He smiled and relaxed his posture. This is Melissa. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, friend applied. “Sorry, I seem to be better at listening to others’ problems than discussing my own.”
“Well, duh.” She patted the arm of the chair next to the end of the sofa where she sat and waited for him to get settled. “Whatever you might have done in your human occupation, you’re a guy first. We women don’t expect you to talk about feelings without hemorrhaging.”
“Right.” Cage crossed his legs. Uncrossed them. Cleared his throat in order to launch into why things wouldn’t work between them. “Speaking of dogs, do you know if they ever found Barnabas?”
So sue him, he was a right bloody chicken as well as the bastard who’d originally planned to screw Melissa Calvert but never had plans to love her.
Melissa bunched her brows together in a look of disbelief and answered in the tone people reserved for addressing the slow-witted. “The dog is fine. Britta found him hiding under a bush two doors down, scared but not hurt, and took him to Hannah. Changing the subject much?”
“Right.” He seemed to be saying that a lot lately. “Okay, I’ll just jump in here.” Talk, don’t think. “The way we left things in June, you know, I wasn’t sure. And then you were sure and I was . . .” Bloody hell, he should have rehearsed. Why hadn’t he rehearsed?
She held up a hand. “You aren’t very good at this, so why don’t I start?” She took a deep breath. “You were right. About me, in June.”
Cage settled against the chair back and pursed his lips, trying to look intelligent but with no clue what she meant. He decided he couldn’t fake it. “Well, I do enjoy being right, but what was I right about, precisely?”
“That I was using you . . . oh, Cage, I’m so sorry. I was scared, and you made me feel safe. I put you in a horrible position.”
Fucking hellfire and brimstone, she was going to cry.
“You’re wrong.” He leaned forward and grabbed her hand, clarity finally slapping him in the face. They’d been so awkward together because each was trying to keep from hurting the other. “I knew you didn’t love me, that you’d find your way back to Mark eventually. But I was a bastard to let you get close, knowing I didn’t . . . to make you think . . .” He ran out of steam, his verbal locomotive chugging to a halt under a dearth of power.
Melissa looked at the floor, and Cage steeled himself for the tears, but when she looked up, she was laughing. “We were gonna tell each other the same thing, weren’t we?”
He smiled, and all of a sudden his body felt almost weightless. The unsettled questions between them had weighed on him more than he’d realized—whether or not she’d hate him, or blame him, and knowing he deserved it. “I do love you, you know.
She looked him square in the eye, with a touch of the old playfulness he hadn’t seen since his early days in Penton. “I love you, too, Cage Reynolds. I think we’re going to be great friends—already are. I’m just not ‘in love’ with you.” She formed little quote marks with her fingers. “Just like you’re not ‘in love’ with me. Truth?”
Cage looked at the ceiling, examining a pattern of rough paintbrush marks that crisscrossed one corner of the rectangular space. He was so out of his element.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.” What a pathetic thing to admit—but, hell, loving was hard enough without the “in love” part, if it even existed. “Never stayed anywhere long enough, I guess. But, really, at the heart of it, is there a difference? Isn’t ‘in love’ just love mixed with infatuation? And when the infatuation cools, isn’t love what’s left over?”
Melissa laughed and shook her head. “You really are such a guy. Yes, there’s a difference between loving and being in love. There really is.”
Her words brought a grudging smile. “I haven’t heard you laugh like that in . . . maybe ever.” Things hadn’t exactly been cheery since he’d come to Penton.
She tucked her feet underneath her on the sofa and propped on the upholstered arm. “I realized something last night when Mirren told me about Matthias being alive. If I let myself get lost because of what he did to me, he wins. That’s true for all of us. If we let Matthias, or the fear of Matthias, tear us apart, he wins, and Penton dies. We deserve better than that.”
Cage smiled. “You’re a wise woman. Penton is one of the reasons I came back.” He took a deep breath. “You were the other. To set things right between us.”
