Wind whips past my hair as he launches us up onto the balcony of his apartment. Then, he sets me down and opens the sliding glass door so I can move past him and into his space. It smells like him, the minty citrus scent filling my lungs.
I’ve only ever been here a handful of times before, and never for very long. Typically, just to drop off a vial of my blood and get some of his in return; something we have to do at least once a month in order to maintain the bond.
Warm leather furniture expertly arranged gives the apartment a lived-in vibe that perfectly matches the calm and collected vampire I’ve known for over a century. Landscape photographs line the walls, images he’s taken himself over the years.
Which is something not everyone knows about him—and something he’d hidden from me until I’d shown up unannounced with a blood vial and caught him photographing the city beyond his balcony.
“I’ll get the shower warmed for you.”
My stomach lurches, and I stumble forward, right into his waiting arms. “Sorry.”
“What is happening to you?”
“I think my body is taking a little extra time to adjust,” I partially lie. The mistruth is in the illusion that this is only temporary. I’m genuinely concerned that it will be this way until either I accept the magic or it kills me. “Bathroom,” I choke out, as the bile surges up in my throat.
He blurs me into the bathroom, and I drop to my knees in front of the toilet. Tarnley grips my blonde hair, holding it out of my face as my stomach spasms and I dry heave. “Fuck, Bronywyn,” he mutters, as he rubs slow circles over my back.
“It’ll be okay,” I choke out in between spasms. The seconds tick by, feeling more like minutes, until finally, my stomach gets the message that it’s empty. I sit back, completely exhausted, as Tarnley releases my hair and turns on the shower. The heavy spray beats against the tile as steam steadily floats up toward the ceiling.
“You’re not okay, Bronywyn. I can feel it.”
His voice cracks at the end of the strangled sentence, so I shift my gaze to him. With the palm of his hand digging into the muscles just above his heart, he looks pained—physically and emotionally.
The bond.Shit.“What do you mean you can feel it?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.” He falls silent, eyes drifting up toward the ceiling. Then, after a moment, he drops his hand and turns back to me. “My chest aches, almost like—”
“Our bond is affected?” I get up to my knees so I’m kneeling in front of him as he leans against the countertop.
Tarnley looks down at me, and the breath leaves my throat on a soft sigh. Something that has been happening to me since the moment we exchanged blood. Not that I wasn’t attracted to him before, but after we bonded, it grew substantially.
Not surprising since the mate bond is the strongest magic nature has to offer. Even our fake bond has its own kind of power.
“Yes.”
“What does it feel like?”
His brow furrows as he considers my question a moment. “Like it’s being torn apart.”
Dammit.That would be the one side-effect I hadn’t fully considered—if it is, in fact, a side-effect of my evolving magic. “We haven’t exchanged blood in nearly a month and a half,” I remind him. “That could be why.”
“Could be.” But he doesn’t even look slightly convinced. Piercing eyes pin me with more heat than I can handle. Especially now, when I’m more likely to puke on his three-hundred-dollar shoes than manage a smile.
“Here.” Raising my wrist, I offer it to him. “Drink. Then you can give me some of yours, and we’ll be back to normal.”
The bond is anything but normal. To drink another supernatural’s blood as a witch is to pull magic inside that doesn’t belong. It’s immensely painful, something I cleverly hide from Tarnley by not allowing him to see me drink his blood.
Typically, we do a vial swap, each of us drinking it in the comfort of our own homes. But with how sick I am already, I doubt he’ll think much else of it if he witnesses the adverse reaction his blood has on me.
“No. You’re not strong enough.” He reaches down and pulls me to my feet, wrapping an arm around my waist to steady me. His hard body pressed against mine sends lust slamming into me that overrides my nausea.
And based on the way his nostrils flare in response, his eyes widening ever so slightly, he senses it.
“I’m really out of it,” I tell him. Until we shared blood and created the bond that forces us together, Tarnley barely ever looked my way. And because of that, I’ve kept my distance, despite how badly I want him most of the time.
It does no good to build a relationship on fiction. And considering how many times I’ve had my heart broken, the last thing I want to do is jump headfirst into something that’s only destined to crash and burn. After all, how many times can one piece together broken glass before it becomes irreparable?
Clearing his throat, he forces his gaze away and leans me against the countertop. “Can you manage?”