Bound Guardian Angel (40 page)

“Cordray . . .?” Sam tugged
on her arm again, goading her to sit up.

She did. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,
Sam.”

Sam’s wispy eyebrows crowded together as she
slowly shook her head. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Then you’re obviously not paying
attention.”

Sam sighed and ass-parked on the couch. “Oh,
I’m paying attention, Cordray. More than you know.” She spoke as if
she held a crystal ball that revealed all.

“What do you mean?”

Sam let out a breathy huff then pushed
herself off the couch. “Do you want some tea? Coffee?” She
hesitated and glanced toward the mini-bar. “Something harder? I
could use something harder myself.”

“Got any whiskey?”

Sam firmly nodded her head as if putting a
period on a sentence. “Yep.”

As Sam poured their drinks, Cordray pulled
herself off the floor and took a seat in one of the club chairs,
drying the rest of the tears from her cheeks. She hated crying in
front of people. Hell, she hated crying period. She hadn’t cried in
forever, but just as with her sense of touch, Trace appeared to
have awakened all sorts of long-forgotten emotions inside her.

Sam returned and handed her a double of Jack
then set the bottle on the coffee table in front of her before
taking the seat across from her, cradling her own glass.

“Smart woman.” She nodded toward the
bottle.

“Yeah, well, it feels like it’s going to be
that kind of conversation.”

She took a hardy gulp of the burning liquid.
“What kind of conversation is that?”

“The kind where you finally admit you’re in
love with Trace.”

She pulled in an abrupt breath. “I’m not in
love with him.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it’s
going to be that kind of conversation.” She sipped her drink. “Why
don’t you just start from the beginning.”

The beginning. She scoffed. “You really want
to know?”

Sam studied her for a long, pensive moment.
“Yes.”

“Fine.” She sat back and gulped down the
rest of the contents of her glass then held it out for more. If she
was going to do this, she needed all the liquid fortification she
could get.

Sam poured her another then set the bottle
back down with a resounding thunk.

“Start talking, Cordray. I’m here as long as
you need me.”

“What about Micah?”

“He’s working. And when he gets home, if
you’re still here, he’ll just have to deal with it.”

“Why? Because the two of you are so close
he’ll do anything for you?” She couldn’t keep the resentful bite
out of her tone.

Seeing what Sam had with Micah left a
bittersweet taste in her mouth. They were so in tune with one
another. So in love. Then again, they were mates. Wasn’t that how
mates were supposed to be? One mind, one heart, one body, more or
less?

She wouldn’t know. She’d never been mated.
But she’d heard enough vampires speak of the mating phenomenon to
understand how things worked.

Sam’s green eyes softened, and she briefly
glanced away before nodding. “Yes, Micah and I are close, but that
doesn’t mean we always see eye to eye. We just find a way to make
our differences of opinion work. We’re a lot alike, Micah and I.”
She paused. “You and Trace are a lot alike, too.”

“No, we’re not.” But they were. They were
both similar beasts. Both freaks.

Sam crossed her legs and sank more deeply
into her chair. “Cordray, you and Trace are cut from the same
cloth. You’re both tough as iron on the outside but vulnerable
inside. You’re both extremely powerful and care more deeply than
you let on. Don’t try to deny it, because I can see it. You
wouldn’t have broken down the way you did just now if that weren’t
true.”

“I didn’t break down.”

Sam held up her hand and bowed her head in
surrender. “Okay, fine. Forget I said that, but it doesn’t mean you
don’t care on a very deep level.”

“So what if I do?”

“Then stop fighting it. Let go. If you want
him, take him.”

Cordray stared into her drink. She did want
him. But taking him would mean she was allowing herself to be hurt
again, maybe even killed this time around. Hadn’t she learned her
lesson? What kind of idiot would purposely allow herself to be put
in harm’s way when she knew the consequences.

“I was in love once,” she said quietly.

A pulse of startled energy beat from Sam’s
body, but she didn’t say anything.

