Heartbitten (A New Adult Vampire Romance Novel) (11 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Robb sat for a while, thinking. Had she seen? Had she really seen what he'd done, the blood, the bite? He hadn't made such an idiotic mistake since he was young.

And that mistake had turned out to be fatal.

It was two years after he'd been taken by the vampires. He'd escaped from their clan and found himself in a small English village in a rural forest area. Pretending to be a runaway boy, he'd stayed in the village church until a family had taken him in as charity.

They had been such kind people. The man worked as a cattle herder and his wife tailored and tended the garden. They had three children. Annabelle, Evan, and Thomas, and Evan was Robb's age. Robb had decided to stay with them and pretend to be normal for as long as he could. And it worked, for a time. But then he had made a mistake.

He'd been drinking blood from the cows at night. That's how he lived. Cow blood was thick, thicker than human blood, and sticky in his mouth. It didn't give him true satisfaction, either, but he would not kill again, not even if cow blood gave him headaches and still left him craving more.

Amid the herd of cattle, he'd slipped back to find a cow who was docile and calm. He patted her rump.

"Easy, girl," he said. He scratched behind the cow's ear and she flicked her tail. In the moonlight her eyes looked as dark as coal. Stupidly trusting, cows. They made perfect victims.

He found the artery with his fingertips, the pulse of blood beating through the skin. His stomach growled as he pressed his lips against the cow's leathery skin. His teeth slid out and then the cow lowed once and was still. There was something in the blood connection that calmed them, but getting close enough to bite was the hard part. He drank, some of the blood dripping out over his lower lip. The day had been long and hard, and he'd been craving this nourishment, as weak as it was compared to human blood.

The blood ran thick and he bit down too hard. The artery spurted against his mouth and filled it instantly. He choked and spit blood, coughing it out of his lungs, using one hand to steady himself on the cow's rolled neck. Blood spattered the ground and the side of the cow, and he noticed the other cows around him growing restless. The blood looked black in the dim moonlight, and Robb heard the crack of a twig.

He looked up and saw a man watching him.

The neighbor's eyes were wide as he watched Robb step away from the cow. Robb imagined how the man must see him: a monster covered in blood, maw red
from the feed. He raised a hand and took one step forward, intending to greet him in a friendly way and hope that the man would listen to him.

That didn't happen. The man screamed, falling over himself as he scrambled to run away. Robb spun to see if the lantern would go on in his house. He did not want his family to know what a creature he was.

The window stayed dark, and Robb was grateful, even with the sudden sorrow that fell over him with the realization that he would have to leave now. The neighbor would tell the family. He must be gone by then. Vampires couldn't be killed easily, but they could be tortured, and the old superstitious faith of these villagers was nothing to be reckoned with.

Tears sprang to his eyes. Evan had been his friend, and the rest of the family had adopted him into their home as a son. Where would he go now? Would he ever be able to find another family that would take him in? And if he did, what then? Nothing would last. He would lose another family, then another, then another...

Robb found himself walking to the edge of the forest, just beyond the cattle grazing pasture. The treetops were like silver in the moonlight and the branches stirred softly, their rustling leaves the only sign that there was an invisible wind making its way through the forest.  In the forest, though, everything looked dark. Robb shivered at the thought of going back to live in the forest. That was where vampires lived, yes, and he was one of them now. But he did not want to live like a monster anymore. He just wanted to be human. Looking back at the house he'd lived in for a short while, he swallowed. He should have left a note. He should have said goodbye. Evan wouldn't understand. And Annabelle would be scared of him, he knew she would. Not to mention the parents.

Robb slumped against a tree trunk, letting his body slide down to the ground. He'd been interrupted in the middle of feeding and he felt tired, so tired. He closed his eyes and rested the back of his head against the bark. It was a nightmare, this whole thing. If he could close his eyes and open them again, the world might be different, and he would be able to stay here...

The smell of smoke woke him. He opened his eyes, knowing that something was wrong before he saw what it was. It was still dark in the forest, and the moon was setting over the tops of the trees, but there was a strange bright glow that Robb finally realized was fire. The house.

He leapt up to his feet and began to run back to the house. He'd reached the pasture fence and realized what the sound was. He'd thought it was the crackling of the fire, but there was a crowd gathered around the burning house. It was their shouting that he'd heard. Smoke billowed amid the flames, the black clouds blotting out the stars in the sky above. The crowd's
words crystallized into form as Robb watched, his breath heavy and panting.

"Kill them! Heretics!"

"Witches! Witches who drink blood!"

"Kill them all!"

