He shut his eyes, seeing a memory of Olivia, wasted by her disease, needing his help to hold Gillian in her arms. He couldn't let that happen to Rebecca.
"So we'll practice safe sex," Rebecca said. "I don't see what the problem is."
"Don't you?" He leaned forward, bracing his hands on the desk top. "What about Las Vegas?"
She shrunk back into the chair. "Las Vegas?"
"Yes. Rebecca, you are a telepath." He cut off her protests before they were fully formed. "While we were making love, you tapped into my thoughts. My desires. For blood."
He saw understanding dawning in her eyes, and a growing horror spread across her face.
"Yes. You understand now. When your mental powers remained dormant, I could shield my thoughts and contain my blood lust. But now, the risk is too great that you will be overcome by the desires I've struggled for years to subdue. If that happens, and you drink my blood...."
He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence, fearing that saying the words might give them the power to come true.
"What if it's already too late?" She raised her fingers to her lips, as if she could feel the blood on them even now. He seized on the change of subject with relief.
"We would know by now. The first sign of infection is a raging fever, a few hours after contamination. You worried me when you passed out in the car on the trip home, but it wasn't a fever, just exhaustion."
Tilting her head to the side, she studied him in silence. He knew that look. She was fitting together facts, building a story. Any moment now, she'd test her theory by asking him a question. And he was sure it would be a question he didn't want to answer. It was.
"Are you speaking from experience?"
"Yes." He tried to wait her out, but she just kept looking at him. Staring at him with those big gray eyes, as if she expected literal pearls of wisdom to fall from his lips at any moment, and didn't want to miss any of them. He couldn't resist her, no matter how painful the memories were that she called up. It was something she needed to know, anyway.
Taking a deep breath, he explained. "When Gillian's condition was first diagnosed, we attempted a blood transfusion. We didn't know about the neukocytes then. It nearly killed her."
Rebecca reached out and stroked Desmond's cheek in a reassuring caress. He smiled, leaning into her touch.
"That must have been awful for you," she said.
"Yes." He closed his eyes, luxuriating in the silken feel of her palm and the whisper of her fingertips. She hadn't meant to upset him, only to understand what she was up against.
He jerked away from her, throwing up his mental barriers. Touching her mind had been an instinctive response to the intimate discussion and comforting gesture. But it proved that they must avoid any sort of physical relationship, not just making love.
He stood up and poured himself a mug full of water as an excuse to get away from her. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw her standing in her head-tilted "thinking" pose. He waited for her next question.
She folded her arms, and fixed him with a look of stern resolve. "You didn't know the dangers then. Now you do. I don't see why we can't just be careful."
She still didn't understand the seriousness of their situation.
"I can only guarantee your safety if we refrain from physical contact. All physical contact."
She frowned. "I touched your cheek not five minutes ago, and nothing disastrous happened. Don't you think you're overreacting? Just a little?"
"You weren't using your mental powers at the time. If you had been, who knows what might have happened."
"Why can't you just use this mental shielding you've spoken of before to keep my thoughts away from yours?"
"Because a shield like that takes conscious control." He shook his head, wishing she'd understand this and make the denial easier for him. "Rebecca, despite my curse, I'm still just a man. I don't have that kind of control. When I hold you, when I touch you, God, even when I just think about holding you or touching you..." He wrenched his thoughts away from images of the two of them tangled in passion.
She stepped away from him, linking her hands behind her back to prevent herself from offering any unwanted gestures of compassion.
"That's it then. A platonic relationship."
"At least until you can control your gifts enough to provide some shielding for your thoughts."
"How long will that take?"
He hated her desperate, pleading expression. Even worse, he hated destroying the slim thread of hope he'd just handed her. "To be able to control my thoughts even during moments of extreme mental or physical stress, took me thirty-five years."
"You expect me to wait until I'm more than sixty years old before I touch you again? No. There's got to be another way."
Chapter 18
REBECCA WRACKED her brain for a solution on the silent walk back to the apartment. Desmond hovered beside her, jumping away with a guilty start whenever he brushed against her. It was clear to her that he was fooling himself if he thought he'd be able to stay away from her.
No, they'd make love again. Probably sometime soon. Despite their best intentions, the magnetism that drew them together was too primal to overcome with rational arguments. If they were anywhere near each other, they'd come together. They wouldn't be able to help it. She needed to find a way to live through the experience before it happened.
She imagined dying in the agony he'd described, and shivered.
"Cold?" he asked.
"A little." She rubbed her arms, even though the chill that permeated her came from within.
Desmond took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders, careful to avoid touching her. "Better?"
She snuggled into the raw silk, still heated with his warmth. It was almost like a caress, and she could imagine the sleeves that held her so securely were really his arms. The warmth behind her was really his body, pressed close to hers.
"Rebecca— " Desmond's voice vibrated, just short of a groan.
"What?" She stopped walking and glared at the flesh and blood man beside her, annoyed that he interrupted her pleasant fantasy with harsh reality.
