Sixteen
Ringo only vaguely remembered entering the Ava, Carrick’s casino. He had been flying at the Bellagio after he had picked up the girl for Donatelli, but it was vague after that. He thought maybe he had slept, and he’d woken with a serious erection and an anvil of guilt pressing down on him.
So he must have decided to look for Kelsey, and when he hadn’t found her at the Hilton—in fact, had discovered she’d paid their bill and checked them out—the Ava had seemed the logical place to look next. But he had gotten distracted by the blackjack table, and the fact that he had cash in his pocket from the job.
It wasn’t with a lot of surprise, though, that he saw his wife slide into the chair next to him, her lips in a straight, angry line. She always had a way of turning up.
“Hey, babe,” he said, giving her a smile. She really was pretty, his wife, her hair glossy and smooth, complexion flawless. “I was looking for you.”
“Obviously very hard,” she said.
Was that sarcasm? Kelsey didn’t do that tone with him. Ringo didn’t like the frown on her face so he nudged her with his knee and smiled.
“This is where we first met,” he said, throwing his hand out so far, he accidentally hit the woman next to him. “Sorry.” He leaned back toward Kelsey. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“How much did you have?”
Six, maybe seven glasses. He wasn’t sure, really. And it was better not to piss her off when he was feeling friendly, horny, ready to make nice. “Not much. And that was an accident.”
With a sigh, she glanced at the table. “I have a room upstairs. Are you going to come to bed?”
Hell, yeah. “Deal,” he told the dealer.
The card was flipped. “Over. House wins.”
Ringo saluted him. “Have a good night.” He lifted his cigarette out of his ashtray and smiled at Kelsey. “Lead the way, babe.”
She didn’t speak to him the whole way to the elevator, and her silence bothered him. Kelsey wasn’t the silent type. “Okay, I screwed up, is that what you want me to say? I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.”
As they waited for the doors to open, he threw his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “Give me a break, Kels.” He loved the way the lights bounced and swam when he was on a trip, and he could have sworn there was a halo of light around Kelsey’s head. A fucking halo. He tried to lick it, but there was nothing there.
“What are you doing?” she said, swatting at him.
He laughed, feeling good, so damn good, he didn’t even understand it. “I love you, you know, you make me crazy, but shit, I love you. It’s like you and me, we’re both such fuck-ups we belong together.”
With a small smile, she said, “I resemble that.”
That made him laugh again, loud and full, and he gave her a nudge forward when the elevator opened. “What floor’s our room on… ”
Ringo’s laughter died out. In the mirror in front of them on the back wall of the elevator, he couldn’t see either one of them, just the potted plant on the console table behind them. Just the plant and his brother Kyle.
“Holy shit.” Ringo swung around but there was nothing there.
Looking forward, there was Kyle again, watching him steadily, carefully, not smiling. The elevator doors started to slide shut, bumping into him.
“What?” Kelsey asked.
Shaking his head, Ringo moved forward, letting the door close. He blinked hard. “Shit. Bad trip.”
That was all it was. Nothing more.
When Brittany woke up, she noticed two things immediately. She had slept for fourteen hours, since the clock in the guest room at her sister’s apartment read 2 p.m., and Corbin was sitting in a charcoal-colored overstuffed chair next to the bed, watching her.
“Bonjour. How are you feeling?”
“Stiff. Thirsty.” She smiled up at him, stretching her arms over her head. “But fine. How are you? All in one piece still, that’s good.”
“Yes, all in one piece.” Reaching a long arm, he brushed her hair back off her face. “We need to talk.”
That sounded ominous. “Okay.” Propping the bed pillows behind her, she sat up and fixed the straps on her tank top. He looked serious, and tired. He probably hadn’t even been to bed yet himself.
“Gregor is no longer a threat.”
“He’s dead?” Brittany wasn’t sure how she felt about that. There should be remorse, pity for a man who had become so twisted, but she had a hard time dredging up any sympathy.
“No. Not dead. But taken care of.” He moved over to the bed and sat on the dove gray sheet next to her thighs. “I do not want you to worry about him.”
