by Tracy Wolff
Now that Lia is gone and her plan foiled, I have even more questions than I did before she died. I want to ask Jaxon if he has any of the answers, but now isn’t the time to think about it, not with Marise flashing her fangs as she quips, “That’s not the only thing that bites around here.”
“So I’ve learned,” I answer with a smirk.
It only takes a few minutes for her to look me over, and her prognosis is pretty much what Alma already told me. A lot of cuts and bruises that it turns out Alma—who is a healing witch—has already put a lot of effort into minimizing. And a half-healed dislocated shoulder that will need to be splinted for a couple of weeks to finish what Alma already started.
There’s also the little matter of the blood transfusion, a little more than two liters, which I really wish she hadn’t mentioned in front of Jaxon. But all in all, I’m in good health and will probably get to go back to my dorm room in a couple of days, if my vitals stay steady.
Or so Marise says as she exits with a little wave.
“It’s not your fault!” I tell Jaxon the second she’s out the door.
“It’s entirely my fault,” he answers. “I nearly drained you.”
“Two liters is nowhere close to draining me.”
“It’s close to emptying you out enough that you die. Which counts as draining to me.” He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry, Grace. About hurting you. About your parents. About everything.”
“You didn’t hurt me. You saved me. Alma said you got me here before any permanent damage could be done.”
He doesn’t answer, just kind of shakes his head as his jaw works furiously.
“I gave you my blood, because you were going to die without it.” I take his face in my hands and look him straight in the eye so he can see that I mean what I’m saying. “And the truth is, it wasn’t a sacrifice. It was as selfish as I could get, because now that I’ve found you, I’m not okay with being in a world where you don’t exist.”
For long seconds, he still doesn’t say anything. Then he shakes his head, swears. “What am I supposed to say to that, Grace?”
“Say you believe me. Say you know it’s not your fault. Say—”
“I love you.”
I gasp, then let out a slow, shuddering breath as tears I don’t even try to hide bloom in my eyes. “Or you could say that. You could very definitely say that.”
“It’s true,” he whispers. “I’m so in love with you.”
“Good, because I’m in love with you, too. And now that Lia’s evil plan is forever over, we can try being in love when someone isn’t trying to kill us.”
He stiffens, looks away, and the cold I thought I’d finally managed to escape skitters down my spine once more.
“What’s going on, Jaxon?”
“I don’t—” He breaks off, shakes his head. “I don’t think we can do this, Grace.”
At his words, the cold congeals, turns my body to ice. “What do you mean?” I whisper. “You just said you love me.”
“I do love you,” he answers forcefully. “But sometimes love isn’t enough.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” It’s my turn to glance away, my turn to look anywhere but at him.
“Yeah, you do.”
I wait for Jaxon to say more, but he doesn’t. He just sits on the bed next to me, arm wrapped around my shoulder, body snuggled up against mine even as he rips my heart out of my freaking chest.
“It won’t always be like this,” I finally whisper to him.
“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s always going to be like this. The fact that I love you means you’re always going to be a target. You’re always going to be in danger.”
“That’s not what this was about.” I turn to him, tangling desperate fingers in his sweater as I tell him, “You know that. You were just a complication—Lia said she wanted me. She said it was about me. Even the shifters were after me because they knew she wanted to use me to…” I trail off, more than happy not to mention Hudson’s name to Jaxon ever again.
“You don’t really think the shifters are going to let this go, do you? Now that Lia’s gone, they may not want to kill you at the moment, but that doesn’t mean they won’t reconsider the first time I—or my family—piss them off. Now that they know how important you are to me, you’re more at risk than you’ve ever been.”
Maybe his fears make sense, maybe they don’t. But the truth is, “I don’t care.”
“I care, Grace.” His gaze is shuttered, but it isn’t blank. Not this time. I can see the pain in its depths, see that saying these things is hurting him as much as it’s hurting me.
It’s enough to have me sliding my hands up to his face, enough to have me cupping his cheeks in my palms as I stare deep into those eyes that have captivated me from the very first moment I saw him.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one in this relationship,” I tell him as I lean forward and press soft, desperate kisses to his forehead, the corners of his mouth, his lips. “And that means you don’t get to make all the decisions for us.”
“Please don’t make this any more difficult.” He grabs hold of my hands where they still cover his cheeks, his fingers twining with mine even as he takes care not to hurt me. “I can’t walk away if you make it difficult.”
“Then don’t walk away,” I implore, my mouth so close to his that I can feel the heat of his breath on my skin. So close that I can see the tiny silver flecks swirling in his eyes. “Don’t turn your back on this—on me—before we even have a chance to try.”
He drops his forehead to mine, closes his eyes with an agonized groan. “I don’t want to hurt you, Grace.”
“So don’t.”
“It’s not that simple—”
“Yes, it is. It is exactly that simple. Either you want to be with me or you don’t.”
His laugh is dark, tortured. “Of course I want to be with you.”
