Evading (Regent Vampire Lords Book 4) (15 page)

“
Y
ou look different
,” he told her. She
felt
different to him, too. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but he’d sensed it the second their eyes met in the pool room earlier. Something in her had changed.

“Different how?” Giselle took a sip from a bottle of water she’d been nursing. She leaned leisurely against the kitchen counter, one hand tucked under the opposite armpit. She was trying to appear relaxed. He knew better. And him being the asshole he was—or maybe just a man thinking with his small head—he could hardly concentrate on anything else but the swell of her breasts playing peekaboo from her low-cut blouse.

Would he always have this visceral physical reaction to her? Hell, who was he kidding? He was a guy. He’d be two hundred and pop an instant woody if she just breathed in his direction.

“Like that invisible weight has finally been lifted.”

She smiled then.
Really
smiled. God, it hit him in the center of his chest every fucking time. He’d do anything to make her do that, twenty-four seven.

“It has,” she replied, sounding a little surprised herself.

“Come here.” Palm up, she gave it a glance before setting her bottle on the countertop. She sauntered—in that sexy way only she knew how—over to where he sat at the table. The moment her hand touched his he had her between his splayed legs. He pushed up her shirt and started roaming the flat planes of her stomach with his tongue before she could protest. “Wanna tell me about it?” he coaxed between kisses.

He thought she’d say no. Expected to have her pinned to the wood his elbow currently rested on in about five seconds when she surprised him, answering a soft, “Yes.”

“Really?” Looking up over her mountainous breasts, her lips were drawn tight, her face serious. Her eyes scared as fuck.

“Yes,” she reiterated again. “I want to tell you about it. I want to”—she paused and dove her hands into his hair, lightly rubbing his scalp—“tell you everything.”

The hard-on he’d been sporting suddenly died an awful death. His stomach felt sick.
Shit
. This was it. Everything he thought he wanted to know about her past suddenly went out the fucking window. He couldn’t bear the tears and agony each mouthful of her torment would bring him. “You sure, baby? We don’t have to do this, you know.”
We don’t ever have to do this if you don’t want
, he wanted to add, but didn’t. If she needed to do this, he had to let her.

Bottom lip pinched between her upper teeth, she answered with a small bow of her head.

“Okay then.” Heart beating a hundred miles a second, he laced their fingers together, leading her into the living room. Settling them on the couch, he kept tight hold of her as much for him as for her. Maybe more.

“So, ah…where do you want to start?” He was finding it hard to breathe already and she hadn’t even said one word.

One slim shoulder lifted up. “I guess the only good place to start is the beginning, right?”
Oh, Giselle
. She was trying to be so brave, but didn’t she see that she didn’t need to be? That she could strip herself raw and bare and he’d always, always take care of her? Soothe her? Love her?

“Stop anytime you need, yeah?”

“Okay. As much as you may want to interrupt, can I get out what I need to before you say anything?”

It would be hard, but he’d try. “Sure.”

With a fleeting smile, she took a deep breath and began. “My mammi died giving birth to me. And as you know, once your mate dies, you follow shortly thereafter, so within a few days, my pappi passed. My brothers, Cato and Aeneas raised me. Cato was the eldest, thirty-five years my senior. Aeneas was twenty years when I was born. He’d just completed his final blooding only days before.

“My brothers took my parents’ deaths hard, as you can imagine. I was living and they were dead because of me. And they never let me forget it. When I was eight, I found a letter my pappi had written me on his deathbed telling me he made them promise to care for me, love me, and give me the life he and Mammi would have.”

Her voice cracked ever so slightly, but she continued undaunted.

“But they didn’t. They hated me. Told me every day I was lucky they let me take another breath. I was death, a stain on the family name. I often wondered why they didn’t just kill me. Why they blooded me at all when they could have just let me die, but as I grew older I heard stories of our pappi. He was an honored, revered male. A pillar of the community. He founded our village, made it a refuge for the lost and the broken. He was truly a great male.

“The more I understood our family’s importance in our village, the more I understood killing me would have drawn the kind of attention they didn’t want. So on the outside, my brothers pretended we were the perfect little happy family and they were the overprotective older siblings. On the inside, though, it was anything but.”

