Alejandro's Sorceress(19)

“That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I lost my father when I was young, too, not that I’m comparing a car accident to your village’s overwhelming tragedy. I’m just saying that I know how hard it is to lose even one person you love.”
“It is horrible. But it’s in the past, and it’s why I do what I do now.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, but Rose probably saw right through his pathetic pretense.
Thankfully, she didn’t call him on his crap.
“We’ve never had a problem with them here, because, well, witches. We’re a pretty vibrant community, and the vamps in this region all know we can hurt them very badly if they ever try anything. So they leave us alone, and we leave them alone as long as they behave,” Rose said.
“How civilized of you.” The bitterness in his voice hung in the air between them.
“I’m sorry. It must sound horrible to you, but the vampires I know personally aren’t like the ones who killed your family. They’re just trying to figure out their place in a society that suddenly knows that they really exist,” she said, and the kindness in her eyes disarmed him, making him want to be someone else. Someone who belonged in a place like this with Rose.
Someone he could never be.
She reached for his hand and held it in both of her own, and he knew he wasn’t imagining the electric sense of connection between them, because her eyes flared wide at the sensation. In the soft candlelight, her eyes were dark pools of mystery. The curve of her cheek was a poem; the fall of her hair was a song.
But he had no talent for poem or song; he was nothing more than rage fashioned into a blunt weapon.
“I don’t—I’ve never felt that before. And I don’t understand why I do now. You’re not even my type,” she said, laughing a little but looking confused.
Anger flared through him at the thought of any other man being her type; a hot, almost feral emotion that he had no right to feel. “What is your type?”
“Nerdy guys with a good sense of humor, pretty much,” she confessed. “And you’re so not that.”
He had to think for a few seconds to come up with the definition of nerdy, but then he smiled grimly. “No. Never that.”
“She must have been crazy,” Rose blurted out. “To leave you for anyone else. You’re special. I’ve only known you a day, and I know that.”
He didn’t know what to do with the feelings she caused to rise up in him, so hopeful and tentative, so he pushed them aside, down deep where he kept painful memories and his knowledge of the viciously real nature of the world. But sunlight was the enemy of pain; it brightened shadowed corners and gave a gleaming polish to the battered edges of what he supposed might be called his soul.
So naturally he doubted it; his soul was long since blackened beyond repair. Ever since he’d shirked his duty to steal a private moment, and people had died because of it.
His fault.
His burden.
His guilt.
“We should get back,” he said abruptly, standing up. “Your cat is still outside, yes? Who knows what the basilisks are doing to it.”
Rose’s small flinch of hurt added another scar to his burden, but he took it gladly. It was what he knew. What he was meant for. Not sunlight or hope, but vengeance.
“Bob is way too smart to get caught by the same trick twice, or I never would have let him roam,” she said, raising her chin. “I’m sorry you think I’m so uncaring.”
He reached out for her, but she turned away, and his hand missed her arm and touched the curve of her hip. A storm of want battered its way through him, and he had to fight not to let himself show it.
“I don’t think that at all, Rose Cardinal. I think, instead, that you care too much,” he said gently.
He put money on the table for the bill, and they walked back to her house in a silence that was far too vast to breach.
    







 
    Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance by Jennifer Ashley, Alyssa Day, Felicity Heaton, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Erin Quinn, Bonnie Vanak and Caris Roane
    
 


 
CHAPTER 11
Rose tossed and turned for a few restless hours, unable to sleep with Alejandro right down the hall. Her skin was still vibrating with the sensation of his touch on her hip; nerve endings she’d never felt before had flared into almost painful existence.
But her inability to sleep was caused by more than the physical wanting. He’d let her see him—really see him—and now she couldn’t pretend, even to herself, that he was nothing more than an arrogant alpha male come to create havoc in her life.