“So be with me, Jaxon.” I wrap my arms—IV cord and all—around him, hold him as close to my battered, desperate heart as I can manage. “Be with me. Love me. Let me love you.”
For long seconds Jaxon doesn’t move, doesn’t answer, doesn’t even breathe as despair and hope battle deep within me. But then, just as I’m about to give up, he takes a deep breath, shudders against me.
And then his hands are on my face and he’s kissing me like I’m the most important thing in the world.
I kiss him back the same way, and nothing has ever felt so good. Because for right now, for this moment, everything is finally exactly how it should be.
64
All’s Well
that Ends
with Marshmallows
“Please?”
“No.” Jaxon looks at me like I’m from another planet.
I cuddle closer, bat my eyes like a windmill on high. “Pleeeeeeeeease?”
He lifts a brow. “Do you have something in your eye, or should I call the nurse because you’re having a seizure?”
“Ugh. You suck.” I cross my arms over my chest and pretend to pout. But after three days of being cooped up in my bedroom, recuperating, I’m not sure how much of it is actually pretending. And even though I know I won’t be here forever, it’s still awful. “Please, Jaxon? If I have to stare at these walls any longer, I’m going to freak out.”
Jaxon sighs, but I can tell he’s deliberating, so I push my luck. “Can’t we go somewhere? Just for a little while? You can even carry me if I get too tired.” I try the whole eye batting thing again, less panicked bird this time and more femme fatale. Or, at least, that’s what I’m going for.
“Yeah, like I’m going to fall for that,” he says with a snort.
Which, okay. He has a point. I’m not real keen on him carrying me anywhere, especially now that things have calmed down around here. But still, the boredom is real�
��and getting more real every moment. “Come on, Jaxon. I know you’re just following directions because Marise said I’m supposed to rest for a couple more days, but I’m not planning on joining the Iditarod. I just want to walk around for a few minutes. No big deal.”
He studies my face for a minute and must figure out what I’ve already decided—that I’m going out with or without him—because he nods reluctantly. Then stands up from where we’ve been stretched out on my bed for the last two hours.
“Civil twilight has set in, so I’ll take you outside for a little while,” he says eventually. “But not far from the castle. And you have to promise to tell me as soon as you start to get tired.”
“I will. I swear!” Excitement races through me, and I spring up after him, then kind of wish I hadn’t, considering my everything hurts, especially my recently dislocated shoulder. Now that they’ve set it, it’s a lot better than it was, but it still aches a lot. Not that I’m about to tell Jaxon that—partly because he might change his mind and partly because I know he blames himself for everything that happened with Lia.
Which is ridiculous, but Jaxon is totally the guy who balances the whole world on his shoulders and who takes the responsibility of that seriously, even if he never asked for it. So no way am I going to let him see how sore and battered I still feel. Not when that means giving him something else to beat himself up over.
“So what do you want to do?” I ask in an effort to distract him from the fact that I’m limping more than a little.
He’s watching me with narrowed eyes and an expression that says I’m not fooling him. But he doesn’t say anything else, except, “I’ve got a couple of ideas. Why don’t you get dressed and I’ll run and find a few things? I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
“We can meet downstairs—” I start but break off when he looks at me with both brows lifted. “Oooor we can meet here,” I finish.
“Yeah, let’s do that.” He leans down and drops a kiss on my lips.
It’s meant to be quick, but I can’t help wrapping my good arm around his neck and pressing myself against him as I deepen the kiss.
Jaxon goes still, but there’s a hitch in his breathing that tells me I’ve got him. Seconds later, he slides his hands down to my hips to pull me even closer. And then he scrapes a fang across my lower lip in a move he knows makes every muscle in my body go weak.
My breath catches in my throat as I open for him. As I press even closer. As I give myself up to Jaxon and the explosion of heat and joy and light that he sets off inside me with just a kiss. Just a touch. Just a look.
I don’t know how long we kiss for.
Long enough for my breathing to grow ragged.
Long enough for my knees to tremble with each stroke of his fingers against my hip.
More than long enough for me to reconsider our walk outside now that things inside have gotten so much more interesting.
But eventually Jaxon pulls away with a groan. He drops his forehead against mine, and we just breathe for a while. But then he pulls away, and in a voice gone deep and growly and oh so sexy, he says, “Get dressed. I’ll be back in a few.”
And then, like always, he’s gone between one blink and the next.
It takes me a little longer to recover. A full minute or so passes before my heart rate steadies and my weak knees feel strong enough to support me. Eventually, I get my act together and start getting dressed in the layers upon layers necessary to survive an hour outside in Alaska. My lips tingle the whole time.
Turns out, it’s a good thing I hurried, because Jaxon is back, knocking on my door and letting himself in before I even have my socks on. To be fair, getting dressed takes a lot longer with a dislocated shoulder, but still. Even if I was completely healed, it’d still be impossible for me to compete with Jaxon’s speed.
He’s carrying a backpack, which he drops by the door when he sees me struggling to pull on my socks.