She paused briefly, unable to hide the wistfulness in her tone. Then with a big sigh, she started again.

“My life was the very definition of hell on Earth. I wished I’d been the one who had died instead of my parents. I begged them often to just kill me and get it over with. But my death would have ruined their standing, their reputations, risked Cato’s seat on the council, which he took over from my pappi. They were rarely physically abusive—it was emotional and verbal, but they’d saved the worst of themselves for when I was older. Because they had better plans for me. It all became very apparent shortly after my fifteenth birthday.”

Looking him straight in the eye, she added, “After a female vampire’s second blooding, her biological changes are swift and…very noticeable.”

Oh fuck, no.
Nooo
. He wanted to stop her. Stop this. He knew exactly where this vile story was headed. He felt his blood burn black and his thoughts turn murderous. The thunderous roar in his ears was so deafening he barely heard her next mumbled sentence.

“…they began to ‘farm me out,’ if you will, so I could earn my keep.”

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

No. No. No.

She kept going. He struggled to listen when all he wanted to do was shut out the toxic confession.

Every evenly spoken syllable was bludgeoning torture.

Every brave sentence strung together another layer of skin flayed.

Every stoic page an unbelievable tale of horror that made his ears bleed and his gut twist.

Mike’s stomach cramped like he had food poisoning, only it was word poisoning instead.

He dug deep for grit he didn’t know he had while she purged for what felt like hours. She kept her head high and her eyes dry. How? He had no fucking idea. But he’d been right. She
was
the strongest person he knew. She was titanium. Any lesser creature would have been crushed under the oppressive weight of what she bore, young and all alone.

The only saving grace was that every last one of those motherfuckers was dead. Including the one who got away. The one Ren had told him about. Because if they weren’t? He’d find them. He’d cut their hands off so they were helpless. He’d gouge their eyes out so they couldn’t see. He’d destroy them until they begged for mercy. Except he’d give none. He’d make them suffer in perpetuity. He’d make them wish for death, knowing their souls rotting in hell would be a better fate than the wrath of Mike Thatcher.

Now things made so much more sense.

Her hesitation. Her excuses. Her defensive and cold façade. Keeping everyone at arm’s length, because if your family betrayed and used and defiled you, who the fuck could you trust?

At some point he’d tugged her onto his lap, not giving her a choice in the matter. With her ensconced safely in his arms, he tenderly stroked her hair…held her a little too tight. He could hardly stop breathing in her scent or take his lips from her temple. He connected them every single place humanly possible.

She was real.

She was here.

She was a survivor.

She talked until her throat was hoarse, but Giselle never broke.

He did, though. He had no shame that he cried quiet tears of anguish, which soaked into her hair. She had to have felt them but she didn’t call him out. Instead, she snuggled closer, needing their linking as badly he did.

When she’d been quiet for a few minutes, there was one question she hadn’t answered and he
had
to ask. He didn’t want to, but it would kill him not to know. His vocal cords felt strangled, the heinous name barely able to be pushed out. “Xavier?”

She hummed a noise in the back of her throat that made bile rise. He should have kept his mouth shut. “Never mind,” he choked.

“No, it’s okay.” She tilted her head and locked her gaze on his for the first time since she began. Bringing a hand up, she placed it gently on his face, stroking her thumb over the apple of his cheek. He realized she was wiping away his tears.

Jesus, his heart exploded with love. His eyes and nose pricked with a fresh wave of sadness. She was the one who went through unspeakable horrors, yet here
she
was trying to comfort
him
.

Unbelievable.

She spoke then, her voice soft, her gaze now focused far away. Stuck somewhere in the past again. “No one touched me physically. Well, not in
that
way at least. They did beat me pretty badly, but it was all a big mind-fuck mostly. There was a vampire with some skill I’d never heard of. He possessed part of my skill, mind sifting, but it was so far advanced. And mine doesn’t work on other vampires. His did. He could dig into your darkest thoughts, excavate your most painful memories, and make you relive every agonizing second of them. Of course, you can imagine what he found. It felt so real and I...”

Fuck. No wonder she stayed away from him for so long after that.

