Page 47 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)
Chapter forty-five
Baird
“ G o to bed, Mira! I won’t let any harm come to ye—but I canna sleep beside ye.
Not tonight…” His words left no room for protest. No space for softness.
He was drawing a line. And he needed to remove any opportunity for Mira to cross it.
He bolted through the house, leaving Mira standing frozen in the entryway, wearing a mask of shock, and slammed the front door, the sound echoing through the quiet night air like a gunshot.
He'd seen it in her face before he’d walked out—the lingering hunger. And he could smell it on her, thick in the air between them. Her desire hadn’t faded, not even after his brutal claiming of her body just moments before.
If anything, it had grown.
She was still aching for him, still trembling with need. Worse than before.
Baird needed to distance himself from her, to sit with the consequences of the act he’d performed, waiting to see if their bond grew—this connection, this new thing that could take root between them.
He had no experience with this .
Robbie had warned him once about what happened when a vampire took the blood of his true mate, from the neck or the heart vein, and by doing so, created something new .
The thing he’d called Sanguis Amantium.
A bond forged in blood and love. Ancient. Irrevocable.
It was more than instinct, more than lust. It was an unbreakable chain.
But the bond would only form if both were deeply in love.
Not infatuation, not fleeting passion—something ancient, something true.
He loved Mira. He could admit that now, in the quiet of his own mind.
It wasn’t just the way she looked at him, or the way her body fit so perfectly against his—it was her fire, her curiosity, her boldness.
Baird bowed his head, full of shame, as he paced the road in front of the house.
What remained of Baird Campbell—the man—was slipping. And the creature he hated, the one he swore he’d never let himself become, was rising. For her .
The monster inside him hadn’t wanted her to know. Did the monster need her to love him the way the man inside him did? He wasn’t sure. He felt the monster wanted only to possess and would use whatever means were at his disposal to do so. But that wasn’t enough for Baird.
His shame was sharp, suffocating. What hollowed him out was the gnawing suspicion that it hadn’t only been the monster who’d kept that truth from her.
That what was left of him in that moment hadn’t wanted to give her the choice. Maybe he needed to know if there was a chance—and the man in him knew this was the way to find out .
The Sanguis Amantium had the power to steal something from her the moment it was created—not just her body, but something more sacred.
The privacy of her inner world. But only if she loved him in return.
He didn’t know how quickly the connection could take root, and he was sick with worry. Worry that he’d discover she didn’t love him, and sick with worry about how she’d feel if she did love him, knowing he’d taken something from her, not given her the chance to choose.
Robbie had said it was like an intravenous line threaded straight into the nexus of the mate’s emotions. The one who drank was no longer limited to reading the biological rhythms of their mate’s body. It went deeper—embedding itself into the hidden chambers of the heart.
A parasitic telegraph, wired to the soul.
Happiness. Sadness. Longing. Loneliness. Pride. Hatred.
He thought about what it would feel like if the bond formed between them. Every emotion she felt would pulse through him, broadcast in whispers and surges.
No matter where she was.No matter how far she ran.Regardless of time, distance, or will.
The Sanguis Amantium was one of the many things Robbie had explained to Baird over the years they’d known one another.
After Baird had been turned and returned to Edinburgh, a memory surfaced—something his mother had once whispered to him when he was a child.
A cryptic, haunting tale passed down through generations.
It was something her mother had told her, and hers before that. A piece of island lore everyone seemed to know but no one dared speak aloud.
There was a man on Arran who never aged.
A man named Robbie.
They said he wasn’t to be feared—he wasn’t evil—but it was wise not to get too close. That he drank blood to survive. That he could make ye forget.
For centuries, the islanders had lived quietly beside him, never confronting what they could not explain. He was simply there —a fixture, a shadow at the edge of everyday life.
Baird remembered seeing him once, as a boy. He had the strangest blue eyes—shimmering like twin kaleidoscopes in the sunlight.
And then, Baird couldn’t stop wondering.
Was Robbie like him?
Baird had sought him out the moment he returned to the island, and the recognition between them was instant. Robbie had just come in from the water, pulling his small fishing boat up to the dock at Lochranza, a bucket of fresh catch swinging in one hand, destined for the fishmonger.
Baird stood at the edge of the dock, watching.
Robbie looked straight at him—his pale, iridescent eyes catching the light—and nodded once.
“Ye own Baird Cottage, no?” he asked, calm and certain.
“Aye,” Baird said.
“Good. Go back home now. I’ll finish up here, and then I’ll come talk with ye.” He paused, eyes narrowing just slightly. “I can see ye have questions… I’ll bring a bottle.”