Lost Paradise (27 page)

I couldn’t teleport with him hanging onto me,
unless I wanted to take him with me. That was the last thing I
wanted. “Get your hand off me!” I hissed. “I can see how much
sleeping beside me means to you. We’ve slept together all week, and
you’ve only been content because you’ve been fucking someone
else—!”

“You let
her
sleep with you?”
Catherine said, shocked and hurt. “You’ve never let—!”

“I couldn’t understand why it kept falling
off!” I screamed, tears running down my face. “This is why! You
broke your promise to me!”

“Sar, you weren’t supposed to find out—”

“I found out, Devlin. We’re done.
Goodbye—”

“We will never be done!” he shouted harshly.
“I love you. You’re having my child—!”

“What are you talking about, girl?” Catherine
said, coming towards us. “Dev took no oath of fidelity to
you—!”

She was wearing my robe! Bitch!
“Yes,
he did!” I screamed, pulling the shreds of my pride together. “He
promised to be with only me here. No other lover was supposed to
share his bed here, you cunt!”

“Dev, is this true?” Catherine said coolly.
“No wonder you came to me at my hotel all this week and wanted to
take me to a hotel tonight instead of here—”

I headed for the stairs. “I don't need to be
here for this!”

Devlin tightened his grip on my arm. “You are
going nowhere!” he hissed. Then he turned to Catherine. “But you
are. Get your clothes on and leave. Don’t ever come back,
Catherine. I never want to see you again.”

“Bastard!” Catherine hissed, baring her
delicate fangs.

Devlin tried to pull me back inside his
bedroom. “Sar, come back inside, please—”

I held onto the doorframe with all my
strength. “No. I don’t want to see you ever again—”

“You never have to, girl,” Catherine said
with a smirk.

Chapter
Eleven

Catherine’s eyes flashed. “Dev promised to
only be with you, to not have other women here in his bed. Is this
true?”

“Yes,” I grunted, still gripping the
doorframe hard. “Yes.”

“Shut your mouth, Catherine,” Devlin growled,
his eyes red tinged. He let go of me and started towards her. “I’ll
warn you just once.”

“He broke his Oath to you, child,” Catherine
said gleefully as she backed away, her eyes glaring furiously at
Devlin. “You’re free of him. If the choker fell off, it recognized
what he had done, that the Oath was irreparably broken—”

“Get her out of here, Lash!” Devlin
yelled.

Catherine was yanked backward, snarling and
struggling. Lash grabbed her hands, knotted them together in one of
his, and began dragging her down the stairs. She was swearing at
Devlin, and fighting, but Lash was stronger than she was.

I turned back to Devlin. “Let me go!” I
demanded.

“No,” he said, drawing me into his arms. “I
love you, Sar. I just needed—”

“You don’t love me, and you never did,” I
said slowly, deeply hurt. “I was a fool to think you could, that I
meant anything to you.”

“Don’t say that,” Devlin said raggedly, tears
welling in his eyes. “You mean everything to me.”

“Stop lying!” I screamed, and threw his
choker at him. He caught it in his hand, snatching it out of the
air.

“I want you to know something,” I said
hatefully. “You won’t ever see this child, not ever. It’s clear you
aren’t fit to be a father. Danial can help me raise him—”

“You can’t keep me from my child!” Devlin
roared, his eyes glowing red. “You have no right, Sar! How dare you
even speak those words!”

“I have every right!” I screamed back at him.
“You lie about everything, Dev. All you know is seduction and
sadism, and how to manipulate people! Nothing and nobody truly
means anything to you, except maybe Lash.”

Devlin glared at me, his face contorted and
terrible in his anger. For a split second, I thought he might
strike me. Instead he took his hand off my arm.

The second I was free, I teleported back to
Danial. He was on the couch waiting. As soon as he saw my face, he
hugged me. “Did you find him with someone?” he asked.

“Catherine,” I said emptily. “He called her
Catherine.”

“She was the first woman he turned,” Danial
said. “I’m not surprised he was with her, though I am surprised he
would choose to do that particular act with a vampire—”

“He was having regular sex with her, not oral
sex. He broke his Oath to me.”

Danial held me tighter.

“I confronted them, Danial. Catherine said I
was free of my Oath, that it was broken.”

