Page 60 of Once Bitten, Twice Mine

She had a million more questions, but didn’t want Valeria to put her walls back up, so she had to choose wisely to avoid being shut out again.

“Must it be human blood?”

“No.”

She waited for elaboration, but none ever came. Part of her wanted to beg, to cry at her feet to get her to stop choosing human blood. To feed from any other source she could, but she couldn’t bear to have her desperation met with apathy. Not when she had already so callously compared humans to cows.

Valeria sighed and moved over on the bed. “Get up here. I can smell how tired you are.”

Caroline knew that was her cue to leave. She was exhausted and wanted nothing more than a good night’s rest in her own bed, but against her better judgment she crawled into Valeria’s bed. Their knees brushed, but neither pulled away.

“I won’t go out tonight.”

“What?”

“I won’t…hunt. I’ll stay in with you all night and hold you while you sleep.”

Caroline nodded. It wasn’t a real solution to their problems, but it would get them through to the next dawn. Then she had until tomorrow’s sunset to figure out what—if anything—she wanted to tell Dr. Murnau. They were trapped between two worlds, but none of that mattered when she was in her arms.

CHAPTER 17

“Miss, you should wake up,” Lucy said softly.

Caroline rolled over, frowning. Typically, Lucy didn’t wake her because she was an early riser. By the time Lucy entered with her breakfast, she would have wiped the sleep from her eyes and shaken off all the grogginess from waking up. She froze. There was no sunshine dancing across her face or fluffy pillow beneath her head. Her eyes snapped open.

She wasn’t in her room. This was Valeria’s room. And Lucy was there.

“Lucy, what are you doing here?”

“I’m attending to Lady Valeria, as you asked. I always see to her before going to you.”

Valeria slept beside her, which meant it was sometime after dawn, so Caroline was on her own, her brain scrambled for a decent excuse as to why she was in another woman’s bed. At least they were both clothed.

“What am I doing here?”

Lucy paused for a long while. “I’m not sure. I expect only you would know such a thing. Or Lady Valeria.”

“But she’s asleep,” Caroline said, cringing at how absolutely daft she sounded, but she couldn’t think of anything better to say.

“It was good of you to come in and visit your friend last night. I know she gets lonely being the only one awake, and you two were gossiping until late into the night when you both fell asleep.”

Oh, Lucy was good at this. She nodded, grateful for the lifeline her maid had thrown to her. “Yes, but now I can go back to my room and continue with my day as if nothing happened.”

Lucy held out her hand and helped her from the bed. Caroline desperately wanted to look behind her to see Valeria one last time. To see if she fell asleep facing her, or had an arm stretched out, or to touch her one final time before she started her day, but she couldn’t do any of those things with Lucy there.

Her breakfast tasted of nothing as she woodenly ate while waiting for Lucy’s questions to start, but they never came. Instead, her maid chattered on about her usual topics of town gossip and who would host the next ball and whether or not the Fosters served cheap brandy when they hosted last.

“Mrs. Thomas said she dropped some mail off last night; have you seen it?”

“No.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “You can never tell her I said this, but she leaves things in the worst places,” she said as she went to the bedroom and plucked an envelope from the nightstand. “Really, she will just put things anywhere and expect us to understand her reasoning. Here.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking the letter from Lucy, but she still didn’t dare to look her in the eye. Even though she had proved herself to be a good, discretionary maid.

Edgar’s loopy handwriting adorned the front of the letter and—as guilty as it made her feel—she felt a stab of resentment that he was contacting her now.

He sent her another useless letter, and it made her want to scream. He wrote of how much he missed her and how he couldn’t wait until their souls were fused after they were wed. They were pretty words that she never expected to spill from him. Any other woman would cherish the words on the page, but she wished her practical fiancé would return.