Page 132 of Blood Stone

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Kate shut the front door and leaned against it.

Roman was sitting halfway up the curved staircase, his hands gripped together again. “That was a very touching scene,” he said dryly. “Two hankies at least.”

“I owed him an apology. I wasn’t going to let him leave without one.”

“I saw it. The ‘apology’. A doozie.”

She just looked at him.

Roman dropped his gaze.

Kate relented. She climbed to the step two below where Roman was sitting and rested her back against the wall. “You and Garrett know each other. You told me that before, but you had to imply it was just a few years. How long have you really known each other?”

Roman looked at her. In the building dark, his dark eyes were black orbs. “Do you truly want to know this?”

“I wasn’t ready for the reality of it, before. Now, I really do want to know. I’m…curious.”

He hesitated. She could understand his caution. So she reached out and plucked one of his hands away from the other and held it. “Please,” she said simply.

Roman moved over to the wall and leaned against it like she was. His lower leg rested on the step beneath her higher knee. “I grew restless at the end of the sixteenth century. Constantinople grew too small, which was a mild understatement as it was the biggest city in the world for fourteen centuries. But I got restless and itchy and I started to wander. And I ended up in Scotland, in the middle of their endless bloody squabbles with the English. I met a Scotsman with flaming red hair, eyes snapping fire and passion for his clan, swinging a broadsword at anything that defied his cause.”

“Garrett,” Kate breathed.

“Mmm. He was a breath of fresh air and I was a jaded Byzantine civil servant. When the bloody English ambushed him and stabbed him in the back with their long staves one night, I killed them all. Then I turned him.”

She shuddered at the picture his simple words painted. “You’re Garrett’s…maker? Is that what you call it?”

“Yes. That’s one name for it.”

“What are the others?”

“We use lots of different words. It depends on where we come from. Who trained us. There’s one word you will know, though.” He gave her hand a little squeeze for emphasis. “Lovers.”

Her stomach gave a little drop. Her heart lurched. But at the same time, her brain was mentally nodding, going ‘of course’.Because it seemed…right. “It’s like I should have been able to see that for myself if I could have focused an extra half an inch closer,” she told him. “You gave yourselves away so many times. The details were there to be seen. I just didn’t see them.”

“Most people don’t. It’s not a failure. We – the blood – count on that to be able to pass as human on a daily basis.” He hesitated again. “You’re not running away in horror, Kate.”

“Because you were lovers? God, why should I? I just wish I’d known sooner. It explains so much about the pair of you that I couldn’t answer. But it does complicate things, doesn’t it?” She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb. “I haven’t made life easy for either of you.”

“It has been…interesting,” he agreed.

“Chinese curse interesting,” she amended. She shifted her hips. “Jesus, these stairs are killing my backside. Couldn’t you have found somewhere more comfortable for a human ass?”

He chuckled. “My ass is growing numb, too.”

She pushed herself up off the step and turned and straddled his hips. He steadied her, his thumbs stroking over her midriff in light semi-circles, making her stomach muscles twitch and quiver.

“I do a good massage,” she offered.

“Oh, you do, do you?” He yanked her top off in one blindingly fast movement that made her gasp.

“Now you’re just showing off,” she complained.

“Absolutely.” He kissed her, his hands swooping up her torso to cup her breasts and squeeze the nipples, tweaking them to taut silvery sensitive peaks. His lips trailed down her throat and paused over her frantic heartbeat. He licked the pulse and moved on, down to her breast and sucked in the tip.

As she moaned and became lost in the pleasure of it, he picked her up, his arm around her waist, lifted her up two more steps and propped her against them.