Balthazar’s hand brushed against the side of her face, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. “Are you sure, Skye? I think you’re right, but—it’s not about what I think. If you aren’t absolutely positive, you’ll come to regret this.”
Skye nodded. “I’m positive. I mean, I’ll let them know that I’m out there and I’m okay. But somehow, I doubt worrying too much is going to be one of their problems.”
“I’m sorry,” Balthazar said, and she could hear in his voice how deeply he meant it.
“Me too,” she confessed, but then she turned her thoughts to the matter at hand. “So. For my sake, and the town’s sake, I need to get out of Darby Glen as soon as possible. That means tonight. I packed what I need in a saddlebag. We can ride over to the Findleys’ place, pick up whatever you need there. And I bet we can make it to Reardon Falls by sunrise. There’s campgrounds there. A lodge. It’ll work in the short term.”
Balthazar looked at her in surprise. “You want the two of us to ride out of here?”
“Well, I’m not leaving Eb behind.” That was all there was to it. The vampires might have taken her home away from her, but she’d be damned if they’d get her horse, too. “There’s plenty of places we can go with two horses—you’ll have to be on Peppermint, of course. We’ll be able to rent a trailer to take us where we need to go, eventually. Out west, maybe. Someplace with a lot of open sky, and nobody to be too nosy about us—and end up revealing where we are to people who shouldn’t know.”
“It’s good thinking, but—” His voice trailed off, and she knew what weighed on his mind. Throughout all of this, he’d expected their relationship to have an expiration date; he’d wanted to get her someplace safe, but in Balthazar’s mind, “safe” meant “far from him.”Which was crap, and it was high time she said so.
“Listen to me.” Skye wrapped her hands around the edges of his coat, drawing them closer together. Balthazar’s face was only inches from her own. “Don’t start with me about how I need a ‘normal life.’ After this, I don’t get to be normal. Not ever. I’m always going to have these powers. I’m always going to have vampires after me.” Unless and until she herself was changed into one of them—but she couldn’t begin thinking of that now. “If you walk away from me, you’re not saving me from anything. Do you understand? If you walk away from me, it’s because you want to. If you stay with me, it’s because you need to.” Her voice trembled slightly as she said the last: “I hope you need to.”
Balthazar’s only answer was to pull her against him in the longest, deepest kiss they’d ever shared. As she opened her mouth beneath his, Skye allowed herself to get lost in the feel and the taste of him, to rest against his broad chest and imagine that nothing in the world could ever touch them.
Maybe it couldn’t, as long as they stood together.
When their lips parted, Balthazar roughly whispered, “I need you. I love you. The only way I could ever have walked away from you was for your own good—because of how much I loved you, not how little. Do you understand that?”
Skye nodded. She’d always known that, deep down. “But you want this?” The path she was asking him to walk down wasn’t any easier for him than it was for her: always on the run, always at risk, with predators from his past forever on their trail. “It’s not much of a life.”
“Don’t you see? It’s the first life I’ve had in four hundred years.” Balthazar cupped her cheek in his hand. “With you—in the only way that matters—I’m alive again.”