“Oh.” Wrapping her arms around him, she hugged him tighter. “I just hate the idea of you suffering the way you did.”
Roland pressed a kiss to the soft hair atop her head and rolled them to their sides. He felt … strange. Lighter, perhaps. As if sharing with Sarah the pain and anger that had pressed down upon him for so long had finally liberated him from it.
Was this contentment he felt, seeping into his very marrow as he twined his legs through hers? It had been so long, he barely recognized it.
With a wondrous sense of peace, he realized he could finally think of his children without their memory being overshadowed by Edward and Beatrice’s betrayal.
“I presided over my home for a decade and was able to watch my children grow to adulthood before people began to notice I wasn’t aging.” He smiled. “Emma became a beautiful young woman, sweet-natured and generous. Thomas was nearly as tall as I am and so handsome the girls all fought over him. Both of them were incredibly bright. I could not have been more proud. Thomas was an immensely powerful knight and earned his spurs a year younger than I did,” he boasted. “He had such honor within him, was so like my father.”
“No,” Sarah correctly softly. “He was so like you.”
Tipping his chin down, he found her smiling up at him.
She drew a finger along his jawline in a light caress that made his skin tingle. “Handsome, smart, and honorable? It sounds like he was a carbon copy of his father.”
Roland’s throat thickened and he was shocked to feel moisture well in his eyes. Abashed, he buried his face in her hair.
“Did you tell them what you were?” she asked, stroking his back.
He had to swallow hard before he could speak. “No, I stayed as long as I dared. Long enough to see Emma happily married to an earl who adored her and to ensure Thomas was ready to assume the title. Then I said my goodbyes, left, and had one of my immortal colleagues send them word of my supposed death.”
Sarah pressed a kiss to his neck. “Did you ever see them again?”
“From a distance. I watched over both of them until they died, then watched over my grandchildren until they died, and their children as well.”
“Immortality must be difficult at times.”
“It can be. I’m not the only Guardian who has isolated himself from others. Forming attachments with humans and having to watch them grow old and die generation after generation can become unbearable as the centuries accumulate.”
It would be no different with Sarah. When she was stooped with age, her hair a snowy-white complement to the wrinkles mapping her sweet face, he would be the same as he was now, unchanged by the decades that had passed.
The thought was an unwelcome one he hastily pushed aside, unwilling to let reality intrude just yet and rob him of the happiness she inspired.
“I hate to ask this,” she said, “but you said two women tried to kill you. Who was the other?”
“My betrothed.”
She muttered something into his chest he couldn’t make out. “Was her name Mary?”
He frowned. “Yes. What do you know of her?”
“Only what you and Marcus said about her while he was trying to talk you out of healing me.”
Oh. “Well, it’s a much shorter story. I met her in the seventeenth century, lost my head over her, asked her to marry me, and when she said yes, told her what I was. She freaked out, but I managed to calm her down, or so I thought. She said she needed time to think. I gave it to her. The next afternoon, she stormed into my home with half a dozen humans bearing knives, stakes, and torches and tried to kill me.”
Even that memory lacked its usual bite with Sarah’s soft form snuggled up against him. Marcus was right. Mary had been a twit. She had seemed to accept him by the time he had finished talking. So she had probably told her sister, then been swayed by her reaction.
Sarah’s small hands came up to cup his cheeks, drawing his gaze to hers. “Roland?”
“Yes?” She was so adorable, with her mussed hair and kiss-swollen lips.
“I promise I will never betray you or try to kill you.”
Another piece of the shield he had erected around his heart fell away.
He touched his lips to hers. “I believe you.” It was true. He did. “And I have to tell you … that scares the hell out of me.”
“I know. If I were in your shoes, it would scare me, too. But I would never intentionally harm you.” The somber promise in her eyes, more brown than green today, morphed into amusement. “Notice I said ‘intentionally.’ Occasionally, I have what I call clumsy days when I just can’t seem to do anything right, which tends to result in bruises, cuts, or burns. So if you hang around me long enough, you might unwittingly become a victim and acquire a few yourself.”
If you hang around me long enough.
Was it a backhanded invitation?
Could she be implying she wouldn’t be averse to spending more time with him when this was all over? That she might be interested in pursuing a relationship with him?
Is that what he wanted?
Hell, yes!
Rolling her to her back, Roland took her lips in a deep, devouring kiss and whispered, “I’ll risk it.”
The bleating of his cell phone woke Roland from a sound sleep. Cursing himself for leaving it upstairs, he carefully extricated himself from Sarah’s tangled limbs—damn, he didn’t want to leave her—then raced up to the living room in a blur of motion.
“What?” he growled, answering on the second ring.
“You must be Roland,” a cheerful male voice said.
“Who the hell is this and how did you get my number?”
The man laughed. “Oh yeah. You’re definitely Roland. This is Chris Reordon. I’m this region’s Cleaner. Seth gave me your number.”
Reordon. Roland had heard of him. He was rumored to be one of the best, though Roland had never felt the need to call upon his services.
Concealing the existence of both the vampiric virus and the gifted ones from the rest of society was a full-time job that required constant vigilance and connections in various law enforcement and government agencies that immortals had difficulty cultivating due to their aversion to sunlight and the time they spent hunting vampires and reducing the threat they posed. The computer age and advent of video cameras, cell phones that took pictures, and the Internet made it all even more complicated.
Fortunately, Seth had long ago begun ferreting out trustworthy humans to build a support network that helped immortals with everything from investing their capital and multiplying their wealth to supplying weapons, providing new identities every few decades, studying the disease that transformed them, researching a cure, performing daytime surveillance when necessary, and running interference with humans who became too curious for their own good. The network had been in place and steadily expanding for centuries now.
Many of the humans employed by the network were descendants of previous members who had passed the torch to their sons or daughters. Absolute loyalty was imperative. Rules and guidelines were strictly implemented. Those who strayed and broke faith with the network—and there had been very few—were swiftly tracked down and punished by the network’s human enforcers with no immortal interference.
The role of Cleaners was fairly self-explanatory: They cleaned up the messes immortals sometimes left behind.
“How did it go?” Roland asked, tamping down his irritation at being ranked on by a human he didn’t even know.
“Just fine,” the man responded in more businesslike tones.
“I’m sorry to say your house is a total loss. We managed to get there before anyone else did. Society’s apathy really works in our favor sometimes. Most of the people who saw the smoke must have assumed someone else had already called 911 and not bothered to call it themselves, because we had plenty of time to stage it before the fire department arrived.”