by Lisa Marie
Brie pulled back, her eyes wide with guilt at causing him pain. “I’m sorry. I-I forgot.”
She blushed, straight to the roots of her hair, and Mark thought it was the cutest thing he had ever seen. “It’s okay. I forgot, too.”
The breath seemed to freeze in her chest when he gave an actual smile. Not just one of his half smiles or smirks, but a genuine, full-fledged smile. Amazing how it transformed him. He looked younger, and good lord, a dimple? Right there, in the middle of his right cheek, was a dimple. Before she could stop herself, she raised her hand to trace a finger around it, as if making sure it was really there.
“You should smile more often. You’re beautiful.” She nearly giggled at the look that crossed his face. His manly pride had been injured at being called something so girly, but she could see he was also pleased.
“I prefer strikingly handsome,” he replied, his voice curt, but his eyes twinkling.
Oh, so, now he was teasing her? She felt herself falling into another loop of disbelief.
“All right then,” she managed with a breathy chuckle. Everything seemed to stop when his eyes suddenly went hot again, the sheer need in them making her dizzy.
“I want to be with you, Brie; inside of you. I’ve wanted it since I first saw your God damned picture.”
Goosebumps sprang up on her flesh at his husky words. She wanted it, too, more than anything she’d ever wanted.
“But I was hired to protect you,” Mark continued, “from assholes like me.”
Regret flashed through his eyes and an unexplainable panic shot through her. Her hand shot up to seize the wrist of the hand still buried in her hair, holding it still.
“Don’t I get some say in this?” Desire clouded his eyes again, but his face was set in the grim mask she was starting to hate.
No, you don’t, her mind yelled at him. We aren’t going back to that.
“Brie, it’s not a good idea. Look what happened last night. We’re strangers thrown together in a tense situation.” He couldn’t believe he was sitting here, explaining why they couldn’t sleep together, while his raging dick dug painfully into the back of his zipper. They both wanted it. But something told him that once he got a taste of her, he’d never be able to let go. And that terrified him more than anything he’d ever faced.
“That may be. But I want you, too, Mark. I don’t know why, and I have no idea what will happen when we leave this cabin. I have been scared for so long. I don’t want to be scared anymore.” Tears slid from her eyes as she talked, her words fading out to a whisper as emotion closed her throat. She knew she should be mortified by the way she was practically begging Mark to make love to her, but all that was pushed aside by the fear that he wouldn’t.
“Jesus, Brie. I’m not a nice man. I screw up, a lot.” Mark hated the tears he saw, hated that he put them there. “I can’t take advantage of you.”
“It’s not taking advantage if I’m willing. I’m not asking for forever, Mark. I’m asking for tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Not forever.”
This was crazy, Mark’s conscious insisted. All of this was brought on by the stress of their situation, their close proximity. He had no doubt that he would be able to resist the pull of her if they weren’t alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods. But the reality was that they were. And he had never wanted anything so badly.
“Brie…” he took a deep breath, stared down into her pleading eyes and felt his resolve start to crack, “—go take a bath.”
Her jaw trembled and her eyes filled with fresh tears. She bumped his injured arm when she bolted from the table. He cursed a blue streak, thinking it was the least of what he deserved. But he wasn’t raised to take advantage of a woman, no matter how willing she was.
Brie wouldn’t want him if they were anywhere else, and that’s what he kept telling himself. Unfortunately, it was cold comfort when the sounds of her sobs reached him over the rush of running bath water.
* * * *
The sun was setting when Eve and Ash finally picked themselves off of the bathroom floor. The water had long ago run cold, but they managed to each get a quick shower in anyway. Eve’s teeth chattered and her feet, which had been soothed from the chilled water, started to throb when she stepped out onto the tiling. She sank to the toilet seat and bit her lip to keep back a cry of pain as Ash wrapped a heavy towel around her shoulders. She clutched the edges and fought the shivering wracking her body. He knelt in front of her and gently picked up one foot to inspect the damage.