"No," Robb whispered in shock. The flames leapt up through the entire house, and now that Robb was closer he could see that there was a body just outside the front of the house. The flesh was charred to a black.

"No," Robb repeated. His ears filled with the sound of the crackling flames.

"No, no. Not them. Not them." He took another step forward and almost fell, so shaky were his legs. Then he saw that the body was not one body, but two. A large figure, the cattle herder most likely, but next to him lay another body, clutched in his arms so that Robb had not seen. A small body.

The body of a child.

Robb turned then and threw up, the contents of his stomach splashing the grass as he leaned over with eyes clenched shut, heaving until there was no breath left in him. The crackling of the flames reverberated in his ears, and he heaved again, again.

"No," he whispered, but there was nobody to hear him.
He looked up once more at the house, the dark smoke boiling up through the roof where the flames licked and twisted. The image burned itself into his mind. He would never forget what he'd seen. Never.

He turned then and ran into the forest, his eyes blinded by tears. In his mind the flames leapt up and the body of the child still lay there on the ground, and he ran. He'd run for days before stopping, and had decided that from then on, he would not ever let his curse affect anyone. He would shield the rest of the world from his darkness.

And now, it had happened again. When Liz saw him, the blood still on his lip, something inside of him had snapped and he'd reacted. He opened and closed his hand. He'd scared her. He'd held her neck in his hand and the only thought in his mind had been how much he wanted to bend his head down and taste her.

The poor girl, so innocent and beautiful. He should never have touched her. He should never have let her into his lab.

But maybe she could be the one... the one he could trust...

No. There was no possible way. Already she was too much of a liability, and if she knew all of his secret, he could not protect her. His heart ached with the thought of losing her, but he couldn't take that kind of risk. He was already too selfish. He shouldn't have let her leave
so easily. It was dangerous for the both of them.

He would have to talk with her again. He could play dumb, convince her that what she'd seen had been only the strange fetish of an eccentric billionaire. He had to get her on his side, make her a hundred percent certain that he was simply a sexual weirdo and nothing more.

It should not be so hard to charm her, to tempt her into his bed and show her a passionate wildness that would make a small bite on the neck seem like nothing at all. And then he would let her go, and all of her stories of him would be only tabloid fodder. She would never know the truth about the darkness inside of him, only that he was a callous lover, and then she would be safe. Better than having to kill her. Of course, who was he protecting but himself?

And why, then, did he feel such emptiness when he thought about Liz leaving for good?

Sitting in the foyer of his multi-million dollar penthouse in London, Robb put his head in his hands and wept for all of the people he had hurt with his love.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next morning, Liz slept through her alarm and woke up bleary-eyed. The inside of her mouth felt fuzzy and her head hurt. She rolled over and looked at the clock, and immediately bolted out of bed.

Two hours late. Two hours late. She'd never been late, much less two hours late, and she scrambled to brush her teeth and run a comb once through her mane of hair. She splashed water on her face and thought about what had happened the night before. Everything seemed like a dream. The blood cultures she had run, with their abnormally high plasma counts. Seeing Robb walk in with a woman, falling on the couch with her...

Liz flushed as she remembered the look on Robb's face, and her body grew hot all over with a strange desire. He'd been so scared that he had come after her, and although she would never in her life have thought it, the pressure of his hand on her neck made her shiver with a thrill that was caused more by pleasure than by anger. It was, perhaps, that she'd sensed his own desire, running like an undercurrent through his body.

But of course he had been aroused. He had been kissing another woman!

"Stop being ridiculous," Liz said, looking at herself in the mirror. She bit her lip and blinked hard at her reflection. "There's nothing there. Now get to work."

Work—yes, that was the most important thing. That was enough to send her flying across the university campus, her purse clasped to her chest, her lab notes pinned under her other arm, the papers fluttering. Not willing to wait for the elevator, she took the stairs up to the grad school lab three at a time and was breathing heavily by the time she pushed the door open.

Jenny swiveled around on her lab stool and flipped her long blond hair behind her.

"Nice to see you, love," she said with a bright smile.

"You didn't wake me up!" Liz said. She tossed her purse onto the lab table, the sheets of lab notes scattering across the surface. "The cultures needed to go through the second round of irradiation at eight this morning—"

"And they did, Liz," Jenny said. "I put them all in and got the radiation chamber running. Don't you trust me with this experiment?"

Liz let out a sigh of relief.

"Of course," she said, although she wasn't sure she trusted her roommate with anything more serious than getting a drink order right at the bar. Not to be harsh about it—Jenny was fun to hang out with, but she didn't take the work nearly as seriously as Liz did. "But why didn't you wake me up?"

