Caleb

by McCarty, Sarah

  The coldness of the next wave of nausea had nothing on the coldness of horror. “I was poisoned?”

  One palm pressed into her forehead, the other into her stomach. It might have been her imagination, but the pain and sickness seemed to lessen beneath his touch. “In a manner of speaking.”

  In a manner of speaking? Had that brief image of her packing cleavage reduced his impression of her brain power to zero? “There’s no ‘manner of speaking’ when it comes to poison. Either I was, or I wasn’t.”

  “Come to bed, and I’ll explain.”

  “Said the spider to the fly.”

  He ignored her mutter, just slipped his arm under her knees and behind her back and lifted her. The swirl of nausea kept her protest trapped in her throat.

  “Easy.”

  Allie swallowed hard and gritted her teeth. She had about one intact nerve left and that “easy” was getting on it fast. “I’m not a horse.”

  “Things would be a hell of a lot easier if you were.”

  Well, that was a heck of a note. A shift in his grip and then the coolness of the bottom sheet met her spine. She felt along the expanse with both hands. “I know I came here with clothes.”

  “You did.”

  “So where are they?”

  His hands came back to her head and stomach. “You lost your supper on them.”

  Again the pain and nausea seemed to recede. She should probably leave the horse comment alone, but damn it, she had to know. “Why a horse?”

  “What?”

  “Why would you rather I was a horse?”

  “It’s not a matter of a rather, but convenience. If you were a horse, you wouldn’t ask so many questions.”

  The bed dipped as he sat beside her. She checked her body’s tendency to roll with the flow. “And you wouldn’t have to provide so many answers.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sick as she felt, the way he said that “yeah,” all low and slow, made her pulse skip a beat. She grabbed his forearm. The rock-hard muscle didn’t give a fraction under her frantic grip. “Caleb?”

  His “Yes?” was distracted.

  “I’m too tired and sick for word games.”

  “I know.”

  There was no doubt about it, she was feeling better. And the good feeling was spreading outward from his hands. Was he a healer? She’d read about healers. “Please, tell me what happened.”

  Beside her, there was sudden stillness. The hand on her forehead slipped down to her cheek, conforming to the curve as if he were memorizing the shape of her face. “I’d rather wait until you’re stronger.”

  “And I’d rather know now.”

  His hand drifted down to her throat, the fingers curving around the base of her neck, his thumb lingering on the pulse point almost caressingly. She recognized that touch. She’d been on the receiving end of it too often to mistake it. It was something men did before they delivered very bad news, like tonight-was-fun-but-I-met-this-new-woman-and-I’d-like-to-see-her-instead-of-you kind of news. They always thought making a woman feel physically good a second before they delivered the crippling blow somehow made it better. Men were so clueless. She braced her shoulders into the mattress. “You might as well spit it out.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever horrible thing you’re going to say.”

  “You think that’s going to make it better?”

  “Can’t make it worse.” And maybe it would either get this dream over with or onto a better version. One that had him showing her how well he knew how to use the hard-on she could feel brushing her thigh.

  “I’m not going to like what you have to say, am I?”

  “No.”

  “It has to do with why I feel that I should be afraid of you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since I’m halfway there, don’t you think you could throw me a bone and give me the whole thing?”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  He’d think on it. Huh! She’d give him something to think on. Her stomach churned on the rush of adrenaline. “I need to get to the bathroom.”

  His palm pressed on her stomach. The nausea subsided. He was definitely controlling her body’s reactions. Her curiosity piqued. Years ago, during her journalist period, she’d searched the country for a real healer, chased down every tabloid rumor, hunted up every new age cult. She’d thought a piece on natural healers would make a great story for the magazines, but she never managed to find one whose talents she could verify. She’d come close at one cult, even believed the quack when he’d told her she had a special energy that needed nurturing, but when they’d started locking her door at night “for her own protection,” she’d come to her senses. And now, she was laying next to a man who actually might possess real healing skills . . . Excitement bloomed. It was difficult to keep her voice even. “I’m pretty accepting of things, Caleb. I won’t freak out if you have certain . . . abilities.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I consider myself a very open-minded person.” Nuts, if anyone asked her family, but he didn’t need to know that.

  His fingers massaged the aching muscles, relaxing them, soothing her body, her fears. She placed her hand over his. “I can take whatever it is you have to say.”

  “You really don’t know what’s good for you, do you?”

  She bet if she could see him, he’d be staring at her with his head cocked to the side the way her brothers did whenever she’d confounded them with her brand of logic. “Just because I don’t believe ignorance is bliss is no reason to get insulting.”

  “I’m not being insulting.”

  “No, you’re stalling.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, cut it out. It’s annoying and as this is my dream, I have a right not to be annoyed.”

  His fingers stilled. “You think this is a dream?”

  “It’s too bizarre to be anything other than a figment of my subconscious.”

  He resumed his stroking. “I can see you viewing it that way.”

  She stiffened. “Was that another insult?”

  “You object to insults in your dreams, too?”

  Was that a hint of a grin coloring the inflection in his deep drawl? “Absolutely.”

