Page 73 of Don't Bite the Botanist
“Admit it, Saiden. You love me.”
“If it gets you to shut up, then sure. Think whatever you want.”
Tressa leaned back in the chair, enjoying the exchange between the guys. Despite what Saiden would never admit, she knew he really did love his cousin. And Derrick had lightened up a bit at the bantering, so Tressa had no intention of interfering in their little squabble. She would wheedle his problem out of him after she solved her own.
Checking her watch, she saw they would be landing at the airstrip just outside of Seacliff in the next fifteen minutes. Which meant she was running out of time to figure out what she was going to say.
Please Lilith, don’t let him hate me, she thought, keeping her eyes locked on the blinking dot on her phone.
He hadn’t moved from the cemetery for the past two hours, and she didn’t know what to make of that. A not-so-small part of her was terrified they were too late and Renata had already gotten to him. If they arrived at the cemetery only to find his permanently dead bodydraped over his mother’s headstone, Tressa didn’t think she would survive it.
She wouldn’twantto survive it.
“Hey, Derrick?” she called out.
“Yeah?” he asked, glancing over at her.
“Fly faster.”
Chapter thirty-eight
Ethan
A soft tickle on his nose pulled Ethan from sleep, and he blinked at the faint spears of sunlight just peeking over the horizon. He glanced at his watch and groaned. Five a.m.
Maybe he was more suited to the life of a night creature than he realized, because five a.m. was not typically a time he wanted to be awake.
Brushing aside the moth that had landed on his cheek, he climbed to his feet and stared down at his mother’s grave.
“Well, Mom, any bright ideas on what I should do now?”
Whoever coined the phrase “as quiet as a graveyard” was clearly not a vampire, because his ears were filled with sound—the chirping of early morning birds, the scuffling of squirrels, the passing of cars on the main road.
So much noise, and none of it was what he wanted to hear.
He ran his hand over the top of the headstone, his vampiric eyes picking up every tiny crack in the seemingly smooth rock. Nothing was ever what it appeared to be on the surface.
“I miss her voice, Mom. I miss her laugh. Fuck, it hasn’t even beentwenty-four hours, and I feel empty. Like a piece of me is missing. I don’t think I can live without her. I don’t know if it’s the whole mate bond thing, or something else, but…”
“That’s not it.”
He flinched at the somber voice that floated over from behind him. So familiar but also filled with so much hesitancy. So much worry. It was her, and yet it was not.
He slowly turned around to see Tressa standing beside a tree on the edge of the cemetery twenty or thirty yards away. He shouldn’t have been able to hear her at that distance, but her voice was clear as day. And so was the fear distorting her beautiful face.
His nose twitched at a familiar copper-tinged scent—almost but not quite hidden by her sweet smell—and his eyes traveled down to her fingers. Blood under the nails. She’d been picking at them again. Because of him.
“What do you mean?” he asked, fighting the urge to rush over to her. To take her in his arms and kiss her until she forgave him for running away like a jackass.
“What you’re feeling,” she replied, taking a few tentative steps toward him then stopping herself.
It killed him. To see her so shy and reserved. It was like everything that made her Tressa had been siphoned away. He wanted her to make a bad joke. Or tease him. Or call him some silly name like ‘Dr. Rose.’ Hell, he’d even take ‘Science Boy’ if it made her smile like she used to.
He wanted his mate back.
“How do you figure?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets so he didn’t do something stupid like grab her and kiss her senseless. Maybe that had been their problem from the beginning. They kept giving in to their lust when they should have been talking.
“The mate bond,” she replied. “It does draw you to a person andurges you to find them when they’re gone. It makes you feel this sense of rightness when you’re together, like you just know that the person belongs in your life and it hurts to be away from them. But the bond doesn’t make you care about their feelings. Doesn’t make you want to do anything in your power just to see them smile. It doesn’t…” She sighed. “It doesn’t create feelings in you that wouldn’t otherwise exist. It doesn’t make youlovethem.”