Well, that was illuminating. If he thought she was going to leave it at that, he had forgotten what century they were in. She wasn’t the delicate little miss who couldn’t take the truth. But before she could argue the point, he continued.
“And Donatelli, in order to save his own ass, and to protect both himself and you from Gregor, has joined your brother-in-law’s political campaign. He understands that he is to have no contact whatsoever with you or the baby.”
“What?” Brittany didn’t consider herself up on vamp politics, but she’d been forced to learn enough to know that Donatelli had previously been Ethan’s opponent, and he had lobbied for population growth, something Ethan didn’t support. “Why the hell would he join Ethan’s campaign? Why would Ethan let him do that?”
“Because Gregor is still running against Carrick, and he has something of a celebrity status in the Nation. Sort of like an Oprah of the vampires. With Donatelli on his side, he had the potential to win. But with Donatelli switching camps, going over to a sworn enemy, everyone will be suspicious of Chechikov. And together, Carrick and Donatelli make a powerful statement of unity. Everyone—Impures, ancients, conservatives—is happy.”
Everyone but her, that is. She was more confused than happy, but it wasn’t her arena. It wasn’t her political battle. If Corbin and Ethan thought it was the right step to take, she would have to trust them. Her concern was her child. “So since Donatelli knows about the baby, there isn’t much use in me running off and hiding, is there?”
Corbin shook his head, his green eyes troubled. “No. I see no real value in you cutting yourself off from friends and family who care about you and can help you with the baby.”
But not him? Brittany’s heart started to pound. Corbin didn’t look right. “What about us? Where do we go from here?”
“It is still dangerous, I will not shield you from that this time. We must be cautious, vigilant, where the baby is concerned. I have not yet decided which is better—to live in Vegas, where you have friends to protect you, or to start anew somewhere else, where no one will be watching you.”
“If it’s not clear-cut, I’d rather stay in Vegas. It would be lonely raising a baby in a new place.” And since she was getting no sense of whether he had meant he would go with her or not, she couldn’t assume he would be helping her.
“I understand. And I will protect you, of course, if that is necessary.” He ran his finger down her thigh. It was an odd gesture, like he wanted to touch her, claim her, but hesitated to take all of her.
He made a pattern on her knee with his fingertip. “And after the baby is born, I could turn you. That way we can be together, forever. All of us.”
“Corbin!” She hadn’t expected him to say that, knowing how he felt about immortality. Yet it immediately was a tantalizing concept, a carrot of eternity dangled in front of her… forever with her child and her lover. It was a happy thought for a simple moment. But reality intruded. What he had suggested was wrong, unnatural, and given the expression on his face, he knew it, too. That was not the way to raise a child.
“You know we can’t do that, as much as I would like to be with you, as much as it hurts to say no.” She put her hand over his, wanting to touch him, wanting to soften her words, and the ache in her heart. “We have to do what’s right for the baby. With you immortal, and me mortal, working together, we can ensure the baby is both safe at night, and being raised in a normal manner, in the day.”
“You think being a vampire is abnormal? You think we cannot be good parents if we are immortal?” His voice rose in indignation.
Brittany fought back the lump in her throat that kept rising. “You know what I mean… every vampire I know was raised by mortal parents, during the day, with schools and friends and birthday parties. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be raised only at night, in a world filled only with adults, who don’t eat regular food and can leap off buildings. No children, no playmates, no sunshine in the park. That has nothing to do with us and the kind of parents we will be. It just wouldn’t be right to force our child into that kind of abnormal, isolated life.”
The image of raising her child in the darkness made her want to weep. It meant being apart from Corbin, at least during the day, but she would sacrifice that for her baby. “With you immortal and me mortal, our child gets the best of both worlds.”
His eyes were dark, troubled. “Except for her parents together. We cannot give her that.”
Tears made him blur in front of her. “Corbin… don’t say that. We can and will be together. Just like we talked about before. We’ll get a house, we’ll live together.”
“Of course we will,” he said. “But it will be but a pale shadow of a normal life. I can never give that to you.”
