Bled Dry (25 page)

“You’re still protecting him,” Ethan accused.

Face turning a mottled pink, Gwenna frowned at him. “I am not! I just know him. And he is capable of a lot, but hurting a pregnant woman or a baby is not his style.” She turned to Alexis. “You have to believe me, Alexis. I have my eyes open wide when it comes to Roberto, but I think we should discuss this with him. Pay him off. Money talks with him, and if he already knows the truth, it’s better to go on the offensive than the defensive. He can be reasonable.”

Alexis had spent too many years in criminal justice to think that someone capable of one crime wasn’t capable of an even bigger one. It wasn’t as big of a leap for a morally bankrupt person as most people thought. “If you trust him, why did you hide your daughter from him?”

Gwenna gasped, all color leeching from her cheeks.

Way to foster a relationship with the in-laws. But Alexis thought it was a legitimate question.

Ethan’s cell phone rang and he dug it out of his pocket. “It’s Seamus. Let me grab this.”

As he moved across the room, Alexis sighed. “Look, that didn’t sound right... ”

“It’s a legitimate question. And the truth is that I was young and foolish, and did whatever my brother thought was the right action to take because I had never made any decisions on my own. I was heartbroken and convinced Roberto had seduced and abandoned me, that I was nothing but a momentary diversion to him. I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him at the time the babe was born, and Ethan assured me he was missing. My daughter only lived twenty-five years, during which time I never saw Roberto. When I met him again hundreds of years later, he remembered me, professed love for me. And he did, in his way. I married him, but I never told him about our daughter, because it hurt to speak of her, and there are some things you don’t say to Roberto, do you understand? He would never have forgiven me, so I kept quiet. It was fear, yes, but not the fear you imagine.”

“I’m sorry.” Alexis didn’t know what else to say. Her social skills basically sucked. Brittany would know how to be comforting, but Alexis was better at kicking ass. “You don’t have to say anything else; it’s none of my business.”

Gwenna smiled. “It’s not for you to be sorry. I want to be honest, and I want you to understand. I left him because I know that he is lacking in morals, that he has flaws that cannot be ignored, that he can be cruel and violent. I don’t kid myself. But he does have lines he will not cross, and trust me, he won’t hurt the baby.”

“We have a spot of trouble,” Ethan said, returning his phone to his pocket, expression grim.

“Wonderful. What now?”

“The opposition has just announced their candidate for president. It is Gregor Chechikov.”

“Gregor?” Gwenna started. “I thought he never left Russia anymore.”

“So did I. But he is here in Vegas, and ready to hit the campaign trail. With his new mortal wife.”

“What’s so special about this guy?” Alexis asked, annoyed that everyone else had about a millennium of knowledge she didn’t possess. She needed to sit down and read the CliffsNotes on vampire history.

“Let’s just say he’s not a nice guy. I’ve never had the misfortune to run across him personally, since he has stayed out of politics for the last several hundred years, but he is something of a vampire legend. A cult figure for vampire arrogance and population growth.”

Alexis didn’t like the sound of that. “So people will actually vote for him?”

Ethan nodded, lips pressed tight together, shoulders taut. “And he has a very real chance of winning. Which means I will have no governmental power to protect Brittany and the baby. Or even Atelier’s research, for that matter.”

The blood she’d had for dinner soured in her stomach. “That’s it. We’re putting her in a vampire witness protection program. We’ll change her identity and move her to Alaska. Christ, Ethan. How hard would it have been for him to use a condom?”

Mothers had probably been asking that about their daughter’s defilers since the Egyptians.

But Brittany was a big girl who had made her own choices and Alexis hated it.

It took Brittany all of three seconds to decide to go wake Corbin up. He could sleep later, she needed answers now.

Leaning over him, she touched his arm, intending to gently shake him awake. But the minute she made contact, Corbin’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm in a steely grip and twisted it up and away from him.

“Ow, Corbin!”

His eyes had sprung open, and the second he saw it was her, he let go. “I am sorry. Are you all right? It is a reflex, instinctive, from my days as a soldier. And perhaps it is a vampire trait.”

Sitting up, he rubbed at her arm, kissing it, looking sleep warm and tousled. “What is wrong? Did you need me for something,
ma chérie
?”

Brittany allowed herself half a second to enjoy the way his tongue felt traipsing across the inside of her palm, then she gently extracted her hand. “Your computer was beeping, making all kinds of a racket. I didn’t want it to wake you up, so I went to see if I could stop it.” Okay, that was kind of a lie, but her nosiness wasn’t the issue at the moment.

“You didn’t touch anything, did you?” he asked, pushing the sheet completely off him.

“No.” Maybe she had touched the plastic bag, but geez, she wasn’t stupid enough to start clicking buttons on his computer. Okay, she had just said that’s what she’d gone to do. Which she hadn’t. She’d gone to be nosy and see what was in there. Not that she needed to explain herself. He needed to explain himself.

“Good.” He sighed in obvious relief.

“Why is there one of my hairs on your desk? And is that my DNA on your screen?”

