In the end, it was the emerald that made her think of his kiss, the chill of his skin and his infuriating composure. Elias, who could never be still nor have patience for much besides his research, had sat beside her, rapt, reading her reactions in her face as she tried on each ring in succession. She handed the emerald to him, simply saying, “I’ll have this one, I think.” It made her feel strange, asking him for something so extravagant, but she reminded herself that he had offered and also that he had made a king’s ransom from that sunblock. He nodded once and stood by as the jeweler repacked his wares. He walked the man out and returned to find her standing on the balcony again, the wind off the sea whipping her hair into tangles.
As Elias stepped out onto the balcony, a rope of her hair brushed across his face and the sensation of it, her silken hair whipping idly across his cheek, stopped him. He felt an unbidden rush of affection for her, and something like gratitude that she was there awaiting his return. He stepped up beside her and took her hand matter of factly. He slid the ring on Paxton’s finger. She smiled up at him.
“I love it. Thank you.”
“If you’d rather, I could slip it in a champagne glass or have someone make a trail of flower petals. I feel sure this resort employs someone to do just that.” He seemed adorably unsure of himself for virtually the first time since she’d known him.
“Exactly this. It’s perfect. I don’t want romantic posturing, Elias. I want you and the strange, diffident way you do things. That was so lovely of you to invite that man here to show me the rings. I liked trying them on and I knew which one meant ‘us’ to me.” She held up her hand to flash the ring at him. “When you kissed me the day we met, when I was so breathless I had to brace myself on the elevator wall, you stood there totally unruffled and I was furious that you could look so unaffected, so icy calm. This reminded me of that.”
“Because you thought I was a frigid bastard who groped solicitors in elevators? I’m awfully flattered, Paxton.”
“Because you’re you. Because you can’t take a compliment or anything remotely related to sentiment without acting like you’re breaking out in a rash. You have to say something cutting or dismissive but it’s all for show. I know that you held a cloth to my head when I had a fever, that you sang me a lullaby. A lot of them, in fact. I know you, Elias, and I think I’ll keep you.”
She unwound her turquoise sarong and dropped it on the floor. She took his hand and pulled him into the dimness of their room.
“Now tell me, Elias Townsend, when exactly I won that bet with you.”
“What makes you believe that you won?”
“Was it when I took you to the ocean and splashed you? Was it when I impressed you with my tremendous culinary skill by toasting marshmallows? Or was it my screech owl call that drove you to the very limits of lust and passion?”
“You grabbed my hand. When we got to the beach, you picked up your backpack and grabbed for my hand and took off running across the sand to get a good spot for our towels. It was then, sliding around on the sand, unable to get my footing and keep up with you but unwilling to relinquish your hand. I thought I was fifteen years old and the luckiest boy on earth to be following you,” he told her.
She laughed and hugged him impetuously, showering his face with kisses.
“When did I entrance you precisely? The irresistible pheromones? The promise of immortality? Saving you from the hazards of mule deer?”
“You kissed my hair. After we went looking for owls and I asked if you could live with a killer and you took me to your bed. I was half gone for you already and you pulled my ponytail holder out and then you took one curl in your fingers and kissed it. It was such a tender, old-fashioned gesture. My toes curled up and I swear I could have swooned right then. That was easily the most romantic thing that I had ever seen and I wanted more than anything to spend the night with you. Then, of course, you got all weird and protective and kicked me out of your apartment. Anyway, that was the moment for me.” Paxton bit her lip from the heady recollection.
Elias took a lock of her tangled, windblown hair in his palm and kissed it. He smiled at her and she fell back onto the bed in a pretended faint.
“Still works on me.” She smiled, dragging him down beside her. “With this ring on, I’m officially engaged to be married. Betrothed. You belong to me.”
“If I’m yours, what do you plan to do with me?”
“Many, many things,” she said, her dark eyes serious and soulful as she slid her arms around his waist and rucked his shirt up.
Chapter 10
Their holiday was cut short when a text alerted Elias that the follow-up on the patients in his clinical trial from three years prior had shown very little regression.
“The enzyme works. I knew it,” he said, seizing a half-asleep Paxton and spinning her around. “Now to pair it with a supplement of Vitamin E and see how that works. We’re getting somewhere. After all these years, I’m closing in on the answer. I need to get back to the lab and look at the tissue samples.”
She started stuffing souvenirs and discarded garments into her bag, bemused by the reversal that had Elias bounding around the room with excitement while she put things in order resolutely.