Danial pulled back from me, his brow knit in
confusion. “That’s not true, Sar. Only Devlin can dissolve the
Oath. And he would never—”

“She said that was why the choker fell off,
Danial,” I said accusingly. “That is why it’s been falling off all
week. That crap about rebalancing was just an excuse to cover up
that he’s been sleeping with her.”

Danial abruptly sat me on the couch and
headed to his study. “Stay here, please. I need to check
something.”

“What?”

“I need to know if she was telling the
truth.”

Was he going for his copy of the vampire
law book?
Must be, odd as it sounded.

I made myself some hot chocolate. The warm
liquid soothed me, even as I berated myself for being a fool. At
least Theo hadn’t been here to see it. Once he knew, it was going
to be one big “I told you so.” And the worst of it was he was
completely right: I’d been an idiot. I’d known exactly what Dev
was, and I’d loved him anyway. I’d thought he’d change for me, that
I’d be the one to tame him, when I was old enough to know
better.

After finishing my cocoa, I went into
Danial’s bedroom, slipped into pajamas, and went to bed. Today had
been bad. I wasn’t giving it the opportunity to get any worse.

* * * *

Danial was shaking me. “Wake up, Love,
please.”

I blinked, then yawned. “What is it?”

“Sar, it’s true,” Danial said emptily. “You
are free of him. The Oath is broken.”

Relief crashed down on me. I sank back down
on the bed and relaxed utterly. I didn’t have to have any more
children. I didn’t have to go to Hayden tomorrow. I’d miss Lash and
Serena, but not enough to go back there. Maybe Serena could visit
me here. As for my friendship with Lash…I’d think about Lash
another day. What mattered was I no longer had to do what Dev told
me, or worry he wasn’t happy. I wasn’t bound to him anymore. I’d
been so tense for so long. Now suddenly, my chief source of tension
was gone.

Danial still was looking at me miserably in
silence.

“I’m not free of you,” I said, opening my
arms to him. “And I wouldn’t want to be.”

“He accepted for me. There is a gray area,
Sar, as he is the one you actually Oathed to.”

“My choker with your symbol is still in
place.”

“I can see that, Love. But it doesn’t mean
the Oath we share isn’t broken.”

“I acknowledge your rights to me, Danial
Racklan,” I said softly, as formally as I could. “I Sarelle
O’Connor, swear to you that I will take no other vampire lover,
save you—”

“Save I and my brother,” Danial said
quietly.

I gave him a furious look, and stopped
talking.

“Sar, he did it for me,” Danial said
apologetically. “I couldn’t do less for him.”

“Then you will have to stay in your gray
area,” I said flatly. “I’m not opening that door, Danial, now that
I’ve finally been able to shut it. I’m not letting him back in my
life.”

“Sar, you love him,” Danial said cajolingly.
“He’s the father of your child. There is no shutting that door, not
now.” He touched my shoulder, then slid his hand to my hip. “You
have his mark beneath your very skin.”

I turned away from him, and didn’t answer. A
few moments later, I felt him lowering himself carefully next to me
in bed, so he could spoon me. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, hugging
me. “I’m just worried about losing you.”

“You aren’t going to lose me,” I replied.
“I’m going to need your help, Danial. When the dhamphir is born,
I’ll have to leave him with you until they are old enough for me to
handle safely.”

“What?” Danial said, shocked. “Dev can’t have
agreed, Sar. He’s wanted a child of his own for so long—”

Who cared if he agreed?
I sure as hell
didn’t. “Danial, we can’t just let him take the baby, when he’s so
irresponsible. What if he decides he needs to have sex and leaves
the baby alone?”

“He won’t do that,” Danial said patiently.
“But in any case, I will not help you keep Dev’s child from him.
That is as blunt as I can say it. ”

“You don’t have to keep him away,” I said
stridently. “Just don’t let him just take the child to Hayden. I’ll
never see it—”

“You will have to go there and visit your
child,” Danial said firmly. “And you will have to face Devlin. You
are having a baby with him, and you are an adult, Sar. The baby
will need him; need his guidance as its father. You don’t need me
to fight your battles for you, at least, not this kind of
battle.”

I didn’t answer, fuming. As angry as Danial’s
refusal made me, without his help I’d have to let Devlin take the
baby, and visit it at Hayden. The only possibility was that if Dear
Dev screwed up enough, maybe Danial would come to his senses.

