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“No, I love it. Half the vampires in the syndicate are horrified that a slayer is their new prima, but they can’t say anything because of Brien. It feels like no one but Talon and Cain tells me what they’re really thinking. They just say what they think I want to hear.”
I hadn’t looked at it from her perspective. Maybe this friend-thing went both ways because it sounded like Twilight could use a friend, too. I flashed my middle finger at those clueless vampires. “Well, fuck them, then.”
She burst out laughing. “My friend Renata’s going to love you.”
“Who’s Renata?”
“Another slayer. Except now she’s the Paris Syndicate princess—and mated to Zaq Kral.” Twilight made a comical face. “It’s complicated. Let’s just say she’s not the princess type.”
“Well, good for her. Zaq Kral is hot.” The middle Kral brother was a gorgeous, fallen-angel of a man with sun-streaked brown hair and green eyes.
“Don’t tell Renata that. She’s wicked good with a switchblade.”
“Noted.”
Twilight raised her wineglass to me. “To friends.”
I touched my mug to it. “To friends.”
22
Talon
I paused outside Eden’s door, an insulated picnic bag in my hand, edgy as a guy on a first date. I blew out a breath.
You’re thirty-nine years old, for fuck’s sake, and Eden’s just a thrall.
I’d stashed her in a private suite like a sultan with a harem of one, restricted her movements, confiscated her money. Yeah, it was punishment, but the vampire in me enjoyed having her on a short leash.
Now, though, I hungered to move on. To make her happy. To have her laugh with me like she did with Rio, loud and uninhibited.
Because Eden wasn’t just a thrall to me, was she? She was…more.
“I want to get back what we had.”
That night she’d told me that, I’d figured it’d never happen. But now I wanted it, too.
I’d always liked Eden, but her time away from the island had changed her. She was more mature, with unexpected layers. Look at how she’d more or less adopted Rio. A street rat, and she’d taken him into her apartment, housed him, fed him.
Believed in him, which I knew from experience was what he’d needed most of all.
The old Eden wouldn’t have done it. At least, the Eden I’d thought I’d known wouldn’t have.
And this new, more complex Eden drew me like a bee to honey. I itched to peel those layers away and find the woman at their heart. Itched to know her better.
But it wouldn’t happen unless I opened up a little myself. Showed her that I cared about her, that she wasn’t just an obligation.
So I’d pulled Twilight aside to see if she had any ideas, and she’d suggested a picnic. Which was why I was loitering in the passageway, clutching a snack packed by Rio.
Enough.
Disgusted with myself, I unlocked the door with a wave of my hand over the sensor and went inside.
Eden was on the living room couch, frowning down at the beaded fabric in her lap. Her light blond, black-tipped hair had grown out in the three-and-a-half weeks since I’d brought her back to Lilith Island, giving her a softer, just-out-of bed look.
My dick twitched.
Picnic first, damn it.
