Vamped Up (21 page)

He swallowed down the tears rising hot and fast in his throat. “Eve, is it really you?”

“Let me go,” she gritted between clenched teeth.

“Never again.” He had to breathe deep to make sure his heart hadn’t stopped beating completely. Eve came back. She was here. Her hair was a shade darker than he remembered, and the blue of her eyes was more muted . . . but the more he breathed her in, the more he knew . . . deep down in his gut . . . it was Eve.

“Let me go or I’ll scream.” She clutched the book even more protectively in her arms.

But she didn’t remember him at all . . 
.

His gaze settled on the luscious curve of her lips. “Nothing will take you from me now. Scream or not, I’ll love you still. I’ll find you after they take you away from here. And you’ll love me as you did before.”

Her eyes widened, though Ruan could’ve sworn it wasn’t out of fear. There was a spark of remembrance there. There had to be. Souls could retain imprints from past lives, couldn’t they? Wouldn’t the intense passion they shared have marked her soul like it marked his?

This time she didn’t shrink away—just eyed him curiously, her own breath catching. “How do I know you?” She gave him her best annoying glare. “You don’t look familiar.”

God, where did he start? There was so much to say. Too much.

The warmth of her body flowed through the space between them, making him hot with desire and dizzy with anticipation. He couldn’t wait to be together again. To finally live after so many years of being dead inside. “I met you a long time ago . . . it’s felt like an eternity . . . every moment that has gone by without you by my side has been pure torture.” The words hiccupped in his throat. “I can’t believe you’ve come back.”

When the silence in the room nearly burst from the pressure, she said, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. I’ve never met you before. I’m sure of it.”

“And I’m sure you have, though not in this life.” Ruan watched gold strands of hair sweep over her shoulder as she shifted against him. His gaze fell to her heaving chest, to the lush vein pulsing at her neck. His stomach pinched with a hunger pang and he looked away.

Another rumble shook the room, matching the quivering of Ruan’s insides, causing curtains of dust to fall from the ceiling.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” she said with a shiver, the conviction nearly erased from her tone. “Release me.”

Shaking his head, Ruan held his ground.

“The moment I scream, they’ll kill you. You’ll be dead with the snap of a finger.”

“No.” His heart throbbed. He dizzied under its extreme clench. “If I die it will be because I loved you too deeply.”

She blinked slowly. “What did you say?”

“I said I don’t know if my heart can bear this. My love for you is too strong—too overwhelming. My body can’t take it.” She didn’t know him. She didn’t remember. She had to remember. “Eve, love doesn’t die just because the heart stills. It carries over. It carries on. I don’t mean to frighten you . . . it’s just that now that I’ve found you again, I can’t let you go . . .” He paused, not knowing how to continue or how much more to say.

She stilled in his arms, put down the book, her arms coming to rest on his biceps. “No. I mean, what did you say before? Repeat what you said . . . exactly.”

His breathing slowed. Was he breathing at all? He spoke each word carefully. As if the weight of the world rested on his tongue. “I said if I die it will be because I loved you too deeply.”

Electric currents shot between them, sizzling the blood in Ruan’s veins. Eve began to tremble, the lights behind her sapphire and amber eyes sparkling like gems. Something stirred within her, he knew it. “This doesn’t make sense, I know that, but . . .” Hope roared in Ruan’s heart. “I’ve heard that before, haven’t I?”

“Yes.” It was coming back to her. Ruan fought the smile pulling at his mouth. “It was part of your vows to me on our wedding night . . . one hundred years ago.”

“It can’t be . . .”

“You vowed to love me forever.” Ruan closed his eyes and let her marriage vow roll off his tongue. “You said the love we shared was eternal. That it consumed your soul fully . . . your heart couldn’t possibly support the depth and breadth of our love. You said . . .” Ruan opened his eyes and stared into hers, willing her memory to surface. “That if I woke in the morning to find you still and not breathing, you will have died because you loved me too deeply.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. “No, but it can’t—I can’t . . . that can’t be right.”

