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“I want to know how you survived. Look at you.” Lord knew she was looking hard enough at him. “You’re perfect. Not a scrape, not a bruise.” She moved closer. “How, Luke? How can that be?”
“You know what I am, Sara.”
“You fed.” She closed her eyes. “Oh, God…”
“Sara.” His hand clutched her wrist.
“Tell me.” She looked up, saw the pain and regret on his face. “Tell me now before I find out some other way.”
“I fell to your pool deck,” he said. “And, yes, I was injured.” He looked hard at her. “The damage could have healed with time. But I did not have time.”
“The furlough,” she said, and he nodded.
“Do you know what heals a vampire, Sara?”
“Blood,” she said, then closed her eyes.
“There was a girl.”
“Oh, God.”
“Sara.”
She shook her head. “Give me a second. Give me a second to get my head around this.” She forced herself not to close her eyes. Not to imagine him, mangled and broken beside the pool. And, God help her, she forced herself not to wish that it had been her at his side to help him heal. “Is she alive? This girl?”
“Yes. She will be fine.”
Something in his voice caught her attention. “Tell me.”
“The hunger was upon me,” he said, and she recalled the raw need she’d seen on his face before she’d punched the panic button. “I had…lost control, was still in the throes of that need, that hunger, when I drank from the girl. Annie.” He drew in a breath. “I took too much,” he said. “Took her close to death.”
“What did you do?”
“A vampire’s blood heals,” he said. “I gave. She drank.”
He closed his eyes, and for one single, shame-filled moment, Sara despised the woman, this girl who had shared something so horribly intimate with Luke.
Disturbed and embarrassed, she looked away, not wanting to picture him cradling the girl, helping her, keeping death at bay. She tried to focus on his file, on all the people he was suspected of killing. The list was long and colorful, yet it was this girl who filled her thoughts.
“You were almost out of time,” she said. “Why save her?” Why save one girl when he’d so boldly killed so many others?
“Because she was innocent,” Luke said, and for a moment, a brief, fleeting moment, Sara had a fresh glimpse into the heart of the man.
“Will she…” She tried to imagine the horror of being thrust into that world, feeling the dark serpent rise. Of becoming the very thing that had killed her father. “I mean, will she be a vampire, too?”
“No.” The word was quick and sharp and said with such force that she took a step back. “I gave her only enough to keep her safe until help arrived. I would not turn her. I—” He broke off, and though his voice remained steady she saw the pain on his face, and she wondered.
“Luke,” she said, stepping forward, wanting to comfort even though she didn’t understand. Her fingers brushed his, the contact enough to fire her senses, and then the door burst open.
She jumped back, guilty, as the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life got right in her face.
“What the fuck are you doing with my client?”
“Nicholas…” Sara didn’t miss the warning in Luke’s voice. Neither, apparently, did his advocate.
“Dammit, Luke—”
“No,” Luke said. “I chose to speak to her on my own. I’ll not have my judgment questioned.”
