The smile faltered when she saw who it was.
Leo.
She hesitated in her progress, even took an involuntary step backward. He came down the steps quickly and stood in front of her. Faced with him so unexpectedly she was flustered and upset, panic gripping her chest. She had been almost positive he would be gone by then! If she had thought he would be there she would never have come…or at the very least she would have prepared herself, would have steeled herself for the meeting.
Truth now, Faith. You were hoping he would be here.
Hoping and dreading. But why didn’t he leave?
“Faith.”
“Leo,” she greeted him awkwardly. She felt raw and exposed. Her confidence had been in tatters since she had left. So had her peace of mind.
“I came to tell everyone that Andy is in a good home for Down syndrome adults now. He’s a real good kid. Funny as hell. He’s got a thing for knock-knock jokes. You’d never know…”
You’d never know he’d harbored a psychopath.
“I came to finish…the lost spirit in the desert…” She gestured vaguely behind herself. “I was stopping in. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
She said the statement hard, so that he would know she hadn’t wanted to find him there. She wasn’t going to flaunt her feelings, but neither could she hide them in their entirety.
“Faith, come inside. I…I have something for you. I didn’t know if you’d ever come back here, but I hoped you would…so I…I brought you something.”
“I really don’t need anything,” she said, feeling awkward again as he reached out to take her hand and pull her toward the house. He led her upstairs, back into the suite he had used when they’d last been there. She stayed in the living area. She didn’t think she could bear looking at the bed where they had made love so thoroughly. Where for a vignette of time, they had meant something intimate to each other.
He went into the room briefly and came back to her.
“I went back and packed up all my things…brought them back here. I figured that I need to stay around here. Since I can go out into daylight I can be of real use around here. And I’ll be certain to get my adrenaline fixes around here, that’s for sure. So anyway, I-I found something…something that Docia once gave me when she was a little girl and I guess I could never throw it away.”
He handed her a red heart-shaped box with a ribbon around it. She could tell by the heft of it that it was empty, void of all the chocolates that might have been inside of it at one point for some distant Valentine’s Day. The box was worn and beaten in along its cardboard rims, the foil embossing flaking and faded.
Utterly puzzled, she pulled the ribbon and opened the box, knowing already there wasn’t anything inside. She held the two pieces of the box, one in each hand, and looked up at him in confusion.
“It’s my heart,” he said quietly. “Old, battered, empty.” He reached to run a gentle thumb along the line of her jaw. Everything about him changed in that instant as he drew her closer to himself. “I’m giving it to you so you can fill it up. I know it’s going to be hard to do, since I don’t make things easy, but I was hoping you’d take on the job. Rescue me, the way you rescued Jackson. All in.” He cleared his throat. “I know it’s selfish of me, and I know I have no right to ask. I’m pretty used up and worthless in the emotions department right now, but…” He trailed off, but she waited patiently as he searched for his next words, for his cautious feelings.
“I can’t promise you anything but this minute, this moment right now,” he said softly, pulling her in tight and close. “None of us have anything for certain besides this minute. None of us should promise what we might never be able to give because the next minute after the promise we could be gone, leaving it empty and unfulfilled. And I couldn’t do that to you,” he said as he pulled her cheek to the fervent, breathy press of his lips. “When you walked out…when I realized you’d left me entirely, at first I thought, for just one second I thought, thank God. That will make things easier. And the very next instant I knew I was wrong. I knew…I knew I’d been wrong all along. Wrong not to share myself with you, wrong to sell you short, wrong to push you away. I realized the last thing I wanted to do was go on without you. I know you left because I drove you to it, but please, please let me make it up to you. One day at a time. Don’t ask me to let you go again because my heart couldn’t possibly take it. I love you and I will never betray your trust like that again. Now, my heart is in your hands, Faith,” he said, holding her hands where they were holding the silly cardboard box. “Do with it what you will.”
Faith felt heated tears burning into her eyes as the intent behind the gesture was suddenly made so clear to her. It was stark in the words he had used, and brilliantly seared across his scroll. That single, glorious word. Love. Then came devotion. Then more and more words, all the same, all running over with his emotions and his feelings toward her. She had never seen anything so bright and beautiful in all of her life. She laughed shakily, a blink of her lashes sending tears haphazardly over her lashes, gluing his gently pressing lips to her cheek. He kissed the salty fluid away.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice harsh. “Don’t cry. I don’t mean to hurt you. It’s just…it’s just the best I can do.”
She laughed again, this time with more genuine mirth. She pulled back so she could look into his eyes, their warm brown looking troubled and confused. He didn’t know how to reconcile her tears with her laughter. He couldn’t figure out what she was thinking.
“Leo.” It was all she said before walking away. Just his name. And for that instant he thought his chest was going to rip wide open, leaving him bleeding at her feet. To know she was turning her back on him hurt more than he had ever thought it possibly could. Even more than the first time she had left. In all the times he’d given the “It’s not you it’s me” speech to women as a means of escaping their emotional attachments, he’d never imagined himself ever being on the other end of it. He’d never understood until that instant how horribly painful it was. How cold and callous and unsympathetic he had been when utilizing it.
