I didn’t run away.
In case you were wondering.
I had half a dozen excellent reasons to leave the Ward mansion—a gorgeous house, half residence, half museum overlooking Central Park. For one thing, I’d been trapped in it against my will for two weeks. I’d been threatened here. Physically assaulted by a deranged woman. I’d damn well near died a couple times. I’d had my head messed with in pleasant and not-so-pleasant ways. I’d started to get claustrophobic to a degree I’d never experienced before.
And I’d fallen in love with Morgan Ward.
That, too, was a reason to leave.
All of it was a monumentally bad idea. It wasn’t about the fact that we’d all but been forced into each other’s arms by his meddling, psychopathic family. It wasn’t even about the fact that he was a vampire. By now, you must have realized I didn’t give a damn about that. Maybe I should have, maybe him being something other than human should have terrified me—or at least troubled me—but truly, honestly, I didn’t care.
What I did care about, what the deal breaker was for me, the one reason why I thought I should leave despite being in love with him was this: I didn’t believe he was ready to be in a relationship, with me or anyone else. He still hurt over a past relationship—over multiple past relationships—and I didn’t know if there was anything I could do to help him get past that other than give him time and space.
So I should have left. I’d been all set to leave, in fact, freed at last from the compulsion that had kept me trapped. My suitcase was packed and my heart resolved.
And I’d have been a complete and absolute coward if I had left like that.
Yes, he still hurt over his past relationships. He hadn’t moved on from either of the last two women he’d loved. For that matter, he had killed both of them, which really should have been one more checkmark in the ‘leave now’ column. But hurting or not, trapped in the past or not, I knew he felt something for me. He hadn’t named it, he hadn’t admitted to any feelings the way I had, but we’d been together, he’d been inside my body and mind, and I refused—I completely and utterly refused—to believe for one second that it had meant nothing to him. He hadn’t just fucked me. He’d made love to me. And then he’d tried to scare me off and prove to me that he was nothing more than damaged goods. Dangerous damaged goods, at that. I’d almost fallen for it.
But like I said, I wasn’t a coward. Or I didn’t want to be one. In the end, the result was the same.
I dragged my suitcase back to my suite, kicked off my shoes, and tiptoed through the hallways back to Morgan’s room. I have no idea why I tried to be so quiet. There were only two other people in the mansion. Stephen, the butler, was awake, as I knew quite well since he’d been the one to stop me in my tracks and make me question my runaway plan. And Morgan… If he was still asleep, no doubt he’d wake once I entered his room.
Just the same, I was as quiet as I could when I pushed the door open and stepped inside. In the bluish light cast by his alarm clock, I approached the bed. Morgan was on his side, facing away from me, the sheet riding low on his hips. I climbed in and lay down behind him, winding an arm around his waist. I pressed my forehead to the back of his neck and breathed in, taking in his scent. His usual cologne was little more than a faded memory. Stronger was the smell of him, musky, masculine—the smell of sex, too, lingering from our night together.
The moment I curled my arm around him, he turned to stone against me, dispelling any doubt I might have had that he was asleep.
We stayed like that for a long time. I kept hoping he’d turn toward me, kiss me, maybe, or even do more, and we wouldn’t need to have this conversation quite yet. Wishful thinking.
“You didn’t leave,” he finally said, and that was the very opposite of what I expected.
If you’d asked me what I thought he’d say, I’d have bet he’d accuse me of leaving his bed when I’d said I wouldn’t run away from him even after what he’d showed me of his past. That would have been the logical thing for him to say. After all, I had left; my return didn’t change that.
But when he said those three words, ‘you didn’t leave,’ I realized he wasn’t talking about the bed. He wasn’t turning things around and commenting on my return. It sounded much different. What he was saying was, ‘you didn’t leave the mansion like I expected you to. How come?’
Which meant that he knew I was free to leave. And he hadn’t told me he knew.
Granted, I hadn’t told him about Miss Delilah’s visit and the fact that she had freed me from her compulsion, but only because she’d placed me under another compulsion and forbidden me to tell him.
So how did he know?
“How did you know?”
“That you didn’t leave? Your presence here right now is sort of a giveaway.”
I tightened my arm around him and raked my teeth over his shoulder. Using teeth on a vampire. Smart, that’s me.
“Don’t pretend to be obtuse,” I said, ignoring his hiss. “You know what I mean. How did you know I could leave?”
He gave a small shrug. Feeling his body shift against mine should not have felt that good—and yet.
“This is my home,” he said. “Do you think anything can happen here without my knowledge? Like my dear sister visiting and opening the doors of your gilded cage? Honestly, Angelina. Shouldn’t you know me better by now?”