“You’re brilliant,” she said as they boarded the helicopter. He nodded in acknowledgment and swung the copter up from the helipad smoothly. His arrogance, his assuredness made her smile.
Elias spent days in his lab, emerging occasionally to update her on the progress, to try to unravel the niggling difficulty with calcium absorption that was causing bone fractures in his otherwise successful test subjects. Paxton picked out a wedding dress with Gillian’s advice (nothing lacy and Goth…too obvious to be ironic). She entered the lab quietly to take blood from the refrigerator, trying not to disturb him. Paxton thought of his hours in the lab as if he were Mozart at a piano, his pen poised above staff paper, a wrinkle on his brow as he tried to refine his creation. She wasn’t jealous of his work any longer because it animated him, it had been his reason for choosing the immortality that brought them together.
As she passed him, Elias caught her hips and swung her toward him, pinning her against the table. Expecting a playful embrace, she was stunned by his appearance. Dropping the bag of blood to the floor unheeded, Paxton gripped him by the shoulders, looking searchingly in his eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“It won’t work, Paxton. I was wrong. The enzyme…in that dose, it corrodes the osseous tissue. They may not succumb to neurodegeneration but their spinal columns will crack and they’ll be brittle as birds. It doesn’t work—” He broke off in anguish, the self-doubt tempered with sheer astonishment that he had been mistaken. “I thought if I increased Vitamin D, the calcium could be resorbed. But to affect that change, the levels of D would have to be toxic. God, Pax, it’s a labyrinth.” He dropped his head as if unable to meet her eyes. “I’ve failed.”
Paxton took his face in her hands, stroking the sharp cheekbones with her thumbs, leaning her forehead against his as if to absorb his pain. He shrugged her away and swept the tablet, the printouts, the microscope all off the table into a crashing heap on the floor. He ran water in a glass and threw that on the pile.
“There. Another useless pile of wet rubbish I can burn that won’t save my father or anyone else.” He kicked at the pile and threw back his head and let out a primal yell of frustration.
Paxton dragged on his arm, pulling him away from the shattered glass and mangled equipment. He gripped her by the arms and his gaze bore into her. “Get out,” he growled. She caught his collar in both hands and hauled him against her, kissing him fiercely, grinding her mouth into his. She backed him up to the folding chair and pushed him down into it, lowering herself into his lap and kissing him so hard his head bent back. Elias’ fingers dug into her hips as she kissed him, tugging at his hair until a pleasant sting started at his scalp. Paxton ran her hands down his lean, sinewy arms as he bunched her skirt up to her waist, his fing
ers brushing her thighs.
Tossing her long hair back, she bared her throat to his heavy gaze. He stroked her neck with both his hands; unable to fathom the gift she was offering him, the gift that she herself was. Paxton took his face in her hands and guided his mouth to her throat, convulsing against him as his teeth punctured her tender flesh. She held his head there, urging him closer, weaving her fingers through his hair. Spent, he drew back from her and she collapsed against his chest.
“That, Elias, is why we need a chair in the lab,” she said. He kissed the top of her head.
“I’ve still failed, Paxton.”
“Are you telling me this is the only setback you’ve had in nine hundred years of research?”
“A hundred and ninety years. Not nine hundred.”
“Well? Is it?
“Hardly. But I was so close, so certain this time. It’s a blow to me, to the very hypothesis I set out to prove.”
“Will you lose your funding?”
“No. I’ll have to make adjustments. This sets us back several years in development. The company won’t be happy.”
“Do you or do you not own the company?”
“Yes. I own the company but the board will be displeased.”
“Why shouldn’t they be? I’m displeased. You’re displeased. I mean, look at the floor. You did a full-on Macbeth routine there.”
“If I was doing the Scottish play, then what was the routine you did in the chair?” he challenged.
“Let me think. There are loads of dirty jokes in Shakespeare.” She kissed him slowly.
“I’ll clean that up tomorrow and try to figure out where the mistake is.”
“What are you going to do now? Go look up Shakespearean references to prove me wrong? Learn another language?”
“I had thought I’d take you on an owl walk, Paxton. You can teach me how to make that atrocious sound,” he said.
“I think I have a better idea. You told me once that turning me wasn’t the only way you could make me forget. I’m going to make you forget. Let’s go for a ride in the elevator.”
The End
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
A Distant Echo: Book 1 (Grim's Labyrinth Series) Page 9