AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her heart jackhammered now and she put her hand to her throat. She forced herself to breathe, but it wasn’t easy. She felt as though her entire life had been building to this moment.
As she gathered her forces, she had to overlook his almost dark expression. He hadn’t wanted to see her. For the past year, since Kyle’s death, he’d been avoiding her at every turn.
She’d finally forced the issue and demanded a conversation with him. She thought the Wild Boar a good place given its casual nature, neutral territory for a talk.
For a moment, as she drew close, however, she forgot everything she’d come to say. Instead, all she saw was him, the lines of his strained brow, his gorgeous brown eyes, his wavy blond hair that flowed away from his face. He wore it long like all Guardsmen and drawn back in a woven clasp for battle. In the shadows of the night, his eyes looked almost black. Over the years, she’d seen them in other kinds of light as well. In the early evening, the color appeared like amber and brown combined.
He was very handsome with strong cheekbones and full lips. His nose was slightly aquiline which gave him a predatory look, not a bad thing at all for a warrior in Mastyr Stone’s Vampire Guard.
Unlike Kyle, he was a full-blown mastyr and suffered as all the mastyrs did with chronic blood starvation. Intense, crippling stomach pain accompanied the rise to mastyr power. These men bore their condition with tremendous grace and Devyn was no exception. That his twin wasn’t also a mastyr was something of a mystery to Emily. Why did one brother have such power, while the identical twin didn’t?
He frowned slightly. “I don’t have much time, Emily. I’m sorry. I have another appointment.”
She’d heard a dozen excuses over the past year, just like this one. But she wouldn’t be put off. She had things she needed to say and tonight she would say them.
She gestured toward the door. “I thought we might have a drink together. We haven’t done that in a while.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his long black leather coat. It was Guardsman issue and had no sleeves, though underneath was a traditional long-sleeved woven shirt. The mid-calf length of the duster was sexy as hell especially combined with hip boots and leathers.
He glanced around avoiding eye-contact. “I don’t think so. Not tonight. Maybe another time.”
She decided she had to be bold. “I don’t believe you have another appointment, or a date, or anything. Surely, we can share a beer after all this time.”
His gaze shifted to her and his frown deepened almost to a scowl. “What do you want here, Emily?”
She took a step toward him, which brought her just a few inches away from his lips. Her gaze fell there and for a long moment she couldn’t respond.
She’d imagined his lips pressed to hers a thousand times. “What do I want? A beer and a little conversation.”
He huffed an annoyed sound. “Nothing can come of this and you know it.”
She recalled what she’d witnessed in the time-path. For whatever reason, Devyn was holding back. If he wasn’t going to invite her to sit down for a drink, she was going to have her say despite his resistance. She needed him to know the truth. “Kyle’s been gone over a year now and there’s something I want you to know. I’ve never told anyone this, but I was going to leave him. In fact, and this is very hard for me to say, I was going to tell him the night he died, but he never came home.”
Devyn’s gaze shot to hers. “You were leaving my brother? Why?”
She wanted to shout, ‘because I was in love with you’, but she knew it would only make matters worse. She suspected Devyn was carrying a heavy weight of guilt about his brother’s death.
Instead of addressing her feelings, she brought forward what she believed was the tougher issue. “Kyle and I didn’t suit, Dev. You must have seen that. He was lighter than air most of the time and I couldn’t bring him to ground enough to make sense of our life together. He was so much fun. But, after the parties and laughter, well … Do you want to know the truth? I was lonely.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get what you’re saying. You were basically living with him. I know you had your own house, but you were always at his. How can you say you were lonely?”
“You know how. He always had the remote in his hand and a beer in the other. Though the entire last year it was usually a bottle of single malt. Tell me you didn’t notice something was off as well.”
~ ~ ~
Devyn rubbed his chin, his gaze cast anywhere but on her face. This was the last thing he expected, to hear that Emily was going to leave Kyle. Not that it made a difference. He couldn’t be involved with her.
But, sweet Goddess, why did she have to smell like heaven? She was a springtime bouquet of flowers. Something about her scent, maybe the womanly part, streamed into his brain in a way that made it hard to think.
He believed he understood why Emily had reached out to him. Or at least he thought he had until she mentioned how she’d been planning to leave his brother.
“Did Kyle know what you intended?”
“On some level, he must have. He wasn’t happy, either.”
“You’re wrong about that. He told me you were the best thing that ever happened to him. If anything, he said he felt unworthy of you.”
“He said that?” She frowned. “But that means he spoke to you about us.”
