Bled Dry (33 page)

Everyone but her, that is. She was more confused than happy, but it wasn’t her arena. It wasn’t her political battle. If Corbin and Ethan thought it was the right step to take, she would have to trust them. Her concern was her child. “So since Donatelli knows about the baby, there isn’t much use in me running off and hiding, is there?”

Corbin shook his head, his green eyes troubled. “No. I see no real value in you cutting yourself off from friends and family who care about you and can help you with the baby.”

But not him? Brittany’s heart started to pound. Corbin didn’t look right. “What about us? Where do we go from here?”

“It is still dangerous, I will not shield you from that this time. We must be cautious, vigilant, where the baby is concerned. I have not yet decided which is better—to live in Vegas, where you have friends to protect you, or to start anew somewhere else, where no one will be watching you.”

“If it’s not clear-cut, I’d rather stay in Vegas. It would be lonely raising a baby in a new place.” And since she was getting no sense of whether he had meant he would go with her or not, she couldn’t assume he would be helping her.

“I understand. And I will protect you, of course, if that is necessary.” He ran his finger down her thigh. It was an odd gesture, like he wanted to touch her, claim her, but hesitated to take all of her.

He made a pattern on her knee with his fingertip. “And after the baby is born, I could turn you. That way we can be together, forever. All of us.”

“Corbin!” She hadn’t expected him to say that, knowing how he felt about immortality. Yet it immediately was a tantalizing concept, a carrot of eternity dangled in front of her... forever with her child and her lover. It was a happy thought for a simple moment. But reality intruded. What he had suggested was wrong, unnatural, and given the expression on his face, he knew it, too. That was not the way to raise a child.

“You know we can’t do that, as much as I would like to be with you, as much as it hurts to say no.” She put her hand over his, wanting to touch him, wanting to soften her words, and the ache in her heart. “We have to do what’s right for the baby. With you immortal, and me mortal, working together, we can ensure the baby is both safe at night, and being raised in a normal manner, in the day.”

“You think being a vampire is abnormal? You think we cannot be good parents if we are immortal?” His voice rose in indignation.

Brittany fought back the lump in her throat that kept rising. “You know what I mean... every vampire I know was raised by mortal parents, during the day, with schools and friends and birthday parties. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be raised only at night, in a world filled only with adults, who don’t eat regular food and can leap off buildings. No children, no playmates, no sunshine in the park. That has nothing to do with us and the kind of parents we will be. It just wouldn’t be right to force our child into that kind of abnormal, isolated life.”

The image of raising her child in the darkness made her want to weep. It meant being apart from Corbin, at least during the day, but she would sacrifice that for her baby. “With you immortal and me mortal, our child gets the best of both worlds.”

His eyes were dark, troubled. “Except for her parents together. We cannot give her that.”

Tears made him blur in front of her. “Corbin... don’t say that. We can and will be together. Just like we talked about before. We’ll get a house, we’ll live together.”

“Of course we will,” he said. “But it will be but a pale shadow of a normal life. I can never give that to you.”

“Normal is what we make it. We’ll have the same amount of time together that a lot of couples do... some work swing shifts from each other so they don’t have to pay for day care, other women have husbands who travel. This is no different.”

He nodded, even as his eyes told her otherwise. There was defeat there, sorrow. “You are right. Of course. It will be no different.”

Without warning, his fist bunched in the sheet, and he tore it down, off of her. “I want you.”

Men could so easily shift their emotions to sex, it was astonishing. But Brittany could use the touching, the distraction, the feel of him inside her, the promise of being together. “What do you want me for?”

“For everything.” He kissed her, lips hard and aggressive. “For forever.”

“You have me,” she told him, putting her arms around his neck, pulling him closer to her. She loved the way he smelled—like rich, confident, and sophisticated man—and she liked how his smooth, polished control always disintegrated in bed with her.

In two seconds he had her tank top off, and her bare nipples beaded in anticipation as the cool air hit her skin. She was forced to lift her backside off the bed as he immediately went for her panties, dragging and tugging them down.

His mouth was hot and urgent, his tongue thrusting deep into her as he undid his pants. Brittany fell back on the bed, gripping the taut muscles in his biceps. He pulled his mouth off hers long enough to ask, “Is it okay on your back?” His fingers, hands that had known two hundred years of life and had held that sword so confidently, fluttered carefully over her belly, over their child.

The position didn’t feel uncomfortable, and she liked the way he rose up over her, the way she could see every inch of his face, his expression, when he filled her. “It’s okay.”

That was all he needed to hear. His pants disappeared, and he entered her, his body covering hers, his urgency and desperation and love pressing on her, in her, and Brittany gasped in pleasure, at the intimacy of being connected to him, their child between them.

Before she could match his rhythm, or adjust her hips to meet his thrusts, he flipped over and pulled her on top of him, his hands cupping her breasts, thumbs toying with her nipples. Gripping the sheets, she leaned forward and moved on him, wanting him to recognize, to know, to see, what she felt for him. That some way or another, they would make it work. It did work, because they loved each other, and wanted a future.

