Passion Bites: Biting Love, Book 9 (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I left the boardroom feeling confused. Confusion, bad enough. But
feeling?
Brrr.

Luke, Twyla and Nixie were waiting for me outside the door to escort me out of the maze.

Oh, and to interrogate me.

“What’d he say?” Twyla asked the question that was obviously on all their minds.

But I could only shake my head. I wasn’t sure he’d really said anything. “I have to get to the infirmary.”

Luke said, “You’re going to seek healing. Good.”

“I’m going to check up on the household members who were injured. Then I’m going home for a while.” For as long as it was my home.

A line extended all along the hallway to the infirmary, a room the size of a high school’s nurse’s office. Inside, Zinnia handed out aspirin and antacids. The moment she saw me she leaped to her feet with a smile and a “All yours” gesture, and scooted.

Luke hovered while I tried to work, so painfully in the way that I finally snapped at him to help or clear out. I was sorry until he sulked. Our eyes met and we grinned sheepishly at each other. He got busy finding chairs and handing out bottled water to those who waited.

After checking over everyone, I lugged myself up the stairs and across the yards to my…Mr. Crahn’s townhouse. I got Luke to stay at Emerson’s by telling him that I wanted time to myself, but really it was because the sun was already high in the sky and I didn’t want him to burn.

Creeping upstairs, I took a moment to check on my bestie. Lizelle was snoring in her room, and Una was fast asleep in hers.

I stood in the hallway debating with myself. She needed to know about her husband. But as I tried to frame words that would ease her grief, yet didn’t make him somehow a martyr, my heart beat harder and my mind went blank.

Would it hurt to let her sleep awhile? Yes, she needed to be told that John Umbras was dead. But why did she have to find out from the most ill-equipped person on the planet to deal with it? She might hate him, but that would actually probably make her grief more complex and harder to cope with.

I peeked into her room. She wasn’t sleeping peacefully, she was rolling around on her bed and grunting. I sighed and whispered, “Lizelle?”

She woke in terror. I went to her, taking her awkwardly in my arms. She blinked at me and the terrors receded.

“Alexis.” She straightened. “Thank you for waking me. I was dreaming we were back there in that awful room, but we’re safe. Me and Una. Because of you.”

“You’re welcome.” I felt like the worst kind of person for the bait and switch, life-saver to life-ender, I was about to pull.

But it wasn’t going to get easier.

Still, I started small. I released her, stood up and went to the window. The grass was green. I’d miss this place. “Did you know John was living in Julian’s townhouses? That was why he was at the wedding shower last night.” Ready to seduce Lizelle back, so he could grab Una for experimentation, but I didn’t say that.

“He was?” She sounded surprised, but I glanced back at her face to make sure, and to see how she absorbed what I was about to say.

“Yes. He was working for Giuseppe Marrone.”

She shook her head, but not in negation. “A monster working for a monster. Fitting.”

“Maybe, Lizelle, but…well, there was a fight. A big one. John…” I stared down at my hands. Here it was. “He didn’t make it.”

“He…he’s dead?”

I nodded. “He was killed. Fighting for Marrone.”

“Well. Good.” She spat it, but her eyes were suspiciously bright. And she was staring at her closed door. Where, across the hallway, her daughter slept, unknowing that her father had died.

Then she sobbed and tears started running down her face. I didn’t think it was grief for a beloved husband, but she’d had a series of shocks, and though he’d abused her physically and emotionally, her main financial resource was gone. And maybe there were emotions brewing in there I knew nothing about. I wanted to comfort her but hesitated. Even I could see that, whatever those emotions were, they pooled inside her like blood in a bruise. One wrong word from my glass monster could cut already fragile skin and send her hemorrhaging.

I didn’t know what to do. Even if I could find the right ones, words were utterly inadequate. Then she covered her face in both hands and bawled, and
I
was utterly inadequate. She hunched there, crying her heart out, and I didn’t know what was best for her. Should I try to hug her? Try to jolly her out of it? Bring her a hot beverage? My own heart wanted to cry, hurting for her, my bestie.

What did I do to stem the flood of emotions—me, who understood them the least?

