Her tiny smile died.
Brody shook his head. “It won’t work, Taylor.”
She blinked. “Why not?” Her voice was thick with unexpressed emotion.
“You can’t trap Veris. He’ll resent it. He’ll resent you. He’s spent his entire life as master of his own fate. You can’t manipulate him, you can’t handle him and you can’t out-think him.”
“I know,” she said softly, her eyes enormous as she looked up at him with a wretched expression.
“Then why on earth did you try?” He tried to keep his question gentle.
“Because you possess more of him than I ever will,” she whispered.
His breath escaped him in a hard rush. “Sweet Jesus, Taylor.”
She was just staring at him with those huge eyes. If she started crying, he knew he was going to feel like the world’s biggest piece of undead dog meat, but Taylor never turned on the tears just for effect. She would be fighting to hold them back. She hated crying in front of them, especially as neither of them could shed a tear even if they wanted to.
Brody curled his hand into a fist, fighting for calm. “I don’t possess so much as a hair on his head. I never have. He stays because he wants to.”
“Bullshit,” she said softly, hopelessly. “Nine hundred and fifteen years…nearly a thousand years, Brody. No one stays just because they haven’t got bored yet, not for that long.” She drew herself up straighter, leveling her shoulders. “You both love me, I know that. But what you feel for each other…” She shook her head. “I’ll never have that. I can’t. I haven’t been around for a thousand years and all the little flips back in time we get to do aren’t nearly enough to make up for it. They’re just glimpses. Teasing. Sometimes I wish they didn’t happen at all, because they just make me envy you for the long, long life you’ve had.” She picked up the glass again and this time her convulsive jerk emptied it.
Brody had no time to even begin to pull his mind together to formulate a response. Veris came back in the door, wearing his professor clothes. A summer-weight, silver-gray silk suit and dazzling white short-sleeved shirt that stretched over his biceps and triceps as he lifted his arms to transfer the jacket from his right hand to hang it over the back of the Craftsman chair next to the door.
“You’re leaving already? So early?” Taylor asked.
“I think it’s probably best,” Veris said. “I can beat the rush at security and settle in at the first class lounge, then get straight into writing the keynote speech as soon as the plane takes off.”
“But—” she began, then stopped. “That’s probably a good idea,” she said stiffly. “I’ll get the car brought around.”
“I’ve already done that,” Veris said. “It’s waiting for me.”
Brody hid his sigh. He knew what Veris was doing, but Taylor wouldn’t understand. Not this time. Perhaps not for a century or more.
She was staring at Veris with a bewildered, hurt look and Veris ignored it. He kissed her. It was rough, quick and hard and Brody suspected only he saw the held-back emotion. “Happy birthday, my dear sweet one,” Veris told her.
Taylor nodded. After a second she said, “Thank you.” Her voice was thick. “I hope your lecture series is a roaring success,” she added stiffly.
Veris had already turned away, toward Brody. So only Brody got to see his eyes close and his grimace. “You knew,” Veris said without looking back at her.
“That you were doing a tour of universities in Europe, not a conference? I’m not stupid, Veris. I knew within a week of you getting the invitation.” Her voice was controlled—so tightly leashed Brody knew she was fighting to hold back some emotion. Envy perhaps. Resentment. Four years ago, Taylor herself might have been the one to receive such an invitation. Or perhaps it was simply anger for Veris trying to hide this from her in the first place. Brody had warned him the conference story wouldn’t hold up with her.
Veris opened his eyes and looked at Brody. “Then its well beyond time I left,” he said, speaking to both of them. “I’ve done more than enough damage.” His big hand curled around Brody’s neck. “Take care of her.”
“Of course.”
Veris kissed him, with the same hard possessive passion he’d used on Taylor and Brody felt his heart rate elevate in response. He swallowed as Veris let him go.
Veris picked up his jacket and walked to the doorway. He paused there and glanced back. “I love you both. It makes my heart ache to leave.” He drew a breath. “
Ábéodan.
”
Neither he nor Taylor moved as Veris left. Nor while the front door closed. They listened as the limo tires crunched on the gravel outside. Only when there was silence once more did Brody dare look at Taylor again.
She was crying silently. Tears rolled down her cheeks unchecked as she stared at the doorway Veris had used.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “He wanted to stay. I could almost
feel
it. I drove him away, Brody.”
Brody sighed and drew her into his arms. She came hesitantly, almost childlike in her bewilderment.
“You just have to give him time. Veris will think about things and eventually he’ll come around to it.”
She lifted her head to look at him, her tear-smeared cheeks shining in the late evening light. “I know about these moods of Veris’. You’ve told me about them before. I know how you two work. How you take breaks from each other. You just take off. A month, a year. A decade!”
Brody could see genuine fear in her face. “That’s not what’s happening now.”
“No? How do you know?” she demanded, pushing away from him. “Did he ever warn you in the past? Did you ever tell him? Or did you just have a big argument and take off after telling him you loved him, like Veris just did then?”
Cold fingers touched the heat inside his chest and made everything ripple uneasily.
“You don’t understand, do you?” she said softly. “You think you do and maybe intellectually you do, but you don’t really accept it, not in your gut.”
Brody stared at her, truly baffled. “I don’t understand you now,” he said frankly. “You and Veris have the fancy degrees. I’m just the muscle, remember?”
