Vacation with a Vampire & Other Immortals by Maggie Shayne & Maureen Child

Author:Maggie Shayne & Maureen Child [Shayne, Maggie & Child, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises
Published: 2011-06-30T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

It was killing him to treat her as coldly as he was. He didn’t want to. He wanted to scoop her right up off her feet and carry her back to bed. He wanted to ravish her over and over. He wanted to drink from her again. He wanted to feed her, too. Feed her from his own veins. Share the Gift with her.

But what he wanted had nothing to do with anything. Self-preservation came first. It was what had brought him to this island in the first place. The need to stay solitary. The need to be completely self-contained and not dependent upon anything temporal. And everything was temporal, when you came down to it. Everything. Humans, totally mortal. Lived, died, gone. Houses, homes, rotted with time. Cars fell apart. Money. Jobs. Hobbies. Friends. Relationships, even with other immortals. Nothing lasted.

Nothing but him.

He was meant to be alone. He’d lost sight of that for a time with Cassandra. But he’d learned from that experience, from the pain of it. And he’d brought himself around to being at peace with solitude again. Until Anna had shown up here and brought all those old longings back to screaming life.

If she stayed any longer, he was going to fall in love with her. He was going to let himself believe she really was everything she seemed. Already he felt himself sliding down that slippery path. How many times, just in the past hour, had he caught himself believing in her?

Why was it so hard to let her—make her—go?

She was one of the Chosen. All right. He got that. That meant that there was an automatic bond between them. He couldn’t hurt her, not even if he wanted to. And he was compelled to help, to protect, to watch over her. He got that, too. Those things were the case with any member of her caste.

But this…this feeling of her being…being a part of him, of his life, of his soul, a part that had been missing all this time—it made no sense. It was far beyond what he’d come to understand were the limits of the blood link between his kind and hers.

The sharing of blood increased the power of the bond. He knew that, too. But he’d had little choice about drinking from her. He would have died otherwise. But that had only made things worse. Made her feel even more a part of him. A necessity to him.

Probably he was suffering some ordinary reaction brought on by spending years with almost zero contact with other living beings. Probably it was natural to imagine some supernatural bond with the first female to come stumbling into his life in nearly half a century.

But it wasn’t good for him to feel this way. He wasn’t going to humor this thing, or even tolerate it. She had to go before he fell any harder for her.

As he thought that, he realized he was actually afraid of her. Afraid of the heartbreak she could cause, of his own vulnerability, of the pain he’d suffered the last time.

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