If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might not have seen it. He wasn’t certain it wouldn’t have been better if he’d missed it. Because of all the expressions a man wants to see on the face of his woman when he tells her he loves her for the first time, this wasn’t it. Ava looked as if he had shot her in the heart and left her to bleed to death on the rich Persian carpet.
Chapter Eighteen
He might as well have stabbed her in the chest, Ava thought, dazed. Of all the things he could have said to her, all the insults he could have thrown, all the observations he could have made, that was the one phrase in this universe that was guaranteed to take the little bits of herself—the ones that she had salvaged from her childhood and painstakingly knit back together from the shreds left by her neglectful, selfish parents—to take them and throw them on the floor and stomp on them with freshly sharpened golf cleats.
What the hell had he been thinking?
Ignoring the way her heart stuttered and clenched at the words, she fixed him with a calm look of mild surprise. It cost her the soul of her firstborn child to achieve it.
“I think you must be mistaken. Maybe the stress of the last three days is getting to you. Do you take a vitamin supplement by any chance? I hear they can work wonders.”
“I take it you have some doubts about my sincerity,” he commented wryly.
“No, only your sanity.”
He tilted his head in question. “You find it insane that a man should have fallen in love with you?”
She laid her palms flat over the arms of the chair she sat in, hoping the fabric would absorb the sweat that had begun to form there. “I think love is a pretty word for an ugly game. And I think that in the space of three days, the only thing a man is capable of falling into is trouble.”
“I cannot argue that you have caused some of that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Let me advise you that telling a woman she’s a troublemaker is not among the top ten ways to convince her that you love her.”
Dima shrugged. “You have just told me that you don’t believe I’m capable of loving you. In fact, you implied that you don’t believe that love exists. So, really, what harm can I do myself? It seems a fairly hopeless endeavor on my part no matter what I say.”
Ava tried not to let the twinge of disappointment she felt at his matter-of-fact attitude show. She had expected him to argue with her, at least a little. Her parents had always argued that they loved her.
I tell you I love you every time I talk to you! they had said, as if the words meant more than the deeds.
The less she had believed them, the more they had argued. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“Permit me to ask one question, though.”
She nodded at him, suspicious of that cool-as-glacier-water tone of his.
“I was under the impression that you see the proof of love around you every day. Graham and Missy, my brother and Regina, even Rafael De Santos and his Tess seem to love each other very much. Do you not believe they have those feelings for each other?”
Ava permitted herself a short laugh. It contained very little amusement. “If you can call that love.”
“You don’t believe they love each other? They looked thoroughly happy to me.”
“Oh, I believe they’re in love with each other, that they believe they love each other, but I have a hard time calling something love when it requires changing or concealing a person’s nature to make them fit into your life better.”
He blinked at her for a moment. It took him several seconds to form his mouth around the words, “Excuse me?”
“I don’t think it’s love when a man makes the woman he claims to love take part in some weird werewolf ritual that involves running from a crowd of would-be rapists who are all obviously stronger and faster and more able to see in the dark than she is,” Ava said, feeling the old anger she had struggled with for so long come surging back as she spoke. Suddenly it was easy to remember why she and Graham couldn’t stand each other.
“Nor do I think it’s love when a man changes a woman into another species of creature just so he can keep her with him for as long as he lives. Taking away someone’s humanity isn’t love.”
Dima watched her, his cool blue eyes looking strangely soft in the dim light of the sitting room. “Have you considered that maybe it was love when those women agreed to such things?”
“Telling someone that that’s the way things have to be if they want to be with you isn’t love.” She spoke quickly and flatly, not even needing to pause for thought on that one. “It’s emotional blackmail.”
He nodded slowly, as if piecing together puzzle parts and trying to decide what the full image would be when he was done. “So you were there when Graham ordered Missy to participate in a mate hunt.” He said it without the inflection of a question, as if he were repeating her own words back to her. “And you were there when Regina went through her transformation.”
She scowled. “Of course not.”
“Then how can you know what really happened?” he asked gently. “How do you know that each of those women did not make the offer to change? How do you know that each would not make the same decision again if offered the choice?”
“ ‘Do what I want or fuck off’?” she speculated cruelly. “What choice is there in that?”
Restless, unable to sit still any longer, she pushed up out of the chair and began to pace the small room, from door to window and back again.
“The choice to follow her heart, to take a step or not to, from what I can see.”
“When is that ever the choice? In all my life, I’ve never been offered any choice that involved following heart! It doesn’t exist. The only choice is to go along with what other people want in the hope that it will make them mean it when they say they love you.” She gave a short bark of laughter. Or maybe it was a sob. “Then you do what they want and find out they’re not capable of meaning it and they never will be.”
She stopped in front of the window and clenched her hands into fists at her sides. Emotions roiled inside her like currents in a whirlpool. She closed her eyes to keep from seeing her own face reflected in the dark glass of the window. She couldn’t stand the look of pain and hope and disappointment and stupidity in her own eyes. And she certainly couldn’t look at Dima, not when he watched her as if he understood some of what was going on inside her. No one could be expected to do that. Her parents never had.
