Okay, fine. So he’s right. For too long, her life had been about survival and reaction, instinct. Now, when analytical reflection was needed, her skills weren’t merely rusty—she’d forgotten how to use them.
So start exercising them again, damn it. Think about it. Putting down the pitchfork, she planted her backside on a hay bale.
When Hasna dropped her nose over the other stall door for attention, Jessica petted it absently.
First truth. Anyone who’d endured what she had over the past five years had to have a shrink’s compendium of phobias, complexes and syndromes. Could she really trust her feelings? Her rational mind said the most intelligent course was the unlikely hope for Council clemency, Mason’s offer of setting her up somewhere on her own and then a great therapist. By the time she turned seventy or eighty, she might be ready to handle a healthy relationship with a guy again. Not a problem. She was a third-mark, after all, so she should still have a firm body and great skin.
Second truth. If she went with the assumption that Mason was right, that Raithe had exploited something that was already in her nature, then it was obvious why she responded so strongly to Mason. He was a Dominant, and she’d formed an extremely fragile bridge of trust with him, which continued to stand only because he hadn’t done anything yet to disrupt it. He had a vampire’s magnetic personality and physical beauty, and on some odd level, that was now what she knew best. The familiar.
Both truths made logical sense. But maybe because she had lived on instinct so long, and trusted it, something about her conclusions felt wrong. When she’d responded to his nightmare, she’d known she had to help him, even if she had to mow over Enrique and Amara. She couldn’t bear his pain.
It would be easy to make a romantic leap and think she carried some of Farida’s spirit inside her, returning to a mortal form to bring Mason love again. But she wasn’t much on past-life nonsense, and it seemed too coincidental for Jess’s tastes, too schmaltzy.
And while she felt a strong bond with Farida, she was Jessica, herself. So something else was fueling their bond. Something about how Mason had lost Farida called to Jessica, told her he understood her losses, in a way very few would.
Or maybe she was just hormonal as hell and he was a hot-body vampire who wore eau de pheromones in a way she couldn’t resist. Her lips curved. She’d replayed his bare-assed stalk across his bedroom to get his robe a few hundred times. If her mind was a movie player, the digital media would have worn out by now. But every time she saw that tiger on his shoulder, she wanted to stroke it, feel the muscles shifting beneath the design.
Despite the fact she’d been forced to have sex countless times over the past five years, she craved it with Mason as if she’d been celibate all that time. And maybe, in a way, she had been. She sighed. So what if Mason was right? While she’d abhorred the vampire inflicting it on her, being restrained and commanded to serve him may have capitalized on something that belonged to her, not Raithe, making her feel as if she was betraying herself. Raithe had destroyed her self-esteem, her self-confidence. He’d caused her to hate herself in a way that had made the wasting disease eating at her skin feel almost deserved.
She swallowed, the ache of tears threatening in her throat. She didn’t want to hate herself. And Mason understood all that. He was trying to help her reclaim herself, putting her needs before his own, even as it made him a target of her anger and frustration. Maybe he was as frustrated as she was. While she was petty enough to take some satisfaction in the thought, some warmth came with it, too.
Letting the fatigue of her frenetic work marathon close in, she curled up on her side on the hay bale and thought about him. Coman whuffed into her hair from the opposite stall, and she reached up, touched his velvet nose. So gentle and fierce at once. He could kill her with his strength and power, but he didn’t. Much like his Master.
Because she was pretty sure he was beyond the reach of her mind, she dared to send her thoughts to him. I miss you, Mason. I don’t understand what I feel for you, but I know you’ve gone off somewhere, because there’s an emptiness inside me. How could I know that, if all I have are misplaced, broken emotions? What if the key to finding out what I want is linked to what you want, and you won’t reach out and grasp it?
Maybe she did need therapy. Or maybe she was just the product of a therapy-happy society. Her mind might have all the answers, if she was brave enough to look.
Her eyes drooping closed, she let herself sleep, watched over by the two horses and Jorge. The old groom came in quietly, retrieved the pitchfork and finished up the few chores, keeping a watchful eye over the troubled, hardworking young woman he was beginning to hope would be around awhile longer—and not only because she was cutting his daily workload in half.
In her dreams, she was Farida again, or at least moving in Farida’s mind, watching Mason. He stood at the cave entrance, looking at the desert sunset from the safety of the shadows. The wind blew the open robe back, showing his bare chest and the trousers he wore beneath. Putting aside the pot she’d been cleaning, she came to his side.
