The Scientific Method: A Vampire Queen Novel (Vampire Queen Series Book 10) (24 page)

"I apologize, my lord," he said formally. "While I don't regret the act, I didn't mean to cause discord while under your hospitality."

Butch nodded, accepting the courtesy, but he shrugged. "He was the one being an ass. Come on, enough of this shit. You and your servant are free to enjoy the pool however you want. Let's relax and get some enjoyment out of one another's company before the dawn sends us to bed."

With that, the overlord moved off, already shedding his shirt. Conversations resumed, and then the servants were back in the pool, Dix recovering the volley ball despite Reed's best attempt to grab it. Butch paused at the pool's edge, addressing his three territory vampires in a low voice. They glanced toward Brian. Debra noted smiles at whatever Butch said. Tia looked openly relieved, the men more relaxed. Their looks held speculation, but the overall energy felt all right, especially when the other vampires shed their clothes and joined their overlord in the pool.

Only then did Brian's shoulders ease. Whatever immediate challenges might result from his actions had passed, and her Master could now relax as well. Sliding his hand from her bare shoulder to her elbow, he brought her to her feet, tipping up her chin with his finger.

"You will look at me now," he ordered quietly.

When she did, she found herself unable to say anything. Her mind and heart were torn between two possibilities. Tonight he'd made it clear which path was truth, but for so long, she'd had to believe in far less, accept that as the best she could hope to have from him.

Brian shook his head and drew her out to the patio. Sinking down in a chair, he pushed her onto the foot stool before him, stroking a hand through her hair. He didn't say anything for a bit, and the rhythmic motion, his thoughtful gaze, steadied her enough to be practical, to think of the more important issues that had been raised.

"My lord, what you said...do you think it was wise? I don't want your research to be jeopardized."
Or your life
.

He caught her hand, brushed his lips over her knuckles before squeezing them. "It's something I should have said and done a long time ago. A life half lived isn't worth living. You are my other half, Debra. A true partner in every way."

Her heart and soul simply stopped. She swayed and he dropped his touch to her hips, steadying her.

"Ssshh," he murmured. "It's all right. Don't faint on me."

Despite his grim humor, she gripped his elbows, stared into his face. "I don't understand...why...what happened?"

He sobered. "I had to face the possibility of losing you that night, with Gideon. It unlocked something inside me I've kept locked down for far too long. Tonight it came to a head."

He traced her cheek, her lips. "We've always had an unconventional vampire-servant relationship, because we work together. But I allowed that to blind me to my responsibilities as your vampire master."

His expression steeled in a way that had her straightening under his hands, a nervous flutter in her lower belly. "In the future," he said, "if you have a problem with a vampire like Graham, and if I am too caught up in my work to notice, you will bring it to my attention. I have great faith in your judgment, Debra. I trust you won't make the serious error of deciding it's not something I need to be bothered about. Else I will find a memorable way to correct that impression."

His even look made her toes curl. "And if I am not strong enough to protect you from whatever comes our way," he added, "I will take the time-honored geek tradition of availing myself of my far more physical friends. They owe me large favors, and, with the help of your exceptional mind, I intend that beneficial situation to continue to exist, far into our future together."

She was caught between a smile and much stronger emotions. Despite the fact he sat before her fully dressed and she was in nothing but a scrap of underwear, she felt cloaked in his love and protection, in need of no other covering. At the thought, his gaze became even more vibrant. But then it shadowed.

"I've never offered you the choice, Debra. It's been there, available to you for these past couple of years. You helped me create it, could have asked for it at any time."

He was talking about the Cleves serum, which removed a vampire's marks. Her stomach tilted, suddenly knowing where he was going with this. She started to draw back, stand, but he caught her hands, held her firmly in place.

"In the human world, you'd be at the top of your field. Here, no matter what advances we make, you will always be considered first and foremost a vampire's servant." He touched her chin. "I could delve to the bottom of your soul and never unravel the mystery of why you made that choice. Why you continue to make it. I only know I am grateful for it like nothing else in my life."

