It wasn’t fair.
Then again she was immortal. Not fair either.
His lips moved to her spine, grazing her skin as they swept upward, making her shiver. Her nipples tightened. Her insides clenched tight. God, she wanted him!
When he lifted the hair off her neck and kissed her softly behind her ear, she knew she couldn’t live another six hundred years without this. Without him.
Hell, she couldn’t live another day without this. Without him.
“Cane,” she said, breathless and so hopelessly lost.
“It’s okay, baby. We have all night.”
Thank god for that. But he didn’t understand her dismay. Didn’t know she wanted more than tonight. And couldn’t have it.
Sure, she could stick around Savannah a little while longer, but to what point? The inevitable would only chase her, and the deeper she loved him, the more addicted she was to his touch and his scent and his words… It would only be that much more agonizing to leave him when she had to.
Why would she torture herself like that?
And to walk on pins and needles to keep her identity safe when all she really wanted to do was to peel away both their layers and expose their souls to each other. She couldn’t do it.
Wouldn’t do it.
But he was right. They still had tonight. She didn’t want to squander their time together. It was much too precious.
“I didn’t realize I had such a sensitive side,” she said on a half-laugh, trying to cover her anxiety and pain and push past them.
He didn’t buy into her façade. Instead, he kissed her shoulder and said, “Believe me, Bevelyn, I never knew I could feel this way. It’s not anything I’m familiar with or even…comfortable with. This is fragile.”
She nodded. “Very much so.”
He seemed to swallow down a hard lump. Of emotion? Regret? Hope? She wished she knew.
“I don’t know how to make this last past tonight,” he said in an honest tone.
His candid words touched her heart as much as they broke it.
But how could she fight or deny or refute them?
She couldn’t, of course.
“I feel the same,” she admitted. “There’s so much about me that you don’t know.”
“And you, me.”
They were back to the conversation they’d started—and abandoned—in the foyer before passion had overcome them and no words had seemed significant enough to convey the way they felt about each other. The passion that naturally arced between them. The desire that still burned so bright.
“But…” She wanted to say there had to be a way. Yet how could she? It would be a lie. Anything they attempted to build together past this night would all be based on a lie. A monumental one. A fragile one, as he’d said.
Bev sighed. “Maybe…if…”
I knew more.
More about the curse that would revoke her immortality if she told him her secret. If she simply started a mortal life from this point… But how could that be, really? Her insides didn’t match her outsides. Even though she claimed to be thirty-one, she really looked to be no more than twenty-five or six. But internally? Good grief. Six-hundred-year-old organs. Come on. She’d die on the spot. Within seconds, no doubt.
She closed her eyes, turned away.
“I can’t just walk away come morning,” he said to her, contradicting how complex this was on his side too. Clearly he was thinking the same thing she was—that there had to be a way to make this work.