“Flora swears by this stuff,” he mumbled, balancing her foot on his knee and picking up a small, ceramic pot.
“How bad is it?”
“You have some cuts and a few blisters. Some chipped nail polish.” He grinned at her indignant huff, but didn’t look up. “I think most of the damage is from walking for so long. This should help.” He stuck two fingers into the crock and scooped out a generous amount of a fluorescent blue cream.
He began to work it into the bottom of her foot, and she yelped. His gaze shot up to hers and his fingers stilled. “Just relax. It doesn’t take long to work.”
Eve looked at him doubtfully, but managed not to jerk when his fingers kneaded the ravaged skin of her arch. At first, it felt like fire was shooting from the point he touched straight up her leg. Her fingers tightened on the towel until the knuckles turned white and she tried desperately not to squirm. Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, the pain receded to leave behind a warm, tingling feeling. She let out a huge sigh of relief and closed her eyes. Without the pain there, she could take pleasure in the feel of his hands massaging her foot. That was, until he put the foot he had been working on down and lifted the other one.
“Oh, God,” she nearly whimpered, her bottom lip sticking out in a miserable pout.
Unable to resist, Ash leaned forward and captured it between his teeth, giving it a light nip before sitting back. “Just remember, it does start to feel good.”
Eve nodded, sending the damp tresses of her hair bouncing around her chin. She still hissed in pain when he repeated his ministrations, despite being prepared for it. In an effort to try to ignore the ache, she forced her eyes away from Ash’s hands to take in the rest of him. He knelt in front of her, a faded pair of jeans riding low on his hips, damp spots darkening the material in various places. His hair was slightly wet from his shower and the light bounced off the gold highlights hidden in the sable strands. It fell across his forehead in an almost boyish manner, making him appear younger than he was; or than he was supposed to be. She couldn’t decide which was the proper term.
“How old were you?” she asked suddenly. He looked up at her, his ice blue eyes filled with confusion, even while his hands never faltered in their work. “When you were turned. How old were you?”
“Ah, I was twenty-two,” he answered, dropping his gaze back to his hands. She sighed when his fingers started to knead the muscles in her calves, working out the kinks.
“Where were you? I mean, where are you from?”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?” Ash asked, never looking back at her. In fact, he seemed strangely intent on stroking his thumbs over the back of her leg. She felt a bit of fear at his hesitation and wondered if she really did want to know.
“Yes. I really want to know,” Eve heard herself say, and realized that it was true. If she loved him, she had to accept all of him. That included the ugliness that was his life back then.
“I was born in Georgia. Third born to Thomas and Agnes Marshall. They were sharecroppers. We were sharecroppers,” he clarified, remembering the years of hard work with little reward. He remembered his mama sitting by the fire at night, darning socks or reading the bible. His daddy would sit with her, after the day’s chores were done and listen as she read, smoking his pipe. They were good people, hard workers and, while not the most affectionate of parents, each boy knew he was loved.
“How were you turned?” For the first time since he started, his fingers f
altered in their path up her leg. He took a deep breath and tried to figure out the right words to say.
“It was during the Civil War, right before Lee surrendered. I was…” he paused, feeling suddenly embarrassed for what he was about to admit. “I was deserting,” he said it quickly, his voice catching as the words fell from his lips. He didn’t look up, didn’t want to see the disappointment in her eyes.
Even though it was over a century ago, in a war that she knew nothing about beyond the history books and AandE specials, it was still very vivid in his mind. What he had done was a disgrace to his family. He had deserved to die. “I hadn’t gone into the war until late. My two brothers had gone before me, and my daddy. Daddy didn’t want me to join, since I was planning on going into the ministry. Men of God shouldn’t be forced to fight, he’d said. So, I stayed to take care of Mama, the farm and to get ready to follow my calling.”
