Night's Promise (6 page)

She prayed he would hit her hard enough that she would at least lose consciousness rather than be forced to endure his touch.

A hand went over her mouth and, even though she knew she would pay for the action later, her fear of what he was about to do was too much for her to care. Clawing at the hand, trying to pull it away, she only managed to turn it slightly. Opening her mouth, she bit down on the hand as hard as she could.

A curse sounded through the room and one of her hands was pulled away, the motion much more gentle than anything she’d ever expected from her stepfather. A single finger was pried away from the rest, and Melissa wondered if he planned on breaking the digit as punishment for her bite.

Tears ran down her face and she whimpered, determined not to let him know just how bad he hurt her. Bracing herself for the pain, she was surprised when she felt her finger slide over his lips.

A shudder went through her body and she began to struggle again, harder. But his grip was firm. Her finger went between his lips and her entire body locked up as she felt the sharp fang. When her struggles eased, she heard a sigh.

“If I let you go, will you stop trying to rip me apart?”

A wave of relief swept over her, warming her blood from the cold panic that had washed through her. “Yes,” she croaked. “My-my light…”

“I think the bulb blew,”
Duncan’s voice came, followed by a clicking sound as he tried to turn the light on. “If you tell me where I can find them…”

“The closet. Just across from my room.”

She heard him step away and took the time to quickly pull on the pair of the jeans she always had beside her bed. She had a feeling
Duncan took more time than he really needed to get the bulb. That he was giving her the opportunity to collect herself.

By the time he came back in, she was dressed and feeling a bit more in control of her emotions. Melissa heard him unscrew one bulb and screw another in as she tried to figure out what to say. Brightness filled her room, allowing her to finally relax completely.

Looking at his scratched up face as he stood beside the bed, she felt guilty for having hurt him, even if the scratches were already beginning to heal.

“I’m so sorry,” she began, turning her back and reaching for the hairbrush on her dresser, just to have something to do.

“I’ll heal. Are you still going to tell me you aren’t having any trouble sleeping?”

“Who are you, my brother?” she asked nastily, before she could curb her temper. “What the hell were you doing in my bedroom anyway?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I got up to get a drink of water and I heard you cry out. Forgive me if I wanted to make sure you were all right. It was a mistake I won’t make again.”
Duncan turned to leave the room.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, staring down at the brush in her hand.

A quick glance at the door revealed
Duncan looking back at her, his hand poised on the knob.

“Look, I know it’s not easy to talk about shit when you wake up like that. But damn it, you need to talk to someone. If you refuse to talk to your own brother, and you won’t talk to me, you need to find someone you
will
talk to before whatever you’re running from destroys you.” There was a pause. “I won’t bother you again.”

Looking up, she watched as he left the room.

Her fingers automatically braided her hair into one long plait down her back as her mind went back to the horrible dream. As much as she hated to admit it, he could be right. He at least deserved to know that she’d had a nightmare about her mother.

With slow steps, she exited her bedroom and went down to the kitchen. She grabbed two of Gareth’s tall bottled waters from the fridge, then stuck her head inside the den and the living room before heading down to the guest room.

Knocking on the door, she waited a moment for
Duncan to respond. When no response came, she knocked again. “
Duncan, it’s Melissa,” she said, feeling a bit foolish.
Who else would it be, he knows Gareth isn’t home.

Waiting another minute with no response, she was turning away, assuming that he either really didn’t want to talk to her, or he’d fallen asleep pretty quickly, when the door opened.

He waved her inside. “Come on in.”

“Thank you. I thought you’d like some…” She handed him the water, trying not to notice that he was walking around in his boxers. “That’s a pretty cool tattoo. I didn’t know you guys could get tattoos. Gareth always said they wouldn’t last, something about your bodies rejecting them.”

“You have to use a special ink or it won’t take.” He lifted his hand to the claw marks forever ripping his flesh open. “A sorceress enchanted the ink for me. It isn’t very easy to do—it uses a lot of magick—so, not many vamps have them.”

Nodding as she opened her water, Melissa struggled to figure out what she should say.

“It was a nightmare,” she began lamely. “I was dreaming about my childhood. About…” Her voice caught. “About my mother.”

Remaining silent,
Duncan allowed her to talk. He could feel the grief rolling off her as she sat down on the bed. He knew how hard it must be for her to open up, and he wouldn’t rush her story.

“My mom died when I was fourteen. And life with my stepfather was…not easy.” She looked across the room, anywhere but at him. “I was dreaming about the day she died. About how much my life changed.”

He sensed her closing down. There was more to the story, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t tell him what was going on if he didn’t step in.

“I have trouble sleeping some days myself. I remember what I was like eighty years ago, and I’m not very proud of the things I did. I was a different person. I was the person people called if they had a ‘problem’ to take care of.”

“That doesn’t sound so horrible,” Melissa said, before taking a sip from her bottle.

“I was an assassin, Melissa. Of course, sometimes people called on me to simply scare someone into cooperating. I wasn’t a very nice man, and no one was ever happy to see me. Even the top crime bosses were afraid of me. I gave no man my allegiance, and all of them were terrified of the night I would turn on them. And they all knew, given the right price, I
would
turn on them.”

“That sounds like a rough life. Feeling like no one wanted you around, no one cared. You could have just walked away—simply disappeared one night and no one would have ever thought twice about what happened to you.”

“Tell me about it, Melissa,”
Duncan asked, his voice soothing.

