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Of course, a new problem emerged since she really liked him being inside her mind. Her body heated up instantly, her breasts tingling.
He chuckled softly. You like me here.
Your scent is flowing from you.
I’m tempted all over again. Next time, be inside me like this.
He moaned. Okay, this isn’t helping.
It seems to take so little.
Right. She forced herself to breathe.
Focus on where you were born.
Good idea. She aimed her thoughts into the past, remembering her parents and living in Philadelphia Two in the early 1800s, in what was then, by comparison, a small town. Learning to fly, almost drowning when she flew too close to a lake and her wings got caught in the water, which had been a nightmare. Riding horses and loving it. Growing up and falling in and out of love. Learning to play the piano, expected of a woman in those days. Then choosing a life of travel for a long time, folding from town to town, getting to know her local American world, north and south, learning several languages.
She’d had itchy feet, never wanting to stay long in one place. She’d taken many lovers and felt Samuel tense when a lovemaking image would flow through her thoughts.
Then a close call with a death vampire in 1922, slain by a Militia Warrior, a man who had finally spoken to her heart deeply enough that she’d married him. Jeff Barker. The grief of being childless and overcoming that grief. Of living with him for decades until his death five-years-ago. How much she’d loved making their house a true home, which she still lived in, a small piece of property near the downtown Borderland. Without thinking, she fell into her grief, remembering how often she’d wept, screamed, shouted. At one point, she almost pulled back, but Samuel whispered through her mind, No, let me see it.
Please.
She felt his permission to just feel all that she had lost so she did. He caressed her hand at the same time. What surprised her was that as she remembered Jeff’s funeral pyre, Samuel’s presence within her mind became a tremendous comfort.
He even reached for her and pulled her on top of him and held her in his arms as once again she wept for the man she had loved and lost to the war.
Somewhere in that shedding of grief, Samuel withdrew from her mind so that when she stopped crying she felt an emptiness that stunned her. But he cradled her gently, the heat of his male body soothing her. She sighed heavily.
“You loved him. ”
“So very much. But thank you for being with me like this. I don’t feel quite so heartsick right now. ”
“Good. You’re an amazing woman. ”
“No, I’m not. ” She chuckled. “I’m just me. I know I don’t have Havily’s style and ambition or Endelle’s flamboyance and power. I don’t see myself fitting in with these incredible women. I’m just me. ”
“Then you don’t see yourself clearly, how you picked up and left home to travel at a time when even female ascenders didn’t move around all that much. And then when you married your warrior, how you gave yourself completely to marriage, nothing held back. That’s a great quality to have. ”
“But I have to work at it. The reason I traveled the way I did wasn’t just because I thought it would fun or enriching, but because when I almost drowned I became afraid of the world and afraid to live. Traveling was a way to overcome that. ”
“But don’t you see, most people don’t even take that step. They stay stuck.
Shit. ”
“What?”
“Like me. I’m stuck. This is the first time I’ve seen even a pinpoint of light at the end of this tunnel. ”
“Maybe it would be a good thing to at least try a mind-dive with me. I mean, you had a life before being captured.
Maybe you could just work to release those images. ” She felt his resolution, however, that he was determined to keep his years of torture from her. So, she let it go.
Instead, she asked him what his favorite food was - lasagna - and a dozen other things that he could answer freely, which he did. He’d been a Militia Warrior since his ascension out of St.
Louis One in 1908. He’d served as part of many civic policing forces throughout North America Two, battling death vampires in a squad of four warriors night in and night out.
He liked tequila, maybe a little too much. He spent plenty
