by Cat Miller
“Listen to me waxing poetic. The point is I had finally decided what to do with my considerably extended life. I became a doctor and have never regretted the choice.”
Tessa tried to stop the tears from running down her cheeks. She tried to keep a stiff upper lip, but his story was so touching her heart had squeezed out the tears. Reilly finally looked up from his contemplation of the past.
“Tessa, please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” He pulled her closer until she found herself resting in his lap. He rubbed her back soothingly while she got herself under control.
“You asked me why I’m so nice to you. You want to know why I treat you so well. It’s because I was born and raised just like you. I’m a bit of an outcast myself because I was made and not born this way. I don’t have a problem with humans, honey. Especially not one so beautiful I want to be everything she needed.” He wiped a tear from her cheek and their eyes met.
Tessa didn’t know who moved first but they were kissing before she took her next breath. Reilly was gentle when he searched her mouth. He took long moments to explore her lips before parting them to taste her tongue. It was wonderful and awful in turns. It felt so good to be touched and feel desired by another person after so many years of loneliness. Tessa hadn’t kissed a man since… No. She wouldn’t think about him. Why couldn’t she have a life? Why didn’t she deserve love? Even if it wasn’t the love of her life. She was sick of her heart wasting away over a man it couldn’t have. Tessa threw herself into the kiss and hoped she wasn’t too rusty to please him.
****
Griffin had gone totally ape shit. Cayden stood in the door way of Griffin’s study in his dusty black fatigues and surveyed the damage as it continued to spread across the room. Griffin was in the far corner of the room using a golf club to dismantle a lamp. He either hadn’t noticed Cayden enter the room and shut the door behind him or he didn’t care that he was there watching.
Cayden had been patrolling the grounds when a call came in from the house. He had been surprised to find Sarah on the other end of the line instead of Griffin. She was in a panic. Sarah explained that she had heard what sounded like a struggle coming from Griffin’s office and had called security. When the warriors entered Griffin’s study he had roared at them to mind their own business and return to their posts. She didn’t know what to do. Mason had taken Debbie and their baby girl, Sydney, away for their safety until after the Rogue was dealt with. She didn’t know who else to call.
Griffin and Cayden had formed a friendship over the last year. So there Cayden stood, watching the man he had come to think of as a friend destroying a very expensive looking leather chair with his bare hands. Cayden entered slowly.
“Good evening, Griffin,” he said as if nothing were at all odd about the situation.
Griffin was the most controlled man, vampire or human, Cayden had ever known. For him to lose his shit like this was a big deal. Something was very wrong in Griffin’s world right now. All Cayden could hope to do was return the favor Griffin had done for him. He could be there to listen when the man was ready to talk.
“Cayden. What is it? Is Danielle in trouble?” Griffin’s calm tone was totally at odds with the black wildness of his eyes and the condition of the room.
“Dani is fine. The last I heard she and Chase were headed out of town to baby-sit. Mason is taking Debbie away for the weekend and the newlyweds are on baby duty.” Cayden smiled but it was a sad little smile. They both knew Cayden had a mountain of regrets when it came to Dani and Chase.
“Good. Good. Debbie needs a break.” He nodded and ran his hands through his disheveled hair, making the pure white highlights stand on end.
Griffin turned to flop down in the chair he had just been busy relieving of its stuffing. Cayden located the chair that was normally opposite Griffin’s chair. It had been hurled to the other end of the room. He dragged it back to sit facing his friend and just waited with one booted foot resting on his knee. After several moments of silence Griffin began to speak.
“You go through life wishing you could have some time to yourself. Your life is so full of people pulling you in every direction and you just want to be left alone. You just want to be left alone until one day you are alone. And then you sit alone, in the silence, and you choke on it.”
Cayden mulled that over. He understood what Griffin was saying, but that was not what had caused this explosion and Cayden needed to get to the trigger.