He had a point. I should have seen it coming. After all, I knew he had a PI tracking her, so I should have guessed he’d know she’d returned to New York and had come to the mansion.
“You knew the entire time?” I asked in a murmur. “Last night? When I asked you to have dinner with me?”
“Yes.”
I tried to wrap my mind around that, but it proved difficult. I’d thought I was lying to him, if only by omission, but he had known all along. Was that why he’d agreed to dinner, why he’d taken me to his bed for real this time, not just as a fantasy? Because he knew it might be his last chance? Our last chance?
And then it struck me.
“You were saying goodbye,” I breathed. “All of it. It was goodbye, wasn’t it? And you even tried to make sure I would actually leave. That’s why you tried to scare me away by showing me that memory of yours. You’re such a fucking jerk!”
Tears prickled my eyes, and I buried my face at the back of his neck, tightening my arm around him at the same time.
“Mixed messages,” he commented. “Calling people jerks and then clinging to them? Not particularly helpful.”
“Because you’re helpful?” I countered, my words muffled against him. “When you make love to me one moment and then scare me the next, that’s not mixed messages?”
He laid his arm over mine, entwining our fingers together.
“You’re still here, so I’m assuming the scaring part didn’t work very well.”
I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I was mad at him, mad at myself, mad at Miss Delilah and Irene and quite possibly the entire world—but I wasn’t sure I even knew why I was mad anymore.
“I almost left this morning,” I confided when my thoughts had quieted down. “I packed and everything.”
He’d relaxed against me, but now he tensed again.
“And then,” I continued, “I realized that’s something you’d do. Leave without a word when the conversation isn’t over. I’ve been so mad at you for doing that before. I couldn’t do it to you.”
“You should have,” he murmured. “It’d have been easier.”
And there was that word again. God, I hated it, and I hated hearing Morgan say it even more. Easier wasn’t right. Easier was a cop-out, and in the end it made everything more complicated. Pulling back a little, I tugged him onto his back so I could look at his eyes, make him look at me and see how much I meant my words when I said, “I don’t want easier. I want you.”
Before he could answer with something asinine, I pressed my mouth against his. I didn’t mean it to be anything more than a chaste kiss, but when his lips parted under mine, the invitation was too good to refuse. I touched the tip of my tongue to the curve of his mouth then slipped inside, propping myself a little more securely over him as I kissed him, deep and slow, the kind of kiss we might have shared if I’d stayed in his bed and we’d woken up together, with no unsettling discussion hanging over us.
Every soft touch of his tongue alongside mine sent sparks down my spine, and I knew that if I didn’t stop now, the conversation would be replaced by something much more pleasurable. As appealing as the thought was, we still needed to talk. So, with immeasurable regret, I ended the kiss and rested my head on his chest, my ear above his silent heart.
“I didn’t run away,” I said, pushing past the aching lump in my throat. “But I will leave. I think I have to.”
His fingers had started to run through my hair. They paused briefly, then resumed the slow stroking.
“I know,” he said. “If you stayed, I’d end up killing—”
“Don’t,” I cut in. My hand was curled around his bicep, and without thinking I tightened my grip until my nails were digging into his skin. “That’s not why. I’m not scared of that. I don’t believe that. That’s not the reason why I need to leave.”
He was silent for a little while. I let him, waiting for him to ask, “Why, then?”
“Because you’re not ready to be with someone.”
It hurt to say it, but I knew it was true. I knew it with the same certainty I knew the sky was blue, the same absolute clarity that I knew I loved him.
“You haven’t let go of them, and until you do, I don’t think you can be with me, or anyone else.”
His hand fell away from my hair. He stopped moving. It might as well have been a slab of marble under me, engraved with two names, two sets of dates four centuries apart.
“I don’t mean you should stop loving them,” I added hurriedly. “But you still feel guilty about what happened to them and—”
“What happened to them?” he interrupted me in a cold voice. “I happened to them. Me. Of course I feel guilty.”
He tried to push me off him, but I clung to him, shifting my body so that I all but lay on top of him, my head now raised so I could look at him again. His eyes were nothing but emptiness.
“Accidents,” I said in a clear voice. “What happened to them were accidents. You said you didn’t mean to kill Melody. And you said you don’t even remember what went on with… with your other lady friend. They were accidents. Accidents happen. They happened to them, and they happened to you, too. You were hurt, too.”
He let out a bark of laughter, full of a bitterness that made me cringe.
“I was hurt,” he repeated flatly. “They died. It’s hardly the same thing.”
“But it’s still an accident,” I insisted. “And punishing you for it for twenty years—”
“Now you sound like Irene.”
I swallowed back my dislike for his maker and kept my eyes locked with his, as much as I could in the poorly-lit room.
