Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (37 page)

He gave me an opening. “What do you need from me, my only love? You have only to ask and it shall be done.”

“I need some uncritical affection. If you can't manage that, I'll have to seek it elsewhere.”

There. It was an ultimatum of sorts, but I trusted him not to back down; if I knew one thing about him, it was that Harry and Devotion were one and the same. My companion was the embodiment of virtues rarely found since the extinction of knightly ways. Having made some internal decision, Harry rose to the occasion like I knew he would, sweeping a bow at me as an excuse to catch my hand in his. He rubbed it with his thumb, his eyes tightly closed, and I watched as his eyes moved under those fair translucent lids, back and forth like they were searching, scanning, reading the lines of an invisible transcript.

“Oh, ducky,” he sighed, placing his cool lips to the back of my hand, his eyes tightly closed.

My shoulders fell. He looked sad and unexpectedly every year of his age. My nurturing urge kicked in and I touched his hair as he straightened. His ancient eyes searched mine with four centuries of experience, pegging the expression on my face with expert precision.

“It occurs to me that I may not be entirely pleasant to live with. Is this true?”

“Wow. You thought you were entirely pleasant to live with, Harry?” I smirked at him. “Seriously?”

“Don't joke. You feel…” He blinked at me in wonder as something occurred to him. “Flames and ether, I have made a beautiful woman feel ugly.”

“Let's drop it. I'm sure that Wesley needs us. Maybe I'll go see if I can bribe Chapel and Batten to stay at a hotel.”

“I'll thank you to stop that.” Harry refused to let go of my hand. Since his immortal grip had the strength to pull the roof off the Buick, I gave up. “I understand when you ward yourself from them, but I must insist you stop your cynical wall-building against me.”

I avoided his gaze, blinking rapidly to keep my eyes clear of the threatening tears. When he didn't stop staring at me expectantly, I exploded, “What do you wanna hear?”

“A man could get his heart clobbered by you, Marnie Baranuik, if he were so imprudent as to allow himself to be blinded by your looks. If you have no idea how lovely you are, that is all on me. I should be a clear mirror for you, and in that I have failed.” It sounded like a compliment, a rare occurrence indeed, but with calculated aloofness he continued, “But inside, there is nothing in you that is not hard or fortified. The guardian of your heart is a veritable meat grinder. Cerberus would not do a better job of tearing apart intruders.”

“You're calling me cold? Me? That's rich!”

“I share everything I am with you!” Harry suddenly towered over me in the room, his eyes backlit with rage. “Every morsel of wisdom I've gained, every dollar I've earned, every moment of my night and into every day, no matter how drained I become. I share every ounce of immortality I can possibly spare you. Everything.”

“Everything but your—” I clipped off the word dick, my breath streaming ardently from my nose, and finished, “Everything but intimacy.”

He didn't miss a beat, as though he'd been expecting the issue to crop up. He pounced, pointing hard to the sky, eyes brightening past silver as his pupils expanded to eat the color up. “If I were to cross that line with you, you know the consequences of that act, regardless of how pleasurable--”

“No I don't!” The tears wouldn't stop now, blurring my vision. “What would the consequences be? Spell it out for me, Harry, because I think you're full of shit, frankly. All this crap about possessiveness and jealousy, it's nonsense.”

“And you know everything, is that it?”

“You're hiding something from me.”

His accent thickened and his fine English accent became crisp and cutting. “Do take that tone out of your voice and remember to whom you are speaking, DaySitter.” His back straightened and his mouth settled into a grim line. “You ask me for uncritical affection and when I get close, you poison me with your accusations like a black widow spider.”

“Don't insult me with lies when every other word out of your mouth points to the truth.”

“Why, tonight, do you suggest that I am a fabricator?” The clear bright rage in his eyes dared me to confront the issue. “Out with it. Let's have it!”

When I backed down, he slammed a hand down on the nightstand. The lamp jittered as though startled off its base, toppling to the floor in a tinkle of shattered glass. Lights out. Moonlight poured through Kenmare Irish lace curtains, imprinting the side of the revenant's pale face with an intricate cut work pattern. The new quiet signaled the birth of a dark silence so windless and arctic that I couldn't imagine an end to it.