A priest? Eve stared down at the man in front of her and, despite the cross scar he had on his chest, she couldn’t see it. The fact that he had deserted barely even registered. Personally, she had always been of the mind that both sides should have just said the hell with it and turned around and gone home. She had the silliest thought that maybe she had committed some sin by sleeping with him. Then she reminded herself that he was a vampire. Sin probably wasn’t much of a concern anymore.
“Then daddy got hurt and came home. Charlie and Robert were still out in the trenches. We’d get letters whenever they could get one off, so we knew they were alive. Mama and I lit a candle every time a letter showed up, thanking God for keeping them safe.”
Eve’s attention was rapt as he spoke, the soft sound of his voice painting a picture of the Deep South in war torn Georgia. She could imagine them, on their farm, working the land and fighting for what they thought was right. She was charmed by the way Ash said Daddy, and she could hear the love he still carried for his mama.
“Then Robert got himself killed and Charlie came home missing a leg. So, I enlisted.” He started to massage her other leg, using it as a way not to look up at her. He’d only said it all out loud once before, and that had been after a few bottles of whiskey. He hadn’t even been sure he’d given the jerk that wanted his story anything he could use he was so drunk. That was until Sebastian threw the interview up in his face.
“If the war was almost over, why did you go?”
“We didn’t know it was almost over. Communication in the South was at a slow crawl by that time. Sherman had already marched on Atlanta. We didn’t know much of anything. Like a good, patriotic southern boy, I went. Even though I didn’t believe in the damn war, I rode off and joined the first regiment I found. The first time I fired a gun and killed someone, I threw up. That was also the night I took off. And ran straight into her.”
“Her?” Eve’s heart was breaking for the man he had been. A religious man; torn by duty and faith. So different than the vampire in front of her.
“Celine. My sire.” Ash suddenly felt the need to get up, to stop touching her. It was like he could taint her with the beast he had been, just by relating the story. It wasn’t who he was anymore. No matter how fine the line was between Celine’s childe and the Ash of today.
He lowered Eve’s feet to the ground and stood, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. “She was gorgeous, exotic. I didn’t have a chance. Poor, dumb country boy getting his first taste of a woman. That’s all I was. And even though my mind was screaming at me that I should get the hell out of there, I couldn’t. I was hers the second she laid eyes on me.” The whispered promises came back to him. The dark delights Celine had ensured with her touch, her kiss. A shiver ran over his spine even now, a century later. “The only problem was she didn’t expect the childe to surpass the sire.”
“What do you mean?”
His jaw tensed and his mouth thinned to a grim line, the sharp lines of his face seeming etched from stone.
“Tell me.” Eve hated that she sounded like she was begging, but it needed to be said. Whatever his past was, it was a part of him. And how could she say she loved him if she didn’t know it and accept it all?
“For fifty years, give or take, Celine and I wrote our lives together in blood. This whole new world opened up, and I snatched it. Fear, blood, death sex, all of it. The combination was more than heady, more than addicting. It was everything.” Ash hazarded a glance up at her, just to see the amount of revulsion she had to be feeling. Instead, all he saw in her clear, green eyes was a need to understand; a need to know. No trace of disgust or any kind of judgment. It bolstered him a bit, and he kept his eyes on her when he started to talk again. “Celine loved showing me vampire life. Showed me how to get the perfect combination of fear and arousal in the blood before making the kill. And I was a quick study. The power when you’re turned is unimaginable. You hold life and death in your hands. Hell, you hold immortality in your hands. It isn’t hard not to care about the people you’re playing with.
“Everything between us seemed perfect, until she started to lose her hold on me. I started to see myself as more than her childe. I was the Master and I proved it, time and again. I had more kills than her, more bragging rights.”
“She didn’t take that too well?”
He nodded and let out a harsh chuckle, his mind far away for a brief second before his eyes focused on her again. “Not that she showed me to my face. Little did I know what the hell she was up to.”