“Stop.” He didn’t need her to finish. While his entire body sagged in intense relief that no one had violated her again, he was done. Felt like the dried-up pulp left behind from a squeezed orange. “Don’t say anything else,” he whispered on a broken breath. “Please. I’m not sure I can take any more right now.” Or ever.

Mike was lost for words or thoughts. He was incredibly sad for but immensely proud of Giselle. The woman he was meant to live and die for could have just as easily chosen to give up rather than fight. That she didn’t was a testament to the kind of spirit that lived inside her, even back then. She was a warrior through and through, and he almost felt as though he didn’t deserve her.

Wrapped around each other, they sat silent. He lost track of time, choosing to revel in the simple things: Her warm exhales hitting his chest. The silk of her hair between his fingers. The faint scent of vanilla and…
baby powder?
...on her skin.

Then a sick feeling twisted his innards until they were tied in a thousand knots. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t say that. I don’t want your pity. That’s why I didn’t want to talk about—”

“No, that’s not what I’m sorry for, although I won’t tell you I’m not sorry all that shit happened to you, Giselle, because…fuck. I am. So goddamned sorry.” With a finger hooked under her chin, he lifted her eyes to his. “But now I am sorry about how hard I pushed you in the bedroom. I should have asked. I—”

She set a finger to his moving lips. “Don’t be sorry. I needed it. And you haven’t done anything I don’t like. You, ah…” When her gaze darted away, embarrassment colored her cheeks. It was damn endearing because Giselle did not do embarrassment.

Kissing that finger still resting on his mouth, he prodded gently, “I what, baby?”

“YouwerethefirstmaleIvebeenwithsinceIgotfree,” she mumbled, squirming a little on his lap.

Huh?

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Uh, baby, you sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents. I couldn’t make out a stitch of that garbled mess.”

She huffed in annoyance. He wanted to laugh, but he really wanted to know what turned her beautiful face a nice hue of pink even more.

“I said, you were the first male I’ve been with since I got free.”

Her sentence still ran together and he mentally worked to unwrap her puzzled message. When he thought he had, he needed to confirm it since he still couldn’t have heard her right. “What did you just say?”

“Stop it.” She swatted his chest playfully. “You heard me, asshole.”

“You really haven’t been with anyone since you slaughtered those motherfuckers?” he asked incredulously.

Her eyes shifted again and he gently grabbed her chin, directing her back to him. He patiently waited for her to respond.

“That would be correct,” she admitted in a small voice.

Holy shit.
Giselle hadn’t had a sexual partner for over a hundred twenty years?
No wonder she’d felt like a virgin. She was one in every way that mattered.
A swell of primal male possessiveness welled, his cells soaking it in like a dry sponge until he felt like banging his chest with meaty fists in the treetops yelling victory. Against his will, his cock involuntarily started joining the party, too.
Down boy. Down.
Now
is not the time.

Back to her.

“Then how did you feed?” He knew for vampires, sex and blood went together like peanut butter and jelly or Sonny and Cher, so how the hell did she feed if she hadn’t had sex in over one hundred fucking years?

The color on her face deepened. “Bagged blood mostly.”

His brows rose in question. “Mostly?”

“Sometimes I’ll feed from one of the females at Dev’s club.” She acted like it wasn’t a big deal, but again…PB&J.

“Female? Did you, uh…” Oh hell, yes.
Please
say yes.

“Jesus, you perv.” She laughed. “No, I haven’t had sex with anyone—male
or
female.”

“Well now that’s a damn shame,” he drawled. “You could have just let my imagination run wild, you know.”

“You’re such a male.” Her words scolded him, yet her tone was light and playful.

“Yeah, and I don’t hear you complaining.”

Swooping down, he captured her lips between his, kissing her sweetly and with the utter reverence she deserved. Giselle moaned, shifting on his lap until she straddled him. He held her face and deepened the connection but didn’t plan to take tonight any further. He felt as though he were swimming in an emotional cesspool, his strokes sluggish but measured so he didn’t drown. Tonight was about tenderness. He needed like hell to hold her and remind himself that she was, in fact, real, she was his, and he was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch on planet Earth to have a beauty like her wind him up like a top.