“Yet deep inside, you know I speak the truth. I may be guilty of many things, Eve . . .” Gods below, if she only knew the guilt he’d borne for a hundred years. “But I’ll never lie to you.”

She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. He staggered back, surprised, and wrapped his arms around her middle as tight as he could without breaking her in two. God, she smelled good. Like coming home after being cast away in a foreign land for far too long.

“I’m so confused,” she said, her voice strangled with tears. “What you’re saying can’t be true, yet I can’t help feeling that I really have spoken those words before. I’ve spoken them to you, but I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m Ruan . . . your best friend. Your lover.” He paused, stroking feather-light hands over her hair and down her back. He whispered into her ear, ever so gently, “I’m your husband, Eve. Your soul mate. And now we can finally be together the way we were meant to be.”

“But Lilith said I’m meant to be here . . . with her.” Her attention shifted to the leather-bound book on the tablet between them. “Reading through this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the Grimorium Verum. It holds the prophecies for your race.”

He knew the tome she spoke of, but it was rumored to have been destroyed. Why would Lilith demand Eve, a mundane with no connection to their haven or their khiss, sift through their most sacred records? “Where do you fit into all this, Eve? What have you gotten yourself into?” He skated tender hands over her shoulders.

She stared at the amulet lying still on her neck. His gaze followed. “I have my own role to play in all of this. I’m supposed to help your elders pass to the Ever After.”

Now it was Ruan who was confused. “You’re mentioned in the Grimorium’s pages? Have you seen for yourself?” Surely, this was Lilith’s twisted way of manipulating someone to do her tedious work for her. Translating Valcish couldn’t have been an easy feat. He wondered how long it took Lilith to teach Eve their long-lost language. And how long it would take to translate every word in the tome.

“Yes. My role is written in red and white.” Eve’s heart pounded so strongly against him, it could’ve been his own. Her fingers, lusciously soft as they brushed against his cheek, caused his hands to quake and his knees to weaken. His body responded to her warmth by shooting adrenaline to his core and lightning rods to his lap.

“What else have you read?” Ruan forced out, trying not to focus on the need scorching through his body. “Am I mentioned too? Is my path as clear?”

As if the same need were building in her too, Eve shifted against his hip, then lifted her eyes to his. “I’ve only skimmed the surface of the tome. But if you believe that I belong at your side then I’m sure your path was foreseen, and documented, at some point.”

“And what do you believe? Where do you belong?”

She stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him—the sweetest answer he’d ever received. Her tongue darted into his mouth then out again. He moaned as his stomach somersaulted. She pulled back as if her abruptness startled her too.

Blood in Ruan’s veins drained to his toes. Passion shattered his heart into a thousand jagged pieces that tore through his chest. Sighing, his lips found hers again.

She wrapped her arms around him tight, her body a perfect fit in his embrace.

As her tongue dipped into his mouth, curling along his with increasingly passionate strokes, the fire smoldering in Ruan’s middle erupted. He spun around, perched Eve on the edge of the stone tablet. He skimmed his hands over her hair, her cheeks, all the while studying the intimate details of her mouth and lips with his own.

He’d waited a hundred years for this. He’d painted this scene a thousand times in his head, in his dreams.

“You are more beautiful than I remember,” he mouthed against her lips. “Infinitely so.”

Eve breathed into him, her body pressing against his, melting like wax off a candle. Hands moving fast, Ruan slid the straps of her gown down her shoulders, revealing the most heavenly soft skin. He smudged a line of kisses along her jaw, down her neck to her collarbone, then snapped his gaze up to hers when a bolt of bloodlust fired through his veins.

Fingers tunneling through his hair, Eve dragged his mouth down to her bare chest and arched back.

He kneaded her breast, feeling her heart pound beneath his hand, and suckled her other nipple into his mouth. She was here. She’d returned. His love. His wife. His soul mate. His heart erupted with pure white heat. Love.

