• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I shook my head. “I’m tired of cleaning up blood. Just help me hold him.”

Asher’s eyes went a little wide. “I will call Nathaniel.”

The heat had gone to my head in a pounding headache. “Just jump in, Asher, I promise not to peek.”

He curled beside the tub, tucking every piece of him he could underneath the towel. “If I dropped this towel to the floor, would you really not look?”

His question stopped me. I opened my mouth, closed it, and tried to think through the heat, the headache, the growing nausea, and finally just said the truth. “I wouldn’t mean to look, but no, you’re right. If you’re naked I’m going to look. I don’t think I could stop myself.”

“Like a car accident, you cannot turn away,” he said.

I looked up then and found he’d turned away, hiding his face with that fall of golden hair. Damn it, I didn’t have time to hold everybody’s hand. “Asher, please, I didn’t mean that.”

He wouldn’t look at me. I extracted one arm from Damian, who moved around the remaining arm like a child settling in his sleep around his favorite Teddy bear. I grabbed Asher’s arm through the towel. “Yes, I’d look just for sheer curiosity’s sake, how could I help it? You’ve teased and taunted about how bad your injuries are. You’ve set it up so that I’ll have to look, have to see.”

He was looking at me now, those pale eyes, empty, hidden from me.

I dug my fingers into his arm, trying to grip him through the towel, and finding mostly cloth. “But if you don’t know by now that I just want to see you nude, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

His face told me nothing, that blank politeness that both he and Jean-Claude could pull off when they wanted to. “Now help me get some of these clothes off before I melt.”

He gave a low chuckling laugh that danced over my skin and brought my pulse to my throat. I was too hot to have goosebumps. “You offering to disrobe without any magic to push you, I believe that is a first.”

I had to laugh, because he was right. But the laugh forced me to close my eyes, because it felt like the pulsing of the headache was going to shove my eyeballs out of their sockets. I let go of his arm and pressed my hand to my forehead to try and keep my head from falling into pieces. “Please, Asher, I am going to be sick.”

I heard the water splashing, felt it push against me as someone climbed into the tub. I opened my eyes slowly, trying to hold the headache inside and found Nathaniel kneeling in the water. His hair was still bound in a loose braid that trailed behind him, curling through the water like something separate and alive. The swirling braid brought my gaze low on his body, and I had a peripheral sense that Nathaniel wasn’t getting any clothes wet whatsoever, but I didn’t care. The headache had reached a point where I was afraid I was going to start throwing up if I didn’t get cooler.

He answered my question without me asking it. “Asher wants Damian to try to take blood again, see if it will stay down.”

Asher was still perched on the edge of the tub wrapped in the towel. “Damian must be able to keep down blood, or he will perish. I believe that if you stay in constant contact with him that he will be able to keep a feeding down.”

“If I have to stay in constant contact then I have to get cooler first.”

“Nathaniel will help you,” he said.

I glanced up at Asher, and even in the dim glow of a night light, it hurt my head. “Fine.”

Damian made small protesting movements as Nathaniel tried to take some of his weight off of me. We finally leaned him up against the edge of the tub with Asher supporting some of his weight, but letting him keep my arm pressed to his chest. Nathaniel undid my belt and helped me slip the shoulder holster off one arm, but I needed the other arm free to slip it out of the other strap. Damian fought us, slowly, stubbornly, as if he were sleepwalking. But he was a vampire; he could have torn his way through the wall of my bathroom with his bare hands. If he didn’t want to let go of my arm, we couldn’t make him, not unless we were willing