“Son of a bitch!” she snarled as she tried to steady herself while gingerly checking her forehead for injury.
“My father would take quite the exception to that characterization of my mother,” I chastised her using the same tone I used when scolding my niece and nephews.
Again, she became a blur, but this time, I delivered an uppercut that drove a stake up through her ribs, straight into her heart. A cry of fury had barely escaped her mouth when she burst into flames and disintegrated into ash.
Glancing down, I cursed as I was yet again covered in cremated nightwalker. “Athan is going to have my head on a platter,” I grumbled as I teleported to my front door. The angel was a few steps away, and when I appeared, she screamed as she came to a grinding halt.
“What? How did you? But you’re the same—”
I shook my head and hurried to her side, grasping her arm to keep her stumble from turning into a fall. “Don’t compare me to them, angel,” I demanded, though I deliberately kept my tone soft. “You are very special, and my kind are here to protect you. Even if it wasn’t my job, I would never hurt you.”
She blinked a few times, then wiggled her head as if she was shaking away some clutter. “Why do I trust you?” she blurted.
I grinned. “What is your name, angel?”
“Bronwyn,” she mumbled. A beautiful name, befitting of my—this angel. “Stephan,” I introduced myself. “Well, Bronwyn, I’d like to say it’s because I’m so damn charming, but the truth is that it’s an instinct for consorts to trust daywalkers as you are meant to be one of us.”
Her arm jerked hard as she tried to pull it from my grip, but I didn’t let her go. I silently called myself ten different kinds of a moron for blurting that out. I’d been doing this job for centuries, and I knew how to handle an uneducated consort. But for some reason, I was royally fucking this up. Thinking strange thoughts and speaking without considering my words first.
“You said you trust me,” I reminded her in a cajoling tone. “Come with me, and I’ll answer all your questions while we find you transportation to safety.”
My hand slid down her arm to take hold of her small one so I could guide her into the house. The second our skin touched, my entire world upended. Except...it didn’t turn upside down. It righted itself as though it had always been inverted, and I’d never noticed. Electric shocks sparked and traveled over my skin, several going straight to my cock. The flaccid appendage was suddenly stiff and swollen, pulsing with every beat of my heart and already dripping with the desire to be inside our consort’s virgin pussy. The need to claim her welled up inside me and nearly knocked me on my ass. My canines fully descended, and my throat dried up, parched, and thirsty for her blood.
“What?” Bronwyn’s eyes had widened to round saucers, and they jumped back and forth between our joined hands and my face. “I don’t understand what is happening.” Her pretty lips turned down, and her brown eyes filled with sadness, squeezing my heart. “You’re sending me away?”
“No,” I growled, unable to conceal the raw, animalistic feelings consuming me. “You’re never leaving.”
3
Bronwyn
The ordeal I had just gone through must have affected me more than I realized. My fear over the possibility of Stephan sending me away was more about wanting to stay close to him than having to go back out into the dark night by myself again. I should have been scared about another attack instead of worrying about leaving a man I didn’t even know. But no woman alive would blame me for wanting to stick close to Stephan. Not only had he rescued me, but he was also the most handsome man I’d ever met. Tall, dark, and dangerous with bright blue eyes and pale skin was apparently the perfect type of guy to kick-start my dormant libido.
At a completely inappropriate time, too. I’d just learned vampires were real, and the man I was lusting over was one of them. My heart was racing faster from being next to him than it had been when I was running from the bad vampires who had been chasing me. “Something has to be seriously wrong with me,” I mumbled under my breath.
“What? Are you injured?” Stephan’s eyes lit with fury as he scanned my body for any outward sign I’d been hurt. “Did one of those bloodsuckers get to you before you bumped into me?”
“No, I’m fine.” I shook my head and tried to clear the mental fog. My wits were scattered, and it took me longer than it should have to put everything together. His bright blue eyes and name could only mean one thing. “You’re Kieran and Athan’s brother?”
“You know my family?” He scrutinized my borrowed outfit before asking, “Fuck, please tell me you didn’t get attacked after leaving the party Athan and Selene threw tonight.”
“Yes”—my answer seemed to make him furious again—“although I have nobody but myself to blame for being out there by myself. Athan, Selene, and Thana tried to talk me into accepting a ride home, but I thought I’d be fine since I didn’t have far to go and I was looking forward to getting some fresh, night air.”
Opening the door and gesturing me inside ahead of him, Stephan grumbled, “That’s what I get for dragging my feet tonight.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, so I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I could’ve met you there, and then you wouldn’t have gone through all of this,” he explained as he led me through the elegant entryway and into a sitting room off to the side. “You almost paid a steep price for me wanting to spend as little time at their event as possible so I wouldn’t be disappointed when all of their attempts at matchmaking failed.”
It was a good thing there was a couch nearby because my knees went weak at his answer. I dropped down onto one of the brown leather cushions, my head shaking in disbelief. My voice wavered when I asked, “Athan and Selene hosted the party to try to match you up with someone?”
Stephan must have caught that I was hurt by the idea, even though I had no right to be. He sat down next to me and took my hands in his, giving them a little squeeze. “Not just anyone, though. For daywalkers, there’s only one woman for whom we will feel that spark of love and desire, and it often takes us many centuries to find our match.”
“Whoa.” There was a lot to take in from what he said. I wasn’t sure where to start, so I decided to go with the easiest question first. “What exactly is a daywalker?”
His explanation about the existence of two kinds of vampires and how he and his brothers had been born as daywalkers made me realize that none of the things I needed to ask were going to have simple answers. But I couldn’t bury my head in the sand and pretend tonight hadn’t happened. My eyes had been opened to a world I hadn’t known existed, and there was no going back now. Thinking about his reference to some daywalkers waiting centuries to find their perfect match, I dove into the next subject. “How old are you?”
“I’m six hundred and thirty-four.”
I pressed my head against the couch’s back cushions and stared up at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling. After I did a little mental math, I gasped, “You’re thirty-two times older than me.”