The slick pressure on her clitoris as she rode him was agonizing, delightful, and the way he watched her, the way his eyes opened wider, the way he got a feverish wild look of pride, like he thought she was amazingly sexy, made her gasp, grind harder, deeper. And when she couldn’t take any more, when her emotion and passion overwhelmed her body, she came with a cry, locking eyes with him.

“Beautiful,” he said, cupping her cheek.

She sucked in air, tried to collapse on his chest, body still trembling, but he rolled her onto her side, and pulled her leg over his, opening her completely for him. Her breasts brushed his bare chest, and he kissed her at the same time he pushed his erection into her. They were touching from forehead to feet, entangled together, locked in an intimacy so primal, so elemental, so extreme, that Brittany felt tears in her eyes. As he dug his nails into her naked thighs and exploded, a curse ripped from his lips.

“I love you,
ma chérie
,” he said. “I love you. For me, there is only you.”

Brittany hung on, her emotions perilously close to the edge, skittering toward what, she wasn’t sure. Closing her eyes, she cried, “I love you, too.”

It would always be like this, Corbin knew. Brittany had gotten up for the day after their lovemaking, while he had gone to sleep for a few hours. Now she was tucked back into the queen-size bed in Carrick’s guest room, and Corbin was up, roaming, ready for the night.

There was nothing to be done. He should be grateful they had what they did. That they were together, such as it was. That he would have a family, however spliced together. But it wasn’t gratitude he felt. It was anger, sadness, a creeping, debilitating sort of bitterness that crawled around the edges of his heart and made him want to throw things.

Instead of chucking Alexis’s vase sitting on a low table in their hallway, Corbin went into the living room, where Ethan was working on his laptop computer. He undid his wristwatch, and pulled it over his hand. That watch hadn’t come off his arm in forty years, but now he tossed it onto the table in front of Carrick.

“I am returning this. I consider my punishment over, my retribution fulfilled.”

Ethan looked at him. “You can’t do that. It’s not your right to decide that your punishment is over. It’s mine, and the tribunal’s.”

“I injected Gregor with my vaccine,” Corbin told him. “He will essentially be a mortal, whether he realizes it yet or not. And I suspect he’ll try to hide it—at least until the election is over.”

Almost dropping his computer, Ethan stood up. “You can’t just do that either!”

“I can and I did. He was a threat to my child, to Brittany, to the Nation. To our entire way of life. I neutralized the threat. And I do not regret it. I just thought you should know, as a courtesy.”

Corbin turned on his heel and headed for the door.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“To Paris.”

Or as close to it as he could get in the desert. When he was on top of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel, he sat down on a lit iron rung and looked at the Vegas skyscape. His parents had been exiles in England during the Terror, and he could still remember how his mother had longed for France, wept for the memory of Paris, expressed her impatience in all things that weren’t home. He knew that feeling, that frustration now. He wanted home. Paris. A family. The sun.

He wanted what he had had, what he could have with Brittany, if it were different.

The gift of immortality was one he had never asked for, one he had never wanted. He had been turned against his will, and had always regretted the change in his destiny. He still didn’t want eternity. What he wanted was Paris. Coffee and baguettes. The heat of the sun on his arms, the cold splash of the Seine on his face. Brittany and his child and a finite amount of time to make the most of his existence, to squeeze his worth into a half-century, and to never have to face an endless, gaping yawn of a future.

They could make it work as such. They would make it work. But it broke his heart that he would never see a school play, never watch his daughter on the soccer field, never see her chubby little legs pumping hard on the playground at noon, cheeks flushed with heat. He would have two hours a day with her, at most, and while he walked the night, she would be tucked into her crib, eyes closed to him.

Corbin wanted to sink into obscurity, to be a nameless number in the mass of humanity, who mattered only to his bride and baby. That wasn’t his calling, his destiny. He had a different life, and he would live it.

But on his terms.

“What if I told you... ” Corbin said, leaning over the railing, his words trailing off.

“What?” Brittany asked, sitting in a patio chair on Alexis’s balcony, fighting the urge to stand up and go to him. Corbin was acting strange, storming into the apartment and demanding to speak to her. Alexis would have told her that was par for the course with Corbin, but she knew him. Something was bothering him, something that had him edgy and brusque, and it was different than the way he had been the night before.

She wanted to hug him, to comfort him, but she didn’t want to distract him from whatever he needed to say. There couldn’t be any more withholding of important information from her.

He turned slightly, stared straight at her. “What if I told you I could be mortal again?”

Forget not standing up. She almost leaped off the balcony. “What!”

“What if I told you that, if you wanted it, I could give you that normal life, with a house in ze suburbs, and a husband who is home for dinner every night and attends all ze soccer games?”

“The vaccine?” she asked, pressing her hand to her chest because she had the sudden fear that her heart might actually catapult out of her body.

He nodded. “Yes. It is finished. And tested. On Gregor Chechikov.”

“
That’s
how you took care of Gregor?” Holy crap and then some.