Cordray sighed. “His name was Gideon, and we
were in love.” She lowered her voice to a wistful whisper. “So in
love.” Then she pulled her gaze from her glass and met Sam’s
eyes.

Sam’s mouth had fallen open, and her
expression was one of surprised curiosity.

“Does that shock you? That I actually loved
someone who loved me back? Me? Big, bad, scary Cordray?” She took a
contemptuous gulp of whiskey.

“You’re not scary—”

Cordray lifted her hand, palm out. “No, it’s
okay. I know what people say about me. I know what they think. I
can see inside their heads, remember?” She tapped her temple then
choked down another gulp. “I’m Cruella Deville. I steal puppies for
their fur and drink the blood of babies. I’m Medusa incarnate,
haven’t you heard?”

“Cordray . . .”

All this woe-is-me bullshit rankled her
blood, but she couldn’t seem to pull her head out of the septic
tank, thanks to the alcohol quickly pulling her into its grasp.

“Everyone avoids me.” She laughed mockingly,
raising her glass as if in a toast. “They cross busy streets just
so they don’t have to pass me on the sidewalk. They avert their
gazes as if meeting mine will turn them to stone.” She laughed at
herself then drained her second glass. “I’m the boogey man, the
thing that goes bump in the night, the monster hiding under your
bed. I’m the stranger your parents warned you not to talk to when
you were a little girl.”

She glanced away, seeing the memories of her
long-ago past as if only a few weeks had passed instead of eight
hundred years. “But it wasn’t always that way.”

When she paused and said nothing for several
seconds, Sam refilled her glass. God love her. Sam knew how to keep
her talking.

She took a healthy swig of whiskey, her body
growing warm and loose as she settled more comfortably into her
chair.

“When I was young, I was innocent and sweet.
Docile even, if you can believe that.” Those days had been a
lifetime ago. A hundred lifetimes ago. “I was as obedient and
well-mannered as a princess.”

And wasn’t she? A princess? After all, her
father had been the king. King Bain the First.

His affair with her mother, who had worked
as a servant in her father’s employ until he mated her, had been so
scandalous, yet so perfect.

But Father already had a queen. She wasn’t
his biological mate, but she conceived a child, anyway. Cordray’s
half-brother and heir to the throne, Bain the Second.

Her brother’s birth was practically a
miracle. Unmated pairs struggled to bear young. That was the main
reason why the vampire race hadn’t proliferated much in the early
times. Arranged pairings had been commonplace then, especially
among the more affluent.

All that changed when her father mated her
mother outside his union to the queen. That was when he began
writing new laws protecting human mates. Until King Bain the First,
for a vampire male to take a human mate was verboten. That didn’t
mean it didn’t happen, but those vampires who did mate humans lived
in secret. Others remained tied to their vampire spouses on paper
but maintained their mated relationships on the down-low. Callings
were horrific for a male mated to a human and sometimes resulted in
death if he wasn’t able to spend his fertile time with his true
mate.

This was one reason why Cordray’s father had
changed the laws. He had refused to sit and watch their race die
over archaic laws that had been written during a time before
vampires had gained an understanding of how an existence shared
with humans would pan out.

But his protection of mated males had also
been about protecting his own mating. As the king, he couldn’t just
up and flee with his human mate. He had a job to do. He couldn’t
live a secret life with his mate and return home to his queen to
make things look normal. He was, for all intents and purposes, a
celebrity. Everything he did landed in the public eye. Legalizing
vampire-human matings—as well as enforcing them—had been the only
solution.

After his tragic death, her brother had
continued their father’s legacy. Protecting mated males and
biological unions had become a priority. One that her brother
understood better than most after watching his father live in
torment every day he couldn’t spend with Cordray’s mother.

Certain circles in the vampire community
still clung to those old laws, though. Namely the purists, many of
which were the well-to-do. They still believed in arranged unions
and insisted on pairing their daughters with those they felt were
best suited to create a strong match, despite the challenges those
unions faced.

