“No. Usually we can sense one another if we’re not distracted—vampires, I mean—but I was. Distracted.” He sounded like he wanted to cut that part of himself away, that if he could take a knife to himself and do it, he would.

Skye whispered, “Then how did you know I was in danger?”

“I didn’t.” Dark though the room was, he was close enough now for her to see his eyes.

“Why were you distracted?” She lifted her face to him. “Why did you come after me?”

Balthazar paused one moment before confessing, “Because you were off with some other guy. I couldn’t stand it. Skye—”

He didn’t finish what he was going to say. He crushed her to him as his mouth closed over hers.

This time he didn’t pull away after two kisses, or five, or ten. This time his hands brushed over her hair, outlined her back, traced her entire body. This time she didn’t have to come to him. She could get lost in the wild tide that swept over them both, demanding that she touch him, kiss him again, breathe him in.

When his broad hand slid up her skirt to cup her thigh, she gasped—in delight, but it shook him out of the trance. “Home,” he said, hoarse and ragged. “I need to get you home.”

She knew what would happen if she went home with him. They were about to take a step they could never undo, go so far that there would be no turning back.

Skye kissed him again before whispering against his open mouth, “Yes.”

They tangled up in each other all the way down the hall, all the way to his car, and at every stoplight on the way to his house. Then everything blurred together—the moment she took down her hair, the feel of his chest beneath her palms as she pushed off his shirt, the way their bodies looked together in the firelight—all one long, delirious dream from which she never wanted to wake.

Chapter Twenty-three

BALTHAZAR HAD FORGOTTEN HOW THIS COULD feel. Lying next to the girl you loved, knowing that she loved you in return. The simple pleasure of waking next to someone and watching them sleep. Or what it was like to be still together for a long time, talking of nothing in particular, being silly just to make her smile.

Not that they had much time to waste on silliness.

That Saturday afternoon, after he’d taken her back to her home, they hung out in her bedroom. Her bed was still made—for the moment—but she lay across it with her head on his thigh. “Would they try to take my parents hostage?”

If they could find them, Balthazar thought, but he’d never been as grateful for the absenteeism of Mr. and Mrs. Tierney as he was this weekend. “I can’t rule it out, but I suspect not. They see you as prey. The only one who would try to negotiate with you as an equal is Redgrave, and taking your parents captive … it’s not the kind of thing he does.”

If Redgrave wanted her parents dead, they’d be dead already. Balthazar knew that from his own nightmarish experience. If he told her that, though, it would scare Skye too badly. He didn’t want her more frightened than she already was.

“I don’t want Mom and Dad to lose another child. Losing Dakota was hard enough on them,” she said. He brushed his thumb along her cheek. “I have to stay here. For them.” Her voice trembled, but when she glanced up at him, her blue eyes shone with faith. “But you’ll be with me.”

It seemed to him that he’d never forget anything about that moment: the way she managed to smile for him, the pattern of the soft blue quilt on which they rested, or the slant of winter sunlight through the window that painted rich shades of red into her dark hair.

He hated to shatter that serenity, but he had to: “Not always.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll protect you as long as you need it. Forever, if that’s how long it takes.” With Redgrave’s vampires spreading the word far and wide, “forever” wasn’t a rash promise; it was a realistic estimate. “But, Skye—as much as I care about you—you know we can’t always be together.”

She pushed herself upright. “What? Why?”

“Because you’re alive, and I’m not.” Such a simple way to phrase such a complicated truth: Speaking the words was no easier than thinking them had been that first night they spent together, when he held her in his arms and wished in vain that they could always be like this, that nothing would ever have to change. “Someday soon you’ll want to go to college. You’ll have other friends, human friends, and you won’t be able to explain me to them.”

“What couldn’t I explain? You look like any other guy—well, any other massively hot guy—”

“I look like I’m a couple years older than you. I can pass for a few years older than that. I can’t go any further. Could you explain me when I still look nineteen and you look thirty? Forty?”

Skye blinked; obviously she’d never considered matters in that light before. Maybe it was rash of him to be thinking so far ahead—but he could imagine loving Skye that long. Even longer. She tried to rally. “I’ll tell them I’m a cougar.”

“And you won’t ever want to get married? You won’t ever want to have children?”

“Do you seriously think that’s the only way a woman can ever be happy? You really are from the seventeenth century, aren’t you?”

“You can’t know now what you’ll want someday,” Balthazar insisted. “What you can know, what you have to know, is that being with me long term has a price. A price you shouldn’t have to pay.”