He shook his head once. “No. I will not accept that. A few days ago you didn’t even know you were a vampire. You didn’t have fangs. And yet here you are—you know you know me, you drank from me. What did you see when you did?”
“Me. I saw how you see me.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “You remember everything—and I’m a blank slate.”
“Not true.” Richard shifted, rolling onto his side and propping his head on a hand. His palm rubbed over her belly, warm and possessive. “You are still you. You are the woman you’ve always been. It’s all inside you—the quirky antics, devoted loyalty, playful mannerisms. You’re still my Kristina.”
She pushed his hand aside and sat up, scooting to the edge of the bed. She needed to think and not just to roll him over and fuck his brains out again.
Although that idea held a certain appeal.
“I left you.” She didn’t look at him when she spoke, staring unseeingly across the room to the leafy wallpaper with its exotic designs. “I walked out.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He was silent for so long, she thought he might not answer. He sighed, and the bed dipped as he moved. He rose and walked around. She tried not to watch the muscles ripple across his ass, but for a man—a vampire—who dressed in expensive suits, he cut a fine figure with nothing on his body.
Pouring a drink, he shot her a questioning glance, and she nodded. Her body hummed, whether from drinking his blood or the sex, she couldn’t really put her finger on the cause. He passed her a glass. She scented the coppery hints of blood. He’d been giving her blood steadily with every meal, but she couldn’t resent it.
She felt great.
“Why did I leave, Richard?”
“We argued. We often did.” He sighed and walked over to sit on the bed next to her. “You—you were always supportive of my business efforts. You even supported my bid to take New York. But the busier I became, the more you seemed to resent it.”
“And?”
“And one evening you wanted to go to some event. I couldn’t go because of a small crisis with some of the younglings who went too far. I needed to attend the situation. You were angry with me and demanded that I go, because I promised…” He grimaced and tossed back the drink.
“So you wouldn’t go to a party with me, and I walked out? What kind of shallow bitch was I?”
“You were not a shallow bitch.” His voice hardened, and he caught his hand around her neck, capturing her gaze with a passionate force. “Never—ever—refer to yourself that way again. Do you understand me?”
Trepidation shivered through her, and she nodded slowly.
He leaned in and kissed her, soft and sweet. Forehead resting against hers, he studied her eyes. “It was hardly the first time I disappointed you, sweet. I didn’t see it then, but I was often too busy to do any of the things you loved, and you were frustrated, battling for my attention when an entire city needed me. I told myself time and again, that it was just this one time more and that I would make it up to you, but that night—that night you were done with my choices. You left me to my phone calls and went to change. When you returned, you were dressed in the most provocative of fashions.”
“I tried to seduce you into going with me.” It was a guess, but it sounded like her. Dress her best and strut it out there for him to see and weep.
“Yes, and I was a complete bastard. I forbid you from wearing the outfit out of our home and then asked you to please stop so I could just get the mess cleaned up.” The forlorn note in his voice turned dark. “I was an idiot.”
“I went out that way anyway, didn’t I?”
“Yes.” He gave her a small smile. “Stubborn, sexy and supremely confident, you told me to go to hell and enjoy the heat, because you wouldn’t be there to warm my bed again. You stormed out.”
“And never came back.” Sadness welled up inside of her. Loneliness echoed in his words—loneliness and self-recrimination. She knew herself well enough to know if she had truly been that angry with him, she would have made a spectacle of herself—rubbed his nose in it.
“No. And at first, I thought it was to teach me a lesson, so I was stubborn about looking for you. I was determined that you would come back when you were ready, and I would be there. We would make up, settle our differences and it would be perfect again.”
“But I didn’t come back—” Kiki pulled away and took a drink, rolling the information around in her brain. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, I didn’t think so. But you were angry and very frustrated—rightfully so. I should have looked for you that night.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Catching his hand in hers, she lifted his fingers to her lips and kissed them with affection, the gesture both familiar and new. “Maybe I don’t remember being her, your Kristina, but I know me. I know what I would have done if I thought someone was ignoring me. Hell, I know what I do now. I make a huge scene. I dress up, I sneak out and I do everything I’m not supposed to do because I want someone to notice. So, if I was really trying to prove a point to you, I would have made a hell of a scene—one you couldn’t ignore.”
So the question was why hadn’t she done that?
Richard stilled, his expression turning pensive. “Yes. You had done something similar before—in London. I still blame you for that Bram Stoker nonsense.”
Her mouth twitched. “Really?”
“Absolutely. You went out drinking with every would-be writer and playwright in the countryside. You were determined to make headlines everywhere you could until I dragged you back in and took you to the States. London bored you—you wanted an adventure.”
Kiki laughed. “Okay, I want to remember that for sure.”
“You would.” He teased, but a somber note arrested his smile. “Still, you didn’t even arrive at the party you wanted me to go to.”
“Okay, so I was mad. I got dressed up. I wanted to teach you a lesson and make a scene. But I didn’t go to that party. Did I have guards?” It made sense, Richard traveled with them. Wouldn’t she have had her own?
“Yes. But you escaped them, trading vehicles and visiting about two-dozen different dance clubs. They spent the better part of two days trying to hunt you before they told me they didn’t know where you went.” Violence surfaced in his voice, a dark threat, and Kiki winced. She didn’t envy those guards that explanation.
Chewing her lower lip, she tried to put the pieces together. Maybe she didn’t remember, but what would she do? Right now, if she wanted his attention and he wasn’t giving it—she lifted her drink and stared at the faint bruises on her wrist. They faded, almost gone, but still…
“Richard?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Have you and Andrew always not gotten along?” She knew the vampire prince of Las Vegas, they all did. He was a regular visitor at the casino, but she’d never really cared for him, and after the events earlier this evening, she could safely say she despised him.
“We knew him in the Wolcotts, darling, and no, we have never gotten along. The sycophants around him too easily sway his choices. It’s why Las Vegas is so perfect for—” He stopped and she could almost see the leap his mind made. The leap hers already assumed.
After all, how better to irritate the hell out of her lover than to…
“You didn’t?” He didn’t quite glare at her, but disbelief and disgust twisted in his expression.
“I don’t know that I did and I’m rather hoping not, because he’s a lot skeevy, but I wanted to teach you a lesson and get your attention—why not seek out someone who would thoroughly piss you off?”