Bled Dry (Vegas Vampires #3)(60)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Before she could match his rhythm, or adjust her hips to meet his thrusts, he flipped over and pulled her on top of him, his hands cupping her br**sts, thumbs toying with her ni**les. Gripping the sheets, she leaned forward and moved on him, wanting him to recognize, to know, to see, what she felt for him. That some way or another, they would make it work. It did work, because they loved each other, and wanted a future.

The slick pressure on her clitoris as she rode him was agonizing, delightful, and the way he watched her, the way his eyes opened wider, the way he got a feverish wild look of pride, like he thought she was amazingly sexy, made her gasp, grind harder, deeper. And when she couldn’t take any more, when her emotion and passion overwhelmed her body, she came with a cry, locking eyes with him.

“Beautiful,” he said, cupping her cheek.

She sucked in air, tried to collapse on his chest, body still trembling, but he rolled her onto her side, and pulled her leg over his, opening her completely for him. Her br**sts brushed his bare chest, and he kissed her at the same time he pushed his erection into her. They were touching from forehead to feet, entangled together, locked in an intimacy so primal, so elemental, so extreme, that Brittany felt tears in her eyes. As he dug his nails into her naked thighs and exploded, a curse ripped from his lips.

“I love you, ma chйrie ,” he said. “I love you. For me, there is only you.”

Brittany hung on, her emotions perilously close to the edge, skittering toward what, she wasn’t sure. Closing her eyes, she cried, “I love you, too.”

It would always be like this, Corbin knew. Brittany had gotten up for the day after their lovemaking, while he had gone to sleep for a few hours. Now she was tucked back into the queen-size bed in Carrick’s guest room, and Corbin was up, roaming, ready for the night.

There was nothing to be done. He should be grateful they had what they did. That they were together, such as it was. That he would have a family, however spliced together. But it wasn’t gratitude he felt. It was anger, sadness, a creeping, debilitating sort of bitterness that crawled around the edges of his heart and made him want to throw things.

Instead of chucking Alexis’s vase sitting on a low table in their hallway, Corbin went into the living room, where Ethan was working on his laptop computer. He undid his wristwatch, and pulled it over his hand. That watch hadn’t come off his arm in forty years, but now he tossed it onto the table in front of Carrick.

“I am returning this. I consider my punishment over, my retribution fulfilled.”

Ethan looked at him. “You can’t do that. It’s not your right to decide that your punishment is over. It’s mine, and the tribunal’s.”

“I injected Gregor with my vaccine,” Corbin told him. “He will essentially be a mortal, whether he realizes it yet or not. And I suspect he’ll try to hide it—at least until the election is over.”

Almost dropping his computer, Ethan stood up. “You can’t just do that either!”

“I can and I did. He was a threat to my child, to Brittany, to the Nation. To our entire way of life. I neutralized the threat. And I do not regret it. I just thought you should know, as a courtesy.”

Corbin turned on his heel and headed for the door.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“To Paris.”

Or as close to it as he could get in the desert. When he was on top of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel, he sat down on a lit iron rung and looked at the Vegas skyscape. His parents had been exiles in England during the Terror, and he could still remember how his mother had longed for France, wept for the memory of Paris, expressed her impatience in all things that weren’t home. He knew that feeling, that frustration now. He wanted home. Paris. A family. The sun.

He wanted what he had had, what he could have with Brittany, if it were different.

The gift of immortality was one he had never asked for, one he had never wanted. He had been turned against his will, and had always regretted the change in his destiny. He still didn’t want eternity. What he wanted was Paris. Coffee and baguettes. The heat of the sun on his arms, the cold splash of the Seine on his face. Brittany and his child and a finite amount of time to make the most of his existence, to squeeze his worth into a half-century, and to never have to face an endless, gaping yawn of a future.

They could make it work as such. They would make it work. But it broke his heart that he would never see a school play, never watch his daughter on the soccer field, never see her chubby little legs pumping hard on the playground at noon, cheeks flushed with heat. He would have two hours a day with her, at most, and while he walked the night, she would be tucked into her crib, eyes closed to him.

Corbin wanted to sink into obscurity, to be a nameless number in the mass of humanity, who mattered only to his bride and baby. That wasn’t his calling, his destiny. He had a different life, and he would live it.

But on his terms.

“What if I told you… ” Corbin said, leaning over the railing, his words trailing off.

“What?” Brittany asked, sitting in a patio chair on Alexis’s balcony, fighting the urge to stand up and go to him. Corbin was acting strange, storming into the apartment and demanding to speak to her. Alexis would have told her that was par for the course with Corbin, but she knew him. Something was bothering him, something that had him edgy and brusque, and it was different than the way he had been the night before.

She wanted to hug him, to comfort him, but she didn’t want to distract him from whatever he needed to say. There couldn’t be any more withholding of important information from her.

He turned slightly, stared straight at her. “What if I told you I could be mortal again?”

Forget not standing up. She almost leaped off the balcony. “What!”

“What if I told you that, if you wanted it, I could give you that normal life, with a house in ze suburbs, and a husband who is home for dinner every night and attends all ze soccer games?”

“The vaccine?” she asked, pressing her hand to her chest because she had the sudden fear that her heart might actually catapult out of her body.

He nodded. “Yes. It is finished. And tested. On Gregor Chechikov.”

“That’s how you took care of Gregor?” Holy crap and then some.

“Yes.” And he looked a little smug over that fact. “I have a clean conscience. I protected my family and the Vampire Nation, yet I did not kill him.”

“Jesus. And you know he’s mortal now?”