I stood there frozen in our emotional polar winter, wrestling with the need to scream it, to grab him by the shirt front and shake him silly, unable to get past my fear of the truth. There was another in his life. There was no doubt in my mind. No one was celibate for a decade, certainly no revenant, and the unadulterated truth was there
in his eyes, with neither guilt nor shame, instead putting the blame firmly on me. Another eager, willing body stood there lost in the great black void of his pupils, proudly, wantonly, something worse than a mistress. Maybe it was Gary Chapel, or maybe Gary was just one of dozens, men and women, who supplied the revenant with what he truly needed. I squeezed my hands into fists tighter until my fingernails were raking into the flesh of my palms. I had to know for sure. I had to hear him say it. But if it was said aloud…what if it ruined everything? What if the act of saying it was the last nail in the coffin? The true and final end of our Bond.

“You broke my lamp,” I said quietly.

His eyes flicked down to the shards. “It was a tacky little thing.”

“I liked it.”

His jaw set. “Then I shall scour the world for its duplicate.”

“Try
reallyuglylamps.com
.” I needed to swallow but my tongue was thick and hot. Something dry clicked in the back of my throat. “And technically, it's not tacky. It's shabby chic. It matches your snooty hundred year old lace curtains.”

Harry's eyes blazed anew with the need to correct me, but he held his comment back behind the wall of his teeth.

So that was it. I wasn't ever going to ask about his indiscretions, or his refusal to have sex with me. If there was a time to do it, it was now, but when the right words poured out of my brain and into my mouth, my heart leapt with terror and I couldn't make my jaw unclench. He was waiting, calmer now, his intensity fading from the room, and he no longer seemed the four hundred-year-old monster with centuries of manipulation techniques in his arsenal. He was just Harry, covered in lacework shadows, the guy who was handing me a Kleenex.

I took it. I wiped my nose. What could I say?

“Are you still hungry?” he said quietly.

I shook my head, no.

“Get some sleep. Call upon me if you need anything at all. I shall be in the kitchen seeing to our guests.”

I didn't watch him bow or leave the room, but stared at the curtains as though they were suddenly the most important thing in the world. It occurred to me then that our yelling must have been
overheard by my brother's new revenant acuity, and that two FBI agents in the next room got an earful. To their credit, they had given us our privacy, even after they must have heard the lamp shatter.

I bent to look at the mess and my eyes filled with tears like they'd only been waiting for gravity. I pinched my lips inward and swallowed hard. The lamp had fallen into a wiggling spot of ghoul sludge, but that was the least of my problems. I thought about just kicking it under the bed, slippery stuff and all, to worry about it in the morning. There were tiny pieces of light bulb glass winking in the moonlight that streamed through my window. I reached for them stupidly, and hissed when a tiny splinter pricked my fingertip. I couldn't believe I'd gotten into the habit of walking around without my gloves.

The bedroom door opened again almost as soon as it had clicked closed and Harry stormed back in, his presence a cool eddy through the room.

“Is everything all right? Where are Batten and Chapel?”

“They went for a drive,” he said curtly, clutching his hands together and pressing them over his midriff. “Stupid, considering what may be waiting outside, but they had one collective leg out the door already, and would not be dissuaded.”

“Oh.” I had no other words. “And Wesley?”

“Resting. Exhausted.” He knew this simply by aiming his focus through the floor.

“Oh.”

“This is all wrong,” he insisted. “My stomach is an out-and-out knot, and so is yours. It's perfectly insufferable.”

He paced, using his middle fingertip to repeatedly smooth his eyebrow to the piercings, and then swung around to gaze down at me, his inhumanly entrancing face inscrutable. I swallowed back heady panic in my chest and tried to convince myself that I didn't feel like vomiting. His calculating measurement said he wasn't going to let it go; the conversation I didn't want to have was coming and there wasn't anything I could do to stop it now.

“Are you quite well?” Harry asked, knowing the answer. “What is the matter with your finger?”

“Just a prick. My painkillers are wearing off again,” I side-stepped. “I should have timed them better. I missed my afternoon dose.”

“I will help you find comfort with a neck massage.” He removed his onyx cufflinks and tossed them on the nightstand. Rolling his French cuffs to the elbow exposed the black calligraphy tattooed on his wrist.