  “Then no, more of a statement of the obvious. It’s logical you’d decide this is a dream.”

  “Thank you.” Dream Caleb was much more accepting of the real her than most men of her acquaintance. Which was only fitting. Fiction should be stranger than truth. She placed her hand over his where it rested on her hip. “So what are you, and why am I afraid?”

  The air between them thickened with tension.

  “It’s okay, Caleb. I can take it. Just tell me.” The subconscious was very good at dealing with a lot of things the conscious shied away from. He cursed and then stilled. Tension built right along with her expectation. She felt his glare, heavier than the dark, scarier than the unknown. She clenched her fingers over his, but it didn’t help with the truth he spit out on a hoarse growl.

  “I’m a goddamn vampire and in a little while, you will be, too.”

  The shocking claim echoed around inside her head, veracity bleeding through each syllable, making everything she knew to be fact just jumbled bits of scattered reality. Vampire? Impossible to believe, horrifying to absorb, yet somehow, snapping into that empty place in her memory with irrefutable rightness. Oh God. Oh God.

  “Is that answer enough for you?” he bit off.

  She released his hand, pressed back into the bed, and inched to the far edge. “Absolutely.”

  5

  SO maybe she wasn’t as open-minded as she’d thought she was, because she wasn’t taking Caleb’s announcement of vampirism with the same equanimity with which she would have taken a statement of homosexuality. And considering the hots she had for his body, a declaration that he was gay would have kicked up quite a ruckus with her hormones. “Turn on the light.”

  “You don’t need light.”
r />   Like hell she didn’t. “Turn on the light.”

  She wanted to see his face when she asked her questions.

  His hand covered her eyes a split second before there was a click and then light flared. The burn to her eyes was incredible, even shielded. Tears poured down her cheeks. She pushed at his hand, wanting to see his face. Was he the same, or some monster caricature of himself? What in hell did a vampire look like anyway? What did she look like? Why did she even care if this was a dream?

  His hand didn’t budge and even though she didn’t voice her question, he answered. “You’re the same as always.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.” If she could see it. Weren’t vampires supposed to be unable to produce a reflected image?

  “You can see your reflection.”

  “Not if you don’t take your hand off my eyes.”

  “Your eyes are still too sensitive for any light. You’re going through the change.”

  She had an awful suspicion that the last phrase didn’t mean for him what it meant for her. “I assume you’re not talking menopause here.”

  “No.”

  Her breath came faster, harder. Allie quit trying to move his hand off her face. Breaks she didn’t want him to hear peppered her order. “I think . . . you owe me a bit . . . more elaboration.”

  His hand twitched, and she froze. Any more light than the shadow she saw and she’d go out of her mind from the agony. In a lot of ways, this dream really sucked. She much preferred the ones where they were both naked and the only pain she experienced was from screaming herself hoarse as a result of multiple orgasms.

  “Your ability to adjust to light will kick in when the change is over.”

  “Your optimistic side is showing again.” She waved her hand in the air. “Turn off the light.”

  To his credit, Caleb didn’t say “I told you so.” He just flipped the switch and let the darkness roll over her in a soothing balm.

  “How am I supposed to get around if I can’t see in the dark and can’t bear the light?”

  “The halfway stage is not permanent.”

  Halfway, did that mean this could be reversed? “Can I go back?”

  “The only out is death.”

  Great. So much for the easy way. “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.” The air around them filled with a relentless energy that felt like the edge of steel pressing into her mind. “I won’t let you die.”

  She pushed back against that invisible force, gaining nothing but a return of the knifing pain in her head. “I might not give you a choice.”

  His hand returned to her throat, wrapping around it, the fingers pressing on her pulse point. The steel in his voice threaded his drawl. “You don’t get to decide.”

  That was too much. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m merely telling you how it’s going to be.”

  With his hand on her throat, he was telling her he wouldn’t let her die? Oh yeah, that made sense. She touched her fingertips to the back of the hand pinning her. “I hope you realize the hypocrisy in your position.”

  His thumb stroked along her neck. “I’m no threat to you.”

  A memory teased her consciousness. One of his eyes swirling with lights, a horrible wound, his fangs, the vicious bite. So vivid, yet somehow surreal, floating behind a veil she couldn’t part. Fact or fiction or a blend of both? The memories danced through a distorted sense of time, her subconscious composing images to fit the reality it needed to create, rearranging the mental lies to make them seem real. A bit too real. She inched a little farther away, gaining a centimeter until that big chest came down over hers, pinning her. “You could have fooled me,” she gasped.

  “I wouldn’t have converted you if I’d had a choice.”

  Images of male faces set in hard lines along with a memory of steely resolution in hazel eyes crashed into her brain. She continued her creep across the mattress. “That wasn’t my impression.”

  Her head was firmly stuck in the middle of the bed, but she’d managed to find the edge with her foot.

  “The blood loss weakened me.”

  Or what? He would have succeeded in resisting, or something else? “You were trying to die?”

  “No.” Something brushed over her forehead. She flinched, feeling foolish once she realized it was his fingers pushing her bangs out of her eyes. “Trying to resist converting you,” he finished dryly.