“From the day my mother died until the night Gareth walked into my life, life wasn’t worth living. My stepfather…he used to hit me—never when my mother was alive, but after…” Melissa’s hand rose, cradling her cheek as though she’d just been hit.

“Did you tell anyone?”

She gave a cynical laugh and nodded. “Of course I did. I walked into school with my entire left cheek dark purple, clearly bruised. They pulled me into the office with that speech about how the principal was my friend, how if someone was hurting me I should tell them.

“Well, I told the principal what happened. But when they called Travis in, they believed him when he said that I was acting out. That I just wanted attention and wanted to leave him because I blamed him for my mom’s death. That I’d do anything to make him look as though he weren’t taking care of me. Of course they believed my stepfather. After all, I was just a stupid kid, right? I mean, after all I had just acted out a week earlier, shoving the principal when she told me my mother was dead. I shoved her and screamed in her face, calling her a liar, so of course it was easy to believe I was merely acting out. It was easier for them to remain in their safe little world than think that I could be getting hit.”

Anger filled
Duncan. He wanted to rip apart the people who had sworn to help Melissa if she confided in them, but turned her away when she asked for help. Unable to resist, he pulled her into his arms, the movement one of comfort and nothing else.

For the first time in a very long time, he held a beautiful woman in his arms and merely wanted to offer her his strength, his acceptance…his comfort.

“Tell me how you met Gareth,” he asked softly.

Melissa pulled out of his grasp. “I ran away from home. My stepfather had gotten worse. He…he was going to…he wanted…”

Tears flowed down her cheeks and
Duncan didn’t need to be able to read her mind to know what her stepfather had wanted. Pure rage filled him at the thought, and he wanted the man’s blood. He didn’t even want to drink it, positive the blood of such a foul man would do nothing more than churn his stomach. But he did want to watch as the man died a slow, excruciating death.

It seemed as though now that she had begun confiding in him, she couldn’t stop her story.

“But I ran away before he could do anything. I decided I’d rather sell my body on the street than let him… I’d rather have perfect strangers use me—let them do whatever they wanted—instead of spending another minute with him. I was so lucky,” she said, shaking her head. “The first guy I tried to ‘pick up’ was Gareth. He took me to a diner and bought me something to eat.

“When he took me home, my stepfather slapped me, right in front of him. He didn’t care that I had left, he cared that no one had been around to make his supper or clean his house. Gareth took one look at my stepfather and threw him across the room. He told him if I had so much as a scratch on me the following night when he came to pick me up, the man would pay dearly.

“That was the longest night and day of my life. I was terrified of what would happen if he didn’t come back, what my stepfather would do to me. But I packed, just in case. I didn’t have much I wanted to take with me, but there were a few special things, memories of my mom… And just like some kind of white knight, as soon as the sun set, he was there at the door, with papers that proclaimed he was my ‘long lost brother’. My stepfather gladly signed custody over to him, when Gareth flashed his fangs again. When we left, he took me out to eat and bought me clothes. I felt like a princess that night.

“For the longest time I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Gareth to tell me that I was going to become some kind of pet, an open buffet whenever he was hungry, and gods help me, I didn’t care. I waited for him to tell me what I owed him for ‘rescuing’ me, but he never did. He always treated me as though I were really and truly his sister.”

Duncan
pulled Melissa into another hug. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was that she had been forced to go through that growing up, but words were meaningless. Her story went a long way to explain the close relationship between the brother and sister. It completely explained why the man was so over-protective of her and why, no matter what happened, Melissa stood beside her brother, unconditionally.

“How does that blonde figure into this?”
Duncan asked.

“She’s working for my stepfather.” He felt her hot tears drip onto his chest, but she didn’t try to pull away this time. “He’s never forgotten how badly Gareth humiliated him, how he saved me. He wants to destroy my brother, Duncan. And all I can do is scream in the darkness, wait for him to grab me. I think I could handle anything he did to me,” she told him, her voice muffled slightly. “But if he hurts Gareth…if he hurt Gareth, I would never forgive myself.” Looking up at him with liquid brown eyes, she pleaded. “Don’t tell him. Don’t tell Gareth.”

“Angel, I don’t think I can keep something like this from him.”

“He knows about the blonde. And he knows about the nightmares. But Gareth thinks I’m still afraid of him—of Travis. I don’t want him to know what really terrifies me is the thought of him being hurt because of me. He’ll think it means I don’t believe he can ‘beat’ Travis. I don’t want him rushing into a situation recklessly because he wants to prove something to me.”

Duncan
nodded. “I won’t tell him.” Pulling her closer to him, he couldn’t help his body’s reaction to her. “I have one question. It’s a little personal, though.”

“What?” She gave half a chuckle. “I’ve just confessed my deepest, darkest fears. What’s one more answer?”

“Well, I know you stomp on a guy’s foot for bossing you around, and you punch them in the jaw for pushing you around. What do you do if a man kisses you?”

His question took her completely by surprise. “Black eye,” she answered automatically.

“It’s definitely worth it,” he said.

Sitting there with
Duncan’s arms wrapped around her, Melissa watched, spellbound, as he lowered his head to hers.

When their lips touched, her eyes drifted closed. She expected to feel his tongue inside her mouth, some kind of invasion, much like the other kisses she’d received. But he took his time, his warm lips pressing against hers, moving slowly, easing a response from her as they pushed her worries away.

Duncan
pulled away from her, kissing the tip of her nose. Opening her eyes, Melissa saw a smile on his lips.

“Definitely worth it,” he repeated.