“Normal is what we make it. We’ll have the same amount of time together that a lot of couples do… some work swing shifts from each other so they don’t have to pay for day care, other women have husbands who travel. This is no different.”
He nodded, even as his eyes told her otherwise. There was defeat there, sorrow. “You are right. Of course. It will be no different.”
Without warning, his fist bunched in the sheet, and he tore it down, off of her. “I want you.”
Men could so easily shift their emotions to sex, it was astonishing. But Brittany could use the touching, the distraction, the feel of him inside her, the promise of being together. “What do you want me for?”
“For everything.” He kissed her, lips hard and aggressive. “For forever.”
“You have me,” she told him, putting her arms around his neck, pulling him closer to her. She loved the way he smelled—like rich, confident, and sophisticated man—and she liked how his smooth, polished control always disintegrated in bed with her.
In two seconds he had her tank top off, and her bare nipples beaded in anticipation as the cool air hit her skin. She was forced to lift her backside off the bed as he immediately went for her panties, dragging and tugging them down.
His mouth was hot and urgent, his tongue thrusting deep into her as he undid his pants. Brittany fell back on the bed, gripping the taut muscles in his biceps. He pulled his mouth off hers long enough to ask, “Is it okay on your back?” His fingers, hands that had known two hundred years of life and had held that sword so confidently, fluttered carefully over her belly, over their child.
The position didn’t feel uncomfortable, and she liked the way he rose up over her, the way she could see every inch of his face, his expression, when he filled her. “It’s okay.”
That was all he needed to hear. His pants disappeared, and he entered her, his body covering hers, his urgency and desperation and love pressing on her, in her, and Brittany gasped in pleasure, at the intimacy of being connected to him, their child between them.
Before she could match his rhythm, or adjust her hips to meet his thrusts, he flipped over and pulled her on top of him, his hands cupping her breasts, thumbs toying with her nipples. Gripping the sheets, she leaned forward and moved on him, wanting him to recognize, to know, to see, what she felt for him. That some way or another, they would make it work. It did work, because they loved each other, and wanted a future.
The slick pressure on her clitoris as she rode him was agonizing, delightful, and the way he watched her, the way his eyes opened wider, the way he got a feverish wild look of pride, like he thought she was amazingly sexy, made her gasp, grind harder, deeper. And when she couldn’t take any more, when her emotion and passion overwhelmed her body, she came with a cry, locking eyes with him.
“Beautiful,” he said, cupping her cheek.
She sucked in air, tried to collapse on his chest, body still trembling, but he rolled her onto her side, and pulled her leg over his, opening her completely for him. Her breasts brushed his bare chest, and he kissed her at the same time he pushed his erection into her. They were touching from forehead to feet, entangled together, locked in an intimacy so primal, so elemental, so extreme, that Brittany felt tears in her eyes. As he dug his nails into her naked thighs and exploded, a curse ripped from his lips.
“I love you, ma chйrie ,” he said. “I love you. For me, there is only you.”
Brittany hung on, her emotions perilously close to the edge, skittering toward what, she wasn’t sure. Closing her eyes, she cried, “I love you, too.”
It would always be like this, Corbin knew. Brittany had gotten up for the day after their lovemaking, while he had gone to sleep for a few hours. Now she was tucked back into the queen-size bed in Carrick’s guest room, and Corbin was up, roaming, ready for the night.
There was nothing to be done. He should be grateful they had what they did. That they were together, such as it was. That he would have a family, however spliced together. But it wasn’t gratitude he felt. It was anger, sadness, a creeping, debilitating sort of bitterness that crawled around the edges of his heart and made him want to throw things.
Instead of chucking Alexis’s vase sitting on a low table in their hallway, Corbin went into the living room, where Ethan was working on his laptop computer. He undid his wristwatch, and pulled it over his hand. That watch hadn’t come off his arm in forty years, but now he tossed it onto the table in front of Carrick.
“I am returning this. I consider my punishment over, my retribution fulfilled.”
