Page 20 of Resurrecting His Soul
Melina saw red and bared her fangs. Ricardo wouldn’t forgive her for hurting his new little vampire toy, but he had no love for humans. He would surely forgive her for having a drink at the friend’s expense.
It didn’t take long before Allison recognized the danger she was in. Melina saw fear flash across her eyes and smelled the way her scent changed. It was enough to distract her, and the next thing she knew, she was slammed against the hallway wall. A small but strong hand wrapped tightly around her throat, and fangs were bared in her face. She narrowed her eyes at her attacker and moved to backhand Lisandra, but she caught sight of Ricardo out of the corner of her eye and decided to play the scene differently. Instead of attacking, she retracted her fangs and held her hands up in surrender.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to hurt her. She just startled me when I ran into her in the hall.”
A wicked smile spread across Lisandra’s face. “Huh, we both know that’s bullshit. She couldn’t sneak up on you. You’d hear her and smell her far before she was close enough to even see your ugly face.”
“I was in my head. Worrying that Ricardo wouldn’t be able to forgive me for our spat earlier. I had decided I should go apologize to you two before I saw him. I was heading towards your room, running my apology over and over in my head, so I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Liar,” Lisandra growled. Ricardo’s hand touched her arm, and she slowly backed away from Melina. Melina watched as her glare turned on Ricardo. “She is lying,” Lisandra drawled.
Ricardo looked past Lisandra and met Melina’s eyes. She smiled at him and tried to ignore the hurt she felt when he didn’t smile back. “I have no doubt that at least part of what she has said here is not truthful. However, she had more than enough time to hurt Allison before you got to her, and she did not. In her case, that is progress. I have never seen her hesitate before.”
Lisandra yanked her arm away from Ricardo and Allison stepped between them, then she took Lisandra’s hand and turned her glare on Melina and then Ricardo. “Come on Lis, you don’t have to listen to this shit.”
Seeing the anger is Lisandra’s eyes when she walked away from Ricardo with her stupid little human made Melina dance for joy on the inside, and she had to bite the inside of her lip to keep from allowing her smile to show on the outside. Ricardo would not find her happiness amusing. That was clear by the pain written all over his face, from his scrunched-up eyebrows, to the deep frown marring his handsome mouth. She had to find a way to get rid of Lisandra permanently.
Ricardo didn’t say a word to her before he walked off. She stood frozen in place, hurt by his dismissal, until she heard the front door close and his car peeled out of the driveway. When the realization that he’d just left her alone with his precious new toy hit her, Melina smiled and quietly made her way towards Lisandra’s room.
“I’m telling you, Lis. You need to be careful. The last thing you need is to wind up trapped with another man like Jameson.”
Melina paused outside Lisandra’s room when she heard Allison’s words.
“Ricardo’s nothing like Jameson,” Lisandra snapped. “He would never hurt me like that.”
“How can you possibly know that? Jesus, Lis! You barely know this guy and he admitted he’s a killer. We knew Jameson most of our lives and had no idea who he really was. You put your trust in him, and he almost killed you. I won’t stand by and let you do that again.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.” Lisandra’s voice was shaking. Melina could hear the fear in her voice and smell its thick scent even from the other side of the door.
That was it,Melina thought. This Jameson was how she was going to get Lisandra out of their lives. She’d never smelled a fear so thick, and that was really saying something. Bringing someone she feared that much back into her life would undoubtedly be enough to drive Lisandra away. She just needed to find him and convince him to come for his girl. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to just ask Lisandra about her past or where she’d come from, Melina was going to have to do some digging herself. Good thing she’d been pretty good at cyber-stalking when her life revolved around boys as a human. Ricardo was gone, so Melina headed to his office and turned on his laptop, diving into everything the internet had to offer about Lisandra and Allison before they ended up on a Ferris wheel and ruined Melina’s life. There wasn’t a lot to find. Lisandra was not a social media queen. In fact, she didn’t have a Facebook or Instagram account.
“What kind of loser is this chick?” Melina said to herself.Who the hell doesn’t have any social media accounts?Someone with a controlling man in her life, and judging by the little she’d heard and Lisandra’s distinct fear, she’d bet that Jameson was the worst kind of control freak there was.
