Page 25 of Snowed in with the Vampire Prince

I trailed off. Of course he didn’t want to spend eternity with me. Even when I was a human, something was clearly wrong with me. My parents had given me up. And my wrongness had resulted in my human death as well.

Stop that! He commanded, and his frustration washed through both of us. It isn’t that.

“Then what?” I asked, feeling confused.

He sat up, pulling away from me. The wall around his thoughts was still between us, cutting me off from him.

He grimaced. “We should get dressed. It’s sunrise.”

Without waiting for my reply, he stood up and grabbed his pants from the floor.

I stared at him, frozen, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Icy dread curled my stomach, tightening it into a sharp knot of fear. Fear that he finally saw whatever it was that everyone else had always seen about me. Fear that I wasn’t good enough for him. Fear that he knew that. “What did I say to upset you? Tell me, and I’ll take it back.”

He winced and shook his head. “It’s nothing. Really. We can talk about it later. The wolves are still out there somewhere. They might come back.”

“They’re gone,” I told him. “Probably. Between the two of us, I think we scared them off. They don’t want a war either.”

But I wasn’t entirely sure if I was right. I had seen the way that the Alpha had looked at James, the human who had stood against a pack of wolves with a flaming log held in his bare hands, brave enough to withstand pain and danger to protect himself and the vampire he’d crossed paths with.

When they first bit him, the wolves might have seen something in James and then impulsively decided he should be one of them. They were part animal, after all, and sometimes they acted on instinct. But now that the Alpha had seen what James was capable of, how different he was from other humans, I doubted they were willing to just let him go without a fight. The Alpha would want nothing more than to claim James as his mate now. Wolves were sexually omnivorous, and who they chose as a mate relied less on gender than it did on some sort of secret sauce that was partly animal instinct and partly whether the potential mate displayed the constellation of qualities that wolves valued most: inner strength, loyalty, fierce protectiveness, and courage. Physical beauty went into that equation, too.

The thought filled me with anxiety. James possessed all the qualities that the wolves prized, and more, in spades. And he’d displayed them all to the Alpha last night. The Alpha would want him. Badly.

“So I was right, then. We need to leave,” James said quietly. “I don’t want to be a wolf. And I don’t want to belong to anyone else. And I don’t want them hurting you again.”

“How clearly can you hear my thoughts right now?” I asked, still speaking aloud, even though I already knew the answer to my own question. Even walled off, James could still hear me just fine.

He gave me a small, triumphant smile. “I can hear pretty clearly. You should get dressed, too. We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Can we talk about what just happened?”

“Later, please?” he asked, giving me a stricken look. “It’s stupid, I promise, but I don’t want to get into all of it right now. When we’re safe, maybe.”

When he was home, back in his human life, where I couldn’t follow him. He didn’t say it, but it hung in the air between us all the same. I didn’t believe for a second that what he was feeling was trivial. Otherwise, the walls wouldn’t have come up like that.

Feeling suddenly numb and mechanical, I got up and began dressing.

I tried to ignore it, but I felt the first stirrings of real unease as reality reasserted itself around me. What had I been thinking?

I had let James completely into my heart, past all the defenses I had spent a hundred years building. I hadn’t realized it was even possible for me to feel the kind of feelings I now felt for him. For the very first time, I wanted my eternity just so that I could spend it by his side.

But what if he didn’t want the same thing?

Chapter 12

James

My campsite looked like a scene out of a horror movie. Blood was everywhere, shockingly red against the whiteness of the newly fallen snow. My tent had been shredded to pieces by sharp claws. Paw prints were everywhere I looked. We had to walk right through it to get to the trail leading to my Jeep.

But we didn’t even stop to grab my things or look for Pierce’s phone. I didn’t believe for a second that the wolves were gone. And I knew Pierce didn’t believe that either.

“This would be a lot faster if you had just let me carry you,” Pierce muttered.

“Not a chance.”

“Right,” he whispered, shooting me a miserable look. I felt a flash of anxiety tear through his mind, and then nothing at all. I realized, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he had just shut me out of his mind the same way I had shut him out. Pierce began to walk fast enough down the trail that I couldn’t quite keep up with him.

“Wait,” I said, jogging to keep up with him, panic surging through me. “Can we please stop and talk for a second?”

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