LITMIR.BIZ

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then. With the nearest neighbor almost twenty miles away. He and his family had settled into the seclusion and hadn’t minded being on their own.

      Until that last night.

      As if she knew his thoughts had turned to the past again, she spoke up.

      “What happened? I mean…”

      “I know what you mean.” He took another drink of the hot blood, savoring the thick, rich taste as it slid down his throat. Appropriate, he thought, that he should have blood in his mouth to tell this story.

      “It was Christmas night.” His voice was cool, detached, as though he were talking about something that had happened to a stranger. And that was more right than not, after all. It had been so long now, the man he’d been had nothing to do with the person he’d become. “A man came to the door. Freezing. Hungry. So near death I thought he wouldn’t last the night. I brought him inside.”

      He remembered it all so clearly. The scents. The sounds. The baby’s cry, his wife’s soft humming, his son’s laughter. Decades fell away and Grayson tumbled into his own private hell. “We warmed him. Fed him. Though it wasn’t food he wanted.”

      He shifted his gaze to hers and held it, trapping her in the story with him, dipping into her mind, so that the pictures he painted were as vivid for her as they were for him. “He killed my wife first. One twist of her neck and she was gone. I fought him, but he was too strong. I remember seeing murder in his eyes and I recall the feel of his fangs as they sank into my neck. Then the next thing I knew, it was morning and I wasn’t dead. Though everyone else was.”

      Seconds ticked past before she swayed, closed her eyes briefly and said, “Oh, God. Grayson…”

      “He could have killed me, too, of course. Instead he turned me. So that I’d wake and find what he’d left behind. So that I’d survive, knowing everything I loved was dead.”

      “You couldn’t have known. When you brought him into the house—you couldn’t have known.”

      He refused her offer of sympathy, brushing it aside as if he hadn’t heard the shock and sorrow in her voice. “That’s the point I’m trying to make to you. No one can know. You run an inn. Do you think vampires never stay in hotels? You think they really do live in caves and sleep in coffins?”

      “Up until I met you, I didn’t know they existed!”

      “Exactly. You don’t know. You wouldn’t recognize a vampire if it came to your door.” He laughed shortly. “Obviously. You didn’t recognize the danger in me. Instead you let me in. You wanted to take care of me.”

      “You see compassion as a weakness,” she argued. “It’s not.”

      She still didn’t get it. Grayson felt a surge of anger rise up inside to nearly choke him. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the danger around her. Which meant she was in even more jeopardy than most.

      “You’re the kind of person vampires live for. Most of them are just killers. They’re not interested in making others of our kind. All they want is to feed and destroy. They leave a trail of misery behind them and think nothing more of it once they’ve moved on. It was blind, stupid luck for you that I’ve sworn off humans. Otherwise—” he paused for a sip “—let’s just say you’d make a damned good snack, Tessa.”

      Her eyes narrowed.

      In a blink, he set the mug down, grabbed hold of her arm and gave her a hard shake. “Not everything out there deserves your compassion, Tessa. You don’t want to see what’s out there, that’s your business. But until I’m sure that none of my kind have followed me here, you’ll listen to me. You’ll open your eyes. You think you’re prepared. Safe. But you’re not. Humanity thinks it knows evil, but none of you have a clue.”

      He held her tight with one hand and waved the other toward the window and the storm beyond the glass. “There are creatures moving among you that live only to cause pain. Who look for nothing more than the opportunity to strike. Do you think you can fight them off? Do you think you can survive?”

      Her breath came fast and furious. She pulled free of him and he saw fire in her eyes when she glared at him. It pleased him. At least she had a temper and knew what to do with it.

      “You think you’ve got the patent on suffering? Someone killed your family and left you to live with the memory?” She slapped both hands to his chest, gave him a vicious shove that didn’t budge him in the slightest. Even more furious now, she shouted, “You think you’re the only one?You’re my first vampire, but you’re nowhere near my first brush with real evil. Big deal. Vampires bite. Humans kill, too, you know…”

      There was something raw in her eyes now. A bleeding pain that ripped through her and reached out to touch him as well. He refused to acknowledge it.

      “But a human is still something to be reasoned with,” he told her.

      She laughed at him, the sound harsh and ragged. “You think so?” Her short dark hair dropped onto her forehead and she tossed her head, sending it out of her way. “I ran for five years from a man—a human—who said he only wanted to love me.”

      She couldn’t stand still. She walked in jerky steps to the kitchen counter and back again. “God. He really believed that, too. Two dates. That’s all we had. Two dates and my instincts told me to get away. I knew there was something wrong with him. Something terrifying. So I broke it off.”

      She sent Grayson a look that was filled with bone-chilling terror. “He wouldn’t listen. He stalked me. Haunted me. He stood outside my house at night, followed me to work in the mornings. I got a restraining order.” She rubbed her arms viciously as if her blood had congealed in her veins. “That only made him madder. He set fire to my car. He killed my dog. Finally, he broke in to my house when I was out and killed a friend of mine who picked the wrong night to stop by with pizza…”

      Tears streaked down her face, unheeded, unchecked. Her eyes were wild and furious and filled with a pain he recognized, as he lived with something much like it every day. He reached for her, but she jumped back from him.

      “Don’t.” Tessa held up both hands and fought for control. God, she’d shatter if he touched her. She knew she would. Cold wrapped itself around her entire being, squeezing her heart, icing her lungs until she felt as though she might never draw another breath.

      Her memories were every bit as emotionally charged as his. She couldn’t go a single night without dreaming of the past. Without seeing her home, her things shattered, Jamie’s broken body laying splayed and forgotten in her living room. She heard over and over again the quiet calm of the po-liceman’s voice. The flash of the red and blue lights on the squad cars slicing through the darkness.

      She felt it all. Remembered it all. And had finally found the courage to live anyway. To forge a life for herself. To refuse to surrender to the terror Justin had subjected her to.

      She’d escaped. That was what she clung to. What she had to keep uppermost in her mind. She’d finally found a way to stand in the light. And she wouldn’t go back into the darkness.

      Looking at the man across from her, she stared into his dark eyes and wondered why she’d opened up to him. Wondered how Grayson Stone had become so important to her in such a short amount of time. How he’d gotten past the defenses she’d erected so carefully around her heart, her emotions. He was a stranger. He called himself a monster.

      But somehow, he was so much more, too. She took a deep breath, blew it out and said, “Just don’t touch me right now, Grayson. I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t even know why I told you that. There’s something about you, I guess—I don’t know. It’s just…I don’t like being treated like I’m an idiot. I’m not.” She met his gaze. “I’ve already survived a monster and I’ll do fine with whatever else comes at me.”

      The organ that had once been Grayson’s heart twisted for her sake and the sensation was so rare, it startled

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