He should have turned and walked away. Scooped up his shattered pride and ego and cut his losses. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t even breathe. He watched her move to the desk in the room, reaching for a stack of Post-it notes and a pen. She wrote something on the Post-it, stuck it onto the inside of the old, ridiculous box, then replaced the cover. Confused and numb, he took the box from her when she held it out to him. Unable to do anything else, he opened the box and read the Post-it.
Faith loves me.
Stunned, he read it twice more before looking up into the luminescent yellow of her eyes.
“See?” she said. “We’re off to a very good start.”
“I…” He was speechless. He was soaring and heart-sore and empty and full all at once. He had never felt anything like this swirling storm of emotion before in his life. He had thought he would never let anything touch him that deeply. The only thing that had ever occupied his heart had been his mother, Jackson, and Docia. It simply didn’t know how to function with the enormous emotions being stuffed into it and dragged back out of it.
“Faith, I don’t know what I did, or where I did it…I don’t know how fate could possibly think that I deserve you.”
She took the box from his numb fingers and laid it very gently on the table next to her, as if it truly was his heart and must be handled with all due care. And that was when he realized she would always take care of it that thoughtfully. That carefully. Not the stupid cardboard box, but the stupid thing beating in his chest.
She opened her mouth to say something, but he ringed an arm around her waist and dragged her up against his body, squeezing her so tightly a little meep squeaked out of her. He covered her mouth with his, anchoring himself in the softness of those plush lips. He drank deeply from her, felt the way she breathed hard against him, felt the way she clutched at the fabric of his shirt at his shoulders,
pulling it so tightly he could hear threads popping in protest.
She was so alive. So strong and so damn beautiful it hurt just to think about it, never mind lay his eyes on her. How had he not seen it from the very start? How could he not have felt this feeling the very moment he’d first seen her?
“I realized I needed to stay here. I’m just human, but Jacks and Docia need people around to protect them in daylight. That sounds like a job I can do. And it lets me stay near the people I love. I asked if you could stay too…if…if I could get you to, that is. We’re building something here, a force of Nightwalkers and humans…a force needed if we’re going to fight Apep. You would be a valuable part of that.”
Faith laughed at him. He was pitching the idea at her like he was trying to sell it. As if she would want to go anywhere where he wasn’t.
“I think that’s a perfect idea,” she said, smiling through another rush of tears. “Just…perfect. Now make love to me.”
“Very well,” he said, sweeping her back up against his body and kissing her so deeply she was breathless. “Your wish, as always, is granted.”
EPILOGUE
Apep was eating banana peppers. For some reason he was craving the hottest, spiciest foods imaginable. It was ridiculously delightful. Cravings meant that his pregnancy was well on its way and was advancing quite properly.
It was a disappointment to have lost Chatha, but there were always more lackeys to be had. The Wraiths, for instance. Although, none would quite have Chatha’s special touch. But he would avenge Chatha one day. Actually, Chatha had nothing to do with it. He would set those people down a peg before they got too cocky. Yes, he would. But this time he would take the time to prepare and plan. After all, he couldn’t just rush in with him being in such a delicate condition. He might have to wait until after the pregnancy altogether before doing something about it. Then he and his son could lay waste to all of them. They could rout out every Nightwalker on the planet!
In the meantime, he was going to look into how to reverse his curse. Yes. It was a very good idea to be prepared should the need arise.
A very good idea indeed.
BY JACQUELYN FRANK
The World of Nightwalkers
Forbidden
Forever
Forsaken
Three Worlds
Seduce Me in Dreams
Seduce Me in Flames
Nightwalkers
Jacob
Gideon
Elijah
Damien
Noah
Adam
Shadowdwellers
Ecstasy
Rapture
Pleasure
The Gatherers
Hunting Julian
Stealing Kathryn
Other Novels
Drink of Me
Anthologies
Nocturnal
Supernatural
For Darynda, my writing buddy.
You make me work hard
to keep up with you.
Love you, even when
you karate-chop my larynx!
Read on for an exciting sneak peek of
FORGED
By Jacquelyn Frank
The next book in
The World of Nightwalkers series
“It is not an ugly monument of metal with no purpose. It’s an ugly monument of metal that’s allowing us to carry on this interference-free phone call.” That small bit of logic released a tirade of venom about the evils of modern technology from the other end of that lovely connection and Katrina Haynes rolled her eyes heavenward, as if that were going to help deal with her mother for whom logic was a fluid thing. The ugly cell tower they’d just placed on her mother’s neighbor’s property on the mountain above was a blight and an eyesore and entirely not necessary said she-who-was-infamous-for-bitching-about-dropped-phone-calls and she-who-was-attached-at-the-hip-to- her-barely-understood-smartphone. Her mother had to have the best, whether she could use it to its potential or not.
Katrina’s own smartphone had been a gift from her mother for Christmas, otherwise she’d still be making do with her much beloved flip phone, and being quite content with it. Although, she had to admit to an Angry Birds addiction.
