"Tell me what happened, Darren," she demanded, letting the acid she felt leak into her voice.
"You've been made fully vampire. The amount of blood it took to keep you alive overwhelmed your human blood. You've lost your humanity, so you don't have to worry about what people think of you anymore. We don't even need to tell them you used to be half-human. Now that you're perfect, the past is the past. Now come to me, love. I want to feel our bond more clearly." He was so matter-of-fact about it, as if he were talking about his day at work. He'd killed the most important part of her, the part of her that had been nurtured by her mother from birth. Was she supposed to thank him and be accepting because of a forced blood bond? Was she supposed to be happy that he forced her to bond with him, instead of the man she wanted to spend her life with?
"You're a bastard!" She leapt off the bed and began to pace. "I thought you cared about me. I thought we were friends. How could you do this to me?"
"Danielle, please calm down. I never meant to hurt you. Your anger with me stings. It hurts me when you think hateful thoughts. Our bond will help you accept this, if you relax and let me in. I have been struggling to reach you since we bonded. Please come to bed so we can be whole," he pleaded, pacing behind her. He tried to lead her back to the bed.
"You can feel my feelings?" Something wasn't right.
"I can feel rough edges of them until you get upset. Then it stabs at me. I can feel the sweet warm light of your soul, but I can't enter, yet." He was almost pouting. The bastard was pouting like a child.
She thought about that for a minute. Shouldn't she be able to feel him? Shouldn't she need to be near him, if what they said about bonding was true? She should have been bathing in their love and devotion, but she wasn't. What she wanted to do was run. She wanted to cry for her lost humanity. She wanted to rage and scream to the heavens for vengeance. The last thing she wanted was to be anywhere near Darren.
Dani fell to the floor and began to sob. She'd had the world in her hands, and he'd snatched it from her. He'd plotted to destroy her happiness in order to create the phony love he imagined they would have. He'd disregarded her hopes and dreams to please himself. It took time, but slowly her tears turned to laughter. Darren rubbed her back and tried again to coax her onto the bed. He hadn't noticed the change in her mood.
"Don't cry, Danielle. This will pass quickly. I promise you, it will," he consoled.
Picking herself up off the floor, she looked at him with the absolute loathing she held in her heart for him, and he was taken aback.
"It has passed, Darren. In fact, it was never there to begin with." She froze him where he stood. He wouldn't move, until she was long gone.
"You thought you could drown my love for Chase with a forced blood bond? You thought I would wake up and fall into your arms gratefully and give you my soul and my body?" She laughed and wiped the tears from her eyes. Darren began to realize what she was telling him. His lower lip began to tremble with the tears he held back.
"Let me tell you something. Your lies and tricks were no match for my humanity. You may have stolen my human blood, but my human heart remains, and that heart belongs to Chase Deidrick. It was his when you changed me, and it still belongs to him. We have a deep connection that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with one soul that lives in two beings. You say you can feel me? Guess what? I feel nothing but disgust for you."
Chase gathered everything in his apartment that reminded him of Lovely. He couldn't think of her anymore. He couldn't keep torturing himself with thoughts of her warming someone else's bed and sharing another male's life. He'd have thought that a heart could only break so much before there was nothing left, but his just kept crumbling with no end in sight. He had to remove her memory from his home. He stripped the pretty peach bedding from the guest room and the girlie towels and shower curtain he'd hung to make her feel at home. Then, he pulled the bedding from his bed because he could remember exactly how her pale skin contrasted with the dark gray of his sheets.
He went to the kitchen and wanted to toss the dishes they had eaten from together. That reminded him of the dining room table he would need to replace. Every time they'd sat there together, he would imagine laying her on the table and taking her body. He would need to cancel his newspaper subscription, because the crossword puzzle was too painful to look at. He needed to get rid of his high-tech stereo system, because she could never figure out how to work it. When she finally had given up and let him turn it on for her, the cute little wrinkles in her annoyed brow were almost enough to break him. He'd done his best to pretend he wasn't watching the sexy sway of her hips when she danced and cleaned the house that didn't need cleaning, because he had maid service, but she had gone stir-crazy. He opened the coat closet, where her jacket still hung, and her scent hit him like a wrecking ball.
