Riker raked his hands over his face before pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes and going utterly still.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “It was cruel of me to bring it up. I shouldn’t have gone there.”
Very slowly, Riker’s head came up, but he didn’tlook in her direction. His hollow gaze was fo cused on the distance. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke?”
“Your apology. Humans don’t care about being cruel to vampires.”
Ouch. “I could say the same thing about vampires and cruelty to humans,” she said, resisting the urge to stroke her fingers over the scar on her neck, “but I know Terese cared about me. My apology is genuine,Riker. I don’t know what happened between you on the day Terese died, but I believe you loved her, and I’m sorry I said what I did.”
“Really.” His voice dripped with contempt. “And what makes you believe I loved Terese?”
Her cheeks heated at the memories. “I saw you,” she said quietly. “Sometimes when you’d sneak ontothe property to be with her . . . I’d see you.”
Still crouching, he pivoted and leveled a probing stare at her. “What, exactly, did you see?”
Oh, God, talk about awkward. “Um . . . at the time . . . I mean, I was just a kid—”
“What?” he barked. “What. Did. You. See?”
Your mouth on hers. Your hands roving tenderly over her arms, her stomach, her br**sts.
Those images had stayed with Nicole, becoming more meaningful as she matured. He’d been so very careful with Terese, which was why her death was such a shock, such a mystery.
“Just kissing. Touching,” she said, sounding stupidly girly and breathless. “Only once.” All the times after that when Nicole had seen them together, Terese had been pregnant, and the stolen moments with Riker had been tense.
Nicole chewed her lower lip, wanting to ask the question she’d held on to for twenty years, but now that she could, she wasn’t sure the answer would do anything besides devastate her. She spit it out before she could change her mind.
“How did she die, Riker? What happened that day?”
As if she’d just lit his fuse, he burst to his feet, fangs bared. “She was a f**king slave! That’s what happened! She was so damned miserable that she took her own life. Is that what you wanted to know? I went that day to break her out of there, but she wouldn’t go.”
Nicole stared blankly, unable to process what he’d just said. “I don’t understand,” she said, shaking herhead. “If you were there to rescue her, why did she kill herself?”
“Because your family destroyed her, Nicole. All she wanted at the end was to die.”
“But why wouldn’t she have gone with you?” This was crazy. He was lying. “She could have been with you and the baby.”
Swallowing, the tendons in his neck standing out starkly under his skin, he turned away. “She hated the baby, and she didn’t see a future for us.”
“Why not?”
“Because the baby wasn’t mine.” His words, sharp and edged with hatred, cut like an icy blade. “It belonged to your father.”
Chapter 11
“You lying bastard.” Her face stricken and pale as a corpse, Nicole backed away from Riker, her steps wobbly. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I know damned well that humans andvampires can’t breed.”
Riker shoved his hand through his damp hair.
“I didn’t mean that your father was the baby’s sire. I meant that it belonged to him. He created it. He wanted it for experiments or a breeding program or some shit. I don’t know.”
“Experiments. A breeding program.” Nicole’s voice was utterly fl at. Steamrolled of all emotion except doubt. “You’re saying that Terese was impregnated in a lab?”
“Impregnated is the polite, clinical way to put it.”
Riker looked out at the forest, hoping there were no hunters around, but at this point, he was feeling reckless, maybe even a little hopeful that he could release some tension with a good fi ght. Terese had never been a strong person, and being sold into slavery had weakened her even more. Then she’d disappeared for eight months . . . eight months in which he’d gone crazy, trying to find out where she was, if she’d beensold to another family, if she’d been killed. No one knew.
And then, one day, she was back at the mansion, heavily pregnant. At first, he’d been thrilled, assuming it had happened during one of their rare trysts. A boy, she’d said. But the thrill soon faded as he discovered that the female who used to be Terese was gone. The new Terese had two settings: angry and emotionless.
But the good news was that the Martins had exchanged her lethal perimeter-control collar with one
that would cause only a mild shock and unconsciousness if she crossed the invisible property barrier. Riker finally had a way of getting her out of there without killing her.
“I’m taking you home today. Myne, Baddon, and Ka-
tina are waiting behind the wall.”
“It’s too dangerous. I won’t let you do it.” Terese’s hands slipped under his jacket. “I won’t let you die for me.” She brought a dagger, lifted from his harness, to her throat.
The warrior in him, the male who despised weakness
and never stopped fighting, got really f**king pissed. “Dammit, female, what are you doing?” He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “I’m not worried about the danger, and I don’t plan to die. I’m taking you, and that’s final.”
A single drop of blood formed where the tip of the blade made a dimple in her pale skin. “Please, Riker. Don’t do this. Please.”
“We’ve got it figured out, Terese. We can do this. We have to. You’re due any day now, and I won’t let our son be born here.”
Terese stared blankly. “It’s not your baby, Rike.” There was no emotion in her words. It was as if she was reading lines from a book she didn’t even like.
It was Riker’s turn to stare, his brain having trouble processing what she’d just said. Finally, he managed to utter a few stunted, croaked words.
“Not mine? Whose?”
“I don’t know his name.”
Riker shook his head, still unable to think through the cobwebs. “You f**ked someone else? Was that where you were this whole time? With him?”
“I was locked inside a Daedalus lab.” Her gaze went
somewhere he couldn’t follow, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “There was a male in a cell. They put me in it with him.”
A slow burn started low in his belly. “And you . . .”
“I was restrained.”