“Here, give them to me,” he says, kneeling down in front of me and gently resting my ankle on his thigh.
And just like that, my breath catches in my throat again. Because if I’ve learned nothing else in the time I’ve been here, it’s that Jaxon Vega kneels for no one. Yet here he is, kneeling in front of me like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“What?” he asks as he slides the socks over my feet and past my ankles.
I just shake my head because what else is there for me to say? Especially when his fingertips linger on my calf, tracing patterns into my suddenly oversensitive skin.
I must look as flustered as I feel, because he just kind of grins at me as he slides a second sock over the first before doing the same to my other foot.
I shake my head, look away before I end up melting into an actual puddle.
A couple of minutes later, after putting my boots on for me, too, Jaxon stands up and holds a hand out to pull me up.
“Have you decided where we’re going?” I ask as we head for the door.
He picks up the backpack—something I’ve never seen him carry if he’s not going to class—and says, “Yeah.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but this is Jaxon. He almost never shares more than he has to. Then again, as he gives me a wicked grin, I find myself not minding too much. If Jaxon wants to surprise me, who am I to say no? Especially when his surprises are usually so, so good.
We walk hand in hand through the halls and down the three flights of stairs to the front door. Almost everyone else is in the last class of the day—Jaxon should be, too, but he’s ditching—so the common areas are nearly deserted. Which works for me. I’m still not ready to face most of them after everything that has happened.
“Are you okay?” Jaxon asks as we head out into the cold—and down even more steps. Which is great. I mean, it’s not like every muscle in my body aches or anything…
Still, I nod, both because I don’t want him to know that I’m hurting and because the biting cold kind of takes me by surprise. Which sounds ridiculous—this is Alaska; I know exactly how cold it is outside. But it’s still a shock to my system every single time.
I must not be hiding it as well as I’d hoped, because Jaxon takes one look at my face and says, “We could go back in.”
“No. I want to do something with you. Just the two of us.”
His eyes widen at my words, and the guarded look in his eyes drops away. For a second, just a second, I get to see the real Jaxon—a little awkward, a little vulnerable, a lot in love with me—and it takes my breath away all over again. Because I feel all of that and so much more around him.
“Then let’s go.”
We set out in the opposite direction that I went on my walk around the grounds that first day. Instead of going by the classroom cottages, we head across the pristine snow to the forest that takes up a lot of the school grounds.
We walk slowly, partly because the cold isn’t that bad once I start moving and partly because walking in snow really isn’t easy, especially when you were beaten half to death less than a week before. Eventually, though, we get to a little clearing in the forest. It’s not very big—maybe the size of my and Macy’s dorm room—but there are a couple of benches to the side.
Jaxon drops his backpack on one and pulls out a tall black thermos. He takes off the cup at the top, then opens it and pours something into the cup. Then he hands it to me with a grin.
“Hot chocolate?” I exclaim, delighted.
“Yeah, well, I figure you might want to lay off tea for a while.”
I laugh. “You make a good point.” I start to take a sip, but Jaxon stops me. Then he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small bag of marshmallows.
“I don’t know much about drinking hot cocoa, but I do know that it usually needs marshmallows.” He pulls out a few of the small, homemade-looking squares and scatters them in my cup.
An
d I swear my heart nearly bursts, right here in the middle of a bunch of trees, as darkness slowly descends around us. Because even after everything we’ve been through, I’m still blown away by how Jaxon always thinks about me. About what I might like or what makes me feel good or what would make me happy. And he’s always, always right.
I take a big sip of the cocoa and am not surprised at all that it’s the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had. “So who did you talk into making this for you?” I ask, eyeing him over the rim of my cup.
He gives me a blank look. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there’s a shadow of amusement in the depths of his eyes that belies his words and makes me laugh.
“Well, whoever it is, please tell them it’s really good.”
He smirks a little. “I’ll do that.”
I take another sip, then hold the cup out to him. “Want some?”
“Thanks, but it’s not really my thing.” Now he’s full-on grinning.
“Oh, right.” Which makes a million of the questions I’ve been accumulating for days rush back into my head. “How does that work, anyway?”
He lifts a brow. “How does what work?”
“I saw you drink tea, but you don’t drink cocoa. You ate a strawberry during the party, but I’ve never seen you eat anything else. Except…” I trail off, blushing.
“Except your blood?” he asks archly.
“Well, yeah.”
“Vampires drink water just like every other mammal on the planet, and tea is basically hot water. You start adding in milk and chocolate and it’s a different story.”
“Oh. Yeah.” That makes sense. “And the strawberry?”
“Yeah, that was totally for show. My stomach hurt for the rest of the night.” It’s his turn to look embarrassed.
“Really? So why’d you do it?”
“Honestly?” He shakes his head, looks away. “I have no idea.”
It’s not the answer I was expecting, but looking at him, it’s obvious that he’s telling the truth. So I let it go. And instead say, “One more question.”