“So. What happened here, Griff? Because I don’t believe this was an epiphany for you. What has you so pissed that you feel the need to destroy shit while disrupting everyone in your household? Sarah is about to call your parents, her parents, the Council, or anybody that might be able to get close enough to talk you down.”
“Sarah doesn’t care about me. She just doesn’t want me to make a scene and embarrass her. She’s probably fretting over the servants and the guards telling their friends about my animalistic behavior.” Griffin rolled his eyes.
“I can’t stand that bitch. You should be glad you didn’t let Soleil trap you into a blood bond.”
The memory of his rejection of Dani stung a bit. He had regretted the mistake every moment of every day since that night. Cayden knew that what happened to Darren might have happened to him. It could have been a one sided bond because of her human blood, but he chose to believe that they would have had a bond like Griffin had shared with Tessa. He loved Dani and he knew she had genuine feelings for him too. That could have been the difference between a loveless bond and happily ever after. But it was too late for that now. He made his decision and now he had to live with the consequences. Griffin must have seen him wince because he apologized.
“I’m sorry, Cayden. I know very well you and Soleil would have been nothing like Sarah and I. I’m just venting.”
“Are you going to talk about the problem or just let it simmer until it boils over again?” Cayden asked.
Something dangerous flicked behind Griffin’s eyes just before everything in the room with the exception of the chairs they sat in began to levitate. The force caused the heavy wood furniture to explode into toothpicks; everything flew through the air and crashed into the opposite wall. Holy Shit!
Cayden stood his ground and continued to sit calmly across from a man he knew could crush him in spite of his strength and training. Griffin was older and had incredible telekinetic power. He waited for Griffin to calm and continue.
“He’s touching my mate, Cayden. He’s kissing the lips that belong to me. She has been blockingme for months. Once I realized that the soft warm buzzing in the back of my mind was Tessa, I began to constantly work on strengthening the connection. The more you use a blood connection the stronger if itgets. I don’t know if my bond with Sarah has always been so weak because of my bond to Tessa or if it’s because neither of us every bothered to nurture our own bond.” Griffin paused, lowering his head to his hands. A loud crack splintered the silence and half of the solid granite mantle over the fireplace fell to the carpet.
“I don’t know how she is blocking me, but warmth and the love that always hummed reassuringly in my soul is gone. It has been since she almost died. She finally gave up on me. It must take concentration to maintain the separation between us because now that she is thoroughly distracted with another man’s tongue down her throat, she isn’t able to hold it in place. I can feel her better now than I could even just after we bonded. My work to strengthen the connection worked. I can feel her unease at having him touch her. I feel her discomfort at touching him but she’s determined to move on. She’s been lonely too. And she has lived through this pain for all these years. She had to have felt this and been witness to every night I have spent in the arms of another woman.” Tears began to fall from Griffin’s downcast face and splash onto the carpet. Cayden held his silence. What could he say?
“She doesn’t understand. I didn’t know she was alive. I didn’t know she was waiting for me. I never would have intentional
ly hurt her this way. I never wanted this pain for her. I love her so much. We didn’t need a damn blood bond. We loved each other more than any bond. I just didn’t know she was still alive and waiting for me.” Griffin was practically sobbing. Cayden said the first thing that came to his mind.
“Bullshit. That is such a load of bullshit.”
Griffin’s head snapped up and he glared at Cayden. Cayden put his hands up as if he were trying to calm a snarling beast.
“Hear me out before you start disassembling me from the inside out. I believe that you want to believe you didn’t know she was there. I believe that you never wanted to hurt your mate or cause her pain. I also believe that somewhere in your subconscious you hoped that if you couldn’t really feel her that she couldn’t really feel you. You’re an educated man that lived for years without that buzz in your brain until after you met Tessa. My understanding is that you were only bonded for two or three years before you were separated. It’s not like the bond had been in place for so long that you didn’t remember what it was like to live without it. Even now after over twenty years of being bonded from a long distance you can feel the absence of her presence when she pulls away from you.”
