Page 20 of Too Brazen to Bite (Gothic Love Stories #5)
“ L iar,” Cain choked out, retracting both fangs and shaft from the woman writhing deliciously beneath him as soon as his passion-drunk brain registered the twin points piercing the sensitive skin of his shoulder in exactly the same way his own fangs had fastened upon hers.
He was furious. At her, for having deceived him. At himself, for having let down his guard. At fate, for having given him the greatest pleasure of his life with a lass he couldn’t help but love and want to protect—only for every facet to have been a lie.
She was no innocent human girl in want of a warrior’s compassion or protection. She wasn’t innocent—or human—at all.
Had she known who and what he was from the beginning? Been mocking him, managing him, from the first step of their dance?
Cain flung himself from the warmth of her naked body and off the bed. His every limb trembled in rage. His face twisting, he backed steadily away, even as Ellie’s arms reached out to him.
A puzzled frown marred the contentedness of Ellie’s expression. A soft, fang-tipped smile marred the humanity of her face. “What is it?”
He turned his head. Despite his fury at having been cozened, despite his self-disgust at having been too distracted to discern the truth on his own, he longed to lick the red smear from her lips while taking her again and again and again.
Ignoring the yearning of his traitorous body, Cain refocused on the inescapable evidence before him: The innocent human was actually a vampire.
“Don’t try to play the ingénue,” he growled. “Not with my blood still fresh upon your tongue.”
Guilt flashed across Ellie’s face before she dropped her gaze. “I?—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His hands curled into fists at his sides. He had never felt so foolish, so exposed. So vengeful.
Ellie’s glare was defiant. “Why do you suppose?”
“Och, lass,” he said as he fastened a button. “Perhaps because you’re a duplicitous manipulator?”
She shot upright. “That’s rich, when you’re the specter of death come to hunt us and take us captive!”
He crossed his arms and gave her a look powerful enough to send warriors scurrying for cover. She didn’t change expression.
“Judge me for honoring my blood-sworn duty,” he said at last. “But I never lied to you.”
“I never said I wasn’t a vampire,” she mumbled half-heartedly, then glanced away as if no longer able to meet his gaze.
Ellie slid off the bed and to her feet. She snatched up her discarded gown as if she could hide behind the rumpled silk.
She would quickly learn there was nowhere to hide. No matter how furious she made him, he would never let her go. He had spent centuries hunting the wrong thing.
Love was the only thing worth spending one’s life chasing. And Ellie was the only person he wished to spend eternity with. She was more important than the mission. In fact, she changed the mission. He still had contact with several members of the clan.
Cain would do whatever it took to keep Ellie safe.
Not that she had done badly herself.
“How did you manage to conceal the truth?” he asked in bafflement. “You seem— seemed —so convincingly human.”
“I am human,” she insisted, tugging at her laces. “Sort of.”
Cain couldn’t believe his ears. “You are a vampire! ”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” she burst out, staring up at him beseechingly.
“I don’t know,” he said sarcastically. “Perchance the fangs and the bloodlust might have been clues?”
Ellie backed into the bedside table. “That just started this week.”
Cain stared at her in disbelief. “How old are you? Truly?”
Her lower lip wobbled. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
She lifted a shoulder as if this were a mundane detail only a pedant would concern himself with, but her eyes shone as if battling tears. “Mother... Mother says I was born sometime last century.”
“Sometime last...” Cain gaped at her. “Are you saying Aggie Munro is your birth mother?”
Ellie’s chin rose. “I’ve never said otherwise.”
“You’ve never said anything, confound it!” He tried to reconcile what he thought he knew with what he saw before him. “But if that’s true, your father...”
“Was human.” She ran a finger over the marble bust of one of the Breckenridge ancestors. “I would appear to be half-blood.”
He rocked backward. No wonder she’d smelled human, sounded human, acted human. That side of her heritage would always be part of her. As would that of vampire. It was amazing.
She was amazing.
“Mixed-blood offspring,” Cain breathed, unable to fathom being in the presence of something so rare as to be legendary, yet unable to dispute the truth of it. He hurried forward, reaching out for her in his excitement. “When the Elders find out?—”
She moved so quickly, he didn’t have a chance to process the trajectory of the marble bust slamming into his head.
Blackness.