She reached over and squeezed his knee. “I don’t know if I have a future with Mark. In the long run, I don’t think he’ll want me. But here’s something I realized while you were gone. You don’t love me, Cage, except as a friend. What you love is Penton, and you’ll always have a home here.”
Thank God he’d been turned so many years that he couldn’t cry anymore, or he might sob like an infant. Instead, he kept his eyes on one particular loose thread of carpet and said, “I want that.”
And if he was to have it, to have Penton the way he wanted it, he had to fight for it. They all had to fight. They’d given Matthias Ludlam and the Tribunal too much power. Everyone who loved Penton so much, including himself, was so afraid of losing it that they were destroying it with their own fear. Doing Matthias and Frank’s work for them.
A stirring in the hallway was followed by a soft knock at the suite door. Cage and Melissa exchanged a smile before he got up to answer.
Aidan stood in the corridor, dressed in black combat pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt—Cage didn’t think he’d ever seen him quite so casual. He looked at Cage, looked past him at Melissa, then back at Cage. “Anything I need to know?”
Cage glanced back at Melissa, who shrugged and nodded. “Right. We were just setting to rest the mad rumor that we were destined to be Penton’s next vampire super-couple. Sad to say you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
Aidan grinned, which lifted about two centuries of stress off his face. “Mirren’s rounding up everyone in the old mill to start training at nine, so you have a couple of hours. I want everyone fed before training. One of you feeds from Nik and one from Mark. You pick.”
He set off down the hall, where Cage saw Krys waiting. Aidan turned back. “We’re about the same size, Cage—come by the house and get some clothes. You show up looking like that and Mirren will make your life a misery.”
Right.
CHAPTER 17
As soon as Nik had dropped him off, seen that he’d made it into the house, and then driven away to find his little shifter friend, Mark made sure no one else was in his house and, only then, allowed himself the luxury of a loud groan. If you kept your self-pity to yourself, it didn’t qualify as wallowing.
“You have a minor concussion,” Krys had told him. “And you’re just going to have to work through the back pain.”
Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one walking around with the equivalent of a raw, exposed nerve that burned and throbbed with every move as if someone had scraped sandpaper across it. His back pain had company: his head pounded with its own miserable rhythm.
He reached in his pocket and studied the amber plastic bottle of prescription-strength ibuprofen Krys had given him. Wouldn’t hurt him to take his moose-sized dose fifteen minutes early. If it burned through the lining of his stomach, well, what the hell. One more malady wouldn’t make that much difference.
He shuffled to the kitchen and ferreted a bottle of water from its hiding spot behind containers of leftovers from the Chow House. As the only human in a houseful of vampires with no interest in solid food, and not much of a cook even in the best of health, Mark had qualified for Glory’s version of Meals on Wheels. She’d drop anything left over from the Chow House each day when she went home to meet Mirren when he rose from daysleep.
Speaking of which, Mark had about an hour before Aidan arrived for feeding—he usually took some private time with Krys before coming back from the lieutenants’ daysle
ep spaces. Mark probably could have weaseled out of feeding for one more day, but Penton was too short on humans for him to play martyr—especially with Max gone indefinitely, the new shifter girl not a viable feeder because of some weird reaction Mirren had at her bonding, and Robbie just plain gone.
Long story short, Penton needed its few humans to pull their weight, and he wouldn’t let Penton down. He would, however, rest until Aidan arrived, and hope his back would recuperate from his too-busy day.
Mark shook out two white pills, tossed them toward the back of his throat, and swallowed them with about half of the water. He screwed the white plastic top back on the bottle and took it to his bedroom.
Speaking of wallowing, his sheets looked like a pig had rolled around in them, just as he’d left them this morning. If Melissa were here, she’d have his bed looking neat and straight in the time it would take him to figure out which way to turn the untucked sheet.
But she wasn’t here, so he might as well suck it up and try to make it habitable, or sleepable.
