“Need,” he repeats. “There’s that dirty word again.” He sets me away from him and releases me. “Get dressed.” With that he walks toward the patio door, and steps outside, the very act one of rejection. My hand closes around the ring between my breasts and it hits me then, that I’ve assumed I was a wife he loved. Perhaps I was a wife forced upon him. Maybe he loved another. Maybe we weren’t even married at all. Or maybe the ring belongs to my sister, or friend, or someone he would willingly invite into his life.
The ideas I’ve created in my mind slice through my heart, that dagger at work again, leaving me bleeding, when my blood is not what he wants. Or needs, apparently. But what I need is to go back to my room, to dress, to think. I can’t exactly leave with real monsters out there, I’m not that stupid, but he needs space and so do I. I grab the gown and pull it over my head, my pulse racing as I run for the stairs toward the living room of his two-level Ritz apartment.
CHAPTER TWO
I’ve made it to the lower level of the apartment when Eli appears in front of me, when he was just upstairs, but of course, I’m crazy to think any of this is paranormal. We both know it’s exactly that, but he won’t just speak the words. He won’t just be honest with me.
Standing before me, blocking my path, his muscles knotted, his jaw tense, he radiates power. The kind of power no human male possesses. The kind I’ve only known in the books I pen, the vampires I created from my imagination. Unless it wasn’t my imagination at all.
Even beyond this realization, I understand that in this moment, my body—for lack of a better term—hums when he is near. I am tingling all over, hot and uncomfortable, wonderfully aware of him. I’m angry and hurt, and I still want to touch him so badly I physically ache. God, I need space. I need out of here, before I get hurt in a billion possible ways.
“Where are you going, Ivy?” He demands, his voice low and tight, angry even.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not stupid enough to run away and into the path of a monster,” I say. “Or correction, another monster since you’re so insistent that’s what you are.”
“We both know I am.”
“I know nothing definitively aside from the fact that this is how you prefer things remain between us—messed up. Completely messed up. I don’t know how to put it. I want to put real clothes on. And go back to my room and think.”
“You’re confused about what you want and need,” he assures me.
My defenses flare, my will stronger than the drugging effect of his presence that seems to be growing by the second.
“You don’t know me, not in this life. You don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I was to you in the past—a wife you didn’t want, a friend who never became more but could have, or just a woman you once knew. Whoever I was then, I’m not her now. I think this would all be easier on us both if we remembered that.” I reach for the necklace, intending to take it off.
He catches my hand, his touch a hot branding I feel in every part of me. “You know who you are to me, and who I am to you.”
“Just like I know you’re a monster? How would I know that or anything?” I demand. “You refuse to show me any of it.”
“Because you feel us, Ivy. Just like I do.”
“What I feel is the burden I’ve put on you. I am whoever I am, but that was a long time ago. You’ve lived entire lives since.”
“No,” he says. “This is what came after living my life. I am the burden to you, not the other way around. I will do nothing but hurt you.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say, but I also suddenly feel as if I’m demanding he accept me, which is the definition of desperation. I’ve spent my entire life, incapable of truly bonding with another human being, living a solitary life. Alone. Really, really alone. And now he’s here, and just being near him, I’m alive in a way I have never been before. Those feelings are controlling me. Maybe nothing I feel is even reality. Maybe I’m conjuring a fictional romance out of one of my books. I feel alone all over again, ashamed, and embarrassed. “I just want to go to my room. I won’t leave.”
“No,” he says softly, stepping into me and folding me close, staring down at me, his gaze drawing me in, familiar in a way I cannot explain. “No, you will not leave,” he adds. “I don’t want you to leave.”
It’s hard to think with his body pressed to mine, with his blue eyes staring down at me, with the scent of him enveloping me, but somehow, I shove away the mental images forming of those things and say, “You act like—”
“A man who wants to protect you,” he supplies. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You repeat those words to the point of it becoming tedious. And I think it’s too late to stop that from happening, don’t you?”
“You have no idea what being hurt is,” he replies, “not in this lifetime. That’s what I want for you.”
“I get it. You don’t want me in your life.”
“I want you in my life more than I want anything, ever, in a million lifetimes.” His voice is low, roughened up with emotions, and he presses his forehead to mine and adds, “You want to see the truth?”
“Yes,” I whisper, my hands pressing to his waist, fingers catching his belt hoops, holding on with the sensation that I’m falling, and only he can save me. “Tell me,” I compel him. “Tell me now.”
He cups my face and tilts my gaze to his, his blue eyes, seduction and power, potent in an all-consuming way. I draw in a breath and I am back on the edge of a cliff about to tumble over the edge, I do so now—I fall, and it’s as if my body is floating into a dark abyss, falling, falling, falling…
I blink and I’m standing in an old country store—no an apothecary—a pharmacy, only it’s not the me I know as me, but rather the me who Eli proposed to. The me that was before this version of who I am now. I move around the store, gathering bottles filled with random medicines. I am my family’s nurse, the one who understands pills and potions, the one who cares for both family and friends. I enjoy this part of my life. I like helping other people.
I reach the register and there is a rack of books. I fancy myself quite the reader and enjoy reading to those I care for. A title catches my eye: Sag Harbor by James Herne, a dramatic comedy, it seems. I place the book in the basket in my hand and walk to the register. Melvin, the kind man behind the counter, greets me. “Hello, miss. Good to see you again.”