Page 24 of Snowed in with the Vampire Prince

“Only with you,” I whispered, giving in to him.

I couldn’t deny him anything. Not anymore.

James waited for me to begin. I felt his tenderness for me, a soothing and impossibly fragile embrace, but so much like what I felt for him. I sensed his overwhelming relief that I was okay now. What the Alpha had done to me had scared him, badly.

“My maker, Nathaniel, saved my life,” I told him. “I was leaving a gay bar in New York City, a hole-in-the-wall type of place with an unmarked door that you had to go into an alleyway to get to. It was hidden, like a speakeasy. Anyway, I had gone there looking for someone to have fun with for the evening, but I came up empty-handed.”

I shook my head, grimacing at the memory of the dingy, crowded bar. Even though it had been exactly one hundred years, I could still remember the way it had smelled of mildew, bootleg alcohol, cigarette smoke, and sweat.

James listened in silence, watching me steadily.

I continued. “I left by myself. I was drunk. Even though it was during prohibition, they still had plenty of booze in the bar. And I didn’t even have a switchblade to protect myself with. I was twenty-four, and I thought I was invincible. Besides, nothing had ever happened to me before.”

James stiffened against me. Abruptly, the memories of the events flooded through both of us. He was there, beside me, in the alleyway. I knew that he could sense, from my mind, what was coming next.

“There were half a dozen guys in the alley, waiting for someone to come out of the bar. They took offense to our proclivities.” I didn’t tell him about the iron pipes they held in their hands, nor the sick wash of fear I’d felt when I realized I couldn't defend against them all at the same time. I knew he could see it easily enough anyhow, even though I did my level best to mentally shield him from it. “It could have been anyone they attacked. But it was me. I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and then they took one look at me and saw something they couldn’t abide.” I couldn’t keep the bitter note from my voice.

James clung to me and I felt his surge of protectiveness, like he wished he could go back in time and protect me. I knew he would have traded anything at that moment to have saved me. And, even though he was right beside me, reliving this right along with me, it didn’t even cross his mind to mentally turn away from what he was seeing. He didn’t want to let me go through this alone.

Again, I felt the flash of fierce tenderness in my heart for him. It was such a new, raw emotion, but it felt like it must have been hiding somewhere in my chest all along like I couldn’t have ever felt any other way.

“Nathaniel was in the bar, too. He was looking for a mate. Someone to spend an eternity with. Instead, he found me. He smelled the blood, I guess. And he saved me without even thinking about the consequences. I was so close to death that when he gave me his blood, even that wasn’t enough to save me. But when I died as a human, I came back as a vampire. Nathaniel had been a vampire for well over a hundred years at that point, so he had to have understood exactly what he was doing. I guess he saw something in me that night that told him I was worth saving.”

“Because you are,” James said savagely, as if he was trying to force me to believe it myself.

“Anyway, Nathaniel and I knew right away that we weren’t going to be lovers. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Sometimes you look at someone, and you know,” James agreed, smiling. “And Nathaniel did find someone to spend his eternity with.”

I gave him a mental shrug because I didn’t want to jostle him with a physical one. “I suppose so. He’s been the closest thing to a father—to family—that I’ve ever had.”

What happened to the men who attacked you?

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “They were gone when I woke up. And Nathaniel has never talked about it. But he always gets really unhappy whenever I bring it up, so I’ve stopped asking him.”

“I hope he killed them,” James whispered. “I know I shouldn’t want something like that, but they were monsters. What they did to you was inhuman.”

I smiled at his fierceness. How could I have ever imagined humans to be weak, emotional creatures? James had shown me, again and again, how wrong I had been.

“Is that why you’ve been trying to protect me from the wolves?”

I considered his question. “I would have healed anyone. I told you that before, and it’s true. But… when I realized they were planning to turn you into one of them without giving you a choice…” I trailed off.

You couldn’t have let that happen, James told me, and I could feel his smugness. You never had a choice about becoming a vampire. So you couldn’t let someone else’s choice get taken away from them. Because those men were wrong about you. You are wrong about yourself, too. You’re good. You couldn’t be a monster if you tried.

“Give it a century or two, then tell me how you feel,” I joked. But I could feel myself beginning to give in. I could feel myself wanting to give in to him. To be better, for him.

“I don’t know if I want to be a vampire though,” he whispered suddenly. I felt a ripple of unease from his mind. The accompanying thought told me he was worried about how I’d take that. He added, “So I don’t know where that leaves us. Long-term, I mean.”

“When vampires take human lovers, they can live for an eternity. All it would take is regularly drinking a few drops of my blood, and you’ll never grow old. You’ll never get sick. You’ll be stronger, faster, and less breakable. You’ll heal from any injury quickly. In our world, we call humans like this Sanguinatos. It’s Italian for blooded ones. But really, it just means that I’ll be able to love you for an eternity. We’d never have to leave each other.”

He stiffened. And I felt a sudden wall go up around his thoughts. Until that very moment, I hadn’t even known it was possible to hide anything after a blood bond had been established.

What is it? I asked, alarm ripping through me. What’s wrong?

“It’s nothing,” he whispered aloud. His mind still felt closed off from me. How on earth he’d managed to close himself off to me was a total mystery. He was every bit as in control of the blood bond as I was. More so, actually, because I doubted that I would have been able to wall myself off from him quite like this.

“You don’t want…”

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