She gave a ghost of a smile, but there was more sadness in it than he liked. “You keep saying you like that I’m human, but you fail to make allowances for that fact. You and Veris can argue and go off and brood for a few decades, but I can’t. I don’t
have
a few decades to spare and you keep forgetting that.”
That’s not true.
The hot denial pushed at his lips but he held it back, because she was right. He
did
keep forgetting. Taylor was so much a part of them, even her human aspects had blended into the tapestry of their lives, to the point where they overlooked them and took them for granted.
“You need to feed,” Taylor said flatly, stringing her fingers together, her eyes narrowing as she ran her gaze over his face. “You’re too pale.”
Shock could force him to feed early, and he was being handed a series of shocks here. Brody pushed his hand through his hair, then twisted it to one side and back over his shoulder. “I had better go and take care of it, then,” he said and stretched his shoulders and back as he felt the tension there.
Taylor held out her hand, palm up and out toward him. “You…could feed from me,” she said softly. “If you want to.”
In the four years Taylor had been with them, she had made the offer only once before. Both Veris and Brody bit her when they were in bed, often, but never to feed. The one feeding had been a disaster. Veris had never told Brody what had gone wrong. Neither had Taylor.
Brody shook his head. “I appreciate the offer. But you want a teddy bear, not a predator and you’ve been drinking. The alcohol in your blood would hit me like a depth charge. The results would be…” He tried to find a word that wouldn’t totally unnerve her. “Unpredictable,” he finished.
She chewed her upper lip.
“I’ll come home tonight,” he told her, relenting.
Relief touched her features. “That would be nice if you could,” she said softly. “But I know you have to roam far these days, so don’t promise anything.”
Brody dug in his pocket for the keys to his own car, the one he used when he needed to get around incognito, fast and quietly. The unremarkable black Mustang was parked out the back of the house.
Taylor was back to chewing her lip.
He touched his finger to it. “Stop that. Drink your champagne and eat something. I’ll make this quick and dirty and I’ll be home before you know it.”
She nodded. But her goddamn beautiful eyes were luminous with more unshed tears. Brody kissed her. Despite the chill of the champagne and the salt of her tears he could taste the sweetness of her lips still. Despite four years he still hadn’t decided what the taste was. It had been too long since he’d eaten real food and memory was a poor substitute.
He could feel his uppers trying to descend at the smell of her and the beat of her pulse so close by. She had been right. He needed to feed and soon.
“I must go,” he said, pulling himself away. As he hurried out the door, he dared to glimpse back.
Taylor had dropped into the Craftsman chair, her knees together and her lower legs askew like a junior high school girl’s. Her head was in her hands. If she wasn’t crying, she was about to, or struggling not to.
Brody dug his nails into his palms and forced himself to keep walking away. He would be no use to her if he went near her. Not in this state. He would terrify her and be a danger to her.
Taylor would have a hard time understanding that tonight she was better off alone, even on her birthday, but it was cold hard fact.
The truth gave Brody no comfort either.
Taylor stared at the doctor. It suddenly felt like the old wooden floor of the big office was actually heaving like the deck of a ship. She clutched the arms of her chair. “Excuse me?” she said. Her lips felt thick and uncooperative. “I don’t think I caught that last part.”
“Which part?” the doctor asked, with a small frown, flipping back a page in Taylor’s folder.
“The part about the p-p-regnancy.” She rubbed her forehead. “That
was
what you meant about gestation, right?”
Dr. Edward Cruz frowned again, more heavily this time, making his handsome face look suddenly older. “That is what most physicians mean by the term, I believe.” He looked at the page again. “The blood work confirms your pregnancy.” He smiled at her, flashing very white teeth. “They’re very accurate tests these days.”
Her hand began to shake. “That’s…not possible.”
“You’re not using birth control,” he pointed out, actually tapping the file with his pen. It made the heavy gold Rolex on his wrist flash in the sun streaming through the windows. “Unless you’re consulting with another family physician?” Offense thickened his tone. “I cannot treat you properly if I don’t have the full facts of your medical history, you know.”
Taylor plastered a small smile on her face. “I had no need for contraception. My partner—” She just managed to make herself stop at the singular term. “My partner is unable to father children. We had accepted it would not happen for us.”
Dr. Cruz smiled himself. It was also a small smile. “Then I guess this is a day for celebration for you, isn’t it?”
She let herself fall back against the backrest of the vinyl patient’s chair, staring at him. No words would come to her. Nothing encompassed this.
“How pregnant am I?” she asked at last.
Cruz looked mildly vexed. “When was your last menstruation?” he asked.
Taylor blinked. She barely kept track of such matters anymore. After some deep thought, she came up with a date. Cruz glanced at a calendar and tapped his way through the weeks. “If you are right about the date, at a very rough guess I would say about five and a half weeks. But until we do an ultra-sound scan, it’s an approximation.” He turned the page on her annual physical, clearly ready to move on.
“Why haven’t I had any symptoms?” she asked. “Morning sickness? All that stuff? Women I’ve known who have been pregnant told me they knew the moment they got pregnant.”
This time his frustration was more than evident. He dropped his pen to the desk. “Probably because they were trying to become pregnant and they were looking for symptoms. You’ve possibly overlooked the symptoms or completely disregarded them, or mistaken them for something else. Or else you’re one of those lucky women who will sail through their pregnancy with very few symptoms at all. Shall we move on?”