Ethan looked at him. “You can’t do that. It’s not your right to decide that your punishment is over. It’s mine, and the tribunal’s.”
“I injected Gregor with my vaccine,” Corbin told him. “He will essentially be a mortal, whether he realizes it yet or not. And I suspect he’ll try to hide it—at least until the election is over.”
Almost dropping his computer, Ethan stood up. “You can’t just do that either!”
“I can and I did. He was a threat to my child, to Brittany, to the Nation. To our entire way of life. I neutralized the threat. And I do not regret it. I just thought you should know, as a courtesy.”
Corbin turned on his heel and headed for the door.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“To Paris.”
Or as close to it as he could get in the desert. When he was on top of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel, he sat down on a lit iron rung and looked at the Vegas skyscape. His parents had been exiles in England during the Terror, and he could still remember how his mother had longed for France, wept for the memory of Paris, expressed her impatience in all things that weren’t home. He knew that feeling, that frustration now. He wanted home. Paris. A family. The sun.
He wanted what he had had, what he could have with Brittany, if it were different.
The gift of immortality was one he had never asked for, one he had never wanted. He had been turned against his will, and had always regretted the change in his destiny. He still didn’t want eternity. What he wanted was Paris. Coffee and baguettes. The heat of the sun on his arms, the cold splash of the Seine on his face. Brittany and his child and a finite amount of time to make the most of his existence, to squeeze his worth into a half-century, and to never have to face an endless, gaping yawn of a future.
They could make it work as such. They would make it work. But it broke his heart that he would never see a school play, never watch his daughter on the soccer field, never see her chubby little legs pumping hard on the playground at noon, cheeks flushed with heat. He would have two hours a day with her, at most, and while he walked the night, she would be tucked into her crib, eyes closed to him.
Corbin wanted to sink into obscurity, to be a nameless number in the mass of humanity, who mattered only to his bride and baby. That wasn’t his calling, his destiny. He had a different life, and he would live it.
But on his terms.
“What if I told you… ” Corbin said, leaning over the railing, his words trailing off.
“What?” Brittany asked, sitting in a patio chair on Alexis’s balcony, fighting the urge to stand up and go to him. Corbin was acting strange, storming into the apartment and demanding to speak to her. Alexis would have told her that was par for the course with Corbin, but she knew him. Something was bothering him, something that had him edgy and brusque, and it was different than the way he had been the night before.
She wanted to hug him, to comfort him, but she didn’t want to distract him from whatever he needed to say. There couldn’t be any more withholding of important information from her.
He turned slightly, stared straight at her. “What if I told you I could be mortal again?”
Forget not standing up. She almost leaped off the balcony. “What!”
“What if I told you that, if you wanted it, I could give you that normal life, with a house in ze suburbs, and a husband who is home for dinner every night and attends all ze soccer games?”
“The vaccine?” she asked, pressing her hand to her chest because she had the sudden fear that her heart might actually catapult out of her body.
He nodded. “Yes. It is finished. And tested. On Gregor Chechikov.”
“That’s how you took care of Gregor?” Holy crap and then some.
“Yes.” And he looked a little smug over that fact. “I have a clean conscience. I protected my family and the Vampire Nation, yet I did not kill him.”
“Jesus. And you know he’s mortal now?”
Corbin nodded. “I saw him. Apparently he wishes to keep it a secret from the general vampire population, but he is recuperating from the injuries sustained in the fall. His wife is tending to him. He is very angry, and he is very much mortal.” Corbin gave a slight smile. “She was feeding him chicken broth while he swore at her.”
“My God… you did it. You can reverse vampirism.” Tears popped into her eyes and she swiped at them impatiently. “What are you going to do with the vaccine? And how do you know that Gregor can’t just make himself a vampire again by being drained?”
He turned completely around to face her and leaned back against the railing, crossing his ankles. His black Italian shoes were gleaming and new, pants pressed, shirt expensive. “Even if someone were foolish enough to drain Gregor and give him their own blood, I am confident it will not achieve the same results. And I destroyed my lab. It’s dangerous information to have so accessible to the wrong people, as we both discovered. But… ” He patted his leather jacket. “I did not use it all on Gregor. The formula is encoded on a ThumbDrive, and it will stay there for now, until I determine what is the best course of action to take. But I have enough, right now, to return myself to mortality.”