"After last night?" Jenny cocked her head and gave Liz a look of sympathy. "It seemed like you needed the sleep, babe. Did you want to talk about it?"

"About what?" Liz immediately thought about the drop of blood she'd seen running down the woman's neck. No, she didn't ever want to talk about that.

"About you coming home crying after that date," Jenny said, standing up and crossing over to Liz. Liz didn't say a word as Jenny hugged her tightly, but her heart gave a pang of regret as she thought about Robb.

"It wasn't a date," Liz said. "I don't know what I was thinking."

"Not a date?" Jenny frowned. "Then what—"

"I really don't want to talk about it," Liz said. "It's over. I just want to get back to work."

"Sure," Jenny said after a moment, patting Liz on the shoulder. "Sure, hun."

"Are these the cultures that are already done?" Liz avoided Jenny's gaze. She didn't want sympathy. She wanted to forget anything had ever happened.

"Yep," Jenny said.

"I'll go wash them out then." She gathered up the glassware and walked to the back of the lab. She'd just finished cleaning out the last culture with isopropyl
alcohol and leaned over to put the clean glassware back onto the shelf when her lab coat swung against the table with a soft clink.

The vial of blood. Robb's blood. She'd forgotten that she'd taken it.

Liz reached into her pocket gingerly, as though the vial had teeth to bite her, and pulled out the small tube of blood. The writing was still visible on the side—Robert Chatham—and without thinking, she scraped the label off with her fingernail. His name tore away in small pieces of paper and fell to the ground as she picked at the label with her nail, and she didn't even care that she was making a small mess on the floor. She didn't want to see his name anymore; she was only tempted to see why he'd been running tests.

The cytometer was right there in the back of the lab. Curiosity burned inside of her and before she could stop herself, she went over and inserted the vial into the machine. She'd done these tests so many times that the steps were routine for her, and she turned the dials to the proper settings automatically. Her finger only hesitated for a brief second before pressing the start button.

"Liz?"

Liz jumped back from the machine as though it burned her fingers.

"Jesus, Jenny!"

"Sorry, love, didn't mean to startle you. The cultures are all running their second trial now. I'm headed out to grab a tea, want anything?"

"No," Liz said. "I'm good."

"You sure?" There was concern in Jenny's eyes.

"Really, I'm good," Liz said. "I need to run another test here just to be sure of something."

"K! I'll only be a few," Jenny said. She raised her hand in a half-wave and then was gone.

Liz turned back to the cytometer, which was spinning around in a whir of motion. Just one initial test to see what the main components were.

She bit her lip, knowing that this was an invasion of privacy. But Robb had a secret, she knew it. If he was running tests on himself in the lab, she wanted to know what it was about and whether or not it had to do with the extra research he was asking her to do.

Liz rubbed her temples with her fingers. God, it had been a long night. Jenny was right; she needed some extra sleep. If she continued at the pace she was going, she'd be burned out before getting her graduate degree.

It took another couple of minutes before the cytometer
wound down to a complete stop and she was able to start the analysis.

She'd tested for everything. Her heart beating quickly, she clicked through to the results readout on the screen. Her finger moved down the side of the column of numbers. Acidity was normal. Oxygen content was a bit low, probably due to the blood being stored overnight or however long it had been resting in the trash bin. Metal ion content was fine: iron was normal, potassium was normal, all of the trace elements were at normal levels. Blood sugar was normal, cholesterols a bit high. Liz frowned. Maybe Robb had high cholesterol and was monitoring his levels. That made sense.

Her finger clicked to go to the next page, and when she read the first line she stopped and read it again. That couldn't be right. She blinked and looked at the screen.

The white blood cell count was off the charts, and the reading showed a chromosomal transformation.
Abnormal
white blood cells. At a reading ten times the typical concentration of blood. Liz's mouth dropped open. It was the same high concentration of all of the cultures they were studying in the lab. She'd seen these counts before, and she knew what they meant.

Her hand fell away from the cytometer as the air around her seemed to turn blisteringly hot. She struggled to take a breath as her mind grappled with the secret laid bare before her. That was the truth
behind his research.

Robert Chatham had blood cancer.

She heard Jenny open the lab door and quickly shut off the screen. She opened the cytometer and took out Robb's vial of blood, shoving it back into her pocket. She bent down and opened a cabinet to rummage through the glassware, breathing slowly to try and calm herself down. Jenny would be able to tell at one glance that something was off with Liz.
Breathe
, she told herself.

