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She seemed to consider her next words before she admitted, “Nor did I want to be the one girl fashion designers looked at—after designing gowns for all the other females in the orchestra—and murmured, ‘what am I going to do with her’? I was five-foot-ten at the age of sixteen. Can you imagine how monstrous I felt?”
Jane stared at her for several quiet moments before she turned away. “Sure I can.”
She passed Drake and sat on the sofa, clasping her hands in her lap.
Drake was the only one to see the pain on Jane’s usually composed face. It caught him off guard, doubling the angst he felt. Shana’s admissi
on was a disconcerting one unto itself. Jane’s repressed agony was equally troubling.
He said, “You two are so similar.” And that’s when he understood the full impact of what Jane had seen or felt when she’d searched Shana’s soul.
Surprisingly, Shana deposited her purse once again and joined Jane on the sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said as she covered one of Jane’s hands with her own. “I didn’t realize… I mean, it didn’t occur to me. You can’t live a normal life either.”
“I did once,” Jane told her. “For twenty-six years. I liked being human, but I chose to become a vampire for…someone.”
“Drake?”
Jane let out a soft laugh. “No. We only met a few decades ago. I became a vampire not quite fifty years ago. A lover from Dublin, who was the most brilliant man I’d met—at that point of my life anyway.” She shot an appreciative look toward Drake before she continued her story. “We had a beautiful affair and when I found out he was a vampire, I wanted to live the rest of eternity with him. He felt the same. It was perfect.”
Shana’s brows knitted together. “Then what happened?”
“He was murdered. Stake through the heart. It truly does work.”
“Oh.”
Shana looked over at Drake. He said, “I didn’t know. It’s not something she’s shared with me before.”
“It’s rather bizarre,” Jane added, “but I never realized until tonight, when we met you downstairs, how much I miss being human. Not so much for the sake of being human, mind you. But…the warmth of it. The actual physical warmth.” She twined her pale-skinned fingers with Shana’s darker ones and lifted their hands to her chest, pressing them between the valley of her small breasts. With a genuine smile, she said, “There’s comfort in the human touch, along with a vibrancy I’d long since forgotten. It’s…electrifying.”
Chapter Five
Pleasure and pain walked hand in hand, no matter who you were. No existence, be it mortal or immortal, natural or supernatural, could escape the latter and revel purely in the former.
Shana could see that as clear as day as she gazed into Jane’s eyes and saw the torment she suffered from being “different” from humans and missing their warmth.
But more than that, she saw the relief of acceptance, which Shana easily recognized. It was something she’d sought her entire life, after all. She also saw the flicker of desire for that one thing Jane didn’t have access to—the human touch.
Again, Shana could not only easily recognize this…she could empathize with it.
“Your lover was human when you were first with him, wasn’t he?” she asked Jane.
“Yes. For several weeks. And then he went away for a while and when he came back…” She shrugged her shoulders. “I knew something was different about him, though I didn’t understand it. Yet we were still so in love that when he finally told me the truth, I wasn’t repulsed. I didn’t run away. I wasn’t scared.”
“Because you knew he wouldn’t hurt you.”
She nodded. “I could see it wasn’t easy for him. He had to fight the natural compulsion to drink my blood. But somehow he overcame that tendency by allowing other feelings and desires to overpower his bloodlust.”
Jane let out a long breath of air, as though she were expelling demons long imprisoned inside her. “I loved him with all my heart, please don’t get me wrong. I loved him so much that I begged him to make me a vampire, so that we’d never be apart. But I always missed his warmth. That special touch of a human that no vampire can replicate.”
Shana shook her head. “You’re wrong. I mean, not so much wrong, but…” She tried to find the words to explain how electrifying a vampire touch could truly be. “Drake has strength in his hands and virility that’s thrilling. And you,” she said to Jane, “you have a quiet strength. You look so delicate, but you’re powerful and that’s magnetic.”
Jane stared at her for several moments before saying, “You’re turning all of this upside down.”
“Jane.”
Drake’s deep voice made Shana’s gaze shift to him. “What am I turning upside down?”
“She sensed something about you that, quite clearly, resonates within her,” he said. “Something similar you both share, although I don’t think she knew it at first. She wanted to help you. But she can’t do that until she admits she needs help too.”
