“Of this.”
The hands on my thighs clenched, and I scowled at him. “I’ve fooled around before!”
“I’m not talking about that.” The disturbing gaze didn’t waver. “I feel it, too. I’ve never been in love—”
“Stop it.”
“Why? It’s true. I’m in love, and it terrifies me.”
“Then why are you here?” It came out harsher than I’d intended, but he didn’t flinch.
“Because you’re here.”
I just stared at him some more; what the hell do you say to that?
“I don’t know how to do this,” he told me. “I never had the chance to find out. I spent my youth trying to survive. When I finally managed to work my way into a better situation, a stable one, for the first time . . . Christine.”
Yeah, irony of ironies, the best catch on the planet had ended up tied to a crazy bitch named Christine, who was even a worse romantic prospect than me. But she’d gotten her claws into him deep, not because he loved her, but because he’d hurt her. To be more exact, she’d been injured, he’d tried to change her into a vampire to save her life, and it hadn’t worked. She’d ended up as something called a revenant, a masterless monster that resulted sometimes when a change went wrong, and was supposed to be put down immediately.
But, of course, he hadn’t put her down. Instead, he’d kept her around, like a living penance. And, I strongly suspected, because he’d been abandoned by his own Sire, the vampire father who’d left him just as his human parents had done, and he couldn’t bring himself to do the same to anyone else. But Christine wasn’t a vampire, and she was crazy, and it had all ended about as you’d expect.
“I made many mistakes,” he told me quietly. “For a long time, I thought I would end up paying for them forever. Maybe that is why, lately, everything seems so unreal. She is gone and you are here, and I never thought—” He stopped, and his hands clenched again. “I never thought I would have this, so I am afraid.”
That threw me some more, because it had never occurred to me that Louis-Cesare, of all people, felt anything but confident. He sure as hell never acted anything but confident. Or looked it—
Until now, when there was something in his face I didn’t want to acknowledge, especially not with the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.
“You should be,” I told him harshly. “I could hurt you. She could hurt you. Or worse!”
“And what if she does?”
“What?”
“Or what if I die in the war? Or what if you do? Will being deprived of love for whatever time le bon Dieu gives us help in some way?”
I scowled at him, because he still wasn’t getting this. “If you’re not around Dorina, maybe you won’t die at all!”
“And if I am not with you, I will not live at all, not as I have these past months.”
I stared at him.
“There are a thousand ways to die,” he told me quietly. “There are so few to really live. I would gladly risk the former for the latter, and it is my choice, is it not? To risk whatever I must, my heart, my body, my soul, in order to be with you. Is that not what love is?”
I stared at him some more. And not just because he was doing it again, saying outrageous things that you weren’t even supposed to let yourself think. But because—
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”
I was never supposed to be asked that question.
Dhampirs were nature’s loners, the perfect killing machines, with no friends, no lovers, and no family. And for a long time, that’s all I’d been. My own father had rarely talked to me, and my mother had died before I was old enough to remember, so what did I know about family?
But I’d wanted one anyway. Desperately, terribly, no matter how many times I told myself that I couldn’t have it. To stop whining and get on with things, and so I had. For a very long time, I had. And just when I got used to that, when I finally started to accept it, when I was actually kind of okay with it—
Fate, or fortune, or the game master up there with the whacked-out sense of humor decided to send me a blue-eyed Disney prince with his heart on his sleeve and words on his lips that I’d never, ever expected to have said to me, and—
And I had no idea what to do with him.
None at all.