One of those challenges was that having
children would be nearly impossible. Secondly, if the male of such
an arranged pairing mated someone else, or another male mated the
female, Bain was forced to step in and nullify the arrangement and
honor the mated male’s rights.

This didn’t make him popular with the
aristocratic families who’d coordinated arranged pairings,
especially for those he had overturned. But as the king, popularity
was the least of his concerns.

Cordray thought back on her parents’ mating.
It had been hard on her mother not to be with her father when he
was away being the king. And the way her father swept her mother
into his arms every time he visited, holding her close for so long
Cordray sometimes wondered if he would ever let her go, proved how
hard it was for him not to be with her, too. She and her mother had
treasured those few-and-far-between visits. So had her father.

His visits were how she ultimately met
Gideon. Beautiful and passionate, Gideon had been a young warrior
in her father’s court. A full-blood and fifteen years her senior,
fully transitioned into an adult male. At the time, she had been a
young, innocent, and impressionable nineteen-year-old, still in the
early stages of her transition.

“I was a
fair maiden
,” she said
scornfully. “A maiden who caught the eye of the most handsome male
in the king’s guard.” She blinked heavily, meeting Sam’s gaze. “His
name was Gideon.”

Sam seemed to sense what Cordray was about
to reveal was the key to everything, because she didn’t say a word.
She didn’t even move. This was the reason for all the scary
tattoos, the piercings, the attitude. Her inability to sense
touch.

She gulped down the last of her third glass
and set it on the arm of the chair. “Gideon and I embarked on a
passionate, whirlwind love affair,” she said, beginning the
story.

Just as Leon and Riley vowed they would
always be together, she and Gideon had vowed the same.

“We were so sure we’d be mates. So sure we
were meant to be together forever. But week in and week out, year
after year, his call to mate never fired. Despite how deeply we
loved one another, Gideon never mated me.” She let out a brittle
laugh. “I wanted his child so badly. My father had conceived with
another who wasn’t his mate, and I thought the same thing could
happen to me. That I would conceive a miracle child, too.” She
lifted her glass to her lips only to remember it was empty. She
lowered it again. “But it never happened. I never conceived.”

“How long were you together?” Sam asked
quietly, as if she feared bursting the intimate bubble drawing them
more tightly together.

“Six years. I met him as my transition to
adulthood was just starting, and we were still together when it
finished.” She smiled sourly. “We’d hoped that the reason he hadn’t
mated me was because I wasn’t yet an adult. But even afterward, he
didn’t mate me.”

Her intoxicated mind jumped ahead, no longer
functioning linearly, as often happens when alcohol’s grip takes
hold. Her thoughts fell to the night that changed everything. The
night when she lost herself completely and life as she knew it
shattered.

“He didn’t come to me that night.” Her body
felt as flat and broken now as it had then. “He always came to me
when the king visited, but that night, he didn’t. So I stole away
to the stable. His horse was gone.” The memories were snap-shotting
through her mind, the alcohol clouding the chronology. “I didn’t
understand. Why would his horse be gone? There was only one place
where he could be. The cottage in the woods. It was where we went
to be together. Our hideaway. I assumed he was there waiting for
me.”

The small one-room cottage in the woods,
with its simple porch and small stone fireplace—paradise at the
time—appeared in her mind.

“I darted into the woods, eager to see him.
I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come to tell me he’d be there,
waiting for me. All I knew was that I had to see him. Feel his
touch.” Her gaze fell to the floor. She closed her eyes,
remembering his touch. That night was the last time she’d felt it.
The last time she’d felt anything until she met Trace.

Her vision blurred with tears.

“As the cabin came into view, I saw the glow
of the fire through the window. He was there. I was so happy. So
unbelievably happy. We were going to be together again. He was
going to make love to me, and everything would be all right.” She
looked at Sam through a film of tears. Sam sat on the edge of her
seat, eyes trained on her, her hands hugging her glass, which still
had whiskey in it. “As I got closer, I heard muffled noises from
inside. Gideon wasn’t alone.” Her heart ached all over again at the
memory. “He was with a female. And they were making love.”