Griffin began to pace like a caged animal. He wasn’t enjoying hearing an outside point of view. Especially since Cayden refused to toe the line.
“I thought she was dead, Cayden. They told me she was dead and they had proof. Both Tessa and our baby died in the hospital. I still have the damn death certificates. Human hospitals don’t routinely issue death certificates for living people,” he snapped.
Cayden left his seat to approach Griffin before delivering his final thought on the subject. Griffin was going to have to deal with this internally before he could move on with his life. There was nothing Cayden could do to move the process along for him. So, if Griffin needed to destroy his entire house in an effort to find the truth in his own heart, Cayden wouldn’t stand in his way. Hell, he was still wrestling his own internal demons.
“When I look back on all the time I spent with Dani, I begin to see all the things that made her different. I see all the things that at the time I had decided to ignore. Her thoughts and feelings on humanity were unlike any vampire. Her blood scent drove me crazy in a way that it shouldn’t have. Her physical weakness and lack of speed. All these clues I chose to ignore. For God’s sake she told me several times that she wasn’t what I thought she was. Why didn’t I demand an explanation? Why didn’t I see what was staring me in the face? I’ll tell you why. Because it was easier not to. It was easier to pretend I didn’t know. It was easier to blame ignorance than to admit my own mistakes after I hurt her the night we almost bonded. I claimed to be the one that loved her the most. In the end I was the one that delivered the rejection and prejudice she had expected from our people all along. Why? Because it had been easier for me to turn away from her than to take the prejudice and shame that would come with her onto myself.”
Now Cayden fought back stinging tears.
“It took me a while to figure out what went wrong that night. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t man enough to stand by her side and be proud of her for exactly who and what she was in the face of our people. So this is my question to you, Griff. Did you really not know that Tessa was there, loving you and waiting for you to come back to her? Or was it just easier for you to believe what you were told? Was it easier for you to live the life your parents had laid out before you than to rebel and live a life without the comforts and advantages afforded to a man of your station? Tessa already knows the answers to these questions. I wonder how long it will take you to confront the truth of your own weakness.”
Cayden turned to leave,but Griffin stopped him with a question before he reached the door.
“When did you get be so wise, son?”
Cayden didn’t have think about the answer to that question.
“It was the moment I realized that I’d had it all twisted. It wasn’t that Dani wasn’t good enough for me. It was that she was so far above me I couldn’t see all the ways I wasn’t good enough for her. At least not until it was too late.”
EIGHT
Griffin sorted through what was left of his study in search of the rolodex. His cell phone had gone missing in the mess he’d made and thanks to the age of technology he couldn’t reach anyone without it. Who memorized phone numbers anymore when they were all programmed into your phone? As much as it galled him, Griffin needed to call Doc Stevens. Tessa had changed her number when he refused to stop calling to check on her after her injury.
A short time ago he had sensed a serious shift in Tessa’s emotional state. He didn’t believe she realized that her shield against him had fallen, so Griffin had been receiving a steady stream of feedback. If he had been feeling this depth of emotion from her all these years he would have definitely known she was out there. Griffin wasn’t sure yet if his work to strengthen the bond between them was going to be a blessing or a curse.
It had gone a long way to calming him when Tessa made the decision to pull back from her make out session with Doc. She seemed to have been sleeping when suddenly it seemed as if she were frightened. Maybe even terrified. It was probably just a bad dream but until either the feeling subsided, or he spoke to Tessa or Doc, he wasn’t going to be able to relax. He felt as if his heart was pounding in his chest but it wasn’t. Physically he was calm and steady, but mentally he felt on edge. Understanding that the emotions were Tessa’s and not his own helped him to deal with the onslaught.
