Georgie’s terrified, desperate face slipped behind my vision. Her throat red raw from the thin rope around her neck. Her long dark-brown hair clinging to the sides of her sweat-soaked face. Her body trembling wildly as she stood on her toes, precariously perched on the chair’s edge. The fear in her eyes was by far theworst memory. The desperation as she pleaded with me to do something, anything.
I took a deep breath and forced the image away. “She’s a psychopathic bitch,” I muttered.
Karson headed to the walk-in robe and came back out with fresh sheets.
“How two people as nice as Bob and Marg ended up with a child like her.” I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“She’s a firstborn,” he said by way of explanation. A firstborn vampire who was hellbent on revenge. The combination was lethal.
He began to remake the bed.
“You’re a firstborn and you’re not a psycho.” I twisted my back to him and pulled off my damp nightgown, which was not really a nightgown but one of his long gray t-shirts I liked to wear so I could smell him in his absence. I threw it onto the pile of sheets on the floor.
“Some would debate that,” he answered. There was a short pause and then he said in a soft voice, “The bruising is taking a long time to fade. Is it still painful?”
I stiffened. I had forgotten the cover of darkness was no hinderance to his eyes. My back was still a mess of various shaded bruises and strained muscles. A scar ran down my shoulder blade where a bookcase had snapped off and ripped into my flesh, and another red scar zigzagged across the bottom of my stomach. I could feel his eyes sweeping over yet another sign of my weakness, a reminder of my fragility, the reason he kept me under lock and key. I glanced back at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his fingers interlocked between his thighs. Was that guilt I could see on his face?
“No, it’s fine.”
He patted the bed, and I moved over to sit beside him and took his hand in mine. At the touch of our skin, a bubbly warmthflooded into my fingertips, rushing through my body, filling me with the urge to slide them up his arm, run my fingers over his chest, down over his corded stomach muscles—lower.
“I really think you should stay home tonight. You have eyes and ears everywhere. If someone sees something, you’ll be the first to know. You need sleep, Karson. You can’t keep going like this.”
Karson fixed his gaze on the fire reflecting on the windowpane, his voice coming out rough. “I cannot stop until we have found her.”
“And if that’s months?”
A twinge of something hard in his gaze. “It won’t be.”
I wanted to ask him how he could be so sure, but something kept my lips sealed. “Surely I could be of some use. I could go to bars and ask around at the very least.” I tossed out my hand in annoyance. “Rather than sit here like a useless ornament.”
“But you are by far the most captivating ornament I’ve ever had the privilege of viewing.”
If he thought I’d smile he was wrong. I scowled.
He studied my face in a way that made me think he was trying to read my mind. Probably he was. “Ask?” I huffed.
He smiled softly. “I’ve no need to ask. Even when I can’t peek into your head, you wear your emotions on your face like a picture.”
“Is that so? And what can you see?”
His thumb brushed over my knuckles, his voice husky. “I see determination. I see a fire burning in your green eyes.”
The way he was staring at me, with softness and hunger … The urge to lean into him coiled around my body, a raw, primal hunger to take his fingers and slip them between my thighs. Touching, tasting, bodies tangled together. Wetness pooled in my core, an aching throbbing desperate to be filled. I wanted him to hold me, take me, and make me his. Fuck me.
As if he read my thoughts and didn’t want that—didn’t want me—he rose quickly, then bending down, he kissed me on the cheek, his lips lingering for a long moment. I closed my eyes, savoring the feel of his soft, full lips on my skin.
“Get some sleep,” he murmured, and with a puff of air, he was gone.
I clutched my hands together and clamped my thighs—empty without his touch—and stared at the closed door.
“Sure, why not. What else am I going to do?” I murmured.
I didn’t sleep, not for hours.
Chapter 3
Karson
