“I don’t want your money, Lucien,” she murmured. The feel of his mouth on the skin of her neck was almost more than she could stand. She was ready to start tearing off her dress right there on the bedroom floor.
“I know that. And I will never allow you to be put in that kind of danger again,” he said. The hand he’d dipped beneath her skirt had reached her panties. Now his fingers skimmed the lace trim along the inside of her thigh. “But in order for me to protect you the way I want to, you have to come live with me. So we can be together. Really be together.”
“In Thailand,” Meena said, her eyes closed. She’d thrown her head back against his chest, her throat arched in tantalizing invitation.
“Or wherever you want to go,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be Thailand.” His mouth moved toward her throat.
Meena’s heart thumped again. It all sounded so perfect. The two of them would go away together. Maybe to Thailand. Lucien would protect her. He could because he was so big and strong. Also rich. She wouldn’t need to worry about Leisha or Jon or Adam or Alaric or the baby or anyone else she cared about getting killed.
Because she’d be gone. She’d be far away from them. She’d only have Lucien to care about.
But…
Something tickled the back of her mind. The same thing that had always bothered her whenever Leisha mentioned the baby. The same thing that had bothered her when Yalena had shown her a picture of her boyfriend on her cell phone…
The pit of nothingness.
She opened her eyes, surprised to find that Lucien’s mouth was open and on her throat.
“Wait,” she said, jerking away, her pulse suddenly racing, her breath catching in her throat. “What are you doing?”
He looked down at her expressionlessly. The hand beneath her skirt stilled. “Nothing,” he said carefully. “I’m not doing anything to you, Meena. Except loving you.”
She reached up to touch her neck. She was relieved to find that it was dry.
But all it would take, she knew, was one more bite, and then her drinking a little of his blood…
And she would become like him.
She knew it. He knew it.
Meena got to her feet, suddenly feeling as if the walls of the room were closing in on her.
Her heart was racing as fast as a rabbit’s now. So fast, in fact, that she was worried it might actually fly out of her chest.
What am I doing? she asked herself. What am I doing here?
Alaric Wulf had warned her not to go to her old apartment. He’d told her…he’d made her promise she wouldn’t go see it.
Had he known? Had he known that Lucien would come there to find her and that he’d do this to her?
Of course he’d known.
And she hadn’t listened. Oh, God, why hadn’t she listened? She was just like all the people who never listened to her.
Because only now was the very great danger she was in actually beginning to become clear to her…this time, she was the one on the edge of the crevasse. How was she going to get away? How was she going to get out of this?
She didn’t have any weapons.
And even if she did-could she really kill the man she loved, even if it meant…
…her life?
She paced from one side of the room to the other and then back again, taking quick, shallow breaths.
“Meena,” Lucien said, looking at her curiously. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. Could he read her mind?
Yes. Of course he could. Or partly, at least. He always could.
Fine, then, she decided.
Let him read it now.
She came to a stop in front of him, her toes balanced on the edge of the pit.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t…do that.”
He looked up at her from the floor where he still sat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Oh, don’t lie to me, Lucien,” she said, exploding. “After everything else I’ve been through because of you? Your freak of a brother trying to kill me? An army of vampires trying to drain me of my blood and drink it? And you’re going to sit there and lie to my face?”
Now he climbed to his feet, his calm demeanor gone. “Fine,” he said. His large hands were fisted. There was a muscle twitching in his jaw. It was obvious he’d known exactly what she’d been talking about all along. “So what? Admit that it would make things simpler, Meena.”
“Simpler?” She laughed out loud, though without humor. “If I were dead?”
“If you were one of us,” he said, putting it in a way that he obviously found more palatable. “Then you and I could truly be together. All this talk of going to Thailand-”
“Yeah, FYI,” Meena interrupted sarcastically, “I knew that was never going to happen, because you’d go up like a roman candle on the beach.”
“-doesn’t mean anything if you’re just going to grow old before my eyes while I-”
“Oh, that’s very nice,” Meena said, interrupting again. “So you’re just going to dump me for someone younger when I get old, like every other guy? Are you suggesting I try some Revenant Wrinkle Cream or that I check into one of Dimitri’s spas-”
He reached out then and cupped her face in both his hands, looking deeply into her eyes.
“I will love you, Meena,” he said fiercely, “until the end of time. I will never stop loving you. My life, before I met you, was nothing. Can you understand that? My life was nothing, meant nothing, even if I may not have known it. And then you came along, and suddenly, everything I knew, or thought I knew, was turned upside down. I will never be the same again. How could I be? You have shown me what it is to love, to feel and laugh and, yes, even to feel alive again. So whether you choose to be one with me or not, I will go on loving you, Meena, even after you are a rotting corpse in the ground. But, Meena, I would like to do whatever I can to prevent you from turning into a corpse. I think I mentioned that before.”
She stared up at him, shaken.
“Yes, but, Lucien,” she said, reaching up to grasp his wrists and gazing into his dark eyes, in which she thought she saw flickers of flame, “tricking me into turning into a vampire so that I won’t grow old and die before your eyes? What if I don’t want to be a vampire? Which I don’t, by the way. I have a dog that hates vampires, remember? I have friends and family here in New York City who I’d like to be able to visit…during the day. Also, I’ve seen death. I really, really don’t like going there. Even to visit. Even for a short while. And, Lucien.” She took his hands from her face and flipped them over so that she could hold them, instead, in hers. “I have a special thing that I can do. I think you experienced it, at least on a small scale, when you drank my blood. I can tell when people are going to die…lately, I can tell when they’re just in danger. And that means I can warn them, give them a fighting chance against death…or at least put it off. If you killed me and turned me into a vampire…I don’t know if I’d have that ability anymore. I’m pretty sure my blood drying up in my veins would end that. And-”
She drew a shuddering breath.
“That, I just don’t think I could live without,” she said. “Because those unspeakable horrors you mentioned before, the likes of which you don’t think I can imagine and that I’m pretty sure you rule over?”
He stared down at her, uncomprehending. “Yes? What about them?”
“I think they’re what I’m supposed to be helping protect people from,” she said. She hoped the tears that had begun to stream down her face again didn’t make him think she was regretting what she was saying.
Because she wasn’t. Not at all.
“I don’t know for certain,” she went on. “But I do know that whenever I don’t help people…well, bad things happen. So…that’s what I’m going to go do.”