  The memory of three men’s joint resolve overwhelming her opposition crept forward past her conviction that this was a dream. The memory disappeared as quickly as it came, leaving her fumbling with the remnants. “They forced you?”

  It seemed the very air absorbed his sudden stillness. “I’m not sure how much force was involved.”

  Well, that was honest.

  “Explain.” She thought she understood, though. Because along with the pain and the fear, she remembered other things. Words filled with agony, hope, determination. Words that dragged her back from the darkness with the strength of the emotion contained within them. Words that had saved her because of the will of iron that had backed them. Caleb’s will.

  His shrug felt like an apology. “They knew as weakened as I was, they could influence me, make me do what they wanted.”

  “Which was?” Good grief, this was like pulling teeth.

  “To take my mate.”

  “Mate? Who on Earth uses a word like that anymore?”

  “Vampires.”

  He kept hammering that point, as if sheer repetition could make her believe it. He had a lot to learn about dreams. The mind only absorbed what it wanted in dreams, letting the rest drift around as unclaimed will-o’-the-wisps of illusion. “Uh-huh. Well, you had a life before you became a vampire, and I’m reasonably sure you remember it, so I think you can choose vocabulary to reflect it.”

  “You don’t like the word ‘mate’?”

  She shook her head. “Way too caveman.”

  “Fine, they wanted me to take my woman.”

  “My woman.” Like that was a step up from mate. “Why?”

  The pause between her question and his answer was thick with emotion she couldn’t define but felt she should. For her safety and her sanity, but, from one blink to the next, the strength to do so evaded her grasp.

  “To keep me here.”

  “In this life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you want to stay?”

  “It wasn’t so much I wanted to leave as much as I was determined to do the right thing.”

  “By me?”

  “Yes.”

  It was probably the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her in or out of her dreams. “Is that why you came around my shop every morning? Because you liked me?”

  “I couldn’t resist you.”

  She was more the type of woman men had to get to know to appreciate than one who overwhelmed them with lust. “Right.” She worked her other leg across the mattress. His fingers stroked her pulse with soft persuasion.

  “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever set eyes on.”

  “Thank you.” She rubbed her forehead as the pressure beating behind her eyes increased in a slow, building threat. Thinking was definitely hurting her brain. “So, because you thought I was attractive, you thought it was okay to show up every day at my bakery tempting me?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The weary note in his voice slammed her ego. Did he regret meeting her? “Well, no one asked you to strut your stuff in my store.”

  She was right about that, Caleb knew. Not one person had been happy with his fascination, least of all himself. But like a moth faced with the temptation of light, he’d needed to see her, and because he had, the D’Nally wolves had caught scent of his interest. And that had put her in danger. Because the renegade Dane had acted on it, seeing it as the perfect route to revenge for whatever the hell Jace had done to set the pack against them. The question was whether Ian D’Nally had sanctioned the attack. C
aleb didn’t particularly want to escalate the tension between the Johnsons and D’Nallys to outright feud, but a pack-sanctioned attack against his kin would do it. He caught Allie’s hip in his hand as she inched toward the edge, his senses coming alive as the soft fullness shaped to his grip. “Didn’t one tumble teach you that isn’t going to work?”

  “It taught me that I need a different approach.”

  He shook his head, the smile sneaking up on his blind side as she continued undeterred. She had to be the most determined, resilient person he’d ever met. He doubted she even had a passing acquaintance with the word “quit.” “You need a guardian.”

  The shove she gave his arm spoke volumes. “I can take care of myself.”

  He slid his hand over her shoulder. His night vision was excellent. Not as versatile as day vision, though. It was more of a blend of intense black and white with startlingly accurate shading. It had taken him a while to get used to the lack of color, but after the first fifty years, he’d adjusted. Especially since the satin texture of Allie’s skin glowed like the palest white against the surrounding dark. Like moon glow, calling for a longer touch. A lingering. He resisted the urge. She might think him a dream, but he was pretty sure she’d object to even his dream self taking liberties.

  He settled for just making a bracelet of his fingers and sliding them down her arm. He turned her palm up and stroked the indent on her wrist that his bite had created. His fingertip slid along the groove that marked the change for them all. The deep indent would soon be invisible, obliterated as her conversion completed, but permanent nonetheless in the effect it would have on them all. In the change it would bring.

  He had a wife now to protect, to answer to. A mate. A flicker of movement brought his gaze to her face just in time to catch the nervous pass of her tongue over her lips. A very scared and confused mate who needed his care. Beneath the translucent skin of her throat her pulse throbbed, a too-fast contradiction to the sass in her attitude. A sass he completely enjoyed. In his day, they’d have called Allie high-spirited. Forward. Hot-blooded. His eyes narrowed, concentrating on the pulse point, following the rich flow of blood as it raced along the artery. Very hot-blooded. A woman like her drew men like flies, many for the wrong reasons. A woman like her fed a man’s sense of adventure, challenged his preconceptions, made him think, made him feel. A woman like her definitely needed a protector, because women like her were rare.