Rehvenge caught her hands. “Just…tears.”
She stared at what appeared to be blood on his cheeks. “Are you sure?” When he nodded, she took a Kleenex out of her parka and dabbed his face carefully. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
“You shouldn’t…have come for me. You should have…left me there.”
“I told you,” she whispered, wiping away more. “Everyone deserves to be saved. It’s the way I look at the world.” As she met his beautiful, iridescent eyes, they seemed even more magical as they shimmered with their wash of red tears. “It’s the way I look at you.”
His lids squeezed shut, as if he couldn’t bear her compassion.
“You tried to protect me from all this, didn’t you,” she said. “That was what the showdown at ZeroSum was about.” When he nodded, she shrugged. “So why don’t you understand my need to save you, if you did the same for me?”
“Different…I’m a…symphath…”
“You’re not all symphath, though.” She thought of his marking scent. “Are you.”
Rehvenge shook his head reluctantly. “But not enough…vampire…for you.”
The sadness in him welled up, a rain cloud condensing over them both, and as she struggled for words, she touched his face again-and found that his skin was too cold for her liking. Shit…she was losing him in her arms. With every mile that took them closer to safety, his body was giving out on them both, his respiration growing logy, his heart rate slowing.
“Can you do something for me?” she said.
“Please…yes,” he replied roughly, even though his eyes fluttered shut and he started to shiver. As he curled into a tighter ball, she could see his spine jutting through the skin of his back even through the blanket.
“Rehvenge? Wake up.” When he looked at her, the purple in his eyes was that of a bruise, opaque and pained. “Rehvenge, would you please take my vein?”
In a rush, his lids peeled wide as though along with, We’re going to Disneyland!, and, How about some drive-thru for dinner?, what she’d said was the last thing he’d expected to come out of her mouth.
As his lips parted, she stopped him before he spoke. “If you ask me why, I’m going to be forced to give you a time-out.”
A small smile quirked the edge of his mouth, but then was lost. And even though his fangs had dropped down, their sharp tips suddenly revealed, he shook his head.
“Not like you,” he murmured, touching his tattooed chest with a weak hand. “Not good enough…for your blood.”
She shrugged out of one half of her parka and yanked up the sleeve of her turtleneck. “I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much.”
As she put her wrist over his mouth, he licked his lips, his hunger rising so much, so fast, that color returned to his pale cheeks. And yet still he hesitated. “Are you…sure?”
She had an odd memory of the two of them in the clinic forever ago, jousting, circling each other, wanting and not taking. She smiled. “Absolutely. Positive.”
She dropped her vein onto his lips and knew he wouldn’t be able to resist her-sure enough, he tried to fight it…and lost. Rehvenge bit clean and sucked deep, a moan bubbling up as his eyes rolled back in bliss.
Ehlena stroked the hair that had grown out on either side of his mohawk and rejoiced quietly as he fed.
This was going to save him.
She was going to save him.
Not her blood, but her heart was going to save him.
As Rehvenge fed from his love’s wrist, he was overwhelmed and overwrought, at the mercy of emotions more powerful than his mind. She had come for him. She had gotten him out. And even knowing all she did about him, she was letting him feed and staring down at him with kindness.
But wasn’t that more a measure of who she was as a person than what she felt for him as a male? Wasn’t this duty and compassion instead of love?
He was too weak to read her grid. At least at first.
As his body revived though, so did his mind, and what she felt became known to him…
Duty. Compassion.
And love.
A complex joy flared in his chest. Part of him felt like he’d won the lottery against crippling odds. But the core of him knew that what he was would drive them apart even if the rest of the vampire population never found out about his mixed blood: He was supposedly the head of that colony.
Which was no place for Ehlena.
He released her vein and licked his lips. God…she tasted good.
“Do you want more?” she asked.
Yes. “No. I’ve had enough.”
She resumed stroking his hair, her nails rasping against his scalp. Closing his eyes, he felt his muscles and bones strengthen as what she had so graciously given him revived his body.
Yeah, it wasn’t just his arms and legs coming to life. His cock swelled and his hips surged forward, even though he was half-dead and his shoulders were on fire. But hard-ons were what happened to male vampires when they’d taken the vein of their mate.
Biology. He couldn’t help it.
As his body temperature stabilized, he uncurled from the heat-conserving crouch he’d been in, and in the process kicked off part of the blanket that was around him. Worried that he was flashing his cock, he reached down to pull the thing back into place.
Ehlena got there first.
And her eyes flared in the darkness as she tugged the cover back where it had been.
Rehv swallowed a couple of times, her taste still on his tongue and down the back of his throat. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be.” She smiled and stared into his eyes. “You can’t help it. Besides, it means you’re probably out of the danger zone.”
And into the erotic one. Great. Nothing like extremes to spice life up.
“Ehlena…” He released a long, slow breath. “I can’t go back to the way things were.”
“If you mean being a drug lord and a pimp, somehow I’m not crushed.”
“Oh, that shit would be over with anyway. But no, I can’t return to Caldwell.”
“Why not?” When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “I hope you do. I want you to.”
The bonded male vampire in him was all, Yeehaw, sign us up. But he had to be practical.
“I’m different from you,” he said again, like it was his theme song.
“No, you’re not.”
Because she needed convincing and he could think of no better way of proving the point, he took her hand and moved it under the blanket, putting it on his cock. The contact made him shudder from pleasure, his hips bucking, but he reminded his libido that he was doing this to show her exactly how different he was.
He guided her to his barb, to the place at his base that was slightly uneven. “Do you feel that?”
She seemed to work for control for a moment, as if she were struggling against the same erotic current he was. “Yes…”
The husky way she drew out the word made his spine lift and recede, making his arousal slide in her palm. As his breath got short and his heart pounded, his voice grew deeper. “It locks in place when I…when I come. I’m not like what you’ve had before.”
As she explored him, Rehv tried to remain still, but the power in his body from the feeding, coupled with where her hand was, proved to be too enticing. He moved against her hold, arching in her lap, feeling strangely at her mercy.
Which was just another huge turn-on.
“Is that why you pulled out of me?” she said.
Rehv licked his lips again, remembering the feel of her core surrounding his-
The Escalade went over a bump in the road and he was abruptly reminded that the dark haven of the far back of the SUV was only semiprivate: They were not, in fact, alone.
But Ehlena didn’t remove her hand. “Is that why?”
“I didn’t want you to know about any of this. I wanted to…be normal for you. I wanted you to feel safe around me…and I wanted to be with you. That’s the why of the lying. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. I didn’t want that for you-”