“Well Mother, then you’ll have to be content with looking down the mountain and not up the mountain where the cell tower is. After all, isn’t that what a vista is all about? Looking down around you?”
She whistled sharply, looking down her own drive to where Karma had disappeared. She exhaled, her breath clouding on the deep sigh. It was cold and crisp, just the way she liked it, and as she looked down at her own vista, a breathtaking view of the valley and the small town of Stone Gorge, Washington, where she lived, she guessed she’d probably be a little pissed off, too, if something marred her view in any direction.
“Momma, Karma’s disappeared again. I’m going to have to call you back.”
“That dog,” her mother tsked. She didn’t like the thundering Newfoundland dog. Her mother said it was because the dog reminded her too much of a black bear rather than a dog, and being so close to the wilderness where bears often came down and ravaged her mother’s birdfeeders, Katrina could understand the trepidation. Although Karma was a bounding bundle of soft, sweet, slobbering devotion and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Kat said her goodbyes and hung up the phone before moving down the steeply sloping drive whistling again for her dog. But as she came around one of the drive’s many curves, she found the dog snuffling into the thick leaf fall left over from that autumn’s annual shedding. Karma’s big body was blocking her view of whatever it was she had found. Fearing she’d come up with a skunk, Kat hurried forward.
“Karma, come out of there!” she ordered sharply.
And that was when she saw it. Him. It. She couldn’t decide and she was frozen in place, rooted with fear and shock, her heart pounding with sudden madness in her chest. He was probably the largest man she had ever seen in her life, and living in nearly-wild mountain country that was saying something. He was almost twice as big as the gigantic dog snuffling at him. But the most shocking thing about him was not that he was clearly nude in the slush of the last snowfall that was half melted yet, but that half his skin was gray, like the coarseness of a stone, and half was dusky, perhaps deeply tanned or maybe racially swarthy with an acre of sculpted muscle. He was lying on his stomach, seemingly dead.
Then he groaned, proving himself alive, and rolled onto his back, and all her fear melted away when she saw a copious amount of bright-red blood. She lurched forward, shoving her dog aside, as she dropped to her knees and reached out to touch him. Her hands fell onto his shoulders, one of which was chilled human skin, the other of which was as rough as stone. But that couldn’t be, she thought in some corner of her mind. Skin simply did not turn to stone. Perhaps it was a full thickness burn or some other kind of injury…But the sectioning of skin to stone fluctuated under her touch and suddenly the shoulder opposite turned to stone and the other to flesh beneath her trembling hands, robbing her completely of any further excuses.
But with that change came a sudden gush of blood down the ridges of his defined abdomen before it dripped heavily into the snow, much of which was already stained a melting red.
“Don’t…move,” she said, fumbling for her phone. “I’ll call for help.”
“No!” He reached out to grab her by her front, her thick coat suddenly feeling like nothing in the grip of his fist as he jerked her forward. All of a sudden she felt like something fragile, like he could snap her in two at his whim. “You see what I am. I canna control it. The pain…they would see what I am.” He looked up then, searching the dark predawn skies. She and her mother had always spoke in the freakishly early hours before dawn, and they always called each other through a cup of tea and coffee, respectively, touching base and bookending their days to the sound of each other’s voice. “I need shelter. Please. I canna be caught out in the daylight.”
Katrina sat there on her knees,
the wet snow melted by her body warmth seeping into her jeans, frozen with fear and indecision. In the end it was the bright red of another gush of blood that galvanized her.
“This is crazy, this is crazy,” she said under her breath in a fast, heated whisper. “Okay,” she said so he could hear her. “I’ll bring you inside. But…that doesn’t mean I won’t call for someone. If you try to hurt me…my dog will attack you.”
“Oh,” he said, his chiseled lips turning into a wry smile, “the dog that was just merrily licking my face?”
Crap. Damn it, Karma, she thought with heat.
“W-well…I-I’ll scream or call for help.”
“Thanks for the warning. Once we’re inside I’ll snap your neck to shut you up.” She gasped as he gave her another wry smile. “Doona tell the villain what you’re planning tae do when you doona know what he’s capable of. I willna hurt you. I need your help. And fast. I’m getting weaker by the second and you willna be able tae move me if I become dead weight. You’re far too small.”
He mentioned her smallness almost as if it were a terrible failing on her part and that got her back up. People had treated her like this tiny little missish thing all of her life and frankly it just served to piss her off. She was small, no doubt about that, but she could pack a punch if necessary. And after his warning about keeping her plans secret, she bit her lip to keep herself from saying as much.
Instead she reached out to help him up. It was clearly all he could do to gain his feet, and she realized just how critically wounded he was. But she couldn’t see the damage just yet with all that blood obscuring her ability to determine the worst of it. Despite his concerns over her diminutive shortcomings, he leaned heavily into her all the same, making the disparateness of their heights seem suddenly more obvious. As they trudged up the sloping drive she began to fear her ability to get him to safety. Her muscles began to burn under the strain of climbing with his significant weight against her just as the house came into view through the thickness of the pines.
Forsaken: The World of Nightwalkers Page 32
