Royal House of Shadows: Part 9 of 12 by Jessica Andersen

Author:Jessica Andersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Steeling herself, Reda looked down at her wrist. The slices were neat marks, already sealed up through some sort of vampire magic. But what made her the most queasy was the reddish circle painted on her forearm, showing where his mouth had been.

When it had actually been happening, it hadn’t really bothered her. Now, though, her stomach roiled, though she couldn’t have said why. It hadn’t really hurt all that much, and the pleasure had far outweighed the sting. More, she didn’t feel any different than she did before, and it had saved them, damn it. How was that wrong?

It wasn’t until she didn’t get an answer that she realized she was waiting for one. She wanted reason and logic to weigh in, wanted to hear from practicality, because they were the ones who could explain why her baseline human self said it was wrong for one person to drink blood from another, yet under the circumstances she couldn’t think of a good reason why.

Maybe that was her answer, and the reason why the other parts of her were staying silent—because in the end this wasn’t the human realm, wasn’t even the wolfyn realm. They were in the kingdoms where magic—and emotion—trumped.

She had heard it all before: love is messy, it hurts, it’s not logical, it defies prediction. But now she got why those were clichés, got why some people nodded knowingly over them while others looked blank.

Her parents hadn’t made any sense together. On the surface, a fey dreamer, possibly even a realm traveler, shouldn’t have had anything in common with the stalwart, conservative, linear-thinking major. Yet they had chosen each other, had made four children together. More, when she died, a piece of him had died with her—the piece that had known how to laugh, how to live, how to remember without letting the past take over the present.

Reda had long known that she was a product of her mother’s death and the way her father changed. What she hadn’t really grasped, though, was that she had also come from a love that had been so strong that it had drawn her parents together despite their differences, and whose absence had made her father a different, lesser man.

Which brought to mind another of those sayings: throw your heart over first and the rest will follow. He had done that and gotten burned. Had she on some level realized it and held herself at a distance rather than leading with her heart, not wanting the pain he’d lived through, not wanting to cause the pain he had experienced because of it?

When had she ever thrown herself into a relationship? More, when had she put her heart into it first? Maybe she had started to in the wolfyn realm, only to have Dayn’s secrets rear up between them. But even there she hadn’t given herself fully.

His test might have been proving that he could think of others before himself, but maybe hers had been to do the

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