“Payne?” she whispered, her soft voice warming his heart and easing the pain away. She looked up at him and then pressed her lips to his bare shoulder, lingering there.
“Elissa?” he said when he realised that she wouldn’t continue without him prompting her. She felt tense, her anxiety flowing over him, carried by her scent. What had she wanted to ask but was now too afraid to voice?
Payne gently squeezed her hand and she looked up at him again. He kept his expression soft and open, hoping it would soothe her and help her find her voice. She could ask whatever she wanted and he would answer her this time because he no longer wanted any barriers between them. He wanted to know her, wanted to break through everything that had happened in the past few minutes and find solid ground with her again.
“Why do you feel you deserve pain?” she breathed the words against his skin, her lips brushing him at the same time, stirring heat and desire in his veins.
His guard was down and he realised for the first time in his life that he ached to tell someone and share the burden. Would she turn on him if she knew? He thought that she might. She would want nothing to do with him.
But he needed to tell her.
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
Payne let go of her hand and Elissa thought he would refuse to answer her. She could almost feel him distancing himself as he moved to lie on the bed, slung his left arm behind his head on the pillows and laid his right across his bare stomach. Was he going to give her the silent treatment again? He didn’t look at her. His dark grey eyes fixed on the green canopy of the four-poster bed, the flecks of blue and gold in them bright against their stony backdrop. There was a touch of red edging his irises though. What was he thinking to make them change, veering towards their vampire state?
He drew in a deep breath and sighed it out.
“I was born to an elite bloodline and my parents were very loving towards me.”
Elissa’s eyes widened. He was going to tell her. He was actually going to answer the one question that always seemed to set him on edge. Was it because she had talked about her family with him? It had hurt her to speak about her sister, even when she had kept most of the details about her hidden from Payne still. The colours of his fae markings shifted, the change beginning along the underside of his arms and working up the lines of symbols towards his shoulders. They gradually darkened to shades of ash and blood. He was angry but the distant look in his eyes said that it wasn’t directed at her.
Purple and blue bloomed along his markings, swirling and mixing with the black and the red. Hurt. How did he feel about those markings? Did he hate that they gave everything away about his feelings? She had once thought that he could control them to a degree, masking his feelings. Maybe he couldn’t, or he wasn’t as good at it as she had thought, because she could see all of his feelings in his markings.
Or maybe she was reading too far into things, and he was letting her see his feelings. If that was the case, then it touched her that he was letting his guard down.
“I should probably correct that... my parents were loving towards me at first.” He closed his eyes and exhaled again, causing his torso to shift in a beautiful wave that lured her eyes to it. She forced them back to his face, refusing to stare at him while he was opening his heart to her. He tilted his head towards her and opened his eyes. “We were a close family and my father adored my mother. He had turned her long before they decided to have a child and I loved her as deeply as my father, adoring her too.”
The warmth in his eyes and the slight tilt of his sensual lips conveyed how much he had loved his mother. She hadn’t failed to notice that he was talking past tense. Something had happened to Payne’s happy family.
“I grew up in a mansion with other families but my father was the head of the bloodline. He indulged my every whim, spoiling me and my mother.” His eyelids dropped again, shuttering his beautiful eyes, but she hadn’t missed the darkness that had entered them just a second before he had closed them, shutting her out. “I was on the verge of puberty when my fae markings appeared.”
“You weren’t born with them?” Her heart missed a beat and lodged in her throat, trembling there. Verity had been wrong. Elissa had hoped that her sister had been right and that Luca only had witch in his genes. She had prayed to the earth and the sky that Luca had inherited none of his father’s genes. Now she knew without a doubt that those prayers had gone unanswered. Luca would develop his markings when he matured.