The Warrior Vampire(47)
He looked up to find Naya standing over him, her dark eyes flashing with indignant fire. Ronan struck out with his hand, catching her around the ankle. He took her down with a sweep of his arm, careful to cushion her landing with his own body. A low growl of outrage threatened to escape her throat and Ronan rolled her over in a flash, settling himself between her thighs. “What’s the matter, Naya?” he ground out from between clenched teeth. “Are you worried that you might be seen with me?” Her lips parted as her eyes narrowed, but she made not a sound of denial. “That you might actually have to explain my presence to someone?” The hurt that constricted Ronan’s chest now was the sting of his own rejection. “The female who called you, perhaps?”
Naya clamped her jaw down tight and her chest rose and fell in a rapid rhythm with her breath. She averted her gaze, looking anywhere but directly at him. Emotion shimmered in the dark depths, and the tether that bound their souls pulled taut.
“Answer me!”
“I’m not ashamed of you; I’m trying to protect you, you idiot!” Naya’s head came up off the sand, close enough to Ronan’s face that their noses nearly touched. “If Paul finds out about you, he’ll kill you. You need to get the hell away from me, Ronan. They’re out here. Looking for me!”
A bark of laughter escaped his lips. “Do you think I give a single shit about these males you work for or what they think?”
Her sadness weighed down the air, permeated his pores. “I don’t work for them, Ronan,” she said with a sad laugh. “They’re…” She took her trembling lip between her teeth as though fighting for composure. “The tribe, it’s more than family. When the elders give a mandate, it’s followed. Period. If they find out…”
“What?” he demanded.
“If they even suspect how I feel about you, they’ll kill you. Hell, they might kill me as punishment for my not killing you myself.”
The Sortiari’s slayers hadn’t managed to do the deed. Ronan welcomed anyone else to try. His voice lowered to a murmur. “And how do you feel about me, Naya?”
They’d known each other for a little over a week. Mere days. Did that matter when compared to the complexity of the eternal soul? She met his gaze with a ferocity that set his blood on fire. How could Ronan ever think to keep himself from her? If she ever thought to leave his side, he’d hunt her to the ends of the earth.
“It’s like finding peace after centuries of restlessness. I don’t want to want you, Ronan. I can’t afford to need you. Especially now—” She looked away as though she couldn’t bear to make the admission.
He guided her face back to his. “What?”
Naya’s brow furrowed and she released a heavy sigh. “Especially now that I’m about to belong to someone else.”
He didn’t understand her world. Covens respected the mate bond. A tethering was instant. Absolute. Fighting that bond would be like denying themselves blood. It was as much a part of their nature as feeding.
“That can’t happen, Naya. Not when you already belong to me as much as I belong to you.” Ronan wanted to laugh at his own foolishness. Covens as a whole might have respected a tethering, but there was a female who’d do her damnedest to see his severed.
Tears glistened in her eyes and the words slipped from her lips in a desperate whisper: “I don’t want to belong to anyone. I don’t want to feel this desperate need for you that never goes away.”
To Naya, the tether was nothing more than a collar around her neck. Something that made her subservient. Dependent. How could he possibly make her understand that their tether was so much more than slavery to desire?
“Naya, belonging is more than a simple statement of ownership.” Ronan had never been very articulate. He was a male of action, not words. When a problem needed fixing, he fixed it. But he had no fucking clue how to make any of this right. “If you’d let yourself truly feel what this is between us, you’d know that.”
* * *
Naya didn’t want to feel. She didn’t want her life—or any part of her—to change. And that’s what scared her the most. Because from the moment he’d tackled her in that parking lot, Naya recognized that her life would never be the same.
The green of his eyes became rimmed with brilliant silver. So beautiful. His gaze held her rapt, the intensity of it sending a tremor through her body. “It’s all too much. Too soon. And we have to stop pretending that the world is on pause around us.” Malicious magic ran rampant and the town was too small to keep the secret for long. Ronan’s sister was still missing and he’d yet to recover his recent memories. “We’re being reckless. Irresponsible.” And it had to stop now.