Eve whimpered in response, her body arching back until she was lying flat on the tablet, stretched out before him.

He parted her thighs, feeling the gulf between their bodies close with a connection that reached through time. It was beyond lust. Beyond love. He ran a sweeping finger along her center and found her beautifully bare. She moaned, her mouth gaping open.

A sharp spike of lust rammed through his shaft, shattering what was left of his restraint.

One hand skating small circles over her slick heat, another palming the flat span of her stomach, Ruan growled and raised up to find her lips again. Her mouth was supple. Open. Inviting. His tongue swept in and out in unison with his fingers in her core. She arched up, her body releasing a naturally drugging scent with each rise and fall of her hips. It was the sweet, hypnotic fragrance he’d associated with her. Only her.

“Ruan,” she whispered into his mouth. “I didn’t expect to feel . . . I mean, I’ve never felt something like this before. This has never . . .” Her breath hiccupped as he bit her bottom lip and sucked it into his mouth. She quivered beneath his touch. Trembled under his kiss.

He lowered his mouth to her breast again, his fingers dragging out the pleasure beneath the thin fabric of her gown. He could kiss her body for eternity. Touch her forever. He planned on doing just that.

“What do you want?” he asked, as she reared up, moaning, her core beginning to clench around him. He’d give her anything. Everything. If only for another second to give her pleasure any way she desired.

She shook her head, fanning her long mane of hair over the stone. “Not want . . .” She forced out in a single, panted breath. “Need. I need you.”

“No,” Ruan said, lifting her off the stone and dragging her to the floor. Ripping the chemise from her body, he unzipped his pants and shuffled them to the floor. He needed this more than he needed air in his lungs. He needed to be one with her in this life. He poised himself over her center, arms planted on either side of her body, and rammed into her in a single, earth-shattering stroke. “You need this . . . I need this. I need you.”

Her hips bucked as he pounded a single breath out of her. “Yes.” And then another. “God, yes . . .”

She was a tight fit. A perfect mold for his body to pleasure hers. Their bodies moved in rippling waves against one another as the chamber shook and rumbled from blasts outside the walls. His world had been blacker than night until this moment. The last hundred years deprived of all color. An abyss from which he thought he’d never resurface. But now . . . even the dingy walls in the chamber had beautiful rods of amber and mahogany striking through them. Eve’s hair wasn’t simply blonde . . . it was golden. As bright as the sun’s first morning ray.

Ruan’s stomach tightened and his fangs dropped. He bit down on his lip to hide their menacing white tips and squelched down the rising need to pierce her flesh by burying himself in her deeper.

She moaned loudly, arching up, on the verge of her own release.

God, he was going to lose it.

Pulled as tight as he’d ever been, his body shaking violently with anticipation, he shattered into a thousand directions as he emptied himself into her. He thrust deeper. Harder. She screamed, shifting beneath him, riding her own pleasure to climax.

Arms trembling and energy spent, feeling completely and utterly content for the first time in a hundred years, Ruan collapsed on top of her. He buried his face in her locks of blonde. He breathed deep, rejoicing in the satisfaction sweeping across his body—satisfaction he hadn’t felt in what seemed like an eternity. The only kind that could come from finding his soul mate once again.

Realizing he was still sheathed inside her, he pulled out. The sweet smell of warm, fresh blood assailed his senses. He looked down. His shaft was completely covered in red, beautiful, shimmering blood. Primal need clamped his gut.

“You’re a virgin?” he croaked.

She nodded slowly, biting down on her bottom lip.

“Why didn’t you . . . I shouldn’t have . . .” Oh Lord. “This shouldn’t have happened this way. I’m so sorry, Eve, I thought that since we’ve already—”

She shushed his mouth with the length of her finger. “You were right. I needed this. I needed you.” She kissed him squarely on the mouth. He couldn’t breathe. “I’ve been sheltered by Lilith for so long. Too long. She’s spent her whole life protecting me from the outside world. Do you think it’s possible to be looking for something your whole life without knowing what that thing is?”