Page 104 of A Touch of Crimson
“Do you miss her?” she asked after a while.
His chest expanded on a deep breath. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I should—I owe her that much—but it’s been so long, and I need you so much. It’s hard to see past you. Although, to be honest, I’m not trying very hard. I love the view.”
“It’s okay if you do think of her. I told her I wouldn’t hold it against you if you did.”
“You spoke to her?”
Lindsay set her hands atop the tight lacing of muscle that crisscrossed his abdomen, then set her chin upon them.“She was going to keep you. She was a pro at dealing with all those past lives and memories, while I was drowning in them. I had to fight for you.”
His blue eyes flamed with the heat of his emotions. “You did?”
“I know, right? After all the times I tried to push you away, I finally realized I couldn’t live—or die—without you. So I told her if she kept you, I’d still always have some part of you, and she’d have to share. Apparently, she decided she’d rather have you be with me and think about her, than be with her while thinking about me.”
Adrian’s smile curled her toes. “That sounds like her.”
“I’m grateful,” she admitted. “She gave up her soul so I could keep mine.”
“I will love her for that forever. But you have my heart and soul, Lindsay.”
“I know.”
After a drawn-out moment, he exhaled audibly. “Maybe this…experience was good for her, too. Shadoe wasn’t a bad person, but she wasn’t one to sacrifice her desires for the good of others.”
“You’re thinking she matured over countless lifetimes?”
“I’d like to think so. For her sake.”
Lindsay looked down at her fingers as she traced the faint line of dark hair that bisected his abs and led to delicious places below. After everything he had been through and everything he’d lost, Adrian still had it in him to search for silver linings. She loved him for that, and countless other things. “I told her I’d take whatever I can get when it comes to you.”
He twisted deftly, caging her beneath him. Framed by his unfurling wings, he was darkly handsome. Breathtaking. “Then you’d best be prepared to take all of me.”
“Yes, neshama.” She slid her arms around his neck. “All of you. Always.”
24
“As I feared,” Damien said, “we’ve lost the Andover and Forest River packs. We’re keeping a lid on the others for now, but if we’re attacked from the outside while battling mutiny on the inside, more will fall.”
The early-morning sky of pink and gray was giving way to a soft powder blue.
Adrian stood at the railing of the wraparound deck and watched his Sentinels exercise their wings in the air above him. “We’ll just have to find a way to be more resourceful. In the interim, the illness is spreading through the vampire ranks like wildfire. Perhaps all we really have to do is sit and wait. I won’t count on it, but it’s a possibility.”
“You’re better today,” Damien noted.
“Stronger,” he agreed. “Happier. Ready to take on the world.”
“That’s the sex talking.”
Adrian turned at the sound of Lindsay’s voice, finding her standing a few feet away. She reached over her head and pushed up to her tiptoes, stretching her lovely lithe body—much to his delight.
She straightened and wrinkled her nose at Damien. “I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to flaunt the rules and be disrespectful. It’s just that’s such a guy thing to say the morning after he doesn’t let his girlfriend get any sleep.”
Morning. Adrian looked up at the sun in the sky, then shot a look at Damien, whose mouth hung slightly ajar. Lindsay seemed oblivious to the fact that she was standing in sunlight.
“I’d like to get back into training,” she went on. “I’m going to need it so I can cover your ass and find the vamps who killed my mother. I’m not giving up hunting those fuckers down and making them pay. And I need to know for sure what happened with my dad. If there’s a score to settle there, I have to know. If it was truly just an accident, I need to know that, too.”
“Whatever you require, neshama,” Adrian assured her, concealing his astonishment.
Damien leaned closer and spoke under his breath. “She should be on fire in this level of sunlight. How is it possible that she’s not?”
