Page 125 of High Stakes and Soulmates
“We’ll talk to him tomorrow. It’s too close to dawn now.”
“So then… I’m not Cyrus at all. I just… took his place? Because Cyrus was a real person, right?”
“He was. I mean… technically you’re not, but I don’t know if you had a place in this world before, you know? Did you have IDs and a degree and all of that… whereas here, you have a house, money, you’ve done schooling to become a detective.”
“Right… before the attack, I… I mean ‘Cyrus’ was a police officer. I wanted to be more, hoping it’d help me learn how to find the man who killed my family, so I worked hard to become a detective. I took more schooling and it helped fill in the gaps in my memory of things pertaining to law enforcement because I didn’t recall specific procedures. I thought it was because of the attack, but here it was because I wasn’t Cyrus. Joaquin—I mean Louis—had insisted we get away from that place. I wonder if it was to keep people from recognizing that I wasn’t Cyrus. It might have been easy to fool the police, I was in horrible shape after the attack, but I wonder if people would have realized once I healed.”
“I mean, I’d only seen the real Cyrus at a glance and when I met you again, I really didn’t notice you were someone else, but you two look quite similar and you had such bad head wounds after the accident,” Ezio says. “Your whole face was black and blue.”
I shake my head. “This is too hard to wrap my mind around. Let’s get back to the naked thing and you telling me how you had more stamina than a plow horse on your first go.”
He grins. “Stamina for days.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I say as I tug at his shirt, but it seems like I’m not getting it off him unless I begin cutting it off. “Ezio.”
“You won’t just be a dream when I pull away?” he asks.
“I don’t plan to be.”
He grudgingly lets go and kisses my hand and fingers as he does. It doesn’t make it the easiest to pull his shirt off while his lips are peppering kisses all over my fingers and hand, so I just leave his shirt draped over his head and start on his pants with my one free hand.
“No, no, no. I can’t see your beautiful face.”
“You really don’t need to,” I assure him as he pulls from me for the first time since we entered the house. His shirt drops tothe ground, and when he reaches for me again, I push his hand down to my shirt. He grabs the edge of it and draws it up.
“So… if I’m really not a werewolf, why did I feel so much better after the hospital? It was like I felt alive for the first time in so long.”
“Because they gave you blood,” he says.
“Holy shit, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? I was over here thinking that I was finally feeling good because I was going to turn into a wolf, and here it was because I’d been starving myself.”
“Louis almost had to have been giving you some blood or I’m not sure you’d have been as well as you were,” Ezio muses. “He probably mixed it into your food and you didn’t even notice.”
“That’s fucked up,” I say. “All of it… I was prepared to destroy my life for him. He was… he was my brother.”
“I’m sorry.”
I nod, not sure what else to do. “Thank you. Come on, we haven’t gotten any cleaner at all.”
“Do you want some blood?”
“I don’t… have any blood in the house.”
“You can have my blood.”
“I thought it had to be human blood?”
“I believe dhampirs can drink whatever they’d like.”
“Um… you already lost a lot of blood. I’ll get some later,” I say. “Come on.” I tug him into the shower, and I think it’s only because I’m not forcing him to let go of me that he follows. The water rushes over him, washing away the blood that marred his gorgeous face. He’s too busy kissing my neck and cheek to notice as I scrub at the spots the blood has dried. His eye looks discolored, but of course he doesn’t seem to care in the slightest. I really hope it will heal, that maybe it will just take more time.
While I wash away the blood on his body, Ezio simply kisses all over mine. And when his hand snakes around my bare back, I begin to question how clean we really need to be.
But no! We rolled around on the ground. His legs nearly exploded off. He’s coated in filth and blood and… other stuff that I’m not even sure I can identify. So I dutifully clean him while his hand slides down to my ass, squeezing a cheek as his lips move over my neck.
There’s something so familiar about him. I know we’ve known each other for a while, but the way his hands move over me feels so comfortable. And when he kisses that sensitive spot on my neck, it feels so right.
When I close my eyes, it’s like I can imagine his hands traveling all over my body. I can imagine him holding me, kissing me, caressing me, inside of me…