Emotion consumed him . . . rage that Terese had been abused that way, self-loathing that he hadn’t been able to protect her, and sorrow that the child he’d been wanting so desperately wasn’t his.
But her confession explained so much, and even now, as he looked down at her swollen belly, he knew that what she needed right now wasn’t an explosion of fury that would terrify her. She needed comfort and reassurance, and he needed her and the baby— his baby, dammit—to be okay.
“Listen to me, Terese. Everything will be all right. I promise you. We’ll raise the baby as mine. I will be his father, and no one has to know.”
“I can’t!” she cried. “Don’t you see that I can’t do this? I don’t want this monster inside me. I don’t want the memories in my head.” She gave him a small, sad smile that chilled him for a reason he couldn’t pin down. “I’ve never been strong, not like you. You deserve better than to be saddled with me.
You always have.”
“That’s not true,” he croaked. “Our match wasn’t of our choosing, but I never regretted it.”
“That’s because you’re a good, decent male who doesn’t go back on his word. You made a commitment, and you kept it. But I release you from it now.” She pushed the tip of the blade deeper into her skin. “Please. Do it for me.”
“No! How can you ask that?” He squeezed her hand in an attempt to pull the knife away, but she didn’t budge.
“Dammit, Terese, we can do this. I’ll get you out of here. Once you’re home, you’ll see that it’ll all work out.”
Then he saw it in her eyes, something that had been there for weeks but that he’d denied with all his heart: lifelessness.
She’d lost the will to live. She was dead before he’d even arrived on the Martin property.
“Riker?” Nicole’s hand came down on his shoulder. He wanted to shrug away from her touch, but his body wouldn’t obey. “That day . . . the day she died, I heard her beg you for something.”
Bitterness welled up like acid, scorching his throat and putting a caustic edge on his words. “She begged me to not risk my life to rescue her. And then she begged me to kill her.” He’d been angry at her weakness, and now remorse threatened to eat him alive. He could have handled things so differently.
“When I wouldn’t, she did it herself. I think I couldhave talked her down or overpowered her, but a siren went off.”
Terese had panicked at the sound of the alarm and raised voices, and while Riker was distracted, she’d plunged the blade into her throat.
He didn’t see Nicole stiffen, but he felt it. “It wasn’t your fault.”
It was his fault, but he wasn’t going to shoulder the entire blame for Terese’s death. “No, it was yours.”
An odd, pained sound came from Nicole. “I—what makes you say that?”
“Because she wouldn’t have felt the need to kill herself if your family hadn’t made her a slave, treated her like a lab rat, and forced a pregnancy on her.”
Silence. Then some shuffling. A moment later, Nicole pressed something into his hand.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I loved Terese, and I know she loved me. She gave that to me the day she died, but I think . . . I think it belongs to you.”
Nicole started back toward the cave entrance, her hair damp and clinging to her neck and slumped shoulders. She looked as defeated as he felt.
Exhaling on a curse, he glanced down at his hand.
Lying in his palm was Terese’s ring.
----------------------------------
Nicole was shaking so hard that she stumbled as she approached the cave entrance. The ground came at her, but then Riker was there, hauling her up with his arms around her waist. She found her balance, but Riker didn’t release her, his grip sure but surprisingly—no, astonishingly—tender.
“Are you okay?” he asked gruffly.
For some reason, she couldn’t find her voice, could merely nod. As if he didn’t believe her, he stepped back and scanned her from head to toe, his gaze lingering a little too long on her neck. Damn her and her self consciousness, she reached up to cover the scarring.
Riker covered her hand with his and gently moved it aside. “What happened?”
A shudder ran through her. When he’d asked before, she hadn’t answered. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Riker had just opened himself up about Terese, a trauma that was surely far worse than hers.
“Vampire,” she murmured.
Frowning, he skimmed the pad of one finger over her neck, and an unexpected pleasant sensation ran through her. “That’s a lot of damage.”
“He was a . . .” She started to say that Boris was a servant, but Riker was right. Boris was a slave. Still, she couldn’t quite get the word past her lips. “He’d been defanged.”
Riker’s eyes flared, and she expected another blast of bitterness. “It must have been brutal.” When she didn’t reply, because she didn’t even have the words for how brutal it had been, he asked, “Did it happen during the slave rebellion?”
“Yes.” The memory, combined with the churning in her stomach that was only getting worse, sparked sudden anger. “No doubt you wish I’d been killed.”
“You were a child. You didn’t deserve what that vampire did to you.” He smoothed his finger over the skin of her throat. “My clan adopted rules of engagement a long time ago, and killing children goes against every one of them.”
Her anger flagged, and she glanced away, overwhelmed by everything that had happened since being kidnapped from her home. She’d learned more about vampires in the last twenty-four hours than in her en— tire twenty-eight years of life. And she was considered an expert in her field.
What a joke.
“What’s the matter?” When she said nothing, he hooked a finger under her chin and lifted her face so their gazes locked. “You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not that.” She took a deep, shuddering breath.
“It’s just . . .”
“Just what?”
“I was raised to think vampires were soulless monsters. Creatures that needed to be kept under strict control or they’d kill everything they could lay their hands on. And then I was told you’d killed Terese and my uncle, and after that came the slave rebellion.”
The memory of being attacked got all tangled with the way Riker was touching her, and her heart stuttered, as if it was having difficulty deciding between
fight and flight. Someone really needed to add freeze to the instinctive response options to stress. Fight, flight, or freeze.
“You said you loved Terese.”
“I did. And that’s the wrench in this whole mess.