Lover Mine(71)

"John?" she whispered.

He tapped lightly on her shoulder so she knew he'd heard her.

"Thank you."

He put his cheek down on her hair and nodded his head so she could feel it.

When she pulled herself out from under, he wasn't surprised--at least not until he realized that she wanted to look up at him.

Oh, Jesus, he hated the expression on her gaunt face. She was afraid to the point of terror, her deep gray eyes the color of flat asphalt.

You're okay, he mouthed. You're going to be okay.

"Am I." Her eyes squeezed shut. "Am I really."

If he had anything to do with it, shit, yeah.

Her lids popped open again. "I'm so sorry," she said hoarsely.

What for?

"Everything. Treating you like I did. Being who I am. You deserve so much better. I'm . . . really sorry."

Her voice cracked at the end and as she started to blink, she laid her head back down and put her palm right on his beating heart.

It was moments like this when he desperately wished he could speak. After all, it wasn't like he was going to shuffle her around so he could get to his frickin' pad of paper.

In the end, he just held her with care because that was all he had to offer.

And he wasn't mistaking this exchange for what it wasn't. An apology wasn't a declaration of love and it wasn't even necessary, because he'd all but forgiven her anyway. Yet it helped him, somehow. It was still a far distance from the way he'd hoped things would have gone between them, but it was a damn lot better than nothing.

John tugged the sheet up higher on her shoulder, then let his head fall back. Staring out of the darkened window, his eyes searched the stars that dotted the dense, velvety black of the night sky.

Funny, felt like heaven was up against his chest instead of all above the whole world.

Xhex was alive. And in his arms. And he was taking her home.

Yup. All in all, things could have been a fuckload worse.





TWENTY-FIVE





Lash would later reflect that you never knew who you were going to cross tracks with. You just never knew how a simple decision to go left or right at a corner would change things. a Sometimes the choices didn't matter. Others . . . took you into unexpected places.

At the current moment, however, he had yet to come to that realization. He was just out in farm country, driving along, thinking about the time.

Just a little past one.

"How much longer?"

Lash glanced across the interior of the Mercedes. The prostitute he'd picked up in an alley downtown was sufficiently good- looking and had enough silicon in her to do porn, but Plastic Fantastic's drug habit had left her bony and twitchy.

Desperate, too. So strung out it had taken only a hundred-dollar bill to get her into the AMG on the way to a "party."

"Not far," he replied, refocusing on the road ahead.

He was disappointed as shit. When he'd played this out in his head, Xhex was bound and gagged in the backseat--much more romantic. Instead, he was stuck with this nasty 'hood rat. But he couldn't fight the reality he was in: he needed to feed and his father was expecting some business to be done and finding Xhex was going to require more time than there was to spare.

Among the worst of the concessions was that this bitch riding shotgun was a human: Far less useful than a female vampire, but he was hoping her ovaries worked in his favor when it came to sucking her blood.

More to the point, he hadn't been able to find one of his kind in a skirt.

"You know," she said with a slur, "I used to model."

"Really."

"Down in Manhattan. But you know, those bastards . . . they don't really care about you. They just want to use you, you know."

Right. First, she needed to forget she'd ever heard the phrase you know. And second, like she was doing so much better on her own up in Caldwell?

"I like your car."

"Thanks," he muttered.

She leaned over, her breasts bunching up over the pink basque she had on. The thing had grease smudges from dirty hands on the sides, like she hadn't washed it for a couple of days, and she smelled like fake cherries, BO and crack smoke.

"You know, I like you. . . ."

Her hand went to his thigh and then her head went down into his lap. When he felt her rooting around for his zipper, he grabbed a hunk of bleached-blond tangle and yanked her back up.

She didn't even notice the pain.

"Let's not start this now," he said. "We're almost there."

The woman licked her lips. "Sure. Okay."

The shorn fields on either side of the road were washed in moonlight and the clapboard houses that dotted the scruffy patches glowed white. Most places had a porch light on and that was it. Around here, anything after midnight was waaaaaaay past bedtime for these folks.

Which was part of the reason it made sense to have an outpost here in the land of hot apple pie and American flags.