"You were projecting." He took a deep breath and motioned her forward, falling into step beside her. "If you're going to control your powers, you have to learn to control two things. The first are your mental shields, which keep other people's thoughts from getting in. You've naturally developed strong ones, but when you concentrate on people, you instinctively lower them. That's one of the things that makes you such a good reporter, but in this case, you can't afford to do that. The other thing you need to control is projection, or sending your thoughts out to other people. If your thoughts are as explicit as yours just were, they could get you in a lot of trouble."
"Not only can't I touch you, I'm not even supposed to think about you for the next thirty years?"
"That's how long it will take for you to gain full control of your powers. You should be able to master the basics in a few weeks."
She bridled at his overly patient tone, and snapped back, "So then you'll stop jumping around like water on a skillet, afraid to come anywhere near me?"
His expression didn't change, but she felt a chill wind brush across her mind. She instantly regretted taking out her anger on him. The situation might be driving her half mad with frustration, but he was suffering just as much.
"I'm trying to keep you safe," he reminded her.
"I know. I'm sorry. This is hard for you, too." She sighed, and wrapped his jacket's arms tighter around herself. They continued the walk in silence.
When they reached the apartment, Desmond headed straight for the kitchen and pulled a medicine bottle from the refrigerator. She watched with mingled fascination and horror as he boiled a pan of water to warm the liquid, then turned and faced her.
"Now that you know what I am, there's no reason to hide this. Is there?"
"No." She recognized his challenge, his subtle insistence that his needs could frighten
her into leaving him. She hadn't backed down from a challenge yet, and she wasn't about to start now. "Let's stop pussyfooting around the issue, and cut straight to the point. You're a cursed immortal. I'm not."
He dropped the bottle into the pan with a clatter, turning to look at her. She'd gotten his attention. Good.
"Now, as I see it, there are only three possibilities," she continued. "You can become a normal human being, we can leave everything the way it is now, or I can become like you. Let's take the easy option first. Is it possible for you to turn back into a normal human being?"
Desmond stared at her, opened his mouth to reply, and then just blinked. Chuckling, he shook his head. "You're remarkable, do you know that? I think you took all of five minutes for recovering your wits before you were back to being the scrappy little terrier, worrying the truth out of your story."
"Oh, thanks. Every woman longs to have the man she loves call her a dog."
"You know that's not what I meant, dear heart. Don't get your hackles up." He laughed, and reached out to draw her closer for a conciliatory kiss. His hand stopped just short of her jaw as he realized what he'd meant to do, and he stepped back, out of reach. All traces of humor were gone from his voice when he added, "To answer your question, no, I can't become a normal human being, not without killing all the neukocytes in my system. And the only way to do that is to kill me."
"That's not an option, then." She didn't want him to even consider the possibility that the best way to protect her would be by eliminating the danger, in this case him. "How about the other extreme? Could I become like you?"
"You wouldn't want— "
"That's not what I asked. I asked if it was possible."
He considered for a long moment, before admitting, "I don't know. Philippe has been trying to reconstruct his grandmother's curse for over a hundred years, but hasn't finished it yet."
Rebecca blinked, sidetracked by this new information. "Philippe's grandmother was the Voodoo priestess? She cursed her own grandson?"
"Why not? Her curse killed her daughter. She died in childbirth. My father committed suicide immediately after, I assume because he felt her death."
Rebecca hesitated, but she had to know. "You said you drank blood, before the researchers created their potion. Did you ever... kill anyone?"
"Yes."
She clutched the table behind her, and refused to back away from him. Then she watched his eyes mist with remembered pain, and she only wanted to soothe him. She held onto the table to keep from going to his side.
"The first death was an accident," he said quietly. "A blood sacrifice got out of hand. I vowed that it would not happen again, that I would take no more than what a person was willing to give. After that, I haunted battlefields, offering easy deaths to those dying in pain."
"Did you feel their pain?"
"Yes. Giving them peace helped me as much as it helped them." He smiled sadly. "Of course, I was the only one who survived the experience. Later, I worked the night shift in a hospital. I would bring the newly dead to the morgue, with an unauthorized stop on the way. It was easy to convince the coroner to overlook the evidence. For over a hundred years I've surrounded myself with death so that I could live."
"A hundred years?" With everything else he'd told her, she'd forgotten he'd also said he'd been born in 1853. The rare first editions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells lining his study supported that claim, but viscerally, she couldn't believe Desmond was that old. She examined his features from a table length away, but found no hint of lines or wrinkles, not so much as a single gray hair marring the luxuriant waves of black surrounding his face. She flexed her fingers, remembering the feel of every inch of his exquisite body. There had been no signs of aging, no sagging or wrinkles, anywhere on him. Only firm, muscular flesh.
She clenched her hands by her side, fighting not to reach for him. Imagining the feel of him, skin slick with passion, his body hot with desire, she felt an answering flame kindle within her. But she could not touch him. She must not reach for him. Her fingernails dug into the palms of her hands as she tightened her fists.
"Does that upset you?" He must be shielding his mind from hers. Without his telepathic powers, he misinterpreted the cause of her tension.