Yes, words were inadequate. But as she cried all alone on the bed, I realized silence was worse.

Something, maybe my own burgeoning feelings for Luke, maybe how he accepted my glass monster, helped me to reach out, wrap her in a hug and simply say, “Lizelle. I’m so sorry. Tell me…tell me how you met John.”

“How we met?” She swallowed. “My father…he beat my mother. When I reached puberty…” She hiccuped a sob. “He began abusing me too. John came into my life like a fairy tale prince, and took me away from all that.”

She continued. I listened, wordless. What could I say? I hadn’t known. More, I’d never asked. I knew her parents fought, but as a child I’d never even considered worse. I felt even more inadequate, but I was damned if I was going to let that stop me from being here for her now. I stroked her hair in the comforting way Luke had stroked mine.

And listened as he had, just listened in silent support.

Finally the words slowed, and she straightened away. “Thanks.” I handed her a box of tissue and she wiped her face. “Telling me…that couldn’t have been easy for you.”

“No. But you had to know. Did I…did I do it right?”

She gave a watery laugh. “There is no right or wrong. But you were a friend. And that’s enough.”

Lizelle told me she wanted to be alone for a while, so I reluctantly got up and left the room to stumble into the bathroom.

After a long hot shower, I fell naked onto my bed and slept a solid eight hours.

I woke when a familiar erection nudged me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Luke spooned against me, his eyes closed, golden lashes curled against his cheek.

From the warmth of my body where we pressed together, he’d lain with me through much of the day.

Slowly, lazily, his lids rose. His cock nudged me again, more eagerly. Then more insistently.

“Feels like you’ve recovered,” I murmured.

“You too,” he murmured back.

Sleepy sex is slow and gentle at first. There was no need for foreplay. It had come throughout sleep, as we turned in unison from one side to the other, always pressed skin to skin. As my nipples brushed his muscled back, as the hair of his thighs rubbed the back of mine.

“I feel better.” He pressed a kiss to my shoulder, breath warm. “You?”

“Better. Mmm, that’s better yet.”

“Then I’ll keep doing it.”

“Good. Do this too.” I tilted my hips back and slotted the head of his cock in my pussy, already warm and wet and soft from sleep, from dreams.

He made a small hungry noise. One hand glided down my flank to anchor my hip. Slowly, ever so teasingly, he slid inside me.

I hummed low in my throat, pleasure shimmering through me like a hot summer day.

“You like?”

“Oh yes. You?”

“Very much.” Slow, almost lazy, he began to move behind me. Inside me.

My interest built with each thrust, first tiny sparks of
mmm,
then little bursts of
ahh,
then harder, deeper
oh yeahs,
until I started pushing back with almost as much strength as he drove in.

We moved together, faster now, through the kaleidoscope of ever-changing energies. Coiling desire, relaxing for a moment then spiraling tighter. He reached around and pressed a warm finger into my cleft, unerringly finding the swelling center.

I mewled.

“More?”

I had no words, only urgent, half-formed sounds. Still he heard, understood, slicking his finger along my aching clit. Rocking himself into me, over and over, pushing me toward the pinnacle until I was about to go over.

He grabbed my hips with both hands and thrust soul-deep.

Desire burst. I arched against him. He held me tight, murmuring love words as I exploded again and again and yet again.

When it died down to aftershocks, I realized he was still hard and thick and rigid inside me.

“You.” I squeezed internal muscles. His arms around me tightened in reaction. “You,” I said again, squeezing harder. “
Now.
”

Maybe I had learned a bit of vampire voice, or maybe it was reinforcing the words with decathlon-caliber Kegels, but his fingers tightened spasmodically and he threw back his head and hissed, juddering into me so hard I could feel his testicles contract. The tugging sent me into another small series of after explosions. I squeezed him in time with his contractions, to reinforce them.

He cried my name in a choked voice.

Eventually he relaxed his grip on my hips. His arms came around me, holding me to him. He pressed a kiss to my shoulder, like the beginning, only now my skin was damp under his lips. “Sorry,” he murmured. “That got a little rough.”