Then he saw it. On the dresser, next to the wallet he rarely carried anymore unless he was going to be driving outside Penton, sat another amber plastic bottle, about half the height of the ibuprofen. Maybe Krys and Aidan had stopped by just after daysleep, and she’d had pity on him and left him something a little stronger.
She wouldn’t have that much pity. Mark stared at the label on the bottle, shivering as chills ran along his arms and into his fingers. He set it back on the dresser as if it might grow teeth and bite him. Krys wouldn’t leave a full bottle of oxy for him to find. She’d dole it out a half pill at a time and deliver it with a stern warning.
Hell, what was he thinking? She wouldn’t put an oxycodone tablet anywhere near him unless he were shrieking in pain. Even then, she’d have to think about it.
When he reached for it again, his fingers shook so violently that they knocked the bottle on its side. The sound of plastic hitting wood and of pills dancing merrily inside their amber cage sounded so loud he half expected to hear an echo.
Dosage: 80 mg. Strongest they make. Ironically, bright-yellow warning labels plastered the sides of the bottle. Addiction; respiratory distress; do not mix with alcohol or other medicines without checking with your doctor or pharmacist; do not operate machinery. It was the opioid script, so that after you got good and hooked, the drug manufacturers could claim innocence: you’d been warned.
If he had the sense God gave a billy goat, he’d march right into the bathroom and flush these babies into the local groundwater system. He wouldn’t stand here mesmerized at the sight of the thing that had set him on the road to ruin.
Or the road to Aidan and Melissa. How could he truly hate the thing that had led him to the two people he loved most?
He’d flush them. He couldn’t let Aidan down. Mel. Krys. Any of them.
“Mark? You here?”
He wrested his gaze from the bottle in his hand to the doorway. “Mel?”
He should tell her about the drugs. Let her help him figure out who put them here.
First, he’d see what she wanted. No point in dragging her into it if she was here to start a fight, after all, or discuss the terms of divorce now that she’d had a chance to get used to the idea. Not that he was sure he could go through with it; he’d accepted that he was always going to love her. But he did want her to be happy.
He jerked out the top dresser drawer and tucked the bottle underneath his socks. I’m not hiding it. I’m getting it out of sight until I have time to figure out the right person to tell. He got the drawer closed a split-second before she appeared in the door from the hallway.
“How’s your back?”
Funny, he hadn’t given it a second’s thought as long as that bottle of pills was in his hand. Maybe he should just walk around with them: therapy by association. “It’s better, but I probably overdid it today. I guess you came to talk about the divorce.”
He was so preoccupied with walking to the bed and sitting down with as little wincing and groaning as possible that he didn’t realize for a moment that she hadn’t answered. Once he’d planted his butt on the mattress, he looked up at her and saw the tears.
“Is that really what you want, Mark?” She wiped her cheeks with a very human-looking flash of annoyance. “If it is, then we can talk about it. But not before I apologize.”
God, he wasn’t sure he could handle another tortured conversation. “Why are you here, Mel? Aidan will be by in a few minutes. It’s dinner time for vampires, as I guess you know.”
She had been standing in the doorway as if afraid to get close, but now she stepped inside the bedroom and closed the door behind her. “Aidan’s not coming—he’s waiting until the late feeding tonight and moving Britta to a new guy, Grayson, who came in from Atlanta today. Will and Randa recruited him. They’re switching around the schedule since Max is gone . . . and Robbie.”
That made no sense. “Why switch Britta?”
“You knew Matthias escaped?”
Melissa pulled the heavy wooden chair from beside the closet and parked it in front of him so they’d be facing each other. Only when she sat down and rested her hands on her knees did Mark notice what she was wearing: a loose pair of gray sweatpants and what looked like a tank top under her oversized sweater.
What she’d said finally sank in, and Mark felt the room tilt beneath him. Not again. Oh dear God, not again. Haven’t we been through enough?
“No, tell me.” He closed his eyes and listened as she shared what she knew, which was virtually nothing. Nobody knew where the old bastard was, or what he was up to.