"No. I don't care that you're over a century old. You don't even look thirty." Her face flared hot then cold as she realized what that meant for the future. "Actually, it does upset me. I bet you looked a lot like you do now, a hundred years ago."
He nodded. "Much the same."
"Uh-huh. And a hundred years from now, you'll still look pretty much like this?"
"Yes."
"You know what I'll look like a hundred years from now? I'll be dead."
"Rebecca— "
"Even twenty years from now, you'll look thirty, and I'll be pushing fifty. In forty years, I'll be seventy. You'll still be thirty. Do you see a problem with this? The lines in that famous poem are `Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be,' not `Watch me grow old, the good times are gone.'" She bowed her head, closer than she'd ever been to admitting defeat. "Maybe you're right. Maybe it is best if I go."
"Go? I never said anything about you going."
"Well I can't stay here. Don't you see what it would be like? Day after day, night after night, denying ourselves the most casual of touches, not even thinking of each other in case that triggers a vampire response. Celibacy is one thing, but you're asking for monasticism. I'm not cut out to be a saint. I know I can't do that. I don't see why we should suffer through the agony of trying." She pushed herself away from the table.
He also stood, and stepped forward as if to stop her from leaving the kitchen. "But given the other options— "
"I know which one I'll take." Despite everything he'd said, she couldn't believe in an all-powerful, irreversible curse. They could find a solution, but only if he believed it could be found. Stepping around the table, she caught him off guard, and pulled his head down for a heated kiss. She opened her heart, her soul, and her mind to him, pouring her love through the kiss, desperation shattering any thoughts of restraint.
He wrapped his arms around her, drawing her tight against him, even as his mouth claimed hers in searing response. He kissed her with all the hunger in his soul, trembling with the restrained passion he fought to contain. His mingled fear and desire coursed through her, scalding her thoughts with the heat of his emotion.
He jerked his head back, breaking the kiss and breaking their contact. She barely felt the cold air of the kitchen on her skin as he pushed her away, devastated by the chill left behind in her lonely, solitary thoughts.
"Damn it, Rebecca! You know better than to do that."
"Yes, I do. And so do you. But that wasn't enough, was it?" She advanced on him, forcing him to walk backwards across the kitchen as he tried to keep a space between them. "And knowledge will never be enough to keep us apart. Because what we feel for each other is too strong to be denied. You're the other half of my whole. We can not be separated. And any attempt to keep us apart is doomed to failure."
He rubbed a hand over his face. He was as physically perfect and healthy as ever, but his resigned expression and dull eyes made him seem old and broken. "You may be right. In which case, you'll have to leave."
"No!" Rebecca clenched her fists. Her strategy had backfired. Now she'd have to work doubly hard to convince him of her real intent.
"It's for your own good," he told her. The dreaded phrase snapped her already strained self-control.
"My own good?" She stalked across the kitchen, knocking the chairs out of her way. "And who are you to decide what is best for me? Who are you to decide what I should do? Is it because you don't think I'm a mature adult, capable of making reasoned decisions on my own? After all, you've had over a hundred years of accumulated wisdom and experience, compared to my few decades."
Desmond held out his hands, trying to placate her. At the same time, he backed away, glancing nervously from side to side. "Rebecca
. Darling. You're overwrought."
"Overwrought? Overwrought! Next you'll tell me I'm overreacting."
"But you are."
"Really?" She stopped and struck a casual pose, leaning back on her elbows against the counter. "Then by all means, enlighten me. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that you wanted me to rip out my heart and stomp it into the ground, on the theory that this would make me happy. But if I'm wrong, I'm willing to listen. So talk."
Desmond cleared his throat, unsure of what to say. She'd taken his words and twisted them, making them into something completely opposite of what he'd intended. Of course he only wanted her happiness. But she had to see that her only chance for happiness lay in being separate from him, no matter how much the separation hurt him.
She tapped her foot, reminding him that the time she was allowing him for explanations was fast running out.
"Can we start by listing what we agree on?" he asked hopefully. Maybe if he could figure out where her reasoning had jumped the track, he could get them back in accord.
"Sure. We agree that there are two possibilities for our future: stay together or split up."
"Rebecca, I'm not asking you to leave because I want to be rid of you. That's the farthest thing from my mind. I love you. I adore you. Which is why I can't risk your life this way. I would live with you for the rest of your life, if you would let me. But you're the one who insisted you couldn't do that."
"But what kind of a life would it be without you?"
"Any life is precious. And it needn't be forever. After you've mastered your mental control— "
"You said that would take thirty-five years! You want me to wait until I'm a senior citizen before coming back to you? At that point, making love to you would probably still be fatal. I'd have a heart attack from the unexpected activity."
An invisible fist punched through his chest and squeezed his heart. He couldn't draw a breath, and couldn't hear past the high-pitched whine in his ears. Time had once again played him for a fool. His beautiful, passionate wife would leave, never to return. Even if she came back after she'd honed her mental skills, it would be another woman, bearing her name and her time-ravaged face, who returned to him. His darling Rebecca would never come back.
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