High Stakes (Vegas Vampires #1)(50)
Author: Erin McCarthy

The prosecutor’s office was still mostly male territory, and she worked with male criminals. Being the blond broad, as her boss had once eloquently called her, was something she enjoyed.Most of the time.

At the moment, she just wanted to curl into Ethan Carrick and let him support her. Let someone take care of her for a change.

Ethan rubbed Alexis’s back and murmured words of comfort. He felt bloody helpless. Women crying had always bewildered him, because they cried over everything.Happy tears, sad tears, laughing tears, manipulative, angry, and fake tears.Tears of pain. It was hard to believe just how much pain he had witnessed in his very long lifetime.

Yet only one other woman’s tears had moved him the way Alexis’s did.

After his turning, he had gone home, toEngland , and arrived right after his sister’s death. His mother had stood over Gwenna’s body as a woman who had buried all her children, and assumed her oldest son was lost in the Holy War. Silent, stoic tears had trailed down her pale cheeks. Ethan had felt at that moment that his heart had been torn out of his body and hacked by a sword.

He felt that same way now. He couldn’t help Alexis, couldn’t Wake it better for her, and that was a man’s pain.

"I’m sorry that the woman who gave birth to you didn’t know how to be a mother." He brushed his lips over the soft, silken brands of her hair. "But I would imagine that if someone had asked

Bill, he was glad to have been part of your life. I would imagine he wouldn’t have changed that, despite the outcome."

Her sobs had quieted down to gulping tears. "I guess I know that."

"And I guess you know that you give the woman who gave birth to you too much control over your life. She doesn’t deserve that much attention." She hadn’t deserved to be a mother at all, but that was one of life’s mysteries Ethan would never understand.

"I guess I know that, too. But it’s not all that easy, you know."

"I’m sure it’s not. But I have learned through the years that sometimes we make things more complicated than they need to be." He played with the waistband of her skirt and rubbed his thumb-over the small of her back, amazed at the depth of what he felt for this woman. "I’m sorry if I moved too fast for you, but I think I’m at the point in my life where I can trust my feelings and instincts. I’ve lived long enough to know real versus imagined, and what I feel for you is real. You’re the first woman I’ve asked to live with me."

Neither had he ever told a woman he loved her and truly meant it, but he didn’t think he could say that without sounding like a cad. Yes,with you those words have meaning, but all the other women before got exaggeration in the course of seduction . That wouldn’t exactly win his case.

Nor could he really explain why he hadn’t asked her to marry him. For all his self-realization, something had made him stop short of that, and he was fairly certain it was because he expected her rejection.

"I didn’t mean to rush you, Alexis. It’s just that I look at you and I think, damn, she’s just perfect for me.Absolutely perfect. I’ll never be bored, never stop laughing,never stop desiring her. Do you understand what I mean?" And she’d said he wasn’t a touchy feely kind of guy. He was feeling pretty goddamn poetic at the moment.

Not to mention sweating vampiric bullets. God’s teeth, it was painful to lay your heart out on the table for a woman to toss onto the floor.

But he couldn’t hide his feelings, didn’t want to. He meant what he’d said. When you lived nine hundred years, you knew what you wanted when you found it. Alexis was born to be his mate—the one woman who could lock him out of her thoughts, and the one woman who could drop him to the floor, literally.

"I understand what you mean." She talked to his chest, her voice raspy, but she had definitely stopped crying. "But a decade or so is all we’d have, Ethan, and I just can’t give you that much ofmyself then watch you walk away. I can’t."

He sighed, burying his chin in her hair, disbelieving. He couldn’t have found her, only to never really have her. That he couldn’t accept. He would take whatever she was willing to give. "So what can we have?"

"Now.We can have now.This week. Until theelection’s over, which is what, six weeks? I can’t promise anything beyond that, Ethan, I just can’t."

The blood in her veins flowed frantically with the rapid beat of her heart. He could smell her fear, a sickly sweet odor that clung to her skin. He didn’t want to be the source of that, but he couldn’t wing himself to drop the subject either. It felt too cruel just to accept the crumb of six weeks with her.Six bloody weeks in a life that would last another thousand years. Fifty-two thousand weeks this time with her would be nothing. It would be everything.

"Let me turn you." The words were barely out beforehe regret- tedthem. He’d never offered the Dark Gift to anyone before it was a temptation too great for most mortals to refuse and he didn’t want to think that the lure of immortality was what brought Alexis to him. That .she’d chosen eternal life instead of just him, freely and without doubt.

She moved back away from him and stared. "Are you crazy? Did you drink bad blood? Straight from the psych ward blood? If I became a vampire, I would have to quit my job. I wouldn’t be able to play with the kids Brittany’s going to have someday. I wouldn’t be able to eat chocolate. No, I absolutely do not want to be a vampire."

Pushing on his shoulders, she stood up and wiped her swollen eyes. "You knowwhat, I need to go to work. We can talk about this tonight. I’ll be ready at eight, okay?"

Alexis tossed her hair back, blotted her lips and under her eyes with her napkin, then grabbed her purse and rushed out of the room, the door gently gliding shut behind her with a soft snick.

"Smooth, Carrick." He scratched his chin and rubbed his chest. There was a pain there that must be residual aftereffects of the shooting.

No wonder he’d never proposed or professed love to a woman before. He’d completely botched the whole job.

He’d sounded desperate and ridiculous.Impulsive and weird.

And he couldn’t even blame it on bad blood.

It was love.

Master Vampire reduced to idiocy by his romantic heart.

How cute. Why didn’t he just wear a smiley face button white he was atit.

Ethan threw Alexis’s abandoned bowl of fruit across the room, satisfied when it crashed through the glass of his balcony door, juice and shards flying with appropriate drama.

Then he realized that the bowl itself, a white ceramic job, had gone hurtling over the balcony, and would be landing on the Strip—and possibly someone’s head—in a second or two.

"Shit." Ethan ran across his room and jumped off the balcony in a swan dive, grabbing the bowl as it flew past about the tenth floor.