The Alpha’s Desire 3(24)
It was those thoughts, though, that brought me around to Lex, hearing him in my head scold me any time I even alluded to putting myself down. No matter my full figure, or anything else, in his eyes, according to the way he acted, and spoke, I was beautiful. In his arms, I felt so, too. He made sure of it. I couldn’t lose him. I hoped that someone had rescued him, as well. I had to hold onto that hope or I’d lose my shit, again, and in an instant. Last time it had been pain-induced. This time, it would also be pain spurring it, but a different kind, the agony of a heart who feared for the one she loved, the one she needed to keep that heart beating at all.
Thinking back to my dreams about him since I’d come here, I had to also believe that the first, when we’d been chased on the Royal island by the true, natural werewolf pack, was either a fever-induced nightmare, or a premonition which I hoped to change the course of the future to prevent. However, the second dream felt more real, like he’d used our unique connection, the one of wolf protector and his protected, to reach me. He’d used it when I was a child to come to me, in my dreams, when I’d needed him. It had to be the same now, a way to connect when we couldn’t be together.
I loved that he loved me that much. No matter his state, and in the dream it had seemed bad, he had to still know how I was, and had a need to help me. The only thing was, in the second dream, I’d felt him dying. Still, whatever it was, dream or connection, that didn’t make sense. Riker and Vivian had said that if he still had a beating heart, he could heal. Yet, in the dream state, or psychic connection, he’d just been suffering, dying, like a human would. The only comfort I could find was in the fact that, in our last connection, however long ago it had been, he’d been alive. Suffering horribly, but breathing, his heart still beating. I needed him alive more than I needed air, or at this moment, a large bottle of water to fix the fact that my mouth was so dry that my lips were sticking to my teeth, and my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
Beyond that, I still had the aftertaste of whatever they’d been feeding me, an herbal tasting tea or something I’d been awoken to drink a few times since arriving here. The spicy mix had that grassy aftertaste of green tea. It was not a favorite of mine, so that is what it tasted like to me. Beyond that, I still had that metallic taste of my blood in my mouth. At least, with my teeth gritted together to keep down the rising bile, I hoped and prayed it was my blood. If these were indeed vampires, I’d hate to think the lore had gotten that right, and that I’d been fed their blood to heal me.
Swallowing hard over the sudden lump in my throat, I swore I smelled blood, even on top of the scented candles and whatever else they pumped through this house to make it smell so fresh and clean, like freshly cut flowers and baking cookies all at the same time. It had to be my mind working overtime, though, as there was not a trace of blood left anywhere, save maybe my breath, I guessed, and that thought didn’t help the roll of my stomach one bit. Pushing up to sitting again, the feeling of being watched turned my head to the top of the stairs. The woman with brown hair and matching brown eyes stood at the top of the stairs to my private loft bedroom, which hung in the crook of a high ceiling within this huge loft.
While I would have expected to startle, I didn’t, seeing my rescuer. More, I simply wondered how she’d come into the place and climbed the stairs without me seeing her do so. She nodded at me with a warm, kind smile on her angular, thin face. It added a warmth to her more masculine features. Gracefully, though, she walked to my bed and sat down. I took notice of the fact that the mattress hardly moved when she did so. Strong, as she’d somehow carried me, and solidly built, as in having defined muscles, she was still a wisp of a thing, slender and trim. Not an ounce of body fat on her, and the tight clothing she wore revealed all of these facts.
“Hello, Christina. I’m Nira. It’s nice to finally see you fully awake and all healed. You had a nasty broken leg, and an ugly bump on your head,” she said, sticking her hand out to shake mine.
I reached out my own hand, and was surprised to find her fingers only slightly cold, as any human’s could be, rather than ice cold like the books and movies described vampires to have. Her skin was pale, as I’d noticed before, but not deathly so, just in an I-don’t-care-for-the-sun sort of way. She didn’t speak like she was from another time, at least not so far, and come to think of it, she didn’t cower from the sunlight streaming through the walls of windows in this place. I guess that if she burnt in the sun, she wouldn’t have bought, or even agreed to be in a loft.