“You always say that. And I always say I’m not sorry.” I smiled and relaxed against him. Having done so well with Lizelle, I tried a little emotional honesty. “Because, rough or gentle, I simply like being close to you.”

Maybe I hoped he’d say something touchy-feely in return, like “I like to be close to you too” or “I’d like to get closer” or even “I’m falling in love…”

But Luke said nothing.

Instead he rolled to his feet with a sigh and started pulling together clothes. “We’d better get you some food.”

I understood intellectually he was suggesting food as an avoidance. An evasion mechanism, a game that, once we’d started it, would play out each time we got near the subject of closeness and connection.

My newfound tentative emotions told me he and I were on a cusp. If we didn’t talk it through, if I went to eat now, that’d be it—there’d never be an “us”.

Oh, sure, there’d be more sex. But the nascent connection I’d found with him? It had taken nearly losing both our lives for him to open up as much as he had.

Unless I wanted to risk death on a regular basis, we might never connect again, not at that basic level.

We’d gone through so much to get here. His shutting down and starting to walk away was more than I could bear. Pain tightened my throat, my lungs, made my eyes prick.

“You…” My voice sounded thick to my ears but I forced myself to continue. “You don’t want to talk?”

“Not right now, not really. Don’t you want to eat?”

Not at all. My stomach churned so bad I wanted to vomit. Unless I did something right in the next minute, this was it. Game over. Connection broken. Luke as gone as if he’d burned under Luther’s UV lights. Pain skewered me, like a physical sword through my chest.

People talk about closed doors and open windows and never getting shipped more than you can handle.

But the truth is, sometimes life is shit hitting the fan, and sometimes you’re standing in front of it and no window or door appears and
life laughs.

People break; I broke once when my only friend Lizelle walked out of my life.

I was breaking now too. Or my heart was—I’d kept myself away from emotions for so long I couldn’t tell.

I had to do something. But what? I wanted a union like my parents had, two people, connecting at the soul level. But Luke…he wasn’t ever going to forget his wife.

Adelaide. I was briefly jealous of a woman who’d been dead for three hundred years; who, from Luke’s story, had barely lived before she was gone.

They weren’t mates, but she had a death grip on Luke’s heart, the heart I wanted for myself.

My jealousy burned into rage. Couldn’t he see I loved him more than her?

I love him?

Lizelle had told me he was the one. The one person who would always love me and always have my back. The kind of passion only unlocked by one other soul.

But how could he be my one, when he’d already surrendered his heart to Adelaide?

Pain, fear, jealousy, rage. Passion. Emotions that I normally either thrust away, or stood in paralysis while they overwhelmed me.

Now I did neither. I recognized them. I acknowledged them. And then…then I simply let go.

Slowly, I released my hurt, my rage. My eyes stung with tears as I let go of my passion for him. But I did it because I’d never replace her in his heart.

And then I thought “Why?” Why was I trying to replace her? I remembered Luke telling me he loved my face’s lines, my lowered breasts, because they were part of the journey that made me.

That centuries-long love, that
constancy,
was what made him Luke.

His heart was perfect the way it was, broken, Adelaide holding a piece forever.

Kintsugi.
In that moment I saw my way clear to sharing in his life, every bit of it, and a joy burned away my tears, so immense it could only be called true passion.

“Before I go get food…first, I want to thank you.”

He turned, clothes in his capable hands. “For what?”

“For showing me another way.”

“I don’t understand.” He slowly sat on the bed, not next to me, but not far.

Hope loosened my lungs. “I learned from Lizelle that a change of plans leads to disaster. To events I wasn’t prepared for, not physically and most important, not emotionally. But you showed me another way. You showed me not to push the emotions away nor to let them overrun me, but to acknowledge them and use them to find the right path.”

As I went along I realized I—my heart—was opening up to him, and that it was good. Because if I didn’t get this right, before he walked out of my life forever, I wanted him to know me, the real me, all of me.

Who knew? Maybe he’d love the real me.

“During our escape, you showed me that planning is good for identifying problems and brainstorming solutions—but plans aren’t an end in themselves. Plans change, even goals change. The planning is important, not the plan
.
”