Yeah, that was guilt. He looked down at his feet, hands on his bare knees. “I have run your DNA, yes, to isolate the vampire gene. It is just better to have some rudimentary knowledge of your sequence before the baby is born.”

That sounded like half an answer. “Why? And didn’t it occur to you that you could have asked for my cooperation? Discussed this with me?”

“No, that did not occur to me.” Corbin stood up, bare-chested and gorgeous, damn him.

His boxer shorts clung high on his hips, bunched up, before dropping down to cover his thighs. “Brittany, I have made every decision for the last two hundred years entirely on my own, with no thought to anyone else’s opinion. I am not used to discussing what I view as inconsequential. You will have to forgive me, and I will have to try to adjust.” He brushed a kiss on her lips, his hands on her shoulders. “We will have to remember that it will take time to learn how to be together. Especially for me.”

That was all fine and good, but the weightier question had yet to be asked. “Who is RD1021?”

“What?”

Brittany felt her panic rising like a balloon in her chest. Did she really want to know who her father was? And why the hell was it any of Corbin’s business, or his decision to uncover that truth? “In your database. It’s bad enough that you were analyzing my DNA without telling me, but you had no right to conduct a search for my biological father without asking me how I felt about it.”

“Brittany... ”

He reached for her, but she pulled away, putting her arms over her chest. “Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe it’s irrelevant to me, and I’ve been fine without a father. And now you’ve taken that decisiosn away from me. RD1021 is my father, and now I feel like I have to know who that is.” It had been easy to walk around not caring who her father was when there was no possibility of ever learning his identity, but now she had to know his name, and that scared her. The reality was he could be a jerk, dead, insane, creepy—and that DNA was in her, and in her child.

“There was a match?” Corbin said.

About to answer, she suddenly realized she was standing in the room by herself. “Corbin? Where the hell are you?” And could he piss her off any more?

“Sorry,” he called from the other room. “I’m in the lab. I cannot believe there was a match so quickly. This is fantastic.”

Said he. Brittany fast-walked into the other room in her sleep shirt, glancing at her watch. She was going to be late to the office in about another twenty minutes, but she needed answers. Like who her father was and why Corbin looked like he could turn a vampire cartwheel. He was grinning.

“This is good, very good.”

“Why?” Brittany went up to where he was leaning over the computer, using the mouse to click on something. She touched his shoulder, squeezing hard. He didn’t seem to understand she was annoyed. “Can you please tell me what is going on? Why do you care who my father is?”

He didn’t answer, just kept clicking and scrolling and scanning with his eyes, at one point his finger running down the screen.

Brittany went from annoyed to dangerous female. She inserted herself between the computer and him, knocking his leg out of the way and bending over to face off with him. “I want answers, Atelier, and I want them now. Why did you do this search? Why does it matter who my father is?”

Corbin looked startled. “For the child, of course. Because your father may be politically powerful or he may be inconsequential. That matters in regard to what he can do for our child.”

Brittany leaned back, not sure what to make of that. “I don’t care about getting our baby into a paranormal Princeton. I’m not going to make contact with a man I’ve never met just so he can grease wheels for our kid.”

His fingers drummed on the armrest of his office chair, and he stared to the right, not looking at her.

It hit her that he was lying. Just flat-out lying to her. She knew him well enough now to see it in the subtle shifting of his mouth, his lips flat together, the way he wouldn’t meet her eye. The stiffness of his shoulders. She shook her head, rubbing her temples. “Why else does it matter? You’d better come clean with me right this minute or I’m walking out this door and not coming back.”

Swinging his head back, he stared at her. “You cannot!”

“I can and I will.” Even with tears stinging the back of her eyes, she managed to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I deserve respect, Corbin. I’m not afraid of being alone. I never have been. I would rather be on my own than in a relationship that isn’t honest.”

She gave him a minute to decide. He tried to see around her to the screen, but she moved to block his view.

“Damn it,” he said, falling back against the chair. “Do not do this.”

There was no point in responding to that. Brittany just waited.

He gave a sigh of extreme irritation. “All right then, listen to me. You have to understand that I thought it was safer not to divulge all my concerns to you initially.”

Okay, so he’d chosen to lie to her. Not an auspicious beginning. “What concerns?”

Clearing his throat, he finally looked at her. His expression chilled her insides, a shiver rippling over her in a waterfall effect.

“If our child has the genetic conclusion I think he will, then he will be immortal, but will not need to feed.”

Immortal? Brittany tried to process that. But Corbin wasn’t finished.

“When the birth of our child becomes general knowledge, there will be those who want him. For research. To figure out how to reproduce such genetics again. Because a man who is immortal, with all of the strength of the vampire, and none of the vulnerabilities of needing blood and night dwelling, represents a new race, and ultimately power. Do you understand? That is why I stayed away from you. I did not want anyone to know that the child was mine. I thought I could enter your life publicly later in your pregnancy, letting everyone assume I was not the father, and I could marry you to protect our child. And who your father is could assist us in protecting our child, as well as give us clues to gauge exactly what the child’s abilities will be.”