Ah hell! He couldn't stay here any longer. He would need to sell the whole damn condo and everything in it. He would go to his parents' house, until he found another place of his own. He grabbed his coat and went to the elevator, wanting to leave behind the wonderful and painful memories, along with all of his belongings.
The elevator door opened, and he thought he was losing his mind. He wanted his Lovely so badly, his depraved mind must have projected her there. She was in the elevator, smiling at him, with visible fangs. Her eyes were black, and she wore a long, silky, pink nightgown and slippers. She stepped off of the elevator and continued to smile up at him. If it were insanity, he would take it. When she reached out and touched his face, he realized that she was real.
"You're here." He held her hand to his cheek and breathed her delicious scent deeply into his lungs.
"I'm here, and I love you. I need you, Chase. I need to know if you still need me. Can you love me knowing I lied about who and what I am … what I was? Can you love me now that I have been changed? I need to know, because you are my one true mate, my sanctuary. I don't want to live this long life I'm facing, if I can't face it with you." Her heart was in her eyes when she looked up at him. Truth rang in every word that left her lips.
"If this is a dream, I better never wake up. Why are you here? How are you here? Aren't you supposed to be happily bonded right now?" He was too afraid to be hopeful just yet.
Danielle pulled him down into her kiss, and she projected the events of her morning with Darren into Chase's mind. He needed to see in his own mind that it was for real. Word for word, he listened to what she said, and their connection allowed him to feel her emotions and listen to her thoughts unfold before him. Nothing else needed to be said.
He never stopped kissing her as he led her back into his home, their home, and took her straight to his bed … their bed. He removed her nightgown, marveling at the ivory perfection of her body. Her soft curves fit the hard planes of his body perfectly. He took his time, tasting every inch of her and greedily inhaling the sweet floral vanilla.
He stroked her damp heat with his tongue until she begged him for more. She needed more of him, and he would give her all of himself, forever. Sliding into her slippery darkness, he impaled her over and over, until she shattered in his arms. He whispered promises of a forever love that needed no blood. They could live their entire lives unbound, and the love in his heart would never change. He made love to her slowly, dragging out the pleasure with long steady strokes, until they were both spent and exhausted.
But Chase wasn't done with the center of his universe, his Soleil. He carried her to every part of his home he had tried to erase the memory of her from, and made love to her all over again.
Six months later …
Are you sure you want to do this?" Dani asked Chase one more time.
"Yes, for the millionth time. I want to do this, but I'm beginning to think you don't."
Dani knew she was frustrating him. She'd asked him this question many times over the past months. "Why would you say that?" She felt like he'd slapped her.
"You keep waiting for me to back out. Maybe that's because you want to back out and don't want to hurt me. So you're leaving it up to me to get cold feet." He glared down at her.
"You know that's ridiculous. I want you to be my bonded mate more than anything. I'm just afraid it won't work on me again, and that's not fair to you. What if you bond to me, and I can't bond to you? I don't want you to resent me for being faulty and ruining our relationship." She'd already told him that a thousand times. The blood bond had worked for Darren, but it hadn't affected her at all. Darren had approached her on the street several times and regularly sent her notes requesting a face-to-face visit to discuss their mating. It was insane. Doc said it was a form of the mating madness that took over vampires whose mates had died. They would lose their minds to grief for a time. Not many vampires could withstand the loss of a mate. The difference for Darren was that his mate was still alive. So he held out hope. He just wouldn't accept that she wanted nothing to do with him. Dani's greatest fear was that the bonding failure would happen again with her and Chase. What if something was really wrong with her? Doc had no explanation for why the bonding hadn't worked. They could only speculate. She loved Chase and she never wanted him to feel shorted. She never wanted to let him down.