Ash shoved a hand in his hair, making it stick up in odd spikes from his head. He leaned back against the sink, crossed his arms over his chest and tried to fight off the sorrow he’d failed to outrun for eighty years. “One night, we were in New York. It was during Prohibition and we had just spent the evening at a Speakeasy. That had been a particularly … fuck it … we killed the whole place, because we could. Fuck!” He pushed away from the wall and stormed out of the bathroom, as if he could leave the memories behind and not deal with them.
Eve stood on shaky legs, wrapped the towel more securely around her, and followed him out. He didn’t look at her as she settled on the bed, just continued to stare out the window.
“We were laughing when we walked into our apartment—scratch that, it wasn’t ours. We’d killed the owners the night we got into town. We still had them, propped up on the couch like mannequins in a shop window.” Another bitter chuckle, this one sounding more like a sob, ripped from his throat.
She could practically see the self-hatred written along the lines of his bare back. She was having some trouble herself, imagining the man in front of her doing these horrible things and laughing about them. Her stomach rolled slightly at the idea of the couple who’d died in the safety of their own home. She shook it off, reminded herself that they were long dead, and forced herself to listen to the rest. She had a feeling they hadn’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg.
“Anyway, here we are, laughing about the people in the club, ripping each other’s clothes off and slamming around the apartment. We fucked like wild animals. That’s the way it always was with her. Not like I ever would have thought to try being gentle. That didn’t come till later. After I killed her.”
He said the last part so softly, she wasn’t sure she had heard it right. But from the flash of pain that twisted his features, she’d figured her ears were working fine. Her heart cracked with the misery it must have put him through, despite her hatred for what he—they—were back then.
“Why did you kill her, Ash?”
The sound of his name rolling off Eve’s tongue, so soft and full of concern—for him—made him unconsciously whimper in the back of his throat. It seemed almost obscene, with Celine and the atrocity that was his life back then, so close to the front of his mind. He hadn’t had a name when he was with her. Hell, he had practically forgotten he had one until he’d met Cyrus.
Eve shouldn’t care about him. It wasn’t often that he felt unworthy of anything. This was one of those times.
“Usually, when a vampire is turned,
their first victims are their families. It’s like they have to completely cut ties with their human lives before they can move on. Sometimes, it’s a test by a sire, but mostly, fledglings will do it on their own. I didn’t. I just left. Never looked back. Celine had asked me to, but I wouldn’t. Didn’t care what she said. I think that first little show of, uh, disobedience was more than she could take. She held it in, though. Letting me have my way while she pondered how to bring me back down.
“She waited too long. I was too strong, too powerful. Her plan backfired on her.”
Ash’s head dropped forward and rested against the glass of the window. She could see his struggle to contain whatever was raging inside of him. The faint light from outside cut across his features, exposing the raw emotion struggling to break free.
“That night, after … uh…”
“I get the idea,” Eve interrupted before he could clarify. She heard his sigh of relief and had to smile. She could admit to being a little jealous of hearing him talk about a former lover, even though that lover was his sire and long gone. Not to mention that it had happened so long ago, it really shouldn’t bother her. But she was a woman, and the thought of anyone touching him made her want to scratch the bitch’s eyes out. That brought up the rather disturbing thought that she wouldn’t be around forever.
Later, worry about that later, she told herself, pushing it far from her mind.
“Afterwards, I see this box sitting on the coffee table in front of our ‘hosts’.” He shuddered a bit, but continued, even though his voice had thickened. “She had gone out earlier that evening. I slept in, usually not waking up until close to midnight. But not her—she loved to walk in the city. I asked her what was in the box. She said it was a gift for me and to open it. Again, not unusual. So…” a deep breath, “—I pick up the box. First thing I notice is the scent of blood. Familiar blood. My blood.” Ash turned away from the window and crossed to her. She reached out and took his hand in hers, somehow knowing that what he was about to say next was bad. Really bad.