But Dima could already read her too well, while she couldn’t even get a hint of his thoughts from those icy eyes and stony face.
But it does, lyubimaya. It exists right here.
“Get out of my head,” she growled, her nails digging into her palms until she thought they would draw blood. It was a good thing Misha and Reggie had brought her blood earlier this evening or she might have been tempted to open her eyes and check. “You weren’t invited, and I don’t want you there.”
What about in your heart? his voice asked, the one she heard in her head and her heart and every other part of her weak-willed body. Am I welcome there?
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.”
Then why don’t you ask the questions of me?
He stepped up behind her, his feet silent on the thick carpet, his movements graceful as always, but she didn’t have to hear him. She didn’t have to open her eyes to see his reflection pressed up against hers in the dark window glass. She could feel him, almost like another part of her own body. She was acutely aware of his breath stirring her hair, his heat radiating into her chilled skin, his head bending to hers.
Ava didn’t answer. She couldn’t. If she opened her mouth, she would either scream or beg, and she couldn’t allow herself to do either.
Or perhaps you already know. His breath brushed her ear, then his lips. She had to lock her knees to keep them from giving out on her. I will make no secret of it, kralya. You never have to ask if I will invite you into my mind or my heart, for each already
belongs to you.
Ava cursed silently. How the hell had this happened? It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had come up to the sitting room knowing Dima would be here, planning to seduce him shamelessly. She knew he was upset about her role tomorrow, and frankly, she had begun to wonder if she might have bitten off more than she could chew, so she figured a little medicinal sex would be just the thing to distract them both from their worries. If it was anything like last time, it would probably distract her from things like breathing, thinking, and remembering her own name, too, but those were the sacrifices she was willing to make. And Dima was a man—vampirism, age, and phenomenal muscle development notwithstanding—so he should have had the good manners to cooperate by tripping her and beating her to the floor.
But no. He’d had to go and start talking about love. Sex Ava could handle. She could handle affection maybe. Hell, she’d even find a way to handle vampirism, eventually. Love wasn’t ever supposed to be a part of it.
Who did this to you, kralya? his voice murmured inside her head. Who made you so distrusting of love?
Who the hell didn’t? When everyone you meet immediately tells you they love you—love your work, love your face, love your body, love your smile, love your money—right before they shove a dagger in your back, you learn a natural instinct toward caution.
His arms slid around her, crossing over her abdomen and snugging her back against him. He leaned forward and rested his chin on her left shoulder. This isn’t caution you have, lyubushka. It is terror.
You try being an international modeling sensation at thirteen—which is one year after your father says he doesn’t want to be your mother’s husband or your father anymore, and one year before your mother finally realizes he means it and begins a slow, irrevocable slide into dementia, by the way—and let me know how you do staying confident.
There was a long pause. Ava opened her eyes to find his gaze locked on their reflection in the window. Or rather, it was locked on her reflection, on her face, and he looked somehow both sad and confused.
But lyubushka, he said, and his voice in her head was full of emotion, from pity to affection to sadness to impatience, you are not thirteen years old anymore.
And Ava met his eyes in the glass and burst into tears.
Chapter Nineteen
She felt like a prize idiot.
It didn’t matter that Dima treated her with all the affection people usually reserved for wounded kittens and four-year-old children. Or maybe it did matter, but it just made her feel even more ridiculous. Either way, when he heard the first choking sound of weeping, he turned her in his arms and pulled her into his chest, cradling her against him and rocking her like an infant.
Ava thought she must sound like one, but her tears were uncontrollable. She felt like a bathtub whose drain plug had been pulled. All the tears she’d been storing up since the day her father had left her came pouring out on the shoulder of a vampire when he told her he loved her. All she needed was to see a clock melt and her life would have officially become as surreal as a Salvador Dalí painting.
“Hush, lyubimaya,” Dima crooned, his hands stroking her back, and he rocked her back and forth. “It is all right. You are all right, nenaglyadnaya. Hush.”
She just cried harder. Her hands unclenched with a jerk and she bent her stiffened arms, pulling them away from her sides and wrapping them around Dima’s waist. She clung to him, the first time she could remember clinging to anyone since she had learned to walk, and gasped for breath in between shuddering sobs.
She heard him murmuring to her, comforting sounds and nonsense words, some in English and some in Russian. What he said, she realized, made very little difference. What mattered was that he continued to hold her and even if he was trying to soothe her and encouraging her not to cry, she knew instinctively that it was because he hated to see her so upset and not because he didn’t want to have to deal with her and her messy emotions.