Tears pricked her eyes. But he wasn't done.

"That gratitude will never change," he said. "However, from now until the end of your life, I'm giving you the choice all servants are told they don't have, once they decide to serve. The choice of changing your mind."

That serum also came with a memory-eraser, a charged potion that had blended science and magic, thanks to the help of a human sorcerer, a Guardian of the Light known to Lord Mason. But to not remember Brian, any of this...

He shook his head. "Lyssa and the Council would agree to let me do it without the memory removal. You have earned our trust many times over, plus the foundation of knowledge you carry might be of use to the vampire world in the future. I know your heart. I know you would help us if there was need. I will let you go, Debra, if that's what you want."

The sincerity in his gaze, the earnest intensity...this was the male who'd offered to make her his servant, who'd urgently wanted her to make that choice. Now that his heart was in his eyes, she saw she hadn't been wrong about him. Or her choice.

That truth filled her, so that for a moment she couldn't even speak. She put her head down on his shoulder, clung to his shoulders, just breathed. Tried to breathe. He pressed his lips to her temple, her bare shoulder. Stroked her back. "Debra."

She lifted her head, touched his face. "Don't you remember what I said when I was talking to my grandfather about meeting you? You were everything I'd ever wanted. Someone who challenged my mind. Who made my knees weak, who made me want you with every breath."

"That's a gift that goes both ways." He brushed his lips over hers, stayed so close his eyes dominated her vision. "Before I made you my servant, I saw my more primal vampire urges as...not an embarrassment exactly, but not something I'd explored." His eyes glinted. "By making you mine, I discovered that side of myself. I suppressed it, out of some mistaken belief that I was giving in to my impulses too much, endangering my plans for a facility...endangering you, if I made the mistake of allowing myself to get too besotted with you. I saw such passionate feelings as a growing pain, a young vampire's mistake, instead of what it truly was. Letting myself fall in love."

Her heart rate accelerated at the forbidden words, even as his fingers circled her wrist, stroked that rapid pulse, steadied it.

"But," he added, with emphasis, "I don't want you to think of my feelings, but your own. This is not the career or relationship you envisioned having."

No. That was certainly true. She met his gaze, saw it darken with the pain of her thought. "Do you remember Lord Theo?" she asked. "When he contracted the Delilah virus, he chose to die with his servant, rather than taking the cure, letting her sacrifice her life for him. The ironic thing is he opposed Lyssa's stance on giving servants more protection and rights. But when it came to his own servant...he refused to relinquish his connection to her. She told him she would take the serum, allow him to live. He told her he was worried if their connection was severed by death, he wouldn't find her in the afterlife, and he refused to let her go."

When his brow creased, she shook her head. "What I'm trying to say is it's very hard to understand what love is, my lord. And focusing on what I might accomplish for myself, the recognition I receive, is not the same as the deed itself, the results of it. I may not have envisioned you as the male of my dreams, or this as my career, but before you, I imagined love according to the experiences of the human world. You opened me up to far deeper things that I wanted, that weren't part of that world. I didn't make the wrong choice. I have
never
regretted it."

Now he was the one who looked surprised. She felt him probing her mind for the truth of it, and saw the change in his face as he realized she meant it. She trembled at that look.

"I have simply longed for more," she whispered. "That was the source of my unhappiness, thinking I could never have all of you that I desired. I could not possibly leave you, my lord." She reached up, framed his face with her hands again. "You are my Master, my heart and soul. Just fill them with yourself and your desires, and I will never regret anything but not having all eternity to be with you."

The words made her twice as vulnerable as she'd been the night she'd told him she loved him. But everything he'd done these past few days, and especially tonight, had given her the confidence to hope. To believe.