"That was fast," she said, her hands pushing aside glassware, her eyes locked down on the rows of test tubes. She hoped her voice wasn't trembling and she took one more breath before standing up. "Was the tea shop open—"

Her words sputtered to a stop as she stood up and saw Robb standing in front of her, just opposite the lab table.

"Good morning," Robb said. "What was that about tea?"

"I—I—" Liz had no idea what to say. Her eyes darted to the cytometer screen, but no, she had turned it off. Thank god.

"I wanted to talk with you," Robb said, his voice as calm as if what had happened last night had never happened.

"About the experiment?" Liz asked. "The second trials are running. Jenny already started them."

"Not about the experiment." Robb came around the lab table, moving slowly but surely. Liz put her hands in her lab pockets. One hand grasped the vial of his blood. His gaze flicked down to that pocket, and she held her breath for an instant.

"What is it?" Liz asked. She tried to sound professional, but she was terrified. More so now that Robb was close to her and her body was again reacting to his presence. He reached out and touched her arm softly. The immediate tingle raced from his touch all the way to her core, and she clenched her jaw.

"Last night," Robb said. "I'd like to talk. I need to explain."

His voice was calm, soothing, and the way he looked into Liz's eyes seemed to put a kind of a spell on her. She could not tear herself away from his touch, even as he stepped closer and began to caress her arm from the shoulder to the elbow, his fingers running lightly over her skin.

Oh, the ache! She wanted him to lean forward and kiss her, and at the same time she wanted to run. His eyes looked at her, as though seeing into her mind, and she twitched anxiously. The vial. His blood. His sickness. How could she work for him after learning his secret?

"There's no need to explain," Liz said, coughing to get the lump out of her throat. "It was a simple misunderstanding."

"I want to apologize for my behavior," Robb said. His hand, oh god, his hand was still moving, now with more pressure, all along her arm. She clutched the vial in her fingers tighter, thankful that she'd scraped off the label.

"You already did," Liz said. "I forgive you. It was all a mistake."

Robb's mouth twitched.

"Please come over tonight. Let me talk with you about all this." His dark eyes had a depth to them that Liz could get lost in. She was falling now, falling headlong into his gaze, falling—

"Oh! Sorry!" Liz looked over Robb's shoulder to see Jenny staring at them both, a cup of tea in each hand. "I got you, um, Liz, I got you a tea. Hi, Mr. Chatham."

"Hello," Robb said, his hand loosening from Liz's elbow and falling to his side. The connection between them was broken, and Liz inhaled sharply, the world finally clearing around her. "I hear you've been doing good work in here."

"Trying to," Jenny said. Her arched eyebrows were a question that Liz did not know how to answer. "We've got the second set of results coming in soon, if you'd like to look at them."

"No need," Robb said, his eyes still tracking Liz. "We were discussing an outside project." His phone began to ring. He pulled it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and turned it off quickly.

"Oh, sure! Right!" Jenny's voice was overly bright. "I'll just, um, I'll just be setting up for the third run this afternoon then." She walked backwards toward the lab setup, grinning at Jenny. Making quote marks in the air with her fingers, she mouthed the words:
"OUTSIDE PROJECT!
"

Liz closed her eyes, exasperated.

"I can't," she said. "I have to finish these trials. The last setup and run will take eight hours to complete, and we won't be starting until after lunch."

"Jenny, dear," Robb called out across the lab. Jenny poked her head out from behind the shelves. "Would you be able to run the trials this evening so that Liz can come help me with my project?"

"Sure!" Jenny said. "No problem at all." She gave a thumbs up and disappeared again behind the machines.

Liz shook her head.

"I don't—"

"Please," Robb said, and again Liz saw the fear and desperation behind his cool, collected mask. "I need to explain."

Liz's fingertips ran over the glass of the vial in her pocket, and she swallowed.

"Okay," she said, her heart thumping in her chest. "I'll be at your place by seven."

"Thank you," Robb said. His eyes flickered down to her lips, and for a moment Liz thought that he would kiss her. Then he stepped back.

"I'll see you then," he said, turning and walking quickly out. The door swung shut behind him, and Jenny poked her head up to look over at Liz, an expectant grin on her face.

"Don't ask," Liz said.

"You can't come home crying after a date and then have the guy show up the next day begging you to see him again, and then
not tell me anything
!" Jenny crossed her arms. "If you don't tell me, I won't run the cultures for you tonight."

Liz considered this, thinking that it might be better to not show up. Then she thought about the blood test results, and she knew that she couldn't break her promise to Robb. She would reassure him that she wouldn't tell anyone, and that would smooth their relationship. Their
professional
relationship.