When she showed no signs of stopping, he scooped her up and carried her a few feet before he stopped and turned sharply around, heading for the door to the bedroom she had laid claim to early in the evening. She clung to him while he shouldered the door open and carried her into the dark room. She felt a moment’s panic that he meant to tuck her into bed and leave her to cry herself to sleep, but he never took his hands off of her. Instead of laying her on the mattress, he turned and sat, swinging his legs up onto the bed and propping his back against the pillows piled in front of the headboard. Then he settled her comfortably in his lap and rubbed his cheek against hers, spreading a layer of salty tears over each of them.
“Poor little kralya,” he murmured, and stroked her soothingly. “So many tears.”
He was right. Ava hadn’t known it was possible to cry so much, and she could have lived without ever learning the truth. She felt as if something deep inside her had cracked. Or maybe more like a huge scab inside her had been ripped off, and while the pain was excruciating, she knew that once her nerves stopped screaming about it, she would find new, shiny, healthy pink skin in the place where she had always been wounded.
Slowly, very slowly, she began to calm down. She wasn’t sure how long it took, though judging by the wet spot on Dima’s shirt—which took up almost half of his chest—she used quite a few minutes to do so. The clenching in her chest gradually eased, allowing her breathing to smooth out and her heartbeat to slow to something like normal.
When she shuddered out a long sigh, Dima took her chin gently in his fingers and tilted her face enough to let him look at it.
Ava grimaced. “Don’t say anything. I don’t care how gorgeous she might be—when she cries, no woman looks pretty.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I think you are beautiful.” He leaned down and brushed a tender kiss over her lips. “When your eyes go all red and puffy.”
She smacked him. “You told me you love me. Isn’t that supposed to mean you don’t notice things like that?”
She couldn’t believe she had said it out loud. But more than that, she couldn’t believe she almost believed it.
“I said I was in love, kralya, not that I was blind.”
“But love is blind.”
“Not since the invention of contact lenses.” Grinning, he carefully lifted her and set her down on the mattress next to him. Then he slid off the bed, pausing to press a kiss to her forehead. “Stay here. I will be right back.”
She didn’t have to wonder where he was going for long. He moved only as far as the attached bath, where she heard him moving around along with the sound of water running. Exhausted, she snuggled down onto the bed and laid her face on a fluffy pillow. She hadn’t realized how tiring emotions could be, not this kind of emotion anyway, maybe because she didn’t have much experience with them. Her father had no emotions that she had ever perceived, and the ones her mother had had cost the woman her health and her sanity. These were hardly sterling examples for Ava to want to emulate.
Again, Ava heard no footsteps, but she felt Dima’s approach as surely as if there had been a cable tying them together. She looked up as he sat back on the edge of the bed.
“Here. Drink.” He handed her a glass of water. “All that crying will leave you dehydrated.”
She took the glass automatically, raised it to her lips, and paused. “I can drink water?”
He made a face. “Of course you can drink water. All living creatures can drink water. It is not as if it is full of nutrients your body must process. All it is full of is water.”
“I was just asking,” she huffed, but she was smiling behind the rim of the glass. “At this point, I figure the last thing I need to cap off my evening is a lively bout of vomiting.”
He waited while she drained the water and then set the glass aside. Then he reached out to her and pressed a warm, wet cloth against the skin of her face.
She moaned in surprised pleasure. “Oh, my God, that feels amazing.”
He said nothing, just quietly wiped
the traces of tears from her cheeks and eyes and even her forehead. She knew tears were supposed to roll downward, but hers had apparently defied gravity. Either that, or they had been smeared in interesting directions when Dima had rubbed against her. When he was done, he set the cloth aside and watched her. Ava marveled that even in the dark, his pale eyes shone distinctly blue, and she wondered if that was due to her improved night vision or the power of his eyes themselves.
“It will not be dawn for a couple of hours yet,” he murmured. “But if you’re tired, you should sleep. Tomorrow you will need to be strong and rested.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
She watched his eyes for another minute, then lifted her hand and placed it on his cheek. She felt the rough prickle of stubble against her skin and noted how he automatically leaned into her hand, shifting to nuzzle against her palm. She felt something stir inside her, something she thought the tears might have unleashed. It stretched and blinked and saw what was before her, and it purred.
Ava drew his face down to hers, or maybe it drifted. Either way, she stretched up off the pillows and brushed her lips over his. She heard the catch in his breathing and felt the same echoed in her own chest. Something undeniable happened when they touched, undeniable and electric and terrifying and exhilarating. She didn’t know if it was love, but it fascinated her.
Her lips rubbed against his, soft and unhurried, savoring the shape and texture of his mouth. From a distance it looked so hard, as if chiseled from the same granite as the rest of his face, but up close it was so soft, almost as soft as her own, and it yielded to the slightest pressure of hers.
His lips parted, making it easier for her to play with each lip in turn. She pressed kisses to the top, drawing her breath in softly until his lip clung to hers as if beseeching her for more. Then she shifted to the bottom and caught the flesh between her teeth for a split second, a stinging nip, before soothing the tiny hurt with a tender stroke of her tongue. She heard him groan and felt him sink into her, and her heart began to beat a little faster.
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