“Maybe she has a point,” I said. “Maybe she was right about everything. About trapping me here to make you realize you can still care for people. About saying you should move on. And about letting me go since I can’t help you.”
My words surprised him, I could tell. Truth be told, they surprised me as well. Irene was not my favorite person, far from it, and hearing myself give her credit… it wasn’t any easier to hear it than it was to say it. But what I thought of the woman or her methods didn’t matter. I understood what she’d been after. And I understood that she cared for Morgan as much as I did.
I didn’t know how I expected Morgan to reply. I knew what I wanted him to say—that yes, I did help him, and he wanted me to stay and help him move on—but I knew how unlikely it was. So I waited, holding my breath, wondering if this would be another one of those instances when Morgan ran away because he didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken.
He did not run away, not any more than I had. Instead, he cupped my face in both his hands and kissed me. He kissed me as delicately as though I were one of the fragile, priceless porcelain pieces on display on the first floor of the house. He trailed his lips against my chin, my cheeks, my eyelids, and finally my mouth.
I pressed back against him because I was not fragile. I wouldn’t break, not from a kiss, not from having to leave him—from having him let me leave without a protest. Because, yes, from that very first kiss, I knew this was goodbye, the same way last night had been goodbye. The difference was, this time we both knew it.
We shared a slow, deep kiss, each of us caressing the other’s mouth in turns, slowly building up again the fire that wouldn’t be completely extinguished between us. I tried to memorize everything about that kiss, from the way his lips moved against mine to the stifled moan he let out when I sucked on his bottom lip. But memorizing a kiss wasn’t enough. I wanted to take all of him with me when I left. So I let my mouth trail away from his and over his face, from his strong jaw to the delicate skin under his eyes, from that sensitive spot under his ear to the very top of his forehead. I threaded my fingers through his hair and held it back to press kisses along his hairline, from temple to temple.
I think he understood what I was doing, because he didn’t try to guide me back to his mouth but let me explore to my heart’s content, first his face, then his neck where I sucked hard to leave a love bite, his shoulders which I explored with mouth and fingertips before sliding even lower.
He lay still under me as I teased his nipples to peaks with my tongue, one after the other, gently and at length. Well, when I say he lay still… I should say he tried to be still, did his very best, but his body trembled under mine, and I couldn’t deny it was a thrill to feel it, to know how much I could affect him.
I continued my journey downward, laying wet, smacking kisses across his stomach all the way to his navel. His hands, which had been caressing my back until now, settled on either side of my head and ever so gently made me look up.
He said my name, nothing more than my name, but in that familiar, rumbling voice that never failed to set fire to my mind. How he could do that, how he could make me want him, crave him, make my panties wet, make me feel so damn empty with nothing more than a word… If I said it was unnatural and one of his vampire tricks, he’d claim it wasn’t. Either way, there we were: I was the one touching him while he’d only offered me a kiss, and still I was ready to impale myself on him and ride him until we both collapsed.
Good thing I was clothed, or I might have done just that.
As it was, it took the greatest pains in the world to control myself and continue on my journey. I wanted to taste every inch of him, and I’d be damned if I was going to stop now!
I followed the groove where his thigh met his torso, tracing it with my tongue and studiously avoiding his hardened cock. I was saving it for last. His thigh felt strong as I caressed it with my mouth. His knee was ticklish, and that discovery filled me with a little girl’s giddiness. I licked and kissed his knee, both the top and the sides, as far underneath as I could reach, and hid a smile at his quiet protests and the twitching he couldn’t quite control.
Finally taking pity on him, I made my way lower on the bed, down to his ankle where I bit the protruding bone softly. Kneeling up and sitting back on my heels, I surveyed the expanse of his body, while running my thumb into the arch of one foot, then the other.
I wanted to tell him I was going to miss him, that I didn’t really want to go, and that I’d be back if he only said the word, but when I met his eyes, I realized I didn’t need to say it. He knew all this. Of course he did.
Breaking eye contact, I moved back up his body, offering the right side of him the same caresses I had offered the left. When I reached the apex of his legs, I placed a small kiss on his sack, then a second at the root of his cock, and more, just as fleeting, just as tender all the way to the head where I swiped my tongue over the bead of precome that glistened along the slit.
I’d meant to take him in my mouth, but a quick look up was my mistake. Our eyes met again, and his were pure onyx and molten lava, both incredibly dark and yet full of fire. He moved faster than I could think, reversing our positions so that I lay on my back while he knelt astride my thighs, his hands curled over mine and holding them on either side of my head.
“My turn,” was all he said, his voice rumbling again like thunder, like waterfalls tumbling down from the stars, like all things dark and awe-inspiring.
