Cora bit her lip. She wanted a second to analyze her thoughts. If she only got one more question, she wanted it to be good. “No,” shereplied finally. “I haven’t decided on the third one yet. So that’s all the vamp stuff that’s not real? Everything else is true?”
Waving a hand dismissively, Saiden changed lanes without so much as a glance behind him. “No, there are other inaccuracies. We do not sleep in coffins, and we can and do go out during the day. Though we tend to be more sensitive to the sun than humans, so you won’t usually find us on the beach.” He paused for a second, then added, “And to harken back to your original question, no, I am not dead. Well, not anymore. I died as a human and was reborn as a vampire, but any medical examination would classify me as alive. So long as I consume blood, my heart beats just like yours. I breathe just like you. And I am not cold and clammy as the stories love to portray.”
She should have resisted. It would have been the smart thing to do. But damn if she wasn’t a slave to her impulses.
Cora reached out and ran her hand down his bare arm.
He wasn’t cold and clammy, that was for sure.
Not even close.
Chapter thirteen
Saiden
It was such an innocuous thing—the light brush of her skin against his own—yet it changed his entire world. The second her fingers grazed his arm, he felt it.
The Spark.
In the warehouse he thought he’d touched her skin at some point, but now he realized her sweater must have always been in the way. How could he be so smart and so fucking stupid at the same time? His honed senses kept him alive for three hundred years but failed him the second his mate showed up.
He should have embraced the one thing he craved more than life itself, but instead he fell into firm denial mode. He couldn’t compel her, but that could have been her illness. And yeah, she smelled delicious, but only after you worked past that acerbic medicinal tang.
He’d lived for so long that he’d just given up and dismissed everything as coincidence.
He couldn’t deny the Spark though. It was like a bolt of lightning to the soul. A connection snapping into place. The universe screaming at him, ‘She is the one.’
His mate.
She was his mate.
The one thing he wanted his entire life and assumed he simply wasn’t worthy of having. She existed. He found her. And she was…
A messy, quarrelsome human who only cared about making movies and didn’t even want to be turned.
Damn, Lilith could be a real bitch sometimes.
Cora yanked her hand back as if she’d been bitten, and the action only cemented things further. She’d felt the Spark too. Only she had no idea what it meant.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
What the hell was he supposed to say now? He’d been nothing but a dick to her. How was he supposed to convince her that they were meant to spend the rest of their lives together? He didn’t know much about human women, but he’d seen enough movies to know they tended to freak out if a guy went too fast. There was no way she would understand that even though they just met, the universe knew they would be a perfect match, and she was the only one he would be able to love for an eternity.
A concept that would probably go over the heads of the Tinder and TikTok generation. Though, she had said she didn’t care for social media, so maybe she wasn’t like the others.
Play it cool. That’s what he’d do. He’d play it casual, like nothing had changed.
Even if the truth was thateverythinghad changed. He felt even more awful now that she’d never get to make her movie. Once she became one of them, making any kind of vampire flick was out of the question.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
There was also the tiny, insignificant fact that she didn’t want to beturned. Well, that was going to have to change and fast. He’d given up on ever finding his mate over a hundred years ago. Convinced himself that hunting rogues was all his existence would ever entail. And he was fine with that. He had a purpose in protecting the people he cared about. He didn’t need a mate.
It was easy to pretend you didn’t want something when you thought you’d never have it, but now that she was sitting next to him… he’d just have to convince her. There was no other option. Vampires only ever got one mate. If Lilith finally got off her ass and brought them together, he couldn’t go back to his previous lonely existence. Not when he saw how Marquin and Eliana were together. The level of happiness that a mate could bring was not to be dismissed.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and saw her rubbing her hand absently. Probably blaming the Spark on static electricity.
“So,” he began, suddenly unsure how to even speak to her. “Why don’t you want to live forever? Just curious because in the warehouse you made it seem like a bad thing.”