I caught his cool wrist in my hand and turned it to the moonlight. My name. I looked up at him, shaking my head at myself.

“It has not changed.” He assessed me seriously. “Did you think that it had, or ever would?”

“I don't know what to think anymore.” I closed my eyes tightly so the tears wouldn't return.

“Lay your silly head down, and let me rally round your battlefield.” He massaged his knuckles and cracked them, motioning for me to turn to my stomach so he could give me one of his famous neck rubs that melted a body to the core. But I stayed upright, cross-legged in the tangle of blankets, damp-eyed and nervous. If he wanted this confrontation now, I needed to stop being a pansy, pull up my big girl panties and just say it.

“If you really want to help me Harry, then answer this,” I said, summoning my courage. “If I lived up to your expectations, if I did everything you wanted and more, if I made myself the perfect DaySitter, then would you make love to me, like you did all the others?”

He measured me with his unblinking gaze, going very still.

“Would you take me to your bed, Harry, or your casket, or the goddamn floor, or your friggin’ antique bondage restraints, or wherever the hell you want to do me?”

We stared at one another in silence.

“Is that a no?” I demanded, my voice thick.

Finally, he let his chin fall, and barely above a whisper he told me, “You're not ready.”

THIRTY-FOUR

It wasn't what I expected to hear. I opened my mouth to grill him and he spilled his voice into the bedroom, his words coming quickly and anxiously.

“And when I say that you are not ready, please do not mistake it for inflated ego, for it is concern for your well-being that stays my hand. The repercussions of intimacy could be disastrous, not only physically but psychically, to our Bond, to my very soul and yours, and before you yell at me again, let me promise you that if I could explain better, I would.” He nailed me in place with his battleship-serious stare. “If only I could trust you with this responsibility… yet, it simply is not possible. You are so very unpredictable, stubbornly impulsive. With everything so uncertain in our life right now, to add the element of… no. It cannot be allowed.”

“Element of what?”

“It cannot be allowed.” Frustrated with his inability to speak his mind, he huffed like a cold dragon of the grave, and I said softly, “Don't grind your teeth, you'll snap a fang.”

“Nevertheless, I cannot allow you to continue this ridiculous self-punishment routine, can I? Demanding further intimacy from me, blaming my refusal on some imaginary physical dislike, then suffering to waste your sweet, precious attentions on this ham-fisted jugulator, this, this…” He sniffed indignantly, unable to find words. “Carrion hunter with a chevril conscience and carlot's wardrobe. I've allowed your unchecked, unchided doggerybaw for far too long. Won't you spare us both this madness?”

He scratched the back of his neck and when I didn't respond, he dropped his hand helplessly in his lap. “My only love, there is nothing wrong with you; you are perfectly marvelous in so very many ways. Why do you think I picked you?”

I opened my mouth and tried to catch wind with it, but my lungs seemed to be malfunctioning. “I…I really have no idea. We all thought you were going to pick my father.”

“Violet thought so too,” he admitted, reaching for one of my hands, pulling it to his kneecap. “Until that Thanksgiving when we made the trip from Paris on a mini-break to the farmhouse in Virgil, and stayed for the weekend. For Thanksgiving dinner. When you made the pie?”

I remembered making pie once and only once: pumpkin pie from scratch, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I didn't remember Harry coming for dinner. Ever. I remembered Grandma Vi coming alone. I searched back, floundering, the memory lost, blocked or stolen. Harry diagnosed the look on my face.

“Oh, I was not invited inside,” he explained. “I was not welcome at the time, as your mother was uncomfortable. Violet asked me to wait at the hotel while she had a visit, however my curiosity got the best of me, and I came as far as the back yard. I knew she was discussing me, could hear the dulcet song of her recognizable voice within, in melody with those who sounded fond and familiar to her. I knew that in that sprawling farmhouse, its windows on fire with light and warmth, welcoming to her but not yet to me, there was someone who might serve me in the future, and that Violet would help guide my decision when it came time to figure who that might be.”

I shook my head. “I don't understand. Grandma Vi came for dinner, and you waited outside, in October, in the cold and dark, for hours without meeting us?” At his nod, I shook my head some more. “If you didn't come in, how did you know about the pie?”