He undressed me quickly, although I did notice his fingers were a little unsteady as he worked on the buttons of my blouse, and he ended up pulling it over my head. My jeans and underthings soon joined the blouse on the floor, and then Morgan knelt next to me, already pressing his lips to my skin.
He started at my neck, flicking his tongue along my collarbone, then down the valley between my breasts. He pressed gentle kisses to each mound, but never came anywhere close to the areolas, despite my attempts to stir him in that direction. My nipples were two tight peaks waiting for his touch, but he ignored them and instead kissed down to my navel.
It was payback, of course, for the time I had taken to explore his body. I only needed to look at his face to realize that. But if he thought I’d accept payback without protest, he was gravely mistaken. When he shifted down to settle between my thighs and explore my legs with his mouth and fingers, I pushed myself lower on the bed, getting closer to him, close enough to wrap my legs around his torso and pull him to me. He let out a sound that could have been surprise or amusement, or maybe both, and flung his arms down on either side of me so he wouldn’t topple onto me.
Looming above me, he grinned.
“My, my, Angelina. Are you in a hurry?”
Rather than answering, I reached between us to the thick, pulsing cock that was brushing as though by accident against my folds and clit. I held Morgan’s gaze as I led his cock inside me, bucking down to help him slide all the way in. His eyes closed tight for a second. When they opened again, they were full of fire. His mouth crashed down on mine, and I held him to me as he started to move inside me.
I knew I should have made it last. Now that we’d truly started, now that he was inside me again, the end would only come too fast—no pun intended. Every second we’d drawn things out had been another second spent together. Every second now was taking us closer to our separation.
Knowing all that didn’t change a thing. I needed him, and I needed him now. I needed him because I already felt like I was losing him, and the idea was unbearable. It was my choice to leave, yes; that didn’t mean I was happy about it.
I thought he might have understood—and I dared hope that he might even have felt the same way—because while his hips rocked into me in a steady rhythm, he kept his pace slow, as though to make it last. His head dipped lower and his mouth met mine, coaxing a small moan from me when he sucked on my bottom lip.
His lips retraced the path they’d taken earlier over my face and neck, but now he lost no time in covering my left nipple with his mouth and teasing it with broad swipes of his tongue. The touch sent flickers of fire through me, and suddenly I was arching against him, pushing back to take his cock deeper inside me.
He answered with a groan and sharper thrusts, and pushed himself to a kneeling position without breaking his rhythm. His strong hands grabbed my hips and tugged me closer, practically on his lap. I couldn’t move as much like that, but the angle of his cock pushing inside me, touching every part of me, felt incredible. I’d been clutching the sheets, but I needed to touch him, more of him, so I covered his hands where they clutched my hips and entwined our fingers. Our gazes remained locked. Neither of us said anything. Everything had already been said.
I couldn’t tell you how long I pushed back the waves rising inside me. I tried to make it last as long as I could—to keep Morgan just a little longer—but in the end, the waves crested and crashed through me, their force causing my world to narrow to two things: Morgan, and the pleasure we shared when he followed me over the edge.
We lay curled up together afterward, our bodies still touching everywhere, his chest moving in quick breaths along with mine. I stroked his arm, and he caressed my hair, and while we remained quiet for a long time, it was a peaceful, comfortable kind of silence. I could have stayed like that, in his bed, in his arms for the rest of my life. But of course our time together was already over.
“When are you leaving?” he asked, his voice a little rough.
His fingers continued to card through my hair; was the gesture as soothing for him as it was for me?
“I don’t know,” I murmured, but even as I said it, I knew I was lying. Of course I knew. I just wished it didn’t have to be. “I should go now, shouldn’t I? There’s no point in dragging this out.”
No point in making it even more painful than it already was.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said.
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to stay with him just a little longer. Maybe he’d even come up for a cup of coffee. Or stay a little longer than that. So of course I couldn’t say yes.
“No. Don’t. I’d like that, but it would make it harder to say goodbye.”
His hand pressed to the back of my head, angling it down so he could press a kiss to my forehead. When he pulled away, it wasn’t merely his mouth or his hand leaving me. He severed all points of contact between us and stood. I shivered.
“Have Stephen drive you, then.”
His back was already to me. He riffled through the drawers of his dresser, though without pulling anything out. He could have been the very picture of nonchalance, but his voice had betrayed him. He didn’t want me to go, not any more than I wanted to go. But he believed, like I did, that it was the only thing to do—although his reasoning was very different from mine.
I would have liked one last kiss, one last goodbye, but it would have hurt us more. I slipped into the bathroom with my clothes and made myself decent. Then, for the second time that morning, I left Morgan’s room. For the second time, I did so without a word. And for the second time, even as determined as I was, I still had to wonder if I was doing the right thing.
*