“Is that what you want?” She couldn’t let him do it for her, or the baby. It had to be what he wanted, even though she had the urge to jump up and down and shriek with joy that he could be with her, every day, all day, that he could age with her, and share in all the moments of pride and worry and pleasure that raising children could bring.
But she didn’t want to influence him, wanted him to be sure that he was doing it for the right reasons, for himself. The fact that he might do it for her and the baby spoke volumes about the depth of his character, his caring, his compassion, but it wouldn’t be right to use that to her advantage.
“Yes, it’s what I want.” Corbin gave a short laugh. “Ma chйrie , it is all I have ever wanted. I want to be a mortal man. I want to see my child grow up. I want you. I even want to die one day, an old man, knowing that I treated each day as a gift, each moment as a treasure.”
Then he went down on one knee. “Will you do me the honor of being my wife, through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, until death do us part? Not for the child, but for us. Because of our love, our friendship.”
Brittany was speechless. She was blubbering, tears just streaming all over the place. She managed a ridiculous, choked out “Oh, Corbin!” but nothing else.
He gripped her hand a little harder. “Is that a yes?”
Nodding her head up and down, she gave a short, sob-smothered laugh. “Yes. I’ll marry you.”
Rising elegantly, he sketched her a bow. “Ma chйrie , you make me the happiest of men.”
He was so damn hot when he pulled out those nineteenth-century manners. “And I’m the happiest chick in Vegas. But I have to ask… are there any side effects to the vaccine?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” He pulled her into his arms. “Why? Would you not have me if I grew large nose hairs or turned a strange chalk white color?”
She laughed and settled against his chest. “Don’t be ridiculous. I meant, I don’t want anything awful happening to you. I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want it to kill you. If there is even a chance, it’s not worth the risk.”
“I am confident that the drug inhibits the virus, that is all. Minor side effects may be possible, but nothing alarming.”
Feeling ridiculously, sickeningly happy, Brittany squeezed her arms around him tighter and teased, “What about your sperm?”
“I’m sure I’ll have plenty to keep you busy for years.” He gave her a French kiss, in every sense of the word.
Brittany pulled back and sighed. “Oh, la, la.” Then she smacked his arms, shook him a little. “Promise me you’ll give this some thought. Be sure this is what you want. Mortality, that is. You’re locked into marrying me and can’t retreat from that offer, but mortality is totally your choice.”
“I have thought about it.”
“Just wait until the baby is born. Be sure.” She didn’t want him to have any regrets. “You’re choosing between life and death here. That can’t be an easy decision.”
“It was an easy decision for you,” he pointed out. “I offered to turn you, and you immediately refused.”
“That was different. I wasn’t giving something up. You will be giving up immortality.”
He shook his head. “I am not giving up immortality.” Caressing her belly, he said, “You and I, our love, it will live forever in our child.”
There were the tears again. She was a freaking water faucet. On, off, on again. “What will happen to our child, if he is immortal, and you and I die? If you stay a vampire, you can be with him forever.”
Corbin’s jaw locked. “All children live beyond their parents. That is natural and normal. But our child will have Alexis and Ethan to go through eternity with her.”
“It sounds like you’ve made up your mind already.”
He shrugged. “I will think about it. I will wait. But our marriage cannot wait. You will be Mrs. Corbin Jean Michel Atelier as soon as it is possible.”
“I’m a dentist,” she reminded him. “I get to be Dr. Atelier.”
“Technically, I have that title as well, since I went to medical school in the 1860s. We will both be Dr. Atelier. But you’re the beautiful one.”
“And you’re the hairy one.” Brittany felt silly, giddy, delirious. She kissed his jaw, his neck, his collarbone.
“I am most certainly not hairy.”
“Show me.” She peeled at his shirt, his belt buckle.
“Right here? Right now?”
“Yep.”
So he did.