The phone rang. Danial picked up the phone.
“Stay silent,” he instructed me, then he pushed the speakerphone
button and said, “Hello, Dev.”

“I don’t understand how this happened,
Danial,” Dev replied, his slightly distorted voice irritated. “I’ve
never heard of a collar falling off before, not when it was the
vampire who’d—”

“Dev, you broke your word,” Danial said
edgily. “Sar is within her rights not to see you for a while, if
not to dissolve the Oath entirely.”

“The actual Oath had nothing about other
lovers for me in it,” Devlin said quickly. “The Oath still stands.
There must be some problem with the collar. I’ll take it back to
the jeweler—”

“Be as that may, it doesn’t really matter,”
Danial retorted. “I’ve checked the laws. According to the choker,
you broke your Oath. It couldn’t bind Sar once you did. Every time
you broke your word to her, it released her by falling off. She
kept refastening it. By doing so, she was telling it that she
accepted what you were doing. But now she has refused to refasten
it. She gave it back to you, so she’s not bound to you anymore,
though the Oath to me still binds her.”

“It does not,” Devlin said dangerously.
“Don’t quote me law as if you know it all, you who have Oathed,
what, three women in your four hundred plus years of life? I took
her Oath. You were not even there to consummate it! I acted in your
stead. You would never have dared to—”

“The same jeweler made the choker with my
emblem, Dev,” Danial said angrily. “Mine has never fallen off by
itself. Never. At the least, Sar is marked as my lover. As such,
it’s within my rights to protect her, to make her happy. As she
doesn’t want to see you, I forbid you from coming here until she
instructs me otherwise!”

“You could ask that she see me,” Devlin said
hesitantly. “By law, she has to, if you ask.”

“I won’t ask her to,” Danial said coldly.
“Sar will see you when she’s ready to.”

“Danial, please—”

“Dev, you should have either never promised
to be faithful to her, or you should’ve kept your word. I have no
pity for you, not after how you acted. I’m sure you are very sorry
now. You always are,
after
you’ve been thoughtless! But you
never learn—”

“Danial, please tell me you won’t keep me
from my child,” Devlin said, panicked.

“You know I won’t,” Danial said gently. “And
I’ll keep you abreast of any doctor appointments or developments.
But Sar is not going to come to you, or stay with you at Hayden.
Not this week. Maybe not ever again.”

Devlin didn’t reply.

“And don’t issue threats about telling
Samuel,” Danial said flatly. “You would never want it known Sar was
not Oathed to you anymore. We will not say anything, and I know
neither will you. You love her too much to risk her falling into
their hands.”

“I do love her, Danial,” Devlin said
brokenly. He began crying. “So much it tears me apart.”

“I know you do,” Danial said gently. “But you
got yourself into this. You will have to deal with the consequences
of your actions.”

“Keep her safe,” Devlin said reluctantly.
“And make sure you give her enough blood to keep her well. If she
is not seeing me, she’ll need you more than she has before.”

“I gave her blood last night,” Danial said
easily. “She was radiant after, almost glowing. And her teeth got
sharp, like mine. Would you believe, she actually bit me—”

Devlin made a strangled sound.

“What?’ said Danial.

“Don’t give her that much again,” Dev finally
got out. “You’ll turn her, Danial.”

I almost let out a scream, but clapped my
hand over my mouth.

“You said she could not
be
turned!”
Danial shouted at the top of his lungs.

“I never said that!” Devlin yelled back at
him. “I said she was not turning back in the fall. She wasn’t
turning when I saved her. No amount of sex can do it, it’s true.
But our old blood is potent, Danial. Sar is very resistant to the
virus. Did you hear what I said? Resistant, not invulnerable. A
massive amount could turn her. If her teeth got sharp, she was
close—”

I gritted my teeth.
Why was it always
Devlin who had to have the answers I needed?
Danial was just as
old. What the fuck had he been doing all those years, that he
hadn’t learned any of this? Damn it!

I made myself breathe deeply. Not knowing
wasn’t Danial’s fault; he’d only had the power to turn humans for a
few years now. And he had never had a woman like Annabelle for a
companion. Devlin knew most of what he knew regarding me because of
her, and the decade or so they had spent oathed to each other.