Luke moved in quick vampire fashion to hold me against his chest. “Oh, cara. It breaks my heart to know I’ve hurt you like this. I don’t know how to convince you that nobody”— he leaned back so I could see the truth in his eyes—“Nobody but you has ever captured my heart and seen me for who I am.”
A stray tear escaped my eye. “But I’m realizing I might not really know you at all.”
He wiped the salty drop with the tip of his finger. “Yes, you do. In some messed-up way, I thought I could protect myself and you by keeping my past hidden. Maybe I was too enamored of the way you strip me bare. Too selfish to give up wanting to feel like I was everything you needed and wanted.”
I placed a hand over his dormant heart. “I do love you. But I wonder if the Luke I love is the one who lives a simpler life as a mechanic. Not Luca, the crown vampire prince who is way out of my league.”
Luke captured my lips with his to stop more doubt from tumbling out of my mouth. In the moments where we existed as just the two of us, the love we felt for each other shut out the rest of the world. But that kind of existence couldn’t be sustained forever, even with a vampire.
A sob rose in my throat, and I ended our kiss. I pulled on the chain around my neck and pulled out the elephant token, folding my fingers around it to find the strength to finish the tough conversation.
“If you need me to be someone other than who I am, then maybe I should go home.” I squeezed my fingers a little tighter, the edge of the medallion cutting into my palm. “Because designer clothes won’t change the real me.”
“I don’t want them to.” Luke swore under his breath and ran his fingers through his hair. “Rue, I am so sorry that I have been an instrument to cause you pain on any level. It was never my intention for you to be hurt. In fact, my justification for keeping my past away from you was because I didn’t want it to stain our relationship. And yet it has anyway.”
Luke dropped down on his knees in front of me, and I startled backwards away from him. Taking my left hand in both of his, he pulled me closer.
“Please believe me when I say to you that I am the worst of men and a terrible fiancé,” he admitted, kissing the ring on my finger. “When I gave you this, I meant it as my solemn oath that I would take care of you for as long as you would have me. And I have failed.”
I glanced around to make sure nobody else witnessed his self-deprecating confession. It may have been my intent to get him to see my side of things, but I never meant for him to negate what he was to me.
“Get up,” I pleaded, tugging on him. “The last thing I need is for you to grovel.”
He did as I asked but kept ahold of my hand. “Tell me what I can do to make things better.”
I let out a long sigh. “First, stop saying you failed. If we’re going to be man and wife, then we’re going to screw up from time to time. I accept your apology, but don’t drown in the guilt.”
“But I cannot live with the fact that our trip here has made you feel worse,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I may have been being a tad more dramatic than I should have been. Don’t get me wrong, I’m mad as a kicked hornet’s nest about you hiding things from me, but we’re not going to get anywhere if we keep trying to go backwards.”
Luke frowned as he tried to understand my meaning.
I took off my ring, and his face dropped. However, I handed it to him and held out my left hand with my fingers wiggling. “Now, when you put it back where it belongs, let’s make a promise to each other.”
“I would be happy to pledge any troth you require,” he said with anticipation.
Raising my eyebrow at his archaic phrasing, I thought about what kind of promise we needed. “From here on out, we talk to each other about everything. Every fear, every joy. Everything.” I raised a finger in the air. “And you will answer any and all questions I have about your past, especially the ones that come up from visiting your home town.”
Luke brushed his lips over my fingers. “You will never have to hear about my life from others’ tales. Is that it?”
“No.” I squeezed the elephant token in my other hand. “Being together, especially in a marriage, is a lot tougher. Granny always told me the best advice she could give is not to go to bed angry. But since you sometimes skip sleep altogether, I think our motto needs to be that good or bad, we work through our problems. And we don’t give up until we find a way to the other side.”
Luke counted up my points and repeated them one by one until he gained my approval. With a trembling hand, he slipped the ring back into place and planted a chaste kiss over it.
“Now, about those clothes,” I added.
Luke waved me off. “It was a stupid idea of mine.”
“No, if you truly believe that it might help how your parents react to me, then I don’t mind a few pieces. I’d rather start on the right foot with them,” I said, biting my lip at the thought of meeting the future in-laws.
“Would you like to go back or pick another place?”
My fiancé acted as if I might leave him at any moment, and perhaps I