An odd noise, like a whimper, distracted him from his search. The house was quiet. It was the middle of the night and everyone had gone to bed hours ago. Griffin paused to listen more closely. Something hit the floor in the room above his study. JR had been having bad dreams since the night of his sister’s abduction. Unfortunately, the boy had been standing in the entryway when Greyson had carried Brandi’s lifeless body in the house. The dreams were coming less frequently with the passage of time, but it hurt Griffin’s heart that his boy had witnessed something that had affected him so deeply. He left his study and swiftly climbed the stairs to comfort his son.
JR’s bedroom door was slightly ajar and it was unusually dark when Griffin peekedinto the room. Normally JR slept with his bathroom light on and the door cracked. Griffin pushed the door open and crossed the room to flip on the bathroom light. He nearly tripped over a miniature race track in his path. Before was able to straighten from his stumble Griffin was tackled to the ground. Griffin struggled against several pairs of restraining arms. All Griffin could think of was his son. They were here for his son and he couldn’t let them harm another one of his babies. JR was literally just a child at eleven years old. He wasn’t old enough to show any signs of extra-sensory power.
He had just enough time pull on his telekinetic strength for a single volley of objects in the room to pummel him and his attackers before one of them jabbed him in the side with a syringe. The world spun away from him and Griffin knew he had lost. He was powerless to lift his head within five seconds. His power was completely out of his reach. He now understood the feeling of helplessness two of his daughters had felt when they had come for them. Now they would take his little boy. JR hadn’t stirred or made a noise during the fight, so Griffin knew he had already been drugged before he entered the room.
“Two for one deal tonight, boys. Looks like there will be more money to slip than we originally estimated. Congrats,” a gravelly voice whispered.
“Now let’s get out of here before anyone comes to check on the kid. Dad here made quite a bit of noise.”
“I think we should leave Mr. Vaughn. We weren’t told to bring him.” This voice was vaguely familiar to Griffin even through the fog of his retreating consciousness.
“Shut up and do as you’re told. Do you want to spend the rest of your life sitting in a gatehouse? Do you enjoy being on rotation at the homes of our esteemed Council members? Because that’s all you’re ever going to do in this backward soci
ety. Now grab his feet and get moving. The Master is going to pay us well for the extra work.”
****
The guard house was empty. Just as she knew it would be. Tessa drove straight through the gates that had been left open. She had never been to the Vaughn estate before but her dream had told her right where to go. The premonition had been heart wrenching. She had to get to JR as fast as her human legs would carry her. The cost to her for this mission of mercy would be huge, but she couldn’t let the boy die.
Thinking of her brave daughter and all of the lives Danielle had saved with her selfless acts helped to steel Tessa’s spine. Tessa jumped the curb and drove across the manicured lawn that was surrounded by a circular driveway. The element of surprise would be her only ally tonight. Tessa drove her car to the left of the large stairway that led to huge red double doors she knew would put her right where she needed to be. Tessa grabbed the gun Mason had given her all those years ago and the lifesaving items she had stolen from Reilly’s clinic on the way out the door. With any luck the alarms she triggered when she exited the clinic had Reilly right on her heels. His skills would be sorely needed.
Tessa turned the knob the intruders had left unlocked for an easy escape and drifted into the shadows. The windows above the doors shone on a set of marble staircases. Damn, the place was beautiful. An enormous crystal chandelier hung above the entryway, casting little rainbows of light over the walls and the landing that branched off in two directions at the top of the stairs. An antique looking mirror that was as tall as Tessa took up residence on the wall between the twin stair cases and opposite the front doors. Tessa moved quickly to stand against the wall next to the mirror. They wouldn’t see her until it was too late. She removed a syringe from her pilfered black doctor’s bag and tucked into her shirt pocket. With a pistol in hand she waited for the players to move into position. Tessa’s heart pounded so loudly she was surprised it hadn’t given her away yet. When a group of men made their way down the stairs to her right, she held her breath. It was playing out just as she had expected. She said a silent prayer that the shooting lessons she had taking when Danielle was an infant would come back to her in a hurry.