All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [65]
“You took pictures?”
She smiled, just slightly. “Not me. But Jerome does love that camera of his.”
“Adianna saw them.”
“So that’s the reason for today’s tantrum.”
She had moved close enough that now she could lay her palm against his cheek.
“Darling,” she whispered, “if you intend to try to kill me, it would help if you drew a knife.”
He jumped at the reminder, his hand going to the knife handle at the back of his neck. The movement was slower than usual as he fought learned reflexes.
Olivia moved her hand from his cheek and across the back of his reaching arm until her palm lay over his hand, at the back of his neck. The motion he had attempted stalled as muscles reacted to a more familiar position, relaxing and arching his throat back.
“Or,” Olivia suggested, “we could do something more enjoyable.”
“No.”
But he couldn’t make himself shove her away.
“So, what? You’ll kill me?” she asked. “And then you’ll go home, having destroyed the one place where you don’t have to be the perfect, flawless Zachary Vida. You’ll have destroyed the only person who welcomes you no matter what.”
She slid against him and stretched her petite form so she could kiss his throat. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, he leaned back against the wall, his eyes closing. It was the same reflex that had shut him down at the end of the fight with Sarah.
“Did you really come here to kill me?” she purred.
“Yes.”
She ran a hand up his chest. “You aren’t doing a very good job. No, hush, love,” she said, laughing, when he tried to protest. “It’s okay.” Abruptly, she drew back, pulling a small sound of protest from his throat as she said, “Come. Sit and relax a while. We’ll figure out what you can say to your dear cousin. Was she the only one who saw?”
He took a seat on the plush couch, wondering even as he did what the hell he was doing.
He had come here, once again, to kill her. He had resolved to do so dozens of times, if not hundreds, but every time she calmed him and set him off his guard.
At first, it had just been the fights. The frustration and fear and pain from the battle and any resulting injuries had faded away in the peace that a vampire’s bite could bring. At that point, he had normally woken up in an empty house, long after the vampires had left.
The first time he had woken up with her still there, he had stormed out, refusing to say a word but lacking the courage to attack her.
The next time, she had woken him with a home-cooked meal and apologized that they had taken too much. I can take care of you here, or I can take you to the healers. Your choice. He hadn’t wanted to go to the witches. He would have had to admit to them what had happened.
So he had stayed, and they had eaten breakfast together.
And it had evolved from there, over the course of what had to have been almost two years.
He enjoyed watching her as she moved about the kitchen, her feet bare and her hair down, softly humming some song he thought maybe he knew from the radio as she set a kettle on the stove to boil.
“Why haven’t you killed me?” he asked.
She glanced over her shoulder as she portioned loose leaves into an old-fashioned tea ball. “I don’t care for killing. I’ve done it when forced to,” she admitted, “but this is nicer. Why? Did you want me to kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat next to him and curled against his side.
“Poor dear. What can I do for you?”
The answer was utterly beyond him. Suddenly, he was shaking, a bone-deep trembling he struggled to control until she cooed, “It’s all right. You don’t have to be strong here.”
It was the type of permission he didn’t know how to react to. Wrapped in her arms, he could for the moment step outside the perfect Vida cage, and as soon as he did so, he was weeping.
It was all crumbling. His earliest memories were those of Jacqueline and Dominique screaming at each other, and then Jacqueline storming out. His mother wailing when they told her Jacqueline was dead, demanding to see the body for herself, leaving and never coming back. His brother, only five years old, wandering out in a quest for Mother,