Midnight Marked (Chicagoland Vampires 12)

“No, you didn’t. But then you came to your senses, realized you were wrong.”

I tugged on a lock of his hair. “Don’t push your luck. It took some pretty good campaigning on your part.”

“Thank you for not calling it begging.”

I grinned. “I was going to, but changed my mind at the last minute.”

“Because it would have been cruel.”

“But a really good play on my part. I’d have gotten a lot of points for that.”

“Are we keeping score?”

“Yes. Redeemable for Mallocakes.” They were my favorite chocolate snack cake, although I hadn’t had one in a few weeks. Not since the Night of a Thousand Mallocakes. Which was why I was willing to give them to Ethan.

“I have no interest in your Mallocakes.”

“I’m going to hope that’s not a euphemism.”

“It isn’t, obviously.” He lowered his mouth to my stomach, nipped playfully.

“I remember the first words you ever said to me,” I said. “It was the night I was attacked. You had your arm around me, there on the grass, and you told me to be still.”

He rose onto his elbows and stared at me. I’d never told him that I’d remembered that much of it, of what had happened, and what he’d said. But those words—those two small and impossibly huge words—still had the same power.

“You remember that.”

I nodded. “I think that’s important, Ethan. I think that matters. I don’t remember anything he said or did, just the pain he caused, that he ran away like a coward.” Like he always seemed to do. “But I remember what you said to me. Those two words were, I guess, an incantation.”

He balanced his head on his curled fist, reached up to brush hair from my face. “I remember how pale you’d been, and how lovely. I was afraid we’d been too late. But we weren’t. And you grew angry, and then you grew to accept who you were.”

“And you grew to accept who I was. Except for those times you’re still overprotective.”

“I’ll never stop being overprotective. Not because I don’t believe in you, or trust you. But because that’s who I am. That’s what being a Master is all about.”

“And yet you named me Sentinel. The one person whose job is to argue with you.”

“Not just argue,” he said with a grin. “Although it often seems that way.”

Taking a ploy from Mallory, I thumped him on the ear.

“Ow,” he said with a laugh, and pulled his earlobe. “It’s about checks and balances, Merit. The point of all this is that we’ve changed. We’ve grown and evolved since the night I met you, and the night you met me.” He put a hand on my stomach. “And someday, we’ll have a child. A family. That won’t be easy—having a child, having a vampire child, and having the first vampire child. But we’ll manage it.”

“How, exactly, do you think that’s going to happen?”

He shifted into Master vampire. Mouth slightly quirked in a grin, one eyebrow arched imperiously as he looked back at me. “I’m fairly certain you know exactly how it happens, Sentinel.”

What was it with people and the conception jokes? “You know I didn’t mean that. I meant, you know”—I circled a finger toward my lower half—“the unproven mechanics of vampire gestation. To not put too fine a point on it, what’s going to keep him or her in there?”

His face went utterly serious. “Sentinel, I honestly do not know.” He pressed his lips to warm skin. “Shall we try to let nature take its course?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN