Lover Mine

and not just because she was prone.

I’m going to pick you up now, he signed while mouthing the words.

Her eyes locked on his and then she nodded and tried to sit up. As she struggled, he bent down and scooped her into his arms.

She didn’t weigh enough.

When he straightened, Doc Jane quickly flipped the covers on the bed into a fold and motioned toward the door.

The stiffness in Xhex’s body was costing her energy and he wanted to tell her to relax, but even if he’d had a voice, that would have been a waste. She wasn’t the kind to be carried under any circumstances, by anyone.

At least... normally.

The corridor seemed twelve miles long, and outside, the three yards that it took for him to cross the sidewalk to the SUV was twice that far.

V hopped out from behind the wheel and opened the rear door. “She can stretch out here. I put down blankets before I left.”

John nodded and went to lay her on the soft nest that had been made.

Her hand reached up and locked onto his shoulder. “Stay with me. Please.”

He froze for a split second... and then with brute strength, he stepped up and in while keeping his hold on her. Settling in was awkward... but eventually he got them situated against the wall of the car’s interior with his legs bent at the knees and her in his lap, cradled against his chest.

The doors were shut and then there were two more thunches and a roar of the engine.

Through the darkened windows, lights flared and receded as they sped out of town.

As Xhex started to shiver, he wrapped his arms more tightly around her, keeping her flush against his body and willing his warmth to go into her. And maybe it worked, because after a moment, she laid her head against his pec and the trembling eased off.

God... he had wanted her in his arms for so long. Had imagined it and envisioned scenarios where it happened.

This was so not it.

He inhaled deeply, intending to let out a sigh... and caught the scent he was throwing off. Dark spices. The kind he smelled on the Brothers when their shellans were around. The kind that meant his body was weighing in on his emotions and there was no going back.

Damn him to hell, there was no hiding the bonding and no stopping it. All along, since he’d first met her, he’d been inching closer and closer to that cliff, and clearly he’d pitched over the side of it when she’d fed from him.

“John?” she whispered.

He tapped lightly on her shoulder so she knew he’d heard her.

“Thank you.”

He put his cheek down on her hair and nodded his head so she could feel it.

When she pulled herself out from under, he wasn’t surprised—at least not until he realized that she wanted to look up at him.

Oh, Jesus, he hated the expression on her gaunt face. She was afraid to the point of terror, her deep gray eyes the color of flat asphalt.

You’re okay, he mouthed. You’re going to be okay.

“Am I.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Am I really.”

If he had anything to do with it, shit, yeah.

Her lids popped open again. “I’m so sorry,” she said hoarsely.

What for?

“Everything. Treating you like I did. Being who I am. You deserve so much better. I’m... really sorry.”

Her voice cracked at the end and as she started to blink, she laid her head back down and put her palm right on his beating heart.

It was moments like this when he desperately wished he could speak. After all, it wasn’t like he was going to shuffle her around so he could get to his frickin’ pad of paper.

In the end, he just held her with care because that was all he had to offer.

And he wasn’t mistaking this exchange for what it wasn’t. An apology wasn’t a declaration of love and it wasn’t even necessary, because he’d all but forgiven her anyway. Yet it helped him, somehow. It was still a far distance from the way he’d hoped things would have gone between them, but it was a damn lot better than nothing.

John tugged the sheet up higher on her shoulder, then let his head fall back. Staring out of the darkened window, his eyes searched the stars that dotted the dense, velvety black of the night sky.

Funny, felt like heaven was up against his chest instead of all above the whole world.

Xhex was alive. And in his arms. And he was taking her home.

Yup. All in all, things could have been a fuckload worse.

TWENTY-FIVE

Lash would later reflect that you never knew who you were going to cross tracks with. You just never knew how a simple decision to go left or right at a corner would change things. a Sometimes the choices didn’t matter. Others... took you into unexpected places.

At the current moment, however, he had yet to come to that realization. He was just out in farm country, driving along, thinking about the time.

Just a little past one.

“How much longer?”

Lash glanced across the interior of the Mercedes. The prostitute he’d picked up in an alley downtown was sufficiently good- looking and had enough silicon in her to do porn, but Plastic Fantastic’s drug habit had left her bony and twitchy.

Desperate, too. So strung out it had taken only a hundred-dollar bill to get her into the AMG on the way to a “party.”

“Not far,” he replied, refocusing on the road ahead.

He was disappointed as shit. When he’d played this out in his head, Xhex was bound and gagged in the backseat—much more romantic. Instead, he was stuck with this nasty ’hood rat. But he couldn’t fight the reality he was in: he needed to feed and his father was expecting some business to be done and finding Xhex was going to require more time than there was to spare.

Among the worst of the concessions was that this bitch riding shotgun was a human: Far less useful than a female vampire, but he was hoping her ovaries worked in his favor when it came to sucking her blood.

More to the point, he hadn’t been able to find one of his kind in a skirt.

“You know,” she said with a slur, “I used to model.”

“Really.”

“Down in Manhattan. But you know, those bastards... they don’t really care about you. They just want to use you, you know.”

Right. First, she needed to forget she’d ever heard the phrase you know. And second, like she was doing so much better on her own up in Caldwell?

“I like your car.”

“Thanks,” he muttered.

She leaned over, her breasts bunching up over the pink basque she had on. The thing had grease smudges from dirty hands on the sides, like she hadn’t washed it for a couple of days, and she smelled like fake cherries, BO and crack smoke.

“You know, I like you... ”

Her hand went to his thigh and then her head went down into his lap. When he felt her rooting around for his