After searching for more than an hour, she almost gave up until she came across a news article from ten years earlier. The girl in the photograph of the article looked very familiar.
Local girl, Lisandra Hargrove, in small town Garland, North Carolina wins a full scholarship to Georgia Tech.
Standing beside the young Lisandra in the photo was a man. His arm was wrapped possessively around her waist causing her to stand a bit awkwardly while she held up the letter awarding her the scholarship. Most people would look at the grainy black-and-white image and see a boyfriend supporting his girl in her successes, but Melina saw past the façade. She could see the way his eyes were slightly narrowed and cutting in Lisandra’s direction. Something about that look and the possessive way he held onto Lisandra told her this was Jameson, and she’d be willing to bet he had found a way to keep Lisandra from claiming that scholarship at all.
This was it. She was certain she had just found what she needed to pull Lisandra’s world apart and get Ricardo back to herself. She would bring this man back into Lisandra’s life. If what she overheard was any indicator, Lisandra still feared this man, and if Melina could successfully turn him into a vampire, too, well that would just be the icing on the cake. If she feared the man as a human, she would never be able to stand up to him if he came back into her life with the added advantage of being a stronger, more deadly version of himself. Melina would make him her first vampire progeny and lead him right to the little bitch who’d settled in down the hall.
She needed to feed before she found Jameson. If she was going to be successful in creating her first vampire progeny, she needed to make sure she was at her strongest. That wasn’t going to happen drinking stale blood from a bag, no matter how much Ricardo insisted. Besides, if everything went according to plan, her and Ricardo would soon stop the whole not killing humans charade. She cleared all traces of her search history from Ricardo’s laptop and shut it down before she went out for the night. After she fed, she would head to Garland, North Carolina and she wouldn’t be back until she was certain that her Lisandra problem would be handled with her newfound friend, and Lisandra’s past love.
ChapterFifteen
Ricardo
Driving around hadn’t done anything to ease the ache in Ricardo’s chest, and the pain only grew more prevalent the closer he got to home. Everything turned to shit so fast Ricardo was sure he was going to have a serious case of whiplash. For a moment he had everything. With Lisandra lying in his arms, he finally believed that he’d found a reason for his immortal existence other than death and blood. Never had he felt so complete, so in love. Not even as a human when he’d believed he had met the love of his life. No, that hadn’t been love. He’d been a young fool, so desperate to prove his love to the woman who held his heart all those years ago that he’d been blind to her true motives for being with him.
He shook his head, not wanting to think about Emily. Lisandra needed to be his focus. Now that he knew what it felt like to be loved by her, he would never be able to give her up. When he pulled back up to his house, he felt glued to the seat of his car but also like he was being yanked towards the house, towards Lisandra, all at the same time. On the drive he had run so many scenarios through his mind. Things he would say or do to prove to her that he was on her side. That he would never allow Melina to hurt her again. But sitting in the driveway, so close he could feel their connection pulling him towards the door, everything he had thought about saying to her fled his mind and he sat behind the wheel staring at the door to his home completely dumbfounded and terrified. Fear was not something he was used to. Like love, it was a foreign feeling to him. The love he felt for Lisandra was something he welcomed. It brought him back to life in ways he had not realized he’d been dead. His existence before meeting Lisandra had been the true definition ofthe living dead.Fear, though, it was an emotion he’d love to put right back in its locked safe so it could be tossed back into oblivion for another century or so. And this fear, it was unlike anything he had ever known, even as a human. A pain shot through his chest and he rubbed at it, trying to find some relief. Just thinking about losing Lisandra was pure torture.
After staring at the front door for a few more minutes, he shook off his hesitation and made his way inside and headed straight to Lisandra’s room at high speed. He was lifting his fist to knock on the door to her room when it suddenly opened and he almost stumbled backwards. An irate Allison stepped into his space, so close he could feel her body heat. Her eyes flashed at him, and for a moment he swore they were red, her anger was so palpable. She was a very protective friend. He admired that about her, even while her anger was aimed at him.
Allison made eye contact with him and held his stare, boring a hole through him. “If she comes to any harm because of this world you’ve pulled her into, whether at your hand or that bitch of a vampire you let stay here, I will have your balls.”
The temperature in the hallway dropped several degrees while she stared through him.
He nodded to her. “If any harm comes to her, I will hand myself over to you.”