“You deserve more,” he said. “Soon we’ll go to my family home, and this will be a distant memory.”
“I hope not. It has been the happiest time of my life.” Tilting her head back, she met his amber eyes, his beloved, brooding face.
She wanted to make him smile. “I was raised in wealth, my lord. It brings comfort and sparkling things. But sometimes it brings a fog as well, and raises walls between hearts. I suspect a queen may wander through many, many empty rooms, wearing her jewels, and yet feel so lonely she wishes to die. I cherish this moment, for it is the one I surely have. Everything else is unknown.”
“I will never let you be lonely.” He drew her close, taking her inside the robe so she pressed against his bare side, her hand slipping up the back of the robe to settle on the tiger scar. “I will also weigh you down with jewels and give you many rooms. But I will be with you in all of them.”
She smiled then, lifting on her toes to brush his mouth with her own. “Take me out into the night with you, my lord. Let me see it through your eyes. That is all I care about. I will not be truly happy until every breath you take is mine, every thought is shared.
Until we have become one creation, so that we cannot be parted without destroying us both, as if we are one body severed into two.”
Jessica opened her eyes. Amara was sitting cross-legged on another hay bale. As she woke, the woman’s eyes crinkled. “You looked so peaceful there, I didn’t want to disturb you, but Robert will be here in about an hour. I thought you might want to take a shower.”
“Amara, what if my feelings are true? What if I’ve been falling in love with Lord Mason all along, ever since I found that first journal? Do I trust it? Do I risk it? Will he even believe it or . . . would he reject me?” At Amara’s startled look, she struggled to a sitting position, trying to shake off the fog. “Sorry. Just ignore me. I’m still waking up.” Instead, Amara shifted from her hay bale to sit beside Jess, passing a fond hand over her rumpled curls and retrieving the bill cap that had fallen to the floor during her nap. “I don’t know how to answer, Jessica. If by ‘falling in love,’ you mean it in the traditional human sense, no vampire would admit to holding a human in equal status to himself. Human servant is the closest relationship we can achieve with one, at least in the eyes of the vampire world. That’s why those of us with submissive tendencies tend to do best with them, perhaps understanding the role of Master-servant better.”
Jessica shifted uncomfortably at being included in the “those of us” category, but Amara was continuing. “As I have said, he’s different with you. Mason has been alone for so long, without a true human servant. I am sure he is afraid of hurting you, Jess.
Don’t be angry at him for trying to protect you.”
“Maybe he’s trying to protect himself as well.”
“Perhaps.” Amara gave her an even look. “Is he wrong to do so? Can you truly say you are ready to commit your life to another vampire? They don’t do things by halves, Jessica. They might compel a short draught from someone for a dinner, but the humans in their homes have clearly defined roles.”
“That’s pretty much what he said.” Jessica blew out a frustrated breath. “I get it, but I swear, it’s like being a mule and having this really pretty carrot dangled in front of your nose and then jerked away, every time you’ve made up your mind what you want to do with it.”
Amara chuckled. At Jessica’s narrow glance, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. That was an interesting . . . visual.” Jessica felt her mouth relax into a tentative smile. “I wasn’t intending a sexual reference.”
“Which made it all the more amusing.” Amara gave her upper arm a gentle rub. “If you decide you truly want him, then I think Lord Mason will be hard-pressed to deny you. You will leap for that carrot, and no matter how high he holds it, you’ll climb up his body to get it.” Laughter flitted through her beautiful dark gaze. “Though he is formidably stubborn himself, particularly when he thinks he’s doing the honorable thing.”
Jessica mulled it over. “Where is he? He’s not here. I know that.”
When Amara’s face shuttered, Jessica’s stomach flooded with alarm. “Amara, where did he go?”
“He left for Berlin last night. He’s meeting with the Council about you.” Amara caught her arm when Jessica would have jumped up. “You’re safe, Jessica. You have nothing to fear. He will never turn you over to them.”
“But what if they come here? What if—”
“He will not permit that. If the worst happens, he will notify us. We already have the arrangements to take you to another safe location. But Lord Mason is doing his utmost to get you exonerated for your actions so that won’t be necessary.”
“So why didn’t he tell me he was going?” Jessica tried to calm her jumping stomach. “Never mind. I know the answer to that.