His hands tightened on her, a silent acknowledgment of her thoughts. Then he drew her up to kiss her mouth, her eyelashes, her forehead, his arms sliding around her, pulling her even closer between his spread thighs on the chair. She dug her fingers into his back until he broke the kiss, pressed her head to his shoulder and just held her. She thought the world could turn forever and she'd be content just like this.

But her Master had a way of always giving her more delicious things to want.

"And just what does my servant want now?"

She smiled against his shoulder, lifted her head to stroke a hand through his thick hair. "It's something best demonstrated, my lord."

The flare of interest in his gaze told her she had his leave to continue. She slid her hands beneath his coat, pushed it off his shoulders. He helped her, shrugging out of it as she left him to that and began to open the shirt down the front, caressing his chest as she did so. Her fingers rested briefly on his sternum, trailed down to the base of it. "I have a great deal of interest in the superficial front line myself, my lord."

"Hmm." He pursed his lips. "But the superficial front line skips a key area I feel will require in-depth attention. With your mouth, your hands..."

She grinned and pushed the shirt off his shoulders as well, letting her fingertips linger on the fine architecture of bone and muscle. Crowding closer to him brought her breasts against his bare chest. She let out a tiny sigh at the wondrous feel of it. He clasped her waist in strong hands.

"You wanted me to fill you with my desires," he observed. "Just how much filling do you need?"

"I'm not sure, my lord. Perhaps you could just keep filling the cup until I say stop."

He chuckled at that, then he cinched her close, lifting her to her feet as he rose so her toes didn't touch the ground when he kissed her. "And another thing," he added. "You will never attend another vampire event without me. Period."

She thought it might be possible to shatter from such an overload of feeling, too much to process.

"Nothing to process tonight. Just feel, Debra." He met her lips in another wine-saturated kiss. This one had an even sweeter wine with it, such that she curled her fingers in his biceps, held on, delighted as he made the kiss so long, the world just swirled away.

When he finally lifted his head, let her feet touch, she was breathless, but his eyes gleamed in that way she'd learned to anticipate with delicious anxiety. "I think I do want to enjoy the water with my servant." His gaze slid down to the panties. "But she's overdressed."

He still wore the belted slacks, his shoes. "Same goes, Master."

He gave her a mock stern look, but hooked his thumbs in the thong himself, had her step out of it as he went to his heels and let her hold onto his shoulder to steady herself. The contrast between that and Graham kicking Jia-Li for being unable to stand on contorted feet underscored the difference between the two vampires, and demonstrated in one act all the promises Brian had just made to her. Her eyes stung with tears, but she battled them back. She wanted this to be all about pleasure.

She drew in a breath as he bent and lifted her in his arms, carrying her through the patio door and toward the pool. He didn't carry her often. She liked it.

I'll do it so often you'll tire of it
.

She doubted that could ever happen.

When he used the zero entry slope to walk them into a curve of the lotus-shaped pool, she found the water a pleasant temperature, neither too cold nor too hot. Her Master let her down, but he backed her toward one of the rafts that had been tossed into this end of the pool, tangling his hands with hers as he maneuvered her toward it. Then he scooped her against him with one arm, the two of them drifting in circles as he kissed her, let her twine her legs around him. She let all the fears go, let herself be swamped by love for him.

As she'd told him, her pain and regret came not from the choice itself, but in longing for the choice to live up to her expectations. This moment exceeded them. Then he took it even further.

He opened his mind to her.

Not just the surface level where they solved research problems. His heart and soul, where she could sense the collection of feelings gathered there. This was new for him, too, allowing himself to express his feelings for her, rather than being focused on suppressing them. And he wondered why he'd ever done anything different.

This feeling is worth dying for, Debra. That's what Lyssa and Jacob knew, and why they chose not to hide it
.

She couldn't agree more. The water should have concealed her tears, but he kissed every one of them amid the water droplets. The raft was against her back, a cushion between her and the pool wall, not that she would have even noticed the scrape of the concrete with his mouth on her. But then Brian lifted her onto the raft and tender emotion became something else.