Page 71 of Don't Bite the Botanist
But she knew it wouldn’t have ended well. She would never make aprisoner of her mate. No matter how much she wanted to. No matter how much the mate bond screamed at her to chase after him. No matter how much her soul ached the farther away he got.
And no matter how pissed Saiden was that yet another person “borrowed” his favorite ride.
“Yeah,” Baylin said, pulling up a map on his computer. His hands flew over the keyboard at inhuman speed, and the screen zoomed in on a blinking red dot. “According to GPS, he stopped near a city park in his hometown on the Oregon Coast. He hasn’t moved for almost half an hour.”
“A park?” she asked, climbing out of her chair to move over to the computer even though she could see perfectly fine from across the room. It wasn’t like getting closer to the red dot took her any closer to her mate.
“Looks like,” Baylin said, pointing to the map. “Either that or the cemetery across the street, but I don’t know why he’d go there.”
Tressa scanned the screen, noting the information on the GPS tag—Seacliff Cemetery—and the conversation they had in the garden came back to her. “He went to the cemetery,” she said, her voice wilting.
Baylin arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
Melancholy poured off Tressa, her heart breaking for her mate that was so far away. “My guess? He was feeling confused and scared, so he sought out the one person he could always rely on. His mom.”
Baylin frowned. “I looked into him, though. Isn’t his mom—”
“Dead?” Tressa supplied. “Yeah. I imagine she’s buried there.”
Baylin eyed her curiously. “So why…?”
“Come on, Baylin. Haven’t you ever felt so lost that you just wanted the comfort of your family and would take that in any form you could get?”
“Honestly?” he asked, turning back to the computer, his voice and body tight. “No. The only family I care about lives under this roof.”
Tressa rested her hand on his arm, a small gesture to let him know she wouldn’t pry.
After a moment, his shoulders relaxed. When he glanced back up at her, he was smiling again, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Besides, they always come to me.” He winked. “Even when I don’t want them to.”
Tressa pulled her hand back and smacked him with it. “Stop acting like you don’t love it, and maybe we’ll stop barging in all the time, Baylicious.”
“A vampire can only dream,” he grumbled, then sat back in his chair. “So what, you think Ethan went to the cemetery to visit his mom’s grave?”
Tressa’s finger drifted over to the monitor, brushing against the red dot that was her mate. “I know he did. She meant everything to him. You might not understand, but I know what it’s like to miss your mom so much that even a cold stone with their name on it would be a small comfort.”
“Oh,” Baylin said, and the word lingered in the air between them for a long moment before he cleared his throat. “What are you planning? Are you going to leave him be or…”
Perching on the edge of the table, Tressa picked at her cuticles. “I don’t know, Bay. I’m out of my depths here. My heart is screaming at me to take the next fastest car and get to him as quickly as I can.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Tressa sighed and tucked her hands under her butt so she could focus. “The problem is that my brain doesn’t know if showing up right after he asked for time and space is the best plan of action. It could end up being the final stake in the coffin of our relationship.”
Baylin groaned. “Did you just make a really awful vampire joke?”
“Little bit,” she replied with a forced grin. “I’m doing everything I can to not fall apart here, Bay. Let me have my bad puns.”
He huffed out a short laugh. “Fair enough. But slightly offensive joking aside, I can’t tell you what to do, Tress. He’s leaving himself wide open to an attack, and we both know he can’t take on Renata by himself. But I hear what you’re saying about not wanting to push things so hard they snap. Shit, Saiden is lucky that Cora even speaks to him after the crap he pulled.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Tressa agreed dryly. “Why is it that most vampires are shit at telling their mates the truth?”
Baylin shrugged. “Maybe because people these days freak out when romantic things move too fast? Telling a modern-day human that a cosmic power believes you’re destined to be together after your first handshake is unlikely to get you anything other than a restraining order.”
“Ugh,” Tressa griped. “It makes no sense. Their lives are so short, you would think they would jump at the chance to skip the dating game and go straight to happily ever after.”
“You can’t expedite love, Tressa. It takes time.”
Love.