“Until we know where Matthias is and what the Tribunal’s up to,” Melissa said, flicking a piece of lint off her pants, “they want the original Penton people sticking close together. Britta’s not a target—she hasn’t been here long enough—but you are, and I am.”
Mark knew he had a concussion, but something still didn’t compute here. “What does that have to do with feeding schedules?”
“I . . .” Melissa twisted her hands in her lap. “I wanted to see if you’d accept me in her place.” At his dumbfounded look, she talked faster. “Aidan said I could go to you or to Nik, that Ranger guy, but Mark, I want to try . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’ve made such a mess of everything . . .”
She finally ran out of steam and her hands fell still.
“What happened? Cage got tired of you?”
As soon as the words were out, Mark wished like hell he could reel them back in and choke himself on him. He’d aimed them to hurt, and they’d hit their target. She looked at the floor, and when she spoke again, her voice was soft and subdued. “I was never with Cage. Never. I was so confused when I was first turned, and he seemed safe. I just let you both think . . .”
The heart of Mark’s inner loser, the one who wallowed in self-pity and played at being the angry victim, beat erratically. “What are you saying, Mel?”
She looked up at him, her jaw set. “That I lied when I said I didn’t remember our love. That I lied when I said I didn’t want to feed from you because I was afraid I’d hurt you. I remember it all. I remember us. I’ve wanted you”—she closed her eyes—“so badly.”
The loser’s heart took off like a jackrabbit who knew the fox was closing in. “Then why? Why not tell me that three fucking months ago? You enjoyed watching me beg?”
“I haven’t enjoyed anything since I’ve been turned. Especially seeing you hurt.” She’d started regaining a little of the fire he loved so much. “But I kept hearing you say . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind.”
Oh no, she wasn’t clamming up now and leaving him with the blame. “You kept hearing me say what, Melissa?”
She smiled. “Remember when we went on our last date night, before things got so bad?”
He remembered, all right. The theater had still been the
re, before it burned. Old Clyde’s barbecue place—he was the only original Penton resident who stayed when the vamps moved in—hadn’t been bombed. None of them knew what kind of shit was coming their way. It was nine months ago. A lifetime ago.
“We ate at Clyde’s, then walked down the street to the theater and watched that Twilight movie,” he said, and laughed. “We made jokes about the sparkling vampires and how pissed off Mirren would be if he sparkled.”
Then they’d gone home and made love. It had been the last perfect night he could remember.
“That was when Krys and Aidan were fighting their feelings for each other, when Krys was so scared and Aidan was in total denial,” Melissa said, her voice so soft he had to strain to hear. “You said you’d never want to be mated to a vampire, that it wasn’t worth the things you’d have to give up.”
Mark’s inner loser rolled over and gasped for air. He seemed to realize he was dying, and in his place sprang up a man Mark had thought dead—the hopeful man. The one who knew who he was and where he belonged.
“Mel, I was just talking out of my ass. I didn’t mean . . .” Shit. “You were avoiding me because you thought once I came to my senses I wouldn’t want you?”
Her smile was genuine. It was heartbreaking. It was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in months. “When you put it like that it seems pretty stupid, huh?”
He tried to get up and cross the fourteen inches to get to her, just two small steps. His back seized up on him halfway and he stumbled.
She caught him, eased her arms around him, and before he knew it they were hugging, her body achingly familiar against his. He’d missed her smell, her skin, the feel of her breasts pressing against his chest. None of that had changed.
Goddamned back. “I want to see if you know how to kiss with fangs, but I’ve gotta sit down.”
She helped ease him onto the bed, and this time when she plumped up the pillows and tugged his sheets and quilt back into place, he didn’t try to stop her. And when she climbed on the bed and lowered her mouth to his, he didn’t try to stop that, either. Her mouth molded to his, and when she scraped a fang across his lip and drew blood, he laughed at her horrified expression.
Allegiance (The Penton Vampire Legacy) Page 16