and races ahead, but we're working on that. This time he takes it slow and easy, and I take it slow and easy, and just before we arrive at the train station together (if you know what I mean), I gasp and pull away from him.

"What about Sister Elizabeth?" I ask.

"Sister Elizabeth?" he squeaks out. "What about her?"

"What happened to her?"

He gives me an incredulous look. "I don't know! She's probably still there, sneaking up on ten-year-olds. Is this the time to be discussing nuns?"

My laughter is covered by his kisses, and my curiosity is subdued by something far more insistent. By the time we fall into an exhausted heap the sun is rising in the east and it's Lent. The Grand Carnival is over. For the penitent, today is a day of fasting and abstinence. We don't fall into the category. But Richie's prayers during the night have stirred something in my heart, a longing I thought had long since calcified and turned to brittle dust.

I'm not ready to get down on both knees, mind you, but there's a lot in my life for which I'm grateful. A little gesture of appreciation now and then couldn't hurt, could it?

THE END