Garron was winded, angry and dressed, all things she regretted. She pivoted away from him, facing that spot Vardalos had vacated. Staring out the multi-colored panes of glass, she didn't think she could bear looking at her Master, at what she wanted so much. The anger was receding, leaving a weariness.
"I didn't come here for some magical solution to all of this," she said slowly. "Just a break, a temporary break from always being expected to be something I'm not. That's it. It wasn't supposed to get this complicated. You weren't supposed to be...everything I hoped you'd be."
"Sorry to disappoint."
She would have laughed, except she was pretty sure any emotional response like that would crack her open entirely. "Garron, I can't do it to you. I just can't. In my world--"
"In your world, it's different. Servants have the choice to be servants and every other choice belongs to the vampire. I get it. But nothing's changed about what I told you earlier. There are worlds inside of worlds, and I'm talking about the only one that counts. The one we create between you and me."
He'd closed the distance between them. She shuddered at his nearness. She wanted to tell him not to touch her, that she couldn't bear it, but she didn't have the strength to deny him anything. Except this one thing.
"What they did to you tonight, that was nothing," she said, low. "Richard and Tara are actually quite decent, as vampires go. It can be so much worse. It's not just a matter of you not being able to handle it, Garron. I don't think I could stand by and let it happen. I would get us both killed, because I won't bear seeing my Master be treated like less than he is. Like something he's not. Once they figure it out, you would be killed in front of me. I'd be executed or put under an overlord's direct supervision, someone who could beat me into the vampire they think I need to be."
"I've actually found beating you brings out more of your true self."
She shook her head, tried to move away, but he wouldn't let her. He closed his hand over hers at her side, just held it. When he slid his other arm around her waist, trying to turn her, she resisted. He moved his large palm to her neck, curving his fingers around her nape. "Kaela, look at me. You haven't met my gaze since I came into the room."
Because it was too hard. Too hard to show him everything she wanted, because she couldn't hide it, not when it was just the two of them. But she obeyed, and that muscle in his jaw flexed as he saw it. His fingers were gentle, strong. "Just breathe with me," he murmured. "Let's just take a minute and let the universe stop spinning."
"And let you get your breath back," she observed, laying a hand on his chest, rising and falling faster than usual. His heart was still racing.
"I tend to put on some speed when someone's going to kill my boss. He is the island's major employer."
"I believe he's the island's only employer." His wry humor, his touch was helping, even though she shouldn't let it. Shouldn't let her defenses down. "I wasn't going to kill him. Probably."
Garron gave her his crooked smile. Backing up a pace or two to Vardalos's desk, he propped his hips on it and drew her with him so she was standing between his spread feet. She put her hand back on his chest, her fingers curling into the silken mat of hair because he'd only donned slacks and shoes, his shirt having been sacrificed to the used toy bin. It had looked like a nice shirt. She owed him another one.
"They'll wash and return it to me. The laundry does miracles here." He touched her face. "You like to hear stories, right? I want to tell you a story. Will you listen?"
She stared at the gleam of the dark hair curling over her knuckles. He smelled so good, that aftershave scent. He'd dressed up for her tonight. "That may be the first time you really asked me anything. Most of the time you just tell me the way it's going to be."
"Yeah. I'm having a lax moment. You freaked out on me."
She gave a half snort at the understatement of that. "Tell me a story." She wanted to get lost in it. Go to sleep in his arms, never wake up.
He touched her chin, but he didn't make her lift her face. "You know why I went into the military?"
She shook her head.
"I was a foster kid, Kaela. No family to call my own. Ran away a few times until I settled down at a reasonably decent place, which meant they kept me fed and clothed, didn't smack me around or try to do worse to me. But one of those times I ran away, I found a place to sleep in an alley, next to a garbage heap. Bad smells are part of that and you keep your ears sharp for rustlings, because that means rats. Usually you just move away when the smell's too bad or the rustling is too loud."
He paused. "Something made me look that night. I found a pair of newborn twins, still bloody from being born. Somebody had stuffed them into the garbage. Not on top, in the open, in the hopes someone would find them. They were under other trash bags, someone wanting them to die there. Ironically, though that didn't give them a lot of air, it kept them warmer."
Thinking of the infant he'd found in the explosion, her heart tightened.
"Yeah. It was another reason finding that arm affected me the way it did, not that something like that needs anything to make it worse. But when I was holding that little arm, it took me back to that night."
He looped his arms loosely around her waist, drew her closer, his knuckles resting on the rise of her buttocks. "I didn't even think. Just took off my shirt, wrapped them both up and ran. The nearest hospital was a couple miles away. I could have hailed any adult, a cab, whatever. It was a wretched part of town and I didn't trust anyone, but it wasn't that. All I could think of was getting them there. When I stumbled into the ER, peeled back my shirt and showed them to the on-duty nurse, I remember how the whole waiting area just burst into activity. Not just the nurses and doctors. It seemed even the people there for treatment, everyone from street trash to the middle class wife who'd cut herself with a knife, were suddenly invested in making sure these babies had a chance. You know, one of those rare scenarios where you wake up from your life and realize it's all for one, and one for all."
Her throat ached. "Vampires don't have a lot of those moments."
"No, I expect they don't." He released her to take her hand once more, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles as if lost in thought.
"What happened?" She made herself ask when the silence grew and added to that ache, to the point she couldn't bear what wasn't being said. All the things she wished could be.
"One of them was already dead." He shook his head. "I remember this young doctor coming to tell me. He looked tired, overworked, probably doing his residency. Yet he still had heart enough to go look for the kid who brought them in, and tell me the twin had been dead for a few hours before I found them. If he hadn't, I'd have always wondered if those twenty minutes I spent in the alley before I looked had been the tipping point for her. But he didn't leave it there. He shook my hand and told me, 'To that little girl who survived, for the rest of her life, no matter where you are, what you're doing, even if you never see one another again, you'll always be a hero.'"
He raised his gaze to her. "You know the very first thing that crossed my mind? 'Well, that kinda depends on the life she has from here forward, doesn't it, doc?' I don't know what kind of life she has. I hope it's a good one. Sometimes when I can't think of anything to pray for, I pray for that. When I woke up in the hospital after getting blown to bits, the first thing I thought was 'I hope she had a good day today.' Everything bad that happens in my life, I go back to thinking of her."
Seeing how it mattered to him so much after all these years,
reminded her of the girl she'd been, standing by Jared's grave. Some things never healed.
"Garron--"
He shook his head. "I'm almost done. Let me finish. When I sat down with a recruiter on my eighteenth birthday, he told me the army could become my family. I've been lied to a lot in my life, and I knew some of that was propaganda. But he was one of the ones who believed in it, because he'd seen it work. It did for me. The point of all this is, I realized what things are meaningful, and what things you do to get by. We all put on masks, but my lady, over all these decades, you let that mask become part of your face, take over your soul. We took it back, you and me, in less than three days. You made me feel a connection that I know is real, true, and permanent. Meant to be. That has to mean something, something that translates beyond this island."
Tears spilled out of her eyes and he reached up, brushed them off with gentle fingertips. When he closed a hand on her shoulder, she knew she was rigid. As if hardening herself to receive a blow that was going to hurt almost more than she could bear. He kept on pressing, though.
"I told you I started as a bell boy here, and when they're short-handed, I still do it. When I bring bags to people's rooms, take care of what they need, I enjoy that, because though they might not get it or see it this way, they're looking to me to watch out for them and their belongings. Caring for someone as a Dom is just a different form of what you feel as a submissive, and my understanding of that is what made every minute of what we were doing with those vampires possible. I know who I am, my lady, and what matters and what doesn't. I want to be with you. That's one of the real things that matter. That's worth everything else."
If she continued to stand here, he could talk her into it. But though he was an incomparable Master, a male who'd made her feel things she hadn't felt in so long, he didn't have a hundred and seventy-five years of seeing what she'd seen.
Earlier, she'd thought if she could have ten days again with Jared, knowing she would lose him afterward, she would still take those ten days. But if she could have him back only as a vampire's servant, she knew what her answer would be. Servants were property, slaves, subject to the whim of not only their own vampire, but any vampire more powerful than her. There were just too many more powerful than her.