“No. Yes. I mean, not right now. I don’t even know what I did, those words I spoke. I just was so upset about the cabin. Something just happened in me. Let’s just drop it, Luca. I’ll call Ilsbeth when we get to New Orleans. I’m just so upset right now that someone would burn down the cabin.” Samantha just wanted to crawl into a hole. Some good her so-called magic was. She didn’t really even know what she’d done to bring the rain. She needed to talk to Ilsbeth about what had happened, but right now she wanted to hide, sleep and forget. She hadn’t asked for this life, and felt a great sense of loss; she’d never be normal again.
Looking over at Samantha, Luca realized how small and fragile she appeared curled into the seat, leaning her forehead against the passenger side window. He wondered what thoughts swirled behind her pale blue eyes; she looked a million miles away, silently considering what had happened perhaps. Luca swore silently for indulging himself with her in the lake. He’d been foolish to allow himself the pleasure of holding her soft pliant body: kissing her swollen pink lips: tasting her sweet honey-like essence. What was I thinking? I’ve been thinking with my dick. God, he needed to get it together. She was defenseless, innocent to his ways. No matter how much he wanted to make love to her, he couldn’t allow himself to do it. He could not allow himself to kiss her again. Even though she was technically a witch, he wasn’t sure if she’d ever accept her circumstances. And what of her life expectancy? Would she do what she needed to do to become immortal?
He knew that Kade had resolved that issue with Sydney, giving her his blood to keep her youthful and healthy. But Sydney was a toughened cop who’d fought side by side with him and Kade. She’d faced death time and time again. And while he’d initially hated that Kade had let a human go after Asgear, Sydney had proved her worth. Kade was determined to marry Sydney, and Luca respected their special connection, knowing Sydney could hold her own in the supernatural world.
But Samantha? No, she was like most humans. She was delectably, wonderfully normaclass="underline" a computer analyst, for Christ’s sake. Her only experience with supernaturals was being bespelled, possibly raped, beaten and now being turned into a witch. And now she could add ‘passionately kissed by a vampire’ to her done list. He reckoned that she could find a much better mate than him. He rolled his eyes even thinking of the word: mate. In over two hundred years, he had never even considered marrying, mating, bonding or any other supernatural or human word that meant commitment. Never again.
Raised in Australia, Luca had known that loving someone brought nothing but heartache. In the late seventeen hundreds, his father, Jonathon Macquarie, a marine, had taken his family to the colony of New South Wales so that he could work on the development of the penal colonies being set up by the British. It was a rough life for the soldiers and their families as well as the prisoners; life in a strange new world was not kind, and often inhumane. During the summer of his twenty-fifth birthday, he’d found comfort in the arms of a lovely woman, Eliza Hutchinson. She was the abandoned daughter of a prisoner who’d been brought to the island ten years earlier, caught pickpocketing on the streets of London.
When he’d turned eighteen, Luca’s father had secured a guard position for him. A few years into the position, he was stationed to guard the factory where Eliza’s mother had worked. One day, he’d caught Eliza sneaking in food for her mother, but hadn’t had the heart to turn her into the authorities. Instead, he’d courted her every chance he got at her farm stand in the market, where she sold fresh honey and wool.
Using his influence within the marines, he’d worked hard to secure a ‘ticket of leave’ for her mother, ensuring her freedom as long as she stayed out of trouble. Within months, Luca and Eliza fell very much in love, and she agreed to marry him. Then one night on their way home from dinner, a drunken group of soldiers had cornered them in an alley. They’d taunted Luca and Eliza, as they expressed interest in sexually assaulting her. While Luca was a trained guard, he was outnumbered five to one. In a brutal fight, he’d lost consciousness as a bottle smashed upon the back of his head.
Luca had woken in his parents’ home to find that Eliza had been raped and killed. His legs had been broken and his skull fractured, but somehow he’d survived the attack. During the months he’d spent under his mother’s care, convalescing, Luca was despondent, determined to leave Australia. He’d grown up in the brutal colony watching soldiers punish convicts. Sometimes they were beaten, humiliated or hanged for the smallest infraction. He’d planned to leave someday with Eliza and take them back to London where they’d escape the constant stress associated with forging the path to civilization in the settlement. After her murder, he’d had nothing: no love, no desire to live, and no faith in humanity.
As soon as he could walk again, he’d spent his savings on a passage back to Mother England. Upon arrival Luca immediately ‘took the King’s shilling’, and enlisted as a soldier for the War of 1812. Because of his experience as a guard and his father’s service in the marines, he entered as an officer.
Hopeless and wrathful, Luca had wanted to kill and looked forward to each battle, seeing the face of Eliza’s murderers in every opponent. There would never be enough blood shed to satisfy his need for vengeance against a faceless nameless enemy who’d never seen the shore of Australia. But it hadn’t mattered to Luca. He’d heard that Eliza’s true murderers had been hanged. However it would never be enough to quench his rage and the burning loss he’d experienced. Battle after battle, he’d fought with the utmost intensity, earning the respect of his fellow officers. One fateful night, however, it was his blood that had been shed.
On January 8, 1815, Luca had pushed out with his unit into the darkness of night as the fog clouded his vision. As chaos erupted in the field along the Mississippi, Luca had fallen to the ground in a barrage of musket fire, as had many other officers of the British army.
The next day, as he was saying his last prayers, a stranger had happened upon him. Sensing his impending death, Kade had offered him immortality in exchange for his loyalty. Luca, no stranger to adventure, had accepted his proposal and thus began his life as vampire.
Luca shook his thoughts free of his troubled past. Eliza was merely a distant memory, albeit an everlasting reminder of how fragile mortality was. Since turning vampire, he’d pledged his loyalty and friendship to Kade. Over the years, they’d done almost everything together including fighting, feeding and fucking. Yes, they’d shared quite a few women over the years, but those days were over now that Kade was getting married. And while Luca was glad of Kade’s new-found happiness, he had no plans to follow in his friend’s footsteps.
No, he’d been perfectly content over the past two hundred years with his non-committed sexual escapades. The closest he’d ever come to commitment was with women he’d considered to be ‘friends with benefits’, long before the saying was popular. He was devastatingly handsome, so finding women who’d throw a night of passion his way was never an